ALS Topic
20 -
The Best Model? => Education = Procedures + Stories to Justify +...
= Job (???)
Focus questions for Adelaide Lunchtime
Seminar, 21 October 2018 Venue: · Adelaide
(https://www.meetup.com/AdelaideLunchtimeSeminar/ )
Note:
About Focus Questions: a) Please read them before you come to the
meetup. Think about them so you have more than "instant opinions" to
offer. b) Feel free to add more focus questions. c) THE FOCUS
QUESTIONS ARE JUST A MENU TO CHOOSE FROM. From this menu we can
discuss whatever seems interesting. d) Focus questions are not
intended to push one viewpoint! You can adopt any position you wish.
We actually like friendly disagreement - it can lead to deeper
understanding.
Focus Questions
1.
So when does it end? - Education, that is. When you have a diploma
that licences you to do a job? 2. Only a few people are really
good at their jobs. Only a few really enjoy their jobs. Does this
mean that something in education has failed?
3. The
measurement of learning (assessment) overwhelmingly controls what
people try to learn formally. if you want to change education, you
have to change the content and method of assessment. What are your
suggestions for reform here? What are the options?
4. Five
years after graduation in any subject most people couldn't pass an
exam in what they studied. Does this matter? Has their education
failed? What can be done about this flaky property of learning?
5. Almost every job involves a set of routine procedures + a
storyline to justify the procedures. Either the procedure or the
storyline or both are often inadequate. Once 'diploma-ed' people
will ferociously resist challenges to their procedures & storylines.
Why are they so protective of failure? What kind of education can
overcome their resistance? (Think of actual examples).
6.
Educational institutions worldwide are awash with fraud and
deception. What are some examples of this? What are the reasons
behind it? What can be done about it?
7. When I was about 22
y.o. a literature tutor asked me haughtily if I considered myself to
be an educated man; (she clearly thought I wasn't). I wanted to ask
her if she could tune the dual barrel carburettor on my Triumph
motorbike. How can we develop informed respect for other people's
particular knowledge?
8. As a fresh graduate I thought I
'knew' my subject. That's as far as most people get. Later as a
researcher I felt like a small child on the edge of a vast ocean of
ignorance. Ever since i have distrusted education cultures that
leave students with a sense that they have learned it all. Marketing
promotes that illusion. How can we change it? How can we leave
graduating students with a strong desire to learn more?
9. If
you have ever been a teacher, or especially a lecturer, you will
know that there is a huge temptation to run the same content year
after year with each set of freshmen (just one 50 minute lecture is
equivalent to writing a 5000 word essay). The problem is not that
you have lost interest, but that creating that program afresh each
time means 80 hour weeks and endless reading (there is a constant
torrent of new research). Also, your reputation is wrapped up in
what you said last year. What suggestions do you have for getting
around this problem?
10. Information has been democratized.
Online is more information on any topic than you will find in the
best universities. The trouble is that a large proportion of it is
trash, and a lot of the rest is tentative science with the best
experts disagreeing. Students are no better at sifting fake
knowledge than the general public is at sifting fake news. How can
we equip students with the will, and the skills to tackle this
challenge?
-----------------------------
Comments & Extra Reading
The selection of articles by me below all
contain many other web links, a good few of higher quality than my
own contribution. I add the papers here as a starting point for
anyone who is interested in a particular topic.
Thor May
(2015) "Understanding Active Thinking" - The point at which we use
“thinking” as a term worth mentioning beyond the normal background
buzz of daily life is quite arbitrary. In principle, you can “think
actively” about going down the street to buy an ice cream, and that
might be closer to a normal usage of “thinking” than solving
quadratic equations. This particular essay has paid more attention
to situations which require a somewhat sophisticated level of
attention, persistence and ingenuity in a world where complex
problems are constantly arising. @
https://www.academia.edu/20367171/Understanding_Active_Thinking
Thor May (2014) "The Purpose of Education - a hitchhiker’s
guide to the galaxy?" - Any Internet search will reveal a myriad of
articles and blogs on this topic. The variety of comment is not
surprising since formal education of some kind affects every family
and every individual in almost every country. Informal education has
probably effected just about everyone since humans evolved. What the
online material does show is that while the process is universal,
the objectives are diverse and often in conflict. Indeed much of the
discussion seems to be at cross purposes. I have been a teacher,
mostly to young adults, for 35 years in seven countries with quite
different cultures, so I am deeply familiar with the currents of
intention and counter-intention which touch everyone in the
enterprise of education. My own doctoral dissertation was an
analysis of 20 case studies in institutions where the publicly
expressed purposes of education were often sabotaged. Although I
have seen some of the failures, the institutional reasons for such
failures are so embedded and so internationally widespread that I
can see little direct hope for major changes. What I do see is that
for technological and cultural reasons, the relationships between
public mass education and personal self-education are changing
drastically. The outcomes of that melding are still unclear, but the
process offers hope. @
https://www.academia.edu/7976327/The_Purpose_of_Education_-_a_hitchhiker_s_guide_to_the_galaxy
Thor May (2014) "So we had a few failures. Was that the end
of university?" - The source of this short document is intensely
personal. It is the story of early university misadventure by one
individual, myself. At first glance it might seem of little interest
to anyone but the protagonist. I am publishing it because in fact
pieces of this story fit the lives of so many students who simply
disappear from the statistics and into oblivion. Educational
administrators may make assumptions about them, perhaps based on
personal prejudice and hearsay, while political decisions about
which kinds of students to fund tend to be founded in ideology
rather than the real life stories of actual individuals and their
development. @
https://www.academia.edu/9292229/So_we_had_a_few_failures.
_Was_that_the_end_of_university
Thor May (2014)
"Some Uses and Misuses of Reason" - When the sun rises each morning
we may say the reason is that the earth on its elliptical orbit
spins so that one point faces that star. Or we may say that the Sun
God has mounted his chariot. Or we may say, after Ptolemy and the
Christian elders until a few centuries ago, that the sun is moving
around the earth. Take your pick. They have all seemed good reasons
from reasonable men in their time. Our acceptance of what passes for
reasoned argument has a great deal to do with the company we keep.
Perhaps for most people, the word of accepted authority is the
ultimate parameter on where those reasoned arguments may venture. @
https://www.academia.edu/7094319/Some_Uses_and_Misuses_of_Reason
Thor May (2013) "International Language Testing Washback –
standing the monster on its head" - At the top of the assessment
pyramid are multinational testing corporations, best known by the
names of their standardized tests, such as IELTS, TOEIC, TOEFL,
BULATS, TKT, Cambridge ESOL main suite, or G-TELP (there are many
other aspirants). In some ways these testing companies can be
thought of as the Big Pharma corporations (i.e. drug companies) of
the educational world. Like Big Pharma they are subject to constant
challenges to their ethics and reliability from within and without,
and like Big Pharma they are rather prone to corrupt the issues
which they were designed to assist with. The possible corruption of
language learning by the requirements of testing is known as
wash-back. Wash-back is not always malignant. The analysis in this
paper is a tentative attempt to manipulate the wash-back from an
international test in a manner which actually assists genuine
language acquisition. This material is drawn from some Masters
degree work (2005) and comes to 138 pages. @
https://www.academia.edu/3321484/International_Language_Testing_
Washback_standing_the_monster_on_its_head
Thor May
(2013) "Testing for Teaching; Teaching to What?" - The outline which
follows analyses the two halves of a language teacher’s profession:
a) The first half is daily classroom practice : what is taught and
how is it evaluated? b) The second half of a teacher’s profession is
to know or at least estimate what is going on in the brains of her
students : what is learned and how is it learned? Teaching is a
simulation machine. Learning is for life. The implicit professional
challenge is in making the simulation useful for living. @
https://www.academia.edu/2393660/Testing_for_Teaching_Teaching_to_What
Thor May (2010) "Language Tangle - Predicting & Facilitating
Outcomes in Language Education" - PhD Thesis - This thesis argues
that foreign and second language teaching productivity can only
reach its proper potential when it is accorded priority, second only
to language learner productivity, amongst the many competing
productivities which are always asserted by stakeholders in
educational institutions. Note: This is a collection of 20 case
studies of institutions from 7 countries, examining why they mostly
struggled to to achieve what they advertised themselve to be
offering. It is (in my view) a somewhat scrappy analysis, but it
does lay bare in plain, unsparing language, the limits of
institutional education.
https://www.academia.edu/1542880/Language_Tangle_-_Predicting_and_Facilitating_Outcomes_in_Language_Education_-_PhD_Thesis_-_ThorMay
Thor May (2008) "Corruption and Other Distortions as
Variables in Language Education - Abstract : This paper examines
some of the ways in which foreign language education has been
affected by corrupt practices and various other distortions of best
teaching practice. Particular attention is paid to South Korea. The
nature of corruption and its social origins are identified.
Pressures affecting students, teachers and institutions are all seen
to play a part. It is noted that mass education is a simulation
which leaves space for fraud, whereas actual live language
performance is its own test. Perhaps as a consequence, the gradual
insertion of a new language code like English into a speech
community might succeed over the long term even where immediate
educational practices suggest failure. @
https://www.academia.edu/1552332/Corruption_and_Other_Distortions_as
_Variables_in_Language_Education
Thor May (2002)
"The paradox of scholarship: pissing on every lamp post" -
Scholarship is that process of becoming familiar with, ordering, and
acknowledging the thinking of earlier workers in a particular line
of inquiry. It can easily become a lifetime task. The process is
obviously valuable. Subduing the arrogance of an ignorant mind
(especially one's own) is very healthy. Scholarship not only helps
to avoid past mistakes and save the waste of "reinventing the
wheel", but can also be a stimulus for new and more sophisticated
ideas about a topic. However, the largest body of scholarship always
remains inert, not only failing to stimulate new ideas, but actually
forming a bulwark against the intrusion of fresh thinking... @
https://www.academia.edu/2227990/The_paradox_of_scholarship_pissing
_on_every_lamp_post
Thor May (1987) "Super-Culture And
The Ghost In The Machine" - This little essay is a bit mischievous,
and apparently politically incorrect enough to have sparked outrage
in the minds of some sensitive souls from the polite dinner party
set. Although it has no claims to academic decency, I have preserved
it online as a stimulant to fancier research, since I think the
metaphor the essay runs on captures some essential truths. The essay
had its genesis in the startled observations of a fresh expatriate
teaching in foreign surrounds. In this case, it was the PNG
University of Technology, Lae, Papua New Guinea in 1987. I found my
untried liberal conscience struggling to comprehend the sheer
incompetence of people faced with institutions and technology which
didn't seem to work. Many of the locals were bright and friendly
enough, but somewhere a spark of insight was missing. Much later,
surveying Australia with the naked eyes of a returnee, it was all
too clear that the paralysis of imagination was a universal problem.
@
https://www.academia.edu/3653431/Super-Culture_And_The_Ghost_In_The_Machine
------------
Thor May - Education for diplomas &
narrow vocational skills leave people desperately unequipped to
navigate the shark pool of wider society. For example, this: Chris
Zappone (13 October 2018) "'Regime change without a war': we need to
get smarter about fake news". Brisbane Times @
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/north-america/regime-change-without-a-war-we-need-to-get-smarter-about-fake-news-20181010-p508qk.html
[my comment on this posted to the Brisbane Times: The business model
of military-industrial-political complexes, and overwhelmingly the
one centred on Washington, has heavily leaned for at least two
generations on the propagation of fake news. Fake news underpins the
public opinion that guarantees their budgets and tax demands. So now
the Russians, Big Pharma, and everyone else is offering competition
in that space. They are hugely aided by the electronic tsunamis
which sites like Twitter generate. Especially Twitter, since the
largest part of every population is not functionally literate enough
to take in more than a written sentence or two. Ask Donald Trump
about that. Getting people motivated and analytic enough to navigate
all this stuff may be the biggest challenge our civilizations face.
Conventional 'education' systems do not cut it right now at this
critical level, and it is hard to see how they can be made to. ]
Wendy Tuohy (12 October 2018) "Um, there's no such thing as a
'good-grade guarantee'". [... except there is such a thing... I've
lost jobs over this. Also read the comments in the news story]
Brisbane Times @
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/um-there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-good-grade-guarantee-20181012-p509bj.html
So what cause are you fighting for today, or haven't you yet
made a selection from the supermarket of dreams? 'The problem with
any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the
evidence'. Here is a thoughtful piece on how that is shaping up in
India, but not only India: Sundar Sarukkai (October 18, 2018)
"Labelling, the new illiteracy of our times" The Hindu (newspaper) @
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/labelling-the-new-illiteracy-of-our-times/article25252235.ece?homepage=true
Dorothy Leonard & Walter Swap (September 2004) "Deep Smarts
- When a person sizes up a complex situation and comes to a rapid
decision that proves to be not just good but brilliant, you think,
“That was smart.” After you’ve watched him do this a few times, you
realize you’re in the presence of something special. It’s not raw
brainpower, though that helps. It’s not emotional intelligence,
either, though that, too, is often involved. It’s deep smarts, the
stuff that produces that mysterious quality, good judgment ..."
Harvard Business Review @
https://hbr.org/2004/09/deep-smarts
Kirsty Needham (21
September 2017) "Chinese students question Australian education
sending chills through industry - She changed universities after
failing a subject, and spent two million yuan over six years
studying finance in Australia before returning this year. Back in
China she struggled to find a low-level job paying just 5000 yuan a
month. Amid a wave of stories about disillusioned Chinese students
returning from overseas, and social media debate, the official
People's Daily published an editorial saying returnees may be
"incompatible to domestic society". The risk of studying abroad was
getting bigger because it did not guarantee a good job, the
editorial said. A survey of 150,000 Chinese overseas students found
on average that they make only 500 Chinese yuan ($100) more per
month than Chinese university graduates. One Chinese social media
user, commenting on Lin's story, wrote that his friend had spent 2
million yuan studying in Australia since high school, but the family
would have made a better investment buying two apartments because
the rentals would exceed his salary." Brisbane Times @
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au%2Fworld%2Fchinese-students-question-australian-education-sending-chills-through-industry-20170919-gykfgi.html
Kate Aubusson (22 March 2017) "Scientists outwit predatory
publishers by tricking them into appointing a fake editor". Brisbane
Times @
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/health/scientists-outwit-predatory-publishers-by-tricking-them-into-appointing-a-fake-editor-20170322-gv3vt9.html
Henrietta Cook (26 June 2018) "How unis can beat the cheats
by finding 'fingerprints' in their essays". Brisbane Times @
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/education/how-unis-can-beat-the-cheats-by-finding-fingerprints-in-their-essays-20180626-p4znr1.html
David Batty (14 March 2018) "'Some families are too shady to
work with': meet the tutors of the ultra-rich". The Guardian @
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/mar/13/some-families-too-shady-tutors-of-ultra-rich
Peter Martin (17 February 2018) "It's worth getting a degree
even if what you learn is useless". Brisbane Times @
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/education/it-s-worth-getting-a-degree-even-if-what-you-learn-is-useless-20180215-p4z0iq.html
Paul Karp (9 April 2018) "Bizarre' Naplan writing test
measures 'all the wrong things', US expert says - Test rewards
students for using big words rather than simple language, Les
Perelman finds - Of the 10 to 12 international tests Les Perelman
has examined, the Naplan writing test is ‘by far the most absurd’".
[Comment by Thor: Naplan is a supreme example of testing abuse. Its
designers intended it to be diagnostic, so teachers could fix what
apparently needed to be fixed for each student. Instead, given mass
public and political ignorance of what a DIAGNOSTIC test is (as
opposed to an exit achievement exam), it has been weaponized to
evaluate teachers and rank schools. Therefore as an act of personal
survival, teachers and school administrators warp the system
themselves. This kind of perversion is a core dilemma in
institutional education systems, perhaps inevitably.] The Guardian @
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/09/bizarre-naplan-writing-test-measures-all-the-wrong-things-us-expert-says
Matthew D. Lieberman (June 19, 2012) "Why We Stop Learning:
The Paradox of Expertise - How to keep learning when people think
you know it all." Psychology Today @
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-brain-social-mind/201206/why-we-stop-learning-the-paradox-expertise
Daniel Amen (March 7, 2017) "When You Stop Learning, Your
Brain Starts Dying". Linkedin @
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-you-stop-learning-start-dying-dr-daniel-amen/
Leigh Drogen (December 31, 2012) "Is The World Too
Complicated For People?". [Thor: recommend] Blog @
https://leighdrogen.com/is-the-world-too-complicated-for-people-e6350c891c2d
Darius Foroux (February 5, 2018) "Don’t Know What You Want?
Improve These 7 Universal Skills". Blog @
http://dariusforoux.com/universal-skills/
Madeleine King
(22 August 2016) "The hidden costs of low literacy in Australia" SBS
website @
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight/explainer/hidden-costs-low-literacy-australia
BBC (n.d.) "Reciprocal Teaching: A Classroom Strategy that
Promotes Interactive Learning" BBC @
http://www.bbcactive.com/BBCActiveIdeasandResources/ReciprocalTeaching
PromoteInteractiveLearning.aspx
Brian Bethune
(March 20 2017) "Why Americans have come to worship their own
ignorance Author Tom Nichols argues that people are angry at
journalists for giving them what they want: pared-down stories
tailored to them". Macleans website @
http://www.macleans.ca/society/why-americans-have-come-to-worship-their-own-ignorance/
Ned Manning (2 December 2016) "Stop blaming teachers for
falling results and give them the trust and time to actually teach -
Our obsession with accountability means that every spare moment of a
teacher’s life is spent satisfying bureaucratic demands"/ The
Guardian @
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/02/stop-blaming-teachers-for-falling-results-and-give-them-the-trust-and-time-to-actually-teach
Jonathan Graehl (28 June 2011) "Heightened Learning While
Walking or Running (but Not Driving?)". Blog @
http://graehl.org/2011/06/28/heightened-learning-while-walking-or-running/
Thor's
own websites:
1. articles at
http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay
;
2.
legacy site: http://thormay.net
.
The Best Model? => Education =
Procedures + Stories to Justify +... = Job (???) (c) Thor May 2018 return to
Ddiscussion
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