[?] I-creativity: Idiosyncratic value. Some things have a utility (e.g.
"sentimental value") not really because it depends on the individual's
judgement, but because what is useful to one person really is sometimes
different from what is useful to someone else (e.g. a prosthetic leg, ...).
[?] POP-creativity: popular/populist value. Here value is defined by
the group, not the individual. Where mass market appeal means large numbers
value the product, even if only a little bit. Soap operas, cheap air flights
are examples of this, because the mass market makes it economical to satisfy
demand for quite low-utility things.
Thus value is relative to the person or group, but can in principle be
objectively measured by a third party.
The 2nd dimension: Novelty
Maggie Boden distinguishes:
[1] P-creativity ("Person")
[2] H-creativity ("Historical").
The former is something new to the individual person who creates it; the
latter is new to the human race. Obviously a person may re-invent something so
it is a creative mental act for them, but not a contribution to human culture
unless no-one else has done it already. Conversely, as discussed in a moment
below, we may be completely unaware of the source of our thought i.e. feel it
is an original, creative insight, yet it could be obviously (to others)
derived from someone else.
This dimension, generating the two types above, is important to
cognitive models of how a person can generate new ideas. A cognitive model
needs to be of P-creativity; and then we can explain H-creativity as
caused by the P-creativity of the first person to have that idea.
This distinction is also of great importance to education. Constructivism
asserts that all significant learning is P-creative: requiring re-construction
inside the learner's mind. And to a great extent, in our culture at least, we
define learning in terms of "transfer": i.e. the capability of doing something
with a new idea that is more than a tape recorder can: of applying it in a new
context we haven't previously considered. This has a significant element of
creativity: of being able to put the old idea and new context together in a
combination (and with consequences) that is new to the learner i.e. is
P-creative.
Thus novelty too is relative to a person or group (society), but can in
principle be objectively measured by a third party.
Social credit. An important mechanism. ....?
Note however that it is just our current culture (society) that makes much
of creative artists, engineers, and scientists. Medieval cathedrals, in
contrast, were designed and built by individuals we know almost nothing of: no
such social value was then put on celebrating those responsible for
"creativity". So H-creativity is not equally interesting in all societies.
And note too that our culture doesn't apply it to all things: new words are
coined all the time, but credit is not given to the originators. In fact most
people don't even know that many of our words were coined by Shakespeare: we
credit him with other kinds of creativity.
The 3rd dimension: Surprise
Surprise ≈ a shift in expectations more than in reality or achievement.
Boden's two types assume a godlike, hindsight view of whether something is
novel (to the person or mankind respectively). However also interesting and
important is whether a person perceives something they do as creative.
This is often unrelated to the actual case. For instance research in AI and
linguistics shows that many, perhaps most, sentences a person utters are new:
that person has never uttered them before. However no-one feels that this is
creative, perhaps because essentially everyone not only can do it, but does it
every day. On the other hand, feeling original ("creative") is often important
to people. What it is that determines whether people feel, i.e. judge
themselves to be, creative is an additional important topic we need to study.
This is analogous to metamemory: people's considerable, though imperfect,
ability to know whether they know something before and without actually
recalling it.
Although intuitively we associate surprise with suddenness, in reality that
is irrelevant. What defines surprise is violation of expectancy. An ambush,
no matter how suddenly fighting bursts out, is not a surprise if superior
reconnaissance has warned the intended victims. Conversely, people may be
very slow to adjust their expectations but we would still say an act was
creative even if it took years for many to accept it.
Judging whether something is creative is important to us. So
there are two more types of creativity that are subjective.
[3] SP-creativity: self-perceived creativity.
This relates to self-actualisation: when a person feels they are being
creative, creating a way of doing something that is new to them. Maslow's
notion of self-actualisation, and the use in Positive Psychology of
"creativity" as one of 24 strengths a human may have are indicators of how
important this is. Thus whether a person feels they are creative seems to be
linked to their well-being. As we have seen, this is a perception,
and has no clear relationship to available objective measures of creativity.
[4] GP-creativity: group-perceived creativity.
Group acclaim. This is when other people, one's peers, one's society
perceive you as having done something creative: i.e. novel to them and useful.
While in some respects contemptible ("just fashion"), this valuing is built on
the fundamental implicit values of all communication: to only say things that
are relevant, and a major necessary condition of relevance is that the Hearers
do not already know what you are saying. Thus (perceived) novelty is in fact
absolutely necessary to communication (otherwise we would be stalled,
repeating the endless number of things the other person already knows).
Surprise is about a clash between something we encounter and our
meta-memory-like sense of what to expect. We run our lives, not by
having exhaustive plans for everything, but by having a good estimate of the
things we need to prepare for and the things we can expect to deal with as and
when they come up. For example, many people expect to go abroad for a holiday
once a year, but probably only have plans about one year ahead: they just
assume they will be able to plan and achieve further holidays beyond that.
You can see in the press how this applies to other things. We tend to feel
that an effective flu vaccine is to be expected, and are critical when one is
not available; but we don't expect a machine that stops earthquakes to be
invented. This dimension of surprise is about not having predicted the
existence of a solution to a problem, or about the revelation of unintended
consequences (good, bad, or mixed) of some invention.
The point is that there are often some relatively short duration moments when
new implications come into view during the process of developing an idea,
rather like the way a dozen steps, out of the thousands it takes to climb a
hill, sometimes uncover (or hide) a large vista.
In design, this might be a new use (application), or perhaps realising for the
first time that there is an application at all. These estimates (surprises)
are what make it so hard both to foresee the future and to decide how much to
worry about identified problems. Surprise is a sudden shift in our
(meta-memory type) estimate of what can be developed, be expected to be doable.
See also
Rob Saunders.
He has a computational model of creativity; and it employs a kind of (a
simulation of) peer evaluation of proposed ideas that is in effect a judgement
procedure for GP-creativity (Blay says).
It seems obviously absurd to say "Columbus discovered America", not only
because Columbus died still believing he had reached Asia and never knew it
was a continent new to him, but because the continent had been there for tens
or hundreds of millions of years before humans, and humans had lived there for
thousands of years before Columbus stumbled on it, and even among Europeans
the Vikings had preceded him. But it does illustrate how important it is for
a social group, when it learns something new (cf. H-creativity); and also
that the "group" that seems important here is not a political group but in
some functional sense a community of knowledge (in this case, Europe rather than
Spain, or the profession of navigators, or ...). It also shows how creativity
is relative to a wider group: is about the entrance of knowledge to this
wider group.
In fact this case illustrates that the social group concerned must be about
sharing knowledge. Vikings seem not to have passed on their knowledge of
America effectively, and it had been forgotten.
The Chinese had in fact also sailed to America shortly before; and sent back
written accounts; but this knowledge had been suppressed in China.
Thus surprise is relative to a person or group; but it is doubtful if
it can be objectively measured by a third party because it is a subjective
feeling or perception, albeit with considerable consensus among people in many
cases.
You can't have surprise without novelty, but surprise adds an additional
requirement to novelty. So should I use surprise but drop novelty as a
distinct defining condition for creativity? Novelty can in principle be
established objectively by historical data, but surprise is defined by
expectations: essentially a subjective measure of mental attitudes not of
observable behaviour. Thus they bring out different aspects of our concept of
creativity.
Summary table: types of creativity product
|
Types of creativity (product)
|
| As judged by: ↓ |
Relative to the: → |
Individual |
Group |
| Utility |
Useful / interesting as judged by whom? → |
I-creativity
Idiosyncratic needs,
convenience,
curiosity
(learning) |
POP-creativity
Mass market appeal
e.g.cheap air travel
(teaching) |
| Novelty |
Novel to whom? →
Objective;
Actual novelty |
P-creativity
A first for that person |
H-creativity
A first for humanity
Originality |
| Surprise |
Surprising to whom? →
Subjective;
perceived novelty |
SP-creativity
Self-actualisation |
GP-creativity
Group acclaim, relevance |
Agency, and types of process for creativity
(See also Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.)
Of the four defining properties of creativity, three were seen as describing
the product and dealt with above. This section addresses the remaining
property of creativity: the "zero-th" dimension of human agency.
This has two aspects: the human (who or where do the ideas come from; and what
are the relevant connections between creativity and being human),
and agency (is it a purposeful process or not; or can it be accidental).
This leads to broadening the discussion at times beyond creativity (just as
not everything surprising is creative, so not everything with human agency
counts as creative). However what defines the theme of this section is process
as opposed to the product (the result of a creative act) which was the focus
of the previous section. This section develops a set of dimensions or
attributes of processes. The aim is that all creative processes can be
compared and contrasted by these attributes, although other processes,
especially those leading to products called "discoveries" rather than
"creative", can also be compared here.
By the end of the whole section, we can return to summarise what we have
uncovered about the relationship of agency or purposefulness to the process of
creativity, and the connection of humans to it (as opposed, say, to a machine
for creativity).
It is clear from everyday usage of the term "creativity" that it is only
applied to human actions, but this is so entirely taken for granted that it is
not mentioned in the definitions of creativity that I've come across.
However it seems clear, if implicit, from Aristotle's classification of types
of cause that we can find a way to see almost anything both as caused by a
person, and as caused by non-human factors. Blame games (and praise games)
focus on human agents as the cause and are derided for wishing to ignore
non-human causes that may be more sensible. Similarly modern psychology
documents "attribution biasses": tendencies to attribute causes that, because
of their assymmetries, cannot be rational e.g. people tend to explain their
own actions as due to external pressures, but others' actions as due to their
inherent traits. Thus there is generally a huge middle ground in which,
without being grossly irrational, we may either choose a perspective that
explains events as due to human intentional action, or alternatively another
perspective that explains them as due to non-human, material causes. Even
though the simple analysis of everyday uses of "creativity" shows that it is
generally a label emphasising human intention as the central driving cause,
any attempt to deal with creativity from a third party perspective (e.g.
assessing students for creativity) probably needs to recognise that a product
that could count as creative could often alternatively be seen as a
non-creative consequence of other factors.
These are issues of the process of creativity, rather than the product.
They raise issues of who or what the driving force for the process is,
what they already had and what they seek out, ....
Why should we need humans' (rather than a machine's) creativity?
Why should we need purposefulness (agency) for creativity?
Gradualism vs. catastrophism
While a favourite type of story is of Eureka moments, where an original insight
appears in a flash, this "catastrophism" is distorting as an
account of creativity since slow, incremental, trial and
error improvements are far more common; whether of a design for a toaster, a new
jet aircraft, or a piece of writing. "Step by tedious step, we stumble away
from abject failure. And that's on a good day." [Barth Netterfield] Slow
incremental evolution ("gradualism") is a process where P-creativity, and
SP-creativity, are much less than H-creativity: the former diminishes to a
tiny value as the inventor gets sick of endless little changes, while the
H-creativity slowly goes up as the value which the product will have when the
public finally gets to see it increases. Another argument against
catastrophism as the usual mechanism of creativity are the many cases where
artifacts are used for purposes the inventor did not envisage: and so could
not possibly have "been creative" about.
I.e. this is H-creativity without P-creativity; and where the users discover
uses for the invention which the "inventor" did not know or value. It may be
that the construction of solutions is gradual, yet the experience of surprise
sudden. And/ or that creativity seems or is gradual for the individual
inventor, but sudden for society.
Gradualism vs. catastrophism have been important rival schools of explanation
in Geology in the past; and later (today) in Evolution theory.
In both fields, the eventual view seems to be that there are cases of both,
and this is probably the case with creativity.
However we should note the metaphor sketched earlier, of how most
steps up a mountain make only gradual changes to the vista, but a few steps
are associated with rapid, even dramatic, shifts in what is in view. Since
surprise is an essential aspect of creativity, we should perhaps expect that
creativity often feels as if it is a sudden (catastrophic) process, yet is
actually an outcome of generally much slower processes.
This time scale dimension, or choice of perspective, is independent of the
other issues of agency.
The gradual vs. sudden timescale of the process of creativity seems related to
the surprise dimension of the product. However the argument above about the
surprise dimension is that that is essentially about a readjustment of
expectations, rather than the shortness of the period in which this is done.
For example, the Sydney opera house took over 14 years to construct, yet
everyone regards it as creative and in large part because it was so markedly
different from what, up till then, you might expect of an opera house.
The source: Where does the information used in creativity come from?
Help from whom or what?
As soon as you realise that creativity might not be instantaneous but iterative,
stepwise, then the question arises as to whether the inventor gets help
(information) during the creative process. They might not: some things are just
worked out in the head yet take a long time. But they might: they might get
information from experiments and observations on inanimate things. Or from a
human authority; or a collaborator; or from feedback from user testing.
In which case, should the search-director get the credit or the source of the
information? Do you own your own
genes, or do they belong to the biologist who sequences them?
This is the first aspect of the issue of whether an innovation "comes from" a
person: the inventor. In some cases and senses it does. But it seems clear
that in others, the director / inventor may also obtain vital information from
other people. The types of source of information that may be important to feed
creative outputs are:
- The agent herself (pure thought, genius, ...). A poet who thinks, then
just writes down the poem; similarly for a mathematician generating a new
proof.
- Things: the material world: information from testing. Many creations or
inventions come either from a search for a new things or materials found in
the world, or for new configurations of them, found by testing many
alternative ones. In fact most of what we call creative may be like this:
imagine a fine artist drawing from life, observing shapes emerging from their
sculpting of a model, sketching an idea and endlessly modifying the sketch.
- People: e.g. learning about new value from users, who find new uses for
an invention.
Thus even if we require a human agent for creativity, the process more often
than not involves seeking out information from other things or other people, and
doesn't just emerge from inside the inventor's mind.
If the search depends on other people or things, why attribute its value to
the director?
Search, and Purposefulness (Agency)
Was there any intentional, directed human effort behind a new idea, or piece
of it, at all?
The main alternatives may be:
- Accidental: It was noticed by a human while they were trying to do
something else. Not due to an action directed at finding it.
- Purposeful: It was discovered during a purposeful search e.g. the source
of the Nile, the South Pole, a way to manufacture penicillin.
Thus items may be discovered accidentally. We should however note that even
then it may only be noticed, observed, and reported by a trained observer, and
not by other people. When Fleming discovered penicillin, a non-biologist
would have been unlikely to recognise that the absence of bacteria was an active
sign of death, the sign of the presence of an invisible antibiotic substance.
Considering the gradual nature of some creative processes, extended over
time, and how information sources other than the inventor's own mind are
frequently central, both demonstrate the role of purposefulness or agency.
The agent manages a search for answers, and may use the answers obtained in ways
different from any of the people who may have provided the answer.
This is not like a Eureka moment, but it is like an artist endlessly
"oversketching" (drawing many versions of the same line in a sketch to see
which looks best or right), a poet repeatedly changing this or that word, an
engineer trying different materials or shapes for their new device.
The process of searching for answers has several contrasting types, depending
on the question.
One type of search is to answer a specific closed question e.g. looking up
someone's email address. The other extreme is an open-ended question such as
"What is over the next hill?", what happens when you mix these two substances?
etc.
And furthermore, even when there is no active search, it still takes an
important mental property to recognise something important when you come
across it by accident (like Fleming). The unprepared mind tends not to notice
and does not act on it; the prepared one does.
On the whole, though you may discover something by accident, you don't say
something was created by accident.
Purposeful (2)? Was there any purpose at all behind the invention?
We tend to use the term "discovery" in science and geography, and to use it
for the parts separately. Also, discovery may be purposeful (searching for an
answer), intentional, and human. Yet we don't say "creative" about such
things. That may be because there is no surprise: if the question is precise
and formulated, then the existence of an answer is not surprising.
(Meta-memory again.) Climbing Everest for the first time was not surprising
for the spectators, though enough for the news.
Invention, creativity is more about putting the two parts together; and also
thereby solving a problem. Creativity is about something human: a problem that
is solved; not a dispassionate description of the world.
There are two (at least) opposing accounts of innovation: one is the Eureka
one, attributing it to creativity: to mental creation by an individual with no
antecedants we are aware of. The other is of correcting the bad practices of
the past in order to do it right: which is not being creative but seeing how
to do it the Lord's way / the scientific way i.e. learning from an external
source whether authority or observation. Different disciplines have different
preferences for these two accounts. If the external source is observation,
then we might call it "external context"; if it is other people ....
The two parts of a creative idea.
(If there is a purposeful search) What is sought?
Creativity as project management and purposefulness
An important point to recognise here is that all inventions or creative ideas
are in fact the mating of two parts: a) the value, purpose, function, utility:
what it is for, what problem it solves; with b) the solution, method,
device, painting that illustrates and embodies it.
This is obvious in product design, but applies equally to a poem or painting:
what distinguishes them from random noise is that some people see them as
valuable, novel, and unexpected (even though articulating that value in
descriptive language is not required and usually not done.)
Given that there are two parts, then an inventor is someone who puts them
together but may not have invented both or either part in themselves.
Frequently they begin with one and search for something that can play the part
of the other. All find a way to fill the role of the other part. That means
the essential creative act may be one of directing, managing the search,
rather than supplying the parts.
We can then subcategorise creative acts depending on which parts were there
from the start, which found later; which were accidentally "found", which
searched for. For example professional inventors may decide on the need for a
new mousetrap or a videophone, and seek for a solution. Others however have
stumbled on (discovered) a surprising feature and searched for a goal, for
what it could be useful for. Post-it notes were invented when a glue firm
accidentally invented one of the weakest glues ever seen, and wondered how
that could possibly have a use. Similarly, SMS mobile phone texting was a
function engineers realised was "there" anyway in the system they had built
for voice, and could be offered to customers without any great investment or
running expense: but it was a great surprise when it was seen as so useful by
users.
Put another way, two things are needed for a creation: a purpose or goal or
identified value; and a solution or method for satisfying it.
The 4 possibilities for a purposeful agent then are:
- The agent has the goal, searches for the solution e.g. design a better
mouse trap.
- The agent has the solution, searches for the goal (value) e.g.
What use could an ultra-weak glue have?
- The agent searches for both (professional inventors)
- Neither: the agent tripped over a new continent, or fruit, or giant
tortoises to eat, or a weird sludge in a chemical experiment that turned out
to be the first aniline dye. But this is really a case where someone notices a
novel thing and then searches for a use for it
If it is sought, then is it only discovered?
So perhaps the inventor, the creative person, is the one who directs the
search, rather than who generates the idea from nothing alone. This is also
about whether the innovation "comes from" a person; and specifically about the
project director role, distinct from who discovers the ideas about the parts.
The above implies that there are not one but two things, bits of information,
ideas to acquire in any invention, plus the idea of combining them.
But it also implies that there is an essential role for a director in putting
them together, distinct from being the source of the parts.
This is a definition of a creator: the person who manages the process, and
brings about the putting together of the two parts.
Perhaps, if we maintain that human agency must be behind anything creative,
there are 2 roles for the creative: a) putting the two parts (value and
method) together; b) actively searching for one or both of the parts.
You can discover facts / things; but creativity requires a problem, goal, need.
In essence, discovery is a one part process, while creativity is defined by
combining two parts.
Discovery vs. creativity
In some cases it is hard to identify why we would call a case discovery rather
than creativity. In many cases however it is easy.
Discovery may or or may not be intended, and the result of
human agency; i.e. have a manager / director. (Creativity must be.)
Discovery may be surprising, or not. (Creativity must be.)
A discovery may have utility, or not. (Creativity must have.)
Discovery may be only about value or method. (Creativity must have both;
i.e. must have both of the two parts.)
Discovery, like creativity, may be either gradual or sudden.
Discovery, like creativity, must be novel.
Discovery, like creativity, may have as its information source the
discoverer (e.g. discovering a new maths proof) or may depend on other sources.
However for cases which qualify for creativity as well as discovery on all the
above issues, there may remain a different kind of ambiguity about which it
is. "Discovery" implies it is about external facts, not human wishes.
However, as illustrated by Aristotle's ideas of causes, and by the
psychological theory of attribution error, there is in many cases an ambiguity
in how you interpret any one thing.
There is latitude in whether we attribute a discovery to creativity or not.
The element Radium was isolated by Curie after much effort: it does occur in
nature, but no-one knew it was there and it isn't easy to get hold of.
Plutonium owes the possibility of its existence and its nature and properties
to the same laws of physics as Radium, but in contrast does not occur in
nature but is physically created (manufactured) in nuclear reactors. BUT the
idea is not manufactured, so it's not creative.
Yet no doubt many things get reinvented: perhaps this is P-creativity.
The problems with drawing a clear line between discovery and creativity are,
or include:
- Discovery may be entirely unintentional (creativity cannot be). But
discovery too may be purposeful, and the end of a long planned search
process.
But planning tends strongly to pre-empt surprise.
If it is accidental then not purposeful.
If it is wholly planned then not surprising.
- The picture is of creativity being to a great extent a kind of
problem-solving, not just stumbling accidentally on something and recognising
it as useful (as may be the case in discovery). Thus it has a considerable
aspect of purposefulness. On the other hand, creativity requires surprise; so
perhaps it cannot have too much purpose?
- Thus: Many examples of discovery fail to be creative either because they
lack surprise; or they do not relate to a human goal or problem or value;
or they are accidental and so lack purposefulness.
Creativity is more than discovery because it avoids these lacks.
- Can you have unintentional creativity i.e. notice function and method
together? Yes (e.g. sunken ships to start a new coral reef), but I would call
this discovery.
- An important feature of many processes of creativity is iteration: of
prolonged gradual improvement through many versions. This is as true of
sculpture and painting as of product design. Furthermore this
correction essentially means that the idea comes from the world, from the
results of tests and experience and not from the mental processes of the
creator. This seems more like discovery than creation.
- Scientific creativity. Creativity requires utility or (human) value: but
we could sensibly define that as including value to science i.e. advancing
scientific knowledge in an important way. And indeed within science we value
far more those that establish a new idea, opening new vistas, than those who
are definitely contributing but only one more pebble to an existing cairn.
So perhaps we should use "creativity" in science to denote the big
contributions as opposed to the small.
And the contribution may be either or both of: a new idea, or an experiment or
other study that produces a great advance in certainty about an idea.
- But science on the whole likes to de-emphasise human wishes and need; in
order to decouple knowledge from use, pure from applied science. And this may
be why on the whole "discovery" is the term used even for big advances.
The other reason is that science sees itself as uncovering an pre-exisiting
reality, not creating it.
So those who like to use the concept of creativity might usefully think of the
most successful scientists as creative, and that creativity is what
distinguishes them from the rest; but saying so doesn't fit well with the way
the scientific community likes to talk about itself.
Thus in part the distinction between discovery and creativity is not a matter
of definition but of the perspective adopted by those selecting the term.
If your attribution is focussed on what is different about the human involved,
then "creativity" is the term. If it focussed on the world, on the non-human
factors, then "discovery" feels more appropriate.
Summary
My overall arg. structure for the summary
- Mgt and the 2 part issue: a core defining issue
Entailment of this:
- Director-mgt role is essential, not the info source role.
- Various types depending what came first and from ?. [=see table?]
- Brings out discovery vs. creativity
- Discovery / creativity: relocate as w/w/o value and/or surprise.
This is an immediate next section following one on mgt.
You can have surprise but w/w/o value.
- Summary of possible aspects of agent
Summary of possible aspects of human
- The essential (as opposed to possible) aspects for creativity:
- Has value: but doesn't need a human creator to measure this
- Perhaps is deliberately worked on (2 parts put together)
Could it be a machine agent?
If software can surprise humans?
Simulations do.
Text of the section
An essential feature of creativity with significant consequences for the
process of creativity is that the essential role is not the physical
production but intellectual production, and that it is not the production of
the intellectual elements, but the fitting together of two parts (the function
or value, and the solution or method).
Thus it is the role of director or manager that is essential, not the role of
information source.
It also follows that creative processes could be classified depending on which
of the two elements came first and was the starting point for a search for the
second.
It also leads to a distinction between creativity and discovery, which is the
production of one element and without any assumption of purpose.
Gradualism: makes the need for purposeful mgt more evident.
Discovery may be surprising, or not. (Creativity must be.)
A discovery may have value, or not. (Creativity must have.)
There are two distinct needs for purposefulness in creativity:
- To manage the overall process, the combining of an idea about a need, and
idea for a method.
- To carry out a search for a piece of information.
There are three distinct roles for human involvement:
- As an information source for the creator (though non-human sources may
also be used).
- Humans are particularly important as sources of information about human
needs or wants. Market research exemplifies this: asking people about what
they might want or buy.
- Humans may be agents i.e. act purposefully (though in some senses,
software may carry out searches too).
Creativity must have:
- Utility
- Have been deliberate, purposeful; i.e. the work of an agent (conceivably
a non-human robot).
- Surprise: it must change expectations.
Conclusion: The dimensions (variable properties) of the creativity process
In summary, I propose the following dimensions of the process of creativity,
which are explored in the following tables.
The first is one of the necessary defining conditions for creativity (human
agency), while the others are dimensions on which the process of creativity
varies between instances.
I claim that these dimensions apply equally to technology (product design),
Art, and also to entrepreneurial design of services, and to pure science.
(Although I am personally more familiar with cases from technological
creativity.)
- Is there a manager (inventor), actively seeking the answer?
- Which of the 2 parts came first? I.e. {Solution, value} X {Given, sought}
- Information source: {Solution, value} X {Inventor, other people, observed world}
- Gradual vs. sudden, relative to group vs. individual
Firstly, the question of whether there is an inventor acting as manager at
all: in other words, whether the case satisfies the necessary condition ("0th
dimension") for creativity of being due to human agency.
Cases that do not nevertheless help by giving us a perspective on those that
do, so a few are included as examples.
Examples where an invention is just noticed, and so arguably cannot qualify as
creative, are where both value and solution are noticed together. One case is
noticing that sunken ships in some locations have functioned to begin a new
reef: and now some ships have been placed and sunk deliberately for that
purpose. Another might be noticing that cigarette smoke tends to repel
midges, then smoking for that purpose.
I.e. is there an active manager, or was the "creation" just observed and
adopted?
Secondly, since (according to the argument here) there are always 2 parts
to any creativity which consists precisely of joining them, and the inventor's
job is that of a manager who searches for the missing part, then we can
classify each case by which of the two parts was "given" (there already), and
which was searched for. If both are given then it is a case of no creativity
(discovering something useful, as above). If neither are given, then it is a
case of a professional inventor setting out to do invention by simultaneously
looking for unsatisifed needs (functions) and for solutions that match them.
Thirdly are the dimensions of information source: for each of value and
solution, who or what supplied the information?
The basic idea is whether it comes out of the "director's" head (as in
painting and maths) or from testing the world, or asking other people.
However a major reason for not having a single clear answer to this in many
cases is that often, there may be a demonstrated key element that should make
a solution possible, yet there also needs to be a substantial development
process to establish how the solution can be reliably and economically
produced. Penicillin is an example of how crucial this step is. In fact the
same applies to the "value" element as well: managers may hit on a use they
believe in, but only much further work and rolling it out will in fact prove
whether or not there is real demand for it. This leads to ambiguity in how to
describe each case and fill in entries to the table.
Fourthly is the issue of whether the process is perceives as sudden or
gradual, and by each of the inventor and the surrounding social group.
Additionally is the contrast between pure science and saleable
technology. Both are creative in these terms, but a science goal concerns
the value of knowledge.
In fact in both cases, the value is only really known (established) after the
creation is fully delivered, and even then can change in time as the context
changes.
Illustrative tables of the attributes of the process
This table illustrates how creations may be sudden or gradual; and how the
perception of this is different from the viewpoints of the inventor or of
others (the group).
|
Perceived suddenness of the creativity process
|
|
Perceived by others |
| |
Sudden |
Gradual |
|
|
| Perceived by inventor |
Sudden |
Find a new species, SMS
[Neither function nor solution anticipated] |
NW passage, cure ulcers, 4-colour theorem proof
[Sudden solutions to long standing goals] |
| Gradual |
Aniline dyes, PostIt
[Slow development for unanticipated utility] |
Fusion power, maleria vaccine
[Gradual progress on longstanding goals] |
This table illustrates how either part may come first (be a "given") or second
(be sought by the inventor).
|
Which of the 2 parts came first?
|
|
Utility |
| |
Given |
Sought |
|
|
| Solution |
Given |
Use sunken ships to create a reef
[Discovery not creativity] |
Aniline dyes, PostIt notes |
| Sought |
Zero resistance electrical wire, HIV vaccine, Green automobiles |
Jackson Pollock, Radium, Penicillin-Florey
[Professional inventors] |
Summary table: cases with the attributes of the creativity process for
each
This table compares and classifies different cases of creativity by these
process properties.
A creative design has:
- The result may have an overall director (or manager, or inventor), or not.
(I.e. a purposeful agent as opposed to the whole thing happening
accidentally.)
- Two parts: a value (or utility or goal, or function, or interest, or
...); and a solution (means that delivers the value)
- Each part may be "given", or discovered as a result of a purposeful
search, or discovered accidentally.
- Each part may have been discovered by the inventor, or someone else, or
the world.
- It may have 2 perceived timescales (each sudden or gradual): as perceived
by the inventor and as perceived by the social group.
|
Dimensions of the creativity process
|
| |
Active director? |
Which part sought? |
Info source? |
Time |
| |
If no=> not creative |
Value |
Solution |
Value |
Solution |
Inventor |
Social group |
| |
Yes/No |
given/sought |
given/sought |
Dir/Others/World |
Dir/Others/World |
Sudden/Gradual |
Sudden/Gradual |
|
|
| SMS phone texting |
Yes |
Sought |
Given |
Dir/Others |
Dir |
Sudden |
Sudden |
| Penicillin,Fleming |
No |
Given |
Given |
Dir |
world |
Sudden |
- |
| Penicillin,Florey |
Yes |
Given |
Sought |
world |
world |
Gradual |
Sudden |
| PostIt notes |
Yes |
Sought |
Given |
Dir |
Dir |
Gradual |
Sudden |
| DNA fingerprinting |
Yes |
Sought |
Given |
Dir |
Dir |
Gradual |
Sudden |
| Perkins' aniline dye |
Yes |
Sought |
Given |
Dir |
Dir |
Sudden |
Sudden |
| Sunken ships to initiate reefs |
No |
Given |
Given |
world |
world |
Sudden |
Sudden |
| Columbus |
Yes |
- |
Dir |
- |
World |
Gradual? |
Sudden |
| Radium (for sci) |
Yes |
Sought |
Sought |
Dir |
world/Dir |
Gradual |
Sudden |
| Painting (perspective) |
Yes |
Sought |
Given |
Dir |
Others/Dir |
Gradual |
Gradual |
| JacksonPollock |
Yes |
Sought |
Sought |
Dir |
Dir |
Gradual |
Gradual |
| A new species |
Yes |
Given |
Sought |
Others |
World |
Sudden |
Sudden |
| Plutonium for bombs |
Yes |
Given |
Sought |
Others |
world |
Gradual |
Sudden |
| Kissograms |
Yes |
Sought |
Given |
Dir |
Others/Dir |
Gradual |
Sudden |
| Proof of the 4 colour theorem |
Yes |
Given |
Sought |
Others |
Dir |
Gradual |
Gradual |
| Vaccine for HIV |
Yes |
Given |
Sought |
Others |
Dir |
Not yet achieved |
Not yet achieved |
| Zero electrical resistance wire |
? |
Given |
Sought |
Others |
World |
? |
gradual |
I shall here discuss each case, and the problems I have in filling in the
table for it.
PostIt: the research group discovered the weak glue accidentally, then
searched for a use for it purposefully, and found it. They played the
Director (manager) role; they also acted as the information sources.
SMS (phone texting). The engineering group had already to implement the
channel that would be used for it as the "control" channel by which mobile
phones liase with stationary masts, and are handed off between them.
They saw that this channel could also be used for carrying user messages with
no new hardware, and no difficult extra software to write, and no costs to the
supplier provided delivery time wasn't guaranteed. They imagined it would
have some value, but probably hugely underestimated how much: this was later
"discovered" by observing actual customer use.
Penicillin: Fleming noticed an unusual pattern of bacterial growth in a dish;
inferred that this was due to a fungus which he was able to identify and
culture; isolated the substance it secreted and speculated that it would be
useful medically. Florey decided to attempt to work at developing an
anti-bacterial drug; chose penicillin (he presumably would have gone on to try
others if this was not successful); developed ways of manufacturing it in
usable quantities; and ran medical trials to establish whether it was useful.
If you regard Fleming as the discoverer of pencillin in the sense of someone
who created a drug hospitals could order and use, then Florey did nothing more
important than a foundry worker producing a bronze sculpture. But Fleming
completely failed to develop a production process and so could not treat let
alone cure any human. This led to the deaths of millions of people in the
years between his observation and the development of Florey's drug supply. We
could thus see Florey, but not Fleming, as creative: managing a purposeful
process that verified and connected a value with a working solution for
delivering that value.
Columbus had a purposeful project of discovery. He didn't discover what he
had planned to, so his actual discovery was accidental; and he never correctly
understood what he had discovered. He wasn't the first human to discover it
(that would be the people already living there); he wasn't the first European
to reach the continent (that was the Vikings) but he did discover / establish
a quite different method of sailing there (at the time, much more crucial than
just knowing the geographical coordinates); but most importantly, his
discovery became disseminated throughout the European world. Although he
probably had various utilities in mind, what has proved useful was the
knowledge of his discovery, not particular planned material advantages (gold,
...).
Marie Curie discovered the element Radium after a planned search and heroic
labour, isolating a few grams from tons of pitchblende (Uranium ore).
It was the first knowledge of its existence, and measurement of its
properties. Its human applications were invented later and by others.
Thus from an engineering viewpoint, this was discovery not creativity because
it had no human utility; while later people who developed applications (e.g.
using it to create glow-in-the-dark paint for watches) were creative.
However from the viewpoint of creative science, the value was the
identification of a new element and its properties, especially radioactive
properties. In effect there was a puzzle (accounting in detail for the
radioactivity of pitchblende) and both the method for answering it and the
answer itself had to be pursued.
Kissograms: an example of entrepreneurial creativity, where a new value
(utility) is imagined, verified, and a means developed to supply it. I.e.
creativity needn't be to do with either science, technology, nor art.
In fact, the means (solution) could be viewed as given and the creativity was
in recognising that people might use it and pay for it.
DNA fingerprinting is essentially like PostIt notes: an unexpected property was
observed; and then a use for it was thought up. This brings up a common
ambiguity: although it started with a surprising discovery that would become
the essential part of the "solution", even after inventing the application
(utility), the solution had to be developed into a practicable and reliable
procedure: reworking the solution from feasibility study to tested solution.
Discovering a new species (whether fossilised or living in the wild):
biologists go out to look, say, for new beetles. By examining every on they
find they will recognise a new species. The value is given, and obvious:
zoology is still interested in new species, though the amount of scientific
value of each new one is only known after discovery and depends on how
unexpected it is. Scientists would normally call this "discover", yet it has
all the attributes of creativity.
Perkins examined the sludge from a failed experiment in organic chemistry and
observed a strong mauve colour. He then thought of the application of fabric
dyeing and established it as practicable.
The 4 colour theorem was a long standing conjecture in maths: i.e. everyone
thought it was true, but couldn't find a way to prove it. So the utility was
long established, and concerted efforts to find the "solution" were made,
eventually successful after a very long time.
Similarly for malaria vaccine, and fusion as a practicable power source, except
that success even after all this time is still at best partial, and it is
still not known if it will ever be really successful.
Perspective painting: a story we might tell is that artists wished to create
a stronger impression of visual realism and sought, then developed, the system
of perspective.
With Jackson Pollock he developed both novel ways of painting (no brushes,
horizontal canvases to take liquid paint), and an aspect of visual experience
that his pictures isolated and brought out. If that story is correct, then
w.r.t. creativity he (and no doubt numerous other major painters such as
Picasso) developed novelty simultaneously in both parts (aim, method):
as professional inventors do for product design.
Assessing students on creativity
There are three ways in which we could say that creativity is already commonly
assessed in various academic disciplines, without calling it that.
Firstly, all assessment tests require "transfer": using what was learned in a
new context. The question is, how far is the transfer? Reciting a poem
learned by heart is transfering only to another time and place, but using
identical words (very near transfer). A test on fractions might vary the
actual digits each time, but the method would be identical. Another step up,
would give the numbers in words not digits; a further step might ask about
proportions or percentages rather than using the word "fraction": and not all
children have grasped the connections. All tests test transfer; and some test
ability to transfer the knowledge to significantly distant cases and contexts:
and so are testing one important kind of creativity. (See here Table 8, which relates
creativity to the spectrum of learning transfer.)
Another kind of creativity assessment is the exam essay e.g. in History.
While essays sometimes only elicit direct recall and reproduction,
they are also often used to confront students with an unexpected proposition,
and the learner is required to construct a critical thinking argument for
and/or against the proposition, recruiting what they know and re-using it for
this discussion. This is creative in the classic sense: uses old elements,
but re-configuring them into a novel combination for a new purpose. In modern
educational terms, it might be boasted of as testing critical thinking or
higher-order Bloom goal types. The students who do this certainly feel an
engagement and elation that indicates that it is experienced as creative (and
self-actualising) by them.
The third familiar assessment method concerns problem-solving tasks, and in
particular Johnstone's analysis of designing creative problem solving tasks for learners.
Open-ended problems require the learner to decide on the goal (what will count
as a solution), some on finding new methods, some will have incomplete
information given. Thus such problems have more than one right answer; but
probably only a few predicates (judgement criteria, metrics of goodness of
a solution) which are largely agreed in advance.
Finally: we could view assessing creativity (e.g. of painters or designers)
as an expansion of this, but where the learner probably must add their own
predicates, and where there are probably a very large number of predicates
that are relevant (even if the designer in practice picks just a few to focus
on). Thus if the task is to design a coffee mug, some of the obvious goals
include: holding liquid, tolerating freezing and boiling temperatures,
insulating it so hot coffee doesn't burn the user's hand and doesn't cool too
quickly, being easily washable, not containing steel armature wires so it can
be used in microwaves, etc. Designs will generally address some of these
better than others, so no two designs will be the same even in intention, let
alone in solution. On this perspective, designs could be assessed firstly (1)
for which predicates (design goals) were addressed vs. forgotten (identifying
value), and secondly (2) on how well the design addresses each one
(identifying solutions).
And then further assessed for novelty for the student (3) (was it a
solution not mentioned in the textbook or lectures);
(4) novelty for everyone (the solution has not been seen anywhere before);
and (5) for surprise: a subjective judgement about how striking the solution
seems (as the Sydney Opera house is novel).
Some links on assessing creativity
The HEA has stuff on how to assess creativity
http://www.creativelearning.com/AssessingCreativity.htm
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/150029.htm
www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~gritchie/papers/aisb01.pdf
www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/trefyoun.html
flux.futurelab.org.uk/projects/e-scape-assessing-creativity/
www.palatine.ac.uk/events/view/562/
Links / References
Bloom's taxonomy of learning objectives: see
here for references.
Boden, Margaret A. (1990) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson).
Boden, Margaret A. (1994) "Précis of The Creative Mind: Myths and
Mechanisms" Behavioural and Brain Sciences vol.17 no.3 pp.519-570
Boden, Margaret A. (1995). Creativity and Unpredictability.
Stanford Education and Humanities Review vol.4 no.2
Nutshell: a 10 page summary of her book.
Boud,D. (1995) Enhancing learning through self assessment
(Kogan Page, London)
Malcolm Gladwell (2005)
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
VIA questionnaire.
Signature strengths (free online questionnaire) (creativity is one of their
24 character strengths)
http://www.viacharacter.org/VIASurvey/tabid/55/Default.aspx
InQbate, a highly funded (2005-10) Centre of
Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Creativity.
See also Prof. Peter Childs
A talk I gave on creativity
Ken Robinson report (1999) All our futures: Creativity, culture and
education (UK government report)
PDF
Siddiqui, Zarrin S. (2008)
"Creativity in higher education: great expectations"
International Conference on Assessing Quality in Higher Education 2008
pp.226-237
Acknowledgements
This page has been prompted by an invitation to talk from
eSharp,
by conversations with
Marianne Patera, and with
Blay Whitby.
To be included
"It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create." John Saxe
"The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."
Oscar Wilde
Lev Landau's group was discussing a bright new theory, and one of his junior
colleagues bragged that he had independently discovered the theory a
couple of years ago, but did not bother to publish his finding.
"I would not repeat this claim if I were you," Landau replied: "There is
nothing wrong if one has not found a solution to a particular problem.
However, if one has found it but does not publish it, he shows a poor
judgment and inability to understand what important is in modern physics".
ToDo
I'm weakest on the dim. of info source. Does this matter?
And I have commented on, but perhaps not resolved, the issue of the
difference between the first glimmer of each element of a creation, and
establishing a reliable procedure (not the promise of one that will work
sometimes).
Social accounting
E.g.s of task-artifact cycle: of users find new apps
Anagrams? fit in somewhere?
This needs e.g.s from:
Art
non-techno entrepreneurship
geography or biology
Problems
Insight learning ??
Reprise / Conclusion. If any final conclusion needed.
Why human?
Why agency?
Creativity =~= p-solving, not all discovery. Must have surprise (not too much purpose?)
Aristotle again for creativity -> do need a purpose = telos (utility); and
that is a human need.
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How to refer to it.
xxxx
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
What's the difference between syllabus and curriculum?
Put on a web page together (under best??);
or on existing page for syllabus if it exists
or on existing page for L-objects.
Syllabus & curriculum
Alec Johnstone in a talk seemed to be using:
Syllabus = aims & objectives
Curriculum = timetable (plan of M-acts). [Willy Dunn[e] said that curriculum
was coined at UoG, and referred to the set of set books that were handed
"round" in turn. They were set content, but not time.]
But American IDs I think use curriculum for the aims.
Reigeluth (above):
Curriculum (what to teach)
Instruction (how to teach it) includes:
(= design, dev.(create resources?), impl.(adapt to local circs
=?delivery?)
Counseling
Admin.
Evaluation
Management
I.e.:
Syllabus
Curriculum
Instructional design / L-design
What does curriculum design mean?
Put this on page with
C] L-act/Lactivity hier? L-object. cf. like the books of the original
curric.
B] curric vs. syllabus (vs. L-aims vs. L-design ...)
A] ILOs, L-aim, objectives; outcomes, ...
It (A&K neoBloom book) also says intended student learning outcomes --
outcomes = objectives, curriculum standards, learning goals.
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How to refer to it.
Dale's cone, spontaneous misconceptions, fraud
The bogus "Dale's cone"
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
The issue or phenomenon
Examples:
The issue or pheno
The false cone
The real cone exists
The false Confucius
Model 1: random mutation. Scholarship's reasoned rebuttal of the
attribution
Archiv ref: model of random meme.
Thalheimer etc. doing the scholarship => the attribution (authority) is wrong.
Model 2: Analogy to other pyramids.
Theory and experiment's reasoned rebuttal of the assertion
Bloom, xref my neoBloom.
Evidence against the presupposition behind the assertions:
DrFox (even if medium, then motivation X delivery skill)
NGray: more interesting points about medium use in teaching
Ls don't know how/where they learned (so feeling of recog on seeing the cone
may be a delusion even about the reader's own experience).
(DrFox showed) it all depends on whether trying to learn, or just to be
interested/entertained.
Model 3: Spontaneous misconceptions.
The educational theory of the unreasonable endurance of this error
Other cases: I hear, I see, I do. I have to create this: doesn't seem to be
on my joke/quotes page after all.
Huge false attribs.
Viennot, SponCons as the theory of why these recur (not random bad
scholarship, but an educational reason.)
They occur in every disc. E.g. plants feeding through their roots.
Conclusion
So model 1 establishing that there is no case to answer because therer never
has been any (published, peer reviewed) evidence, and the assertions of
authority are all false.
Model 2 establishes that if, nevertheless, we were to consider the bogus
cone as a hypothesis, then these are several lines of both data and theory
suggesting it is probably quite wrong and an unpromising hypothsis to
research.
Model 3 tells us that nevertheless we are likely to see it perennially
asserted because it seems to trigger a powerful though spurious resonance with
our experience and attitudes.
Appendix
Why is it attractive?
The truths it falsely seems to express?
Cone / see, hear, do
Putnam
Falling asleep when forcing ourselves to read
Falling asleep over TV but not blaming ourselves
Falling asleep in conversation but not blaming ourselves
BUT cone has no "thinking" as a mode of learning
References
Will Thalheimer: top of website
page1
page2
page3
page4
A ppt
Lalley, J. P. and Miller R. H. (2007) "The Learning Pyramid: Does It Point
Teachers in the Right Direction?" Education vol.128 no.1 pp.64-79
links
http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/polovina/learnpyramid/
Niamh's report
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General Educational Rules
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Never forget to put any current question about the learning and teaching
process against the background of some often overlooked truths.
- Ausubel's dictum:
"Ascertain what the student knows, and teach accordingly."
Ausubel,D.P. (1968) Educational psychology: A cognitive
view (San Fransicso: Holt, Rinehart & Winston)
(Or Kathleen Fisher:
"Ascertain what the student misunderstands, and teach accordingly.")
- Learners are diverse in the activities they choose. They are not all the
same. Ideas of identifying what learners want have to be modified in this
respect; and catered for by providing redundant, non-compulsory activities and
resources. [O'Shea and OU research on what successful learners do. Twigg, and
redesigning for "diversity".]
- [Scaffolding vs. consistent course structure]. One pressure is to have a
regular structure, regular level of support. But we should always be
considering front loading support (and contact?), and withdrawing it
progressively. It is needed much more at first; it is better that they learn
to do it themselves later. This needs to be a regular feature of course
designs. Consistency is what we want in a train service and in supermarket
food: but it is actively harmful in learning and teaching.
- Learning and Teaching, not just one or the other.
(Look at where Ls come from and also where they want to go to.)
- Compare with the paper equivalent, don't just be mindlessly
breathless about what technology does this month.
- Time on task.
Supporting a feedback cycle. Whether of knowing, or skill/doing.
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Educational jokes
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
There were two small boys, John and Jim, who were friends. Jim had a dog. One
day they were taking the dog for a walk walk and and Jim said proudly: "I've
taught the dog to whistle". "What do you mean?", said John, "He's not
whistling". "I know", said Jim, "But I said I'd taught him; I didn't say he'd
learned".
Green-Armytage, P. (2002) "Colour Zones -- Connecting colour order and everyday
language" 9th Congress of the International Colour Association, Proceedings
of SPIE Vol. 4421 pp.976-979
"I know I've taught it because I've heard myself say it."
Quoted in K.A.Bruffee (1993)Collaborative learning
True jokes
- Complaints from students that the same bit of plagiarised work got
different marks from different staff.
- Complaints from parents that a student penalised for plagiarism shouldn't
be punished because his mother had done the work anyway.
Here is a 5 min video:
"Doodling in Math Class",
which is entertaining (rather than a joke). My reflections on what it says
about teaching are here.
Aphorisms
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
[T10, T333] - Sydney J. Harris
I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.
[T10, T333] - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts
at education [T10] - Paul Karl Feyerabend
The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent
of formal education. [T10]
- Paul E. Gray President of MIT 1980-90
Formal education is but an incident in the lifetime of an individual. Most of
us who have given the subject any study have come to realize that education is
a continuous process ending only when ambition comes to a halt. [T10]
- R.I.Rees. One (this one?) Robert Irwin Rees was a Brigadier
General, United States Army; and President (1929-1930) of American Society for
Engineering Education.
Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they
encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their
intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive
in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is
humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control
and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not
spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their
ground steadfastly as wise and sober-minded men. [T10]
Socrates
"The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but the
means of education." [T10]
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes,
nails, and pins." [learning for learning's sake, almost.] [T10]
William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) U.S. Unitarian clergyman and writer.
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My
opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller
that could have been prevented by a good teacher. [T10/T6]
Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) American novelist, short-story
writer and essayist.
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your
temper or your self-confidence. [T10]
Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) American poet.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it.
Aristotle
An educated man is one who can entertain a new idea, entertain another person
and entertain himself. [T10]
Sidney Herbert Wood, (UK) principal assistant secretary of the
Ministry of Education in a 1947 talk.
Reported in Time magazine Monday, May 19, 1947.
".. if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man
is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of
education." [T10] [it's all critical thinking]
John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University,
1914.
"Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty." [T10]
Twain
"Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." [T10]
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1898
"All Human Knowledge is precious whether or not it serves
the slightest human use." [T10]
A.E. Housman
Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.
[T10] George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (1633-1695) English statesman and
author
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in
school. [T10]
Albert Einstein
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
[T10, T9] B.F. Skinner, US psychologist New Scientist
May 21, 1964
There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living
and the other how to live. [T10]
James Truslow Adams (historian, freelance author, Pulitzer prize
winner) in "To 'Be' or to 'Do': A Note on American Education" June, 1929
Forum.
"If you travel with us you will have to learn things you do not want to learn
in ways you do not want to learn". [T10]
[Doris Lessing, from a letter replying
to a reader who had been seriously disturbed by reading one of her novels.
Quoted in Alan Yentob's "Imagine" TV programme on Doris Lessing, broadcast
Tues 27 May 2008, 10:35pm on BBC1]
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."
[T10, T333]
Francis Bacon (1625) "Of studies" in Essays. See
here
and here for copies of Bacon's 1625 essay; and
here
for Samuel Johnson's 1753 follow-up.
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." [T1]
George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman.
"Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach teachers.
Those who can't teach teachers, go into politics." [T1]
Muriel Barbery in The elegance of the hedgehog (2006)
"Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching" [T1]
Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying
"I like to teach: it's easier than learning." [T1]
A character says this in John Updike's (1968) Couples
However still easier than teaching, is just to do the task for the learner.
Which is what teachers are continually tempted into.
However
"Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach." [T1]
Or in full:
"With Aristotle we declare that the ultimate test of understanding rests on
one's ability to transform one's knowledge into teaching. Those who can, do.
Those who understand, teach."
Schulman, Lee S. (1986) "Those who understand:
knowledge growth in teaching." Educational Researcher
vol.15 no.2 pp.4-14
"I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think." [T2]
Socrates
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time
that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. [T2]
Oscar Wilde The critic as artistp248
The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, "The
children are now working as if I did not exist." [T2]
Maria Montessori
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate
themselves. [T2] Abbe Dimnet Art of Thinking 1928
There were two small boys, John and Jim, who were friends. Jim had a dog. One
day they were taking the dog for a walk walk and and Jim said proudly: "I've
taught the dog to whistle". "What do you mean?", said John, "He's not
whistling". "I know", said Jim, "But I said I'd taught him; I didn't say he'd
learned". [T2]
Green-Armytage, P. (2002) "Colour Zones -- Connecting colour order and everyday
language" 9th Congress of the International Colour Association, Proceedings
of SPIE Vol. 4421 pp.976-979
"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy
dispositions where it is almost superfluous." [T2]
- Edward Gibbon (1776)
The decline and fall of the Roman empire vol.1 ch.4
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
[T2]Winston Churchill
Confucius said: "I am a transmitter, rather than an original thinker. I
trust and enjoy the teachings of the ancients. In my heart I compare myself to
old Peng." [T2 !]Confucius
You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn
by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he
lives. [T22?] [but how non-applicable to imagine a) that you can
create curiosity about anything anytime; b) that a student is well-equipped if
they can only learn when curious, not when it is useful to them or required by
others] Clay P. Bedford
[? a top executive of Kaiser Industries in California, died 1991]
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."
Plato, from The Republic [T22]
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
[T22] E.M.Forster from a radio talk.
Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought
[T3, (T6)]
Bertrand A. Russell
Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us
on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom. [T3]
- Jean Giraudoux
Learning: the kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. [T3]
Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." [T3]
- This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but until the
attribution can be verified, the quote should not be regarded as authentic.
"Don't let school interfere with your education" [T3]
"Never let formal education get in the way of your learning." [T3]
[may be the accurate one.]
My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
[T3] Margaret Mead
"A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian
spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely
sobers us again." [T3]
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in An Essay on Criticism (1709)
"'Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned', said Celia, regarding
Mr. Casaubon's learning as a kind of damp which might in due time saturate a
neighbouring body."
[T3]
George Eliot in ch.28 of Middlemarch (1871)
For as the Greek verse says:
'To what use serves learning, if understanding be away.' [T3]
Apud Stobaeus, tit. iii., p. 37 (1609);
quoted in Montaigne
On pedantry
On pedantry
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance
is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole
theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at
any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove
a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence
in Grosvenor Square. [T3]
Wilde,Oscar The importance of being earnest
"He who learns without thinking will be bewildered; he who thinks without
learning will be in danger." [T3] - Confucius
All intellectual improvement arises from leisure. [T3, T8]
Samuel Johnson in Boswell (1799): Life of Johnson
[N.B. Johnson is using this as an argument for social inequality]
"Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is
necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and
brains, not pudding, in your head." [T33]
A.E. Housman
No one wants a good education. Everyone wants a good degree. [T33]
- Lee Rudolph
The Master said, "In ancient times, men learned with a view to their own
improvement. Nowadays, men learn with a view to the approbation of others."
[T33] - Confucius
[This shows that an imaginary nostalgia for deep over shallow learning,
or at least for intrinsic over extrinsic motivation, for learning was present
even in ancient times.]
Education is a state-controlled manufactury of echoes. [T33]
Norman Douglas, (probably the English author, died 1952)
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my
contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal
cord would suffice. [T33/T6]
Einstein
Do we really recommend learning from your errors?
Here's a quote from an experimental astrophysicist as his team slaves away
getting their balloon-borne telescope ready for launch:
"Step by tedious step, we stumble away from abject failure. And that's on a
good day." [T4]
Barth Netterfield, in a TV documentary on one of his research
projects
"Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the
mistakes of others." [T4]
Otto von Bismarck
If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. [T4]
Thomas Watson, Sr., founder of IBM
"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing
them." [T4] Hannah Arendt
Mistakes are the portals of discovery. [T4]
James Joyce Ulysses
Learning is like raising a monument; if I stop with this basket of earth, it
is my own fault. It is like throwing earth on the ground; one basket at a
time, yet I advance. [T4] - Confucius
I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones. [T4]
John Peel, disc jockey
The only thing experience teaches us is that experience teaches us nothing. [T4]
Andre Maurois (1885-1967) French biographer and writer
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils
[T4] (Louis) Hector Berlioz .
"Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master." [T5]
Leonardo da Vinci
If the student isn't better than the teacher, then the teacher is a failure.
[T5]
Zen aphorism, quoted by Allen Ginsberg
I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at
education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could
have tolerated anything so primitive. [T5] - John W. Gardner,
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" [T7] Lee Shulman.
"It was imagined that experiments in education were not necessary; and that,
whether any thing in it was good or bad, could be judged of by the reason. But
this was a great mistake; experience shows very often that results are
produced precisely the opposite to those which had been expected. We also see
from experiment that one generation cannot work out a complete plan of
education." [T7]
Immanuel Kant, in his university lectures On Pedagogy
Only dead fish swim with the stream. [T6] Malcolm Muggeridge
No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or 'get rich' in
business by being a conformist. [T6] [but untrue]
John Paul Getty
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates. [T6]
Oscar Wilde
"The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new
things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done." [T6]
Jean Piaget
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of
the originality. [T6]
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) English author, illustrator, mycologist
and conservationist.
Education costs money, but then so does ignorance. [T8]
- Sir Claus Moser (b. 1922), German-born British academic and
statistician, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford. Daily Telegraph
(London, 21 Aug. 1990).
If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it away
from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. [T8]
Benjamin Franklin
[N.B. this doesn't say that formal education is the best investment.]
All intellectual improvement arises from leisure. [T3, T8]
Samuel Johnson in Boswell (1799): Life of Johnson
[N.B. Johnson is using this as an argument for social inequality]
There can be no education without leisure, and without leisure education is
worthless. [T8] Sarah Josepha Hale
(American writer, author of "Mary had a little lamb", died 1879)
Otium sine litteris mors. (Leisure without learning [is] death) [T8]
Seneca (AD 65) Moral Epistle 82
One of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get. [T8]
William Lowe Bryan, 10th president of Indiana University
(1902 to 1937).
Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer
tries to get as little he can for his money. [T8]
Max Leon Forman (1909-1990) Jewish-American writer
We learn simply by the exposure of living. Much that passes for education is
not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when
we know it least. [T9] - David P. Gardner [who is he?]
You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to
know. [T9] Oscar Wilde
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
[T10, T9] B.F. Skinner, US psychologist New Scientist
May 21, 1964
[i.e. you believe you have forgotten, yet you show permanent changes.]
The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us
who do. [T9]
Harold Coffin, a former humor columnist for The Associated Press,
died 1981
Docendo discimus: By teaching, we learn. [T333]
Seneca (AD 65) Moral Epistles 1, 7, 8
More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching
and the spirit in which the teaching is given. [T333]
Bertrand Russell
"Teaching yourself is discovering what is teachable." [T333]
From:
"For me, the first challenge for computing science is to discover how to
maintain order in a finite, but very large, discrete universe that is
intricately intertwined. And a second, but not less important challenge is
how to mould what you have achieved in solving the first problem, into a
teachable discipline: it does not suffice to hone your own intellect (that
will join you in your grave), you must teach others how to hone theirs.
The more you concentrate on these two challenges, the clearer you will see
that they are only two sides of the same coin: teaching yourself is
discovering what is teachable."
E.W.Dijkstra.
[N.B. This distinguishes implicit and explicit. If it's implicit,
you may have learned it, but can't teach it -- at least in Dijkstra's view of
teaching here.]
The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work. [T333]
- Michael Jackson (the pop star) in Moonwalk, 2009
First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you
want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.
[T333] - Richard Feynman
"solution to the problem of education":
I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education
other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a
direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher -- a
situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things,
and talks about the things. It's impossible to learn very much by simply
sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned. [T333]
- Richard Feynman
I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with
me. [T333] - St. Augustine
I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.
[T10, T333] - Ralph Waldo Emerson
It appears, therefore, that some development of the capacity to be alone is
necessary if the brain is to function at its best, and if the individual is to
fulfil his highest potential. Human beings easily become alienated from their
own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation and maintaining
contact with one's own inner world are all facilitated by solitude.
- Anthony Storr
"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest;
Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the
bitterest." [T333] - Confucius
I used to sit alone thinking about this and that. Sometimes I even forgot my
meals or bedtime. Still I gained very little. Later I shifted to reading
omnivorously, but I did not benefit a great deal either. At long last I came
to see that reading in a mechanical way without using my brains was no use.
On the other hand, if thinking is divorced from the reality and no due
attention is paid to reading, one will continue to feel puzzled by many
things. One should constantly review what he has learned and combine reading
with thinking. In thus making use of the theories one has learned to guide his
thought and help analyze the problems at hand, progress will be achieved.
[T333] - Confucius
It matters not what you Learn; but when you once learn a thing, you must never
give it up until you have mastered it. It matters not what you inquire into;
but when you inquire into a thing, you must never give it up until you have
thoroughly understood it. It matters not what you try to think out, but when
you once try to think out a thing, you must never give it up until you have
got what you want. It matters not what you try to sift; but when you once try
to sift out a thing, you must never give it up until you have sifted it out
clearly and distinctly. It matters not what you try to carry out; but when you
once try to carry out a thing, you must never give it up until you have done
it thoroughly and well. [T333] - Confucius
"A student should not be taught unless he is anxious to understand what he
does not understand, and should not be enlightened unless he is eager to
express what he cannot express." [T333] - Confucius.
[the recipe for getting learners to recognise a problem.]
"Letting the students admire the excellence of other students ensures the
success of education." [T333] - Confucius
[My L3 tutorial reciprocal critiquing exercise.]
"Is it not a pleasure to learn and practise from time to time what is
learned?" [T333] - Confucius
Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
[T333] - Goethe
Those who trust us educate us. [T333] - George Eliot
Nine tenths of education is encouragement. [T333]
- Anatole France
[Cf. Mitra.]
Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are
fit to be a teacher. [T222] - Confucius
He can be a teacher who finds what is new in reviewing what is old.
[T222] - Confucius
Confucius
Confucius is the Latin form of K'ung-Fu-tze (Master Kong).
550BC - 478BC or 551-479BC
in /near Shantung. Contemporary of Buddha; 100 years before Plato.
There are five collections of writings by Confucius and his disciples:
The analects of Confucius,
The great learning,
The doctrine of mean,
Mencius;
The book of change,
The book of odes,
The book of rites,
The book of history,
The spring and autumn annals.
Analects.
A.C.Muller's (1990, 2011) translation
Another page
Other sayings
[analect 7:1] Confucius said: "I am a transmitter, rather than an original thinker. I
trust and enjoy the teachings of the ancients. In my heart I compare myself to
old Peng." [T2]
[analect 7:2] Confucius said: "Keeping silent and thinking; studying without satiety,
teaching others without weariness: these things come natural to me."
"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest;
Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the
bitterest."
"A student should not be taught unless he is anxious to understand what he
does not understand, and should not be enlightened unless he is eager to
express what he cannot express."
[the recipe for getting Ls to recognise a problem.]
Student Teams
"Letting the students admire the excellence of other students ensures the
success of education."
[My L3 tutorial reciprocal critiquing exercise.]
Tutorials
"Is it not a pleasure to learn and practise from time to time what is
learned?"
Confucius said: "Isn't it a pleasure to study and practise what you have
learned?
The Master said, "In ancient times, men learned with a view to their own
improvement. Nowadays, men learn with a view to the approbation of others."
[This shows that an imaginary nostalgia for deep over shallow, or at least for
intrinsic over extrinsic motivation for learning was present even in ancient
times.]
The Master said, "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without
learning is perilous."
"I used to sit alone thinking about this and that. Sometimes I even forgot my
meals or bedtime. Still I gained very little. Later I shifted to reading
omnivorously, but I did not benefit a great deal either. At long last I came
to see that reading in a mechanical way without using my brains was no use.
On the other hand, if thinking is divorced from the reality and no due
attention is paid to reading, one will continue to feel puzzled by many
things. One should constantly review what he has learned and combine reading
with thinking. In thus making use of the theories one has learned to guide his
thought and help analyze the problems at hand, progress will be achieved. "
[T333]
Confucius said: "Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are
fit to be a teacher."
[T333]
[Comment] Confucian "learning" is always fully connected to
self-transformation.
Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is
for you to find the other three. [is this genuine?]
"In education there are no class distinctions" [widening participation]
"Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? ...
Tsze-hsia said, "There are learning extensively, and having a firm and sincere
aim; inquiring with earnestness, and reflecting with self-application: --
virtue is in such a course."
The capacity for knowledge of the inferior man is small and easily filled up;
the intelligence of the superior man is deep and not easily satisfied.
It matters not what you Learn; but when you once learn a thing, you must never
give it up until you have mastered it. It matters not what you inquire into;
but when you inquire into a thing, you must never give it up until you have
thoroughly understood it. It matters not what you try to think out, but when
you once try to think out a thing, you must never give it up until you have
got what you want. It matters not what you try to sift; but when you once try
to sift out a thing, you must never give it up until you have sifted it out
clearly and distinctly. It matters not what you try to carry out; but when you
once try to carry out a thing, you must never give it up until you have done
it thoroughly and well.
THE TRUE SCHOLAR
When the opportunity of gain is presented to him, he thinks on virtue. He is
reverent in sacrifice; in mourning, absorbed in the sorrow he should feel. He
who cherishes love of comfort is not fit to be a scholar.
The main object of study is to unfold the aim; with one who loves words, but
does not improve, I can do nothing.
The scholar's burden is perfection; is it not heavy? It ends but with life; is
it not enduring?
Learning is like raising a monument; if I stop with this basket of earth, it
is my own fault. It is like throwing earth on the ground; one basket at a
time, yet I advance.
The true scholar is not a mere utensil. Leaving Virtue without proper
culture; failing thoroughly to discuss what is Learned; being unable to move
toward the righteousness of which knowledge is gained; and being unable to
change what is not good, -- these are the things that (in my scholars) give me
anxiety.
If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge, so as ever to acquire new, he may
be a teacher of others. I marked Yen-Yuen's constant advance; I never saw him
pause. Often the blade springs, but the plant does not go on to flower; often
the plant flowers, but produces no fruit.
Having completed his studies, the scholar should devote himself to official
functions. He should say : "I am not concerned that I have no place; I am
concerned how I shall fit myself for one. I am not concerned at not being
known; I seek to be worthy to be known."
"Knowing without doing is not knowing."
"He who learns without thinking will be bewildered; he who thinks without
learning will be in danger."
"He can be a teacher who finds what is new in reviewing what is old."
Oscar Wilde
Wilde,Oscar The importance of being earnest
Act 1. Jack: "I know nothing, Lady Bracknell."
LB: "I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything
that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic
fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education
is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces
no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper
classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square." [T3]
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. [T1]
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time
that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. [T2]
I like talking to a brick wall, it's the only thing in the world that never
contradicts me. []
The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its
proper value. []
I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.
[exams!]
You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to
know. [T9]
Life is too short to learn German []
I may have said the same thing before... But my explanation, I am sure,
will always be different.
Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a
gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he
knows is bad for him.
- Lord Fermor, in The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) by Oscar Wilde.
Benjamin Franklin [Refs to be checked.]
A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.
If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Some links
http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/quotes.htm Has citations
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/904.html Has citations
http://www.motivationalquotes.com/pages/education-quotes.html
http://www.1-funny-quotes.com/funny-learning-quotes.html
http://www.mylinkstolearning.com/teachqts.htm
http://www.1-famous-quotes.com/quote/555048
Mark Twain quotes on education
http://www.cybernation.com/victory/quotations/subjects/quotes_education.html
http://www.fun4biz.com/coach/coach/learning_quotes_humorous.html
http://quotationsbook.com/quote/23103/
Quotations book
Feynman on teaching
Preface on teaching to Feynman's Lectures
http://www.etni.org.il/quotes/education.htm
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/eduquote.htm
http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~graham/quotes/educationis.html
http://www.nea.org/grants/35593.htm
http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/899
http://www.home-education.org.uk/resources-quotes.htm
http://www.famouslifemottos.org/Education.html
http://www.lightafire.com/quotations/authors/clay-p-bedford/
http://faculty.darden.virginia.edu/brunerb/case-student.htm
http://www.wisdomword.info/benjamin-franklin/
Tags / classifications
Project to support crowd-sourcing of citation verification
T10 The nature / aims of education ...
T1 If you can't do then teach ....
(N.B. do, learn, teach, teach-Ts, politician: that direction implies
(mockingly) decreasing ability, but if you believe in constructivism then the
difficulty runs right to left.)
T2 Constructivism // teaching isn't possible // good teaching
T22 Bad teaching
T222 Good teaching
T3 (education) What is bad about education (learning vs. educ.)
T33 Bad learning
T333 Good learning
T4 Trial and error / Learning by exploration
T5 Progress at teaching, at learning and teaching
T7 The need for educational research (not just doing whatever occurs to)
T6 Imagination, creativity (cf. Ken Robinson)
(Why? because naturally we only like assimilation. Education gets you
practised and confident with accommodation. Accomodation means
diminished doing (performance), but better learning.)
T8 Money: is education worth paying for?
T9 Metamemory / meta-knowledge: self awareness about whether you
remember/know something.
Last changed
25 Mar 2011 ............... Length about 900 words (6000 bytes).
(Document started on 25 Mar 2011.)
This is a WWW document maintained by
Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/best/effect.html.
You may copy it.
How to refer to it.
Effect size
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
This page is about effect size: what it is in a slightly wider perspective
than just statistics. If you just want the statistical view and tests, the
wikipedia page seems good.
Whereas statistical tests such as a t-test aim to tell you what degree of
certainty to attribute to a difference (an effect), another important question
is "How important is that difference (if real)?". I shall use the term
"effect size" as a general title for this question; and take particular
statistical tests of effect size (e.g. "Cohen's d") to be just one
interpretation of the question.
Some different senses of "how important"
Basic approach: StdDev units
How much of the variance is explained
xx
xx
New Sci, Gender effects table
Last changed
15 July 2009 ............... Length about 4,000 words (25,000 bytes).
(Document started on 18 May 2009.)
This is a WWW document maintained by
Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/best/gibson.html.
You may copy it.
How to refer to it.
Gibson, Affordance
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
There have been discussions on what J.J.Gibson means for visual perception,
for the notion of affordance in HCI, and for the notion of affordance in
e-learning. We all have enormous trouble integrating his ideas with our
habitual ones, and the more we are trained (indoctrinated) in computer
programming and reductionist "science" the more trouble we have. A number of
authors have attempted to define and redefine terms like "affordance".
Normally, I am strongly drawn to this kind of approach. But the trouble is
that when we attempt to define a term, we fall back almost entirely
unconsciously on existing patterns of thought, and do not even consider giving
up anything we already believe. Gibson however constitutes a challenge to
some of our patterns of thought.
I think the simplest short thing we can do is to list some basic lessons
Gibson taught: whenever we write something inconsistent with these, then we
are showing our prejudices in ways that are incompatible with the real
world (as well as with Gibson's ideas, which aren't necessarily right in all
ways). Here's my list of such Gibson inspired points, or facts.
- Optic array: Almost all work on human perception, past and present, analyses
it by sense organ or modality. But our actual perception works by integration
not only of multiple sense organ inputs but also of our motor system with our
perception. If you press your eyeball, the world seems to move (because if you
don't send the signal to move the eye yourself, then the integration goes
wrong). At a larger scale, we walk round objects (but retain an integrated
percept of a single object), or rotate small objects in our hand. We move our
eyes through the optic array in order to sample different parts of it and so
pick up more information, like a dog zig-zagging across a scent trail to
determine from which direction it is coming from: perception and active
sampling motion are a single system in real organisms (though not in most
labs). It is unjustified philosophical prejudice, not science, that makes most
of us analyse perception and action separately. In real life they are
fundamentally integrated at the lowest levels.
- Optic flow. One of the things our perception does is recognise objects, but
it does other things which do NOT depend on recognition. We control our
locomotion (whether by foot, or in driving a car) based on the flow of visual
texture fields in our field of vision, and our brains compute information on
our motion without having any knowledge of the nature of the flecks of texture
(e.g. dirt on the window, patterns on the ground, ...). The optic flow field
gives us the value of the variable "time to collision" directly without our
knowing (even unconsciously) the distance to the object we are approaching.
This is why anyone can drive a car, and can do so with very bad depth
perception. Our prejudices and education predispose us to make up a story
about how we recognise the car in front as a car, compute the distance to it
using "depth perception" (parallax, stereopsis, etc.), estimate our speeds,
etc. None of this turns out to be a correct description either of the
function actually performed by our perception or of the mechanism that
delivers it.
- Intermediate states do not have a meaning in the way that final percepts
do. Optic flow and time to collision are one case where the intermediate
computational states are not those you might expect, and in particular do not
correspond to things in the world: they are internal states with less meaning
than a carry digit isolated in the middle of a piece of arithmetic. But this
general point comes up much more pervasively in computation, even though it
goes against our strong intellectual preferences to understand calculations as
putting together parts each of which are meaningful in the same way as the
whole is. For instance, the kind of story we like is that we recognise a duck
because we recognise a duck-like head next to a duck-like body and wings, and
recognise the whole by virtue of first recognising the parts. But even in a
world of information, this is not generally true. Information, technically,
is a reduction of the number of alternative possibilities in a situation. For
example, consider that you are recognising capital letters, and then that the
first bit of information you get is that the right hand side is a vertical
line. This reduces the possible identities of the letter from 26 down to one
of [H, J, M, N, U]. We do not have a (conscious) concept that represents that
subset of letters, but the recognition system must have such an internal state
and many others of that kind, each representing a different increase in
partial information; but these have no correspondence in the world of letters
or words.
- Direct perception. Gibson seemed to deny that there were any intermediate
states or computation in perception. Of course there are if we want to
analyse things that way (and I do): but these states have no meaning
correlates themselves in the outside world. Furthermore, the real point here
is that the phenomenon of perception could and should be described as a
function from properties of the world to percepts with no reference to the
internal computational intermediate states. This shows a clarity of thought,
a realisation of what is primary in understanding perception. This is exactly
parallel to the way that Darwin defined evolution with no concept or knowledge
of genes, let alone of DNA. Genes are one implementation or mechanism for
evolution. Evolution is the primary theory and does not require genes.
Gibson formulated perception as a function from world to percept: not
muddling it up with possible mechanisms. One of the worst, but most
pervasive, intellectual vices is to assume that mechanism is primary. An early
example of this fallacy were those who dismissed Newton's theory of
gravitation for being "action at a distance" that didn't satisfy their
irrational desire for a mechanism transmitting the force through intermediate
entities.
- Affordance. Gibson's basic notion of affordance links action and perception
the other way round: suggesting that (because beings in general and people
in particular are concerned with acting in the world) we perceive as a direct
attribute the actions we might perform with or on each object. This is a
surprise only to those who presuppose (without evidence) that perception is
independent of action, and is prior to it. It may also be a surprise to those
who think perception is about measuring the absolute attributes of objects,
because affordance is obviously not an object attribute, but a relationship
between object and perceiver. But in fact (contrary to our habitual but
faulty thought patterns), perception, like measuring, primarily and more
easily detects relationships. Even when we are measuring an object carefully
with a ruler, we are using our perception of the object's relationship with
the ruler to derive an "absolute" property.
- The perception of novel objects and situations. There has been frequent
discussion of whether Gibson denied or took insufficient account of the role
of learning in perception. It is perhaps more important to ask whether most
research on perception puts too great a weight on it. If we consider object
recognition, then by definition a perceiver cannot do it until they have
encountered the object, perhaps frequently. Yet an infant animal would
presumably die immediately if learning had to precede successful perception
and action. In the real world, beings encounter unknown objects all the time
and a large part (in fact most?) of perception concerns what and how we
perceive unknown objects. In designing artifacts and user interfaces, this is
a chief concern: can a user operate a novel device first time, without
training? This is the context in which most discussions of affordance in
design are situated.
- Success without understanding. In design, the mindset which designers
must escape is the assumption that successful action (such as operating a new
device) depends on knowledge which is obtained from prior training, and that
it is patronising to think that some users cannot master this. Contrary to
this, a user centered approach sees learning as a cost and a burden that good
design should avoid. Indeed, published experiments illustrate how in
situations where information is rich, users still haven't learned what to do
after many trials: they simply rediscover it on the spot each time. The aim
of design in most cases should be to avoid the need for learning and indeed
for thinking, and to aim for users to operate in "flow" from the start. While
understanding is a pleasure, it is not the pleasure being sought when users
try to open a door or operate a tool to do something else. The use of the
concept of affordance in design is to allow users to perceive what to do
without learning. When a door has no handle but a push plate, this is
achieved. When an on/off switch has no label and a delay before any effect is
visible, it is not, since the user cannot tell whether to press once, twice,
or to hold down the switch.
- Human analogical machinery.
Whenever someone sees anything, the thing is always to some extent novel: the
day is different, the time, the phase of the moon, the lighting; if it is a
person then their clothes are different, many of their cells have been
replaced, etc. When it is a novel object, the differences are greater. But
fundamental to perception in fact is deciding what this new stimulus is most
like. When faced with a novel artifact or user interface, and (as is almost
always the case today) the assumption that they will try it out without
reading any instructions, then the big question is: what is this thing most
similar to, which analogy will the user implicitly and unconsciously draw?
Current computation has no impressive mechanisms for this, but human minds are
fantastically good at it, yet it is little studied. Why will one situation
(design) trigger an association, and with it, user behaviour? A few
unpublished examples however suggest that these associations are not always
and reliably predicted by our conscious categories. That is why almost the
only thing we know about HCI is that we have to observe actual users on
particular designs: we cannot adequately predict their response.
One such example from a computer system long ago in a country far, far
away is as follows. The command for listing the emails in the inbox was "ha"
(Headers All); and the command for listing the files in the current directory
was "ls". Not particularly frequent, yet persistently repeated, was the user
error of sometimes typing "ls" for "ha" or vice versa.
How could these two be confounded in the user's mind? The command names, the
documentation, the nature of the objects (file names versus emails) were
different in anyone's ontology, especially that of the technically experienced
users exhibiting this error. This kind of error seems to reveal hidden,
tacit categories (e.g. approximately "show me my bag of things") that have the
power to determine user behaviour.
??
- Learning isn't fundamental to perception: dealing with novelty is.
A more fundamental mechanism is analogy: recognising partial similarity
Learning will be most important toi perception where it is about learning
to do this more effectively
The most important things for an organism (to learn) to perceive are not
objects but actions the agent can achieve: i.e. affordances.
Comments, HCI, Education
Oliver, Dohn and others have commented on the problems with people's
definitions of "affordance" in the fields of HCI and Education (especially
technology and education).
They try to do conceptual analysis, and to connect the concept with
philosophical concepts. I'm going to leave them to it because I don't find
their papers illuminating of educational issues. Following my comments above
I'm going to:
- Ask why/how "affordance" seems relevant to education
- Suggest which points from above or elsewhere might actually illuminate
education, and avoid conceptual errors relevant to our understanding of
education.
Here goes.
- Good examples in HCI of affordance are things like the way Apple and
others carefully designed floppy discs so that they could not be inserted the
wrong way in disk drives (even though there are 8 ways a perfectly square disk
could be inserted). On some doors in our public buildings today, there are
no handles, only plates: so without thinking (and regardless of whether you
use vision, touch, or just trial and error) everyone knows you can only push
it open.
- A good example in education of affordance is something like the way a
child or a student will seize the opportunity, when they have a mentor in a one
to one situation, of asking endless questions: that is what access to an
expert affords us. Students will also, if and when they have the opportunity
with friends they are comfortable with on the same course, compare the
marks and feedback they get. (Only by talking to students did I finally grasp
that this gives them information they can't otherwise get.) Similarly they
are deeply interested, when it is available, in seeing their ranking compared
to their peers; how other students have answered an assessed task, and so on.
Again, most teachers (and published theories of learning and teaching) are
oblivious to why they do this. By observing affordances and their uptake by
learners, things otherwise invisible to us as teachers begin to manifest. They
can tell us about what the needs of our students are (we often are only aware
of the goals we tell them to have); and about how they can satisfy them (when
mostly we only think about what we provide, not what may be there all around
them). This is not only a remedy for the teacher-centeredness of most
educational thinking, but it is also (just like Gibson) like what faces
biologists: believing in Darwin does not in itself give any clues to what
needs an organism has nor to how they may often be supplied by its niche
(often quite invisibly to us).
- A bad example of affordance in education is to say a lecture affords
listening and/or learning. This is both trivial and wrong. It is trivial
because it is what teachers think, not an insight into actual learning. It is
wrong because actually a lecture only affords that to those learners who speak
the same language, who can hear clearly, and who don't already know everything
that is said.
Affordance, as I (following Gibson) said above, is NOT a property of an
object but a relationship between a person, an object, and a
goal/task/function the person has.
- Interestingly this type of misconception is manifest in several other
places in education. One is due to Carroll and Bloom and associated with
mastery learning. Carroll pointed out (and supported by experiments) that
even though most of us still today interpret the spread of marks in a class as
telling us about an attribute of the learner, in fact there is again a 3-way
relation between the learner, the material, and time: almost all learners can
learn all the material but take different amounts of time to do so. This
mis-interpretation by teachers leads to endless needless under-performance.
Again, deep and shallow approaches to learning are NOT traits of the
learner, but a relationship between that learner, that learning context, and a
strategy or approach; learners select their approach depending on the context,
they are not stuck with one approach for all things.
- Assuming that what is actually a 3-way relationship is merely a 2-way,
object-attribute property is pervasive. Psychologists call a common form of
this the "fundamental attribution error", where a person explains a problem or
failure in terms of the properties of another person. The e-learning field is
particularly prone to this, where talk of early adopters vs. resisters is
exactly this (mis-)attribution: and a failure to grasp that the "contexts" of
different people are different, so that the value or feasibility of adoption
of the same equipment just is different for different people, and is
not a constant property of the technology independent of people. Reversing
this by being user-centered would attribute the failure to the designer not
the end-user thus combatting the self-serving basis for most such
attributions; but it would still not tackle the common reality that some things
work for some people but not for others: i.e. it is not about a single
artifact with absolute properties regardless of the user.
- Norman said he would replace all occurrences of "affordance" in his book
by "perceived affordance". I however have another view. A design which
novices and experts alike find immediately usable is one thing; designs
which require learning investment from users are another. Both are important;
and again, the important point for designers is that the desired feature is
NOT a function (attribute) of the design/object alone, but of the 3-tuple of
user, object, and goal/function. This too has an important similarity with
learning designs where in general designers (i.e. teachers designing a course
or a lesson) are even worse than software designers at thinking clearly about
this, about the fact that a given design will only work for learners who
already have certain skills and will fail for others. Lectures, for example,
only afford learning for learners who not only can hear and understand the
words, and who want to learn about the topic, but who have skills (e.g.
note-taking) that are comparable to an experienced user's knowledge of how to
get writing done with a word processor. All learning designs have
pre-requisites of not only teacher skills but of learner skills: that is one
big reason why learning designs seldom transfer to all other contexts.
- Thus taking into account the cost of learning the skill of using
something for a goal i.e. of changing the human agent so that the object now
does afford them an important function, is an issue that is important but
often missed in both HCI and education and indeed other fields. Thus learning
is frequently an important cofactor for affordances. Many published
commentaries on affordances debate whether Gibson would agree with this. A key
point here is that this "learning" is quite different in kind from the
learning most of us mean when we discuss education. In education we almost
always expect and test what the learner can articulate, write about, and teach
to someone else. But with affordances, someone who can do it may be unaware
that they have learned anything, unable to describe what it is they know, or
to pass it on to someone else. There are huge differences in effectiveness
between teachers, as measured by the attainments of their students. This is
correlated with their experience (i.e. the amount of their tacit learning).
But they generally can't pass it on to others, or training would homongenise
this effect away. In HE, some untrained tutors exhibit great skill at
facilitation, while others who have been "trained" are vastly less effective.
These effects are large, important, and not understood; they can in one way
reasonably be described as "learning" yet they share few characteristics with
the "learning" that organised education purveys. Quibbling about what
"learning" means may interest philosophers. For those interested in
understanding education, we should recognise that some aspects of Gibson's
mindset illuminate issues which are dangerously ignored or neglected in most
educational literature, and so are worth paying attention to.
- To get value for understanding teaching and learning from Gibson and the
notion of "affordance", we need to immerse ourselves in that way of looking at
things: success without understanding, picking up information that is lying
around us, using it without remembering it, being able (or not) to do things
without any idea why we just succeeded or whether that success will generalise
to other times and places. Both teaching and learning have a strong
dependence on unidentified skills of this kind. The ideal learning designer
would be able to reason about this, but faces the same difficult research
programme as do biologists who have not yet discovered bat sonar or the use by
some organisms of the way light is polarised to detect where north is or the
electric fields picked up by fish; or planetologists working on the "Gaia"
theory that there are hidden self-correction mechanisms maintaining earth.
In this view, the operation of teaching and learning depends in part on
mechanisms we cannot see and do not yet even suspect the existence of. Alerted
by Gibson's way of thinking, I have noticed many clues over the years that
seem to support this view.
Gibson's ideas thus give us 4 useful things for pushing forward our ideas about
education:
- We use the one word "learning" to refer to two quite different things:
what is expressed learning objectives and tested in exams, and the often
unconsicous changes in behaviour and capability that experience sometimes
causes. This is pernicious not just as a conceptual muddle, but because when
focussed on one meaning we forget to check whether the simultaneous operation
of the other is crucial to the case being studied.
- A reminder that treating 3-way relationships as simple 2-term
object-attributes is pernicious but very common.
- The notion of affordance can remind us to look, not at what things are
officially designed for (chairs for sitting, not rocks; sticks are for trees or
perhaps poking things, but not for termite fishing), but at what people
(learners) actually do with opportunities. This reveals to us something about
the needs they actually feel, not the ones we intend them to have; and the
methods they actually use to satisfy them, not the ones we so kindly designed
for them.
- On the other hand, just as learners / people are more flexible than we
expect in some ways, they are less flexible than we assume or wish in other
ways. Especially in the short term, we have to allow for the costs of
learning how to learn.
References
Benjamin S. Bloom (1984) "The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group
Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring"
Educational Researcher Vol.13, No.6, pp.4-16
Biggs ch.
Carroll, J.B. (1989) "The Carroll model: A 25 year retrospective and
prospective view" Educational Researcher vol.18 no.1 pp.26-31.
Dohn, N.B. (2009) "Affordances revisited: Articulating a Merleau-Pontian view"
Computer supported learning vol.4 pp.151-170
Oliver,M. (2005) "The problem with affordance" E-learning vol.2 no.4
pp.402-413.
The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the
Potential Downfall Of American Society.
Mike Adams, Biology Department
Eastern Connecticut State University
The Connecticut Review, 1990
This is a copy from http://www.cis.gsu.edu/~dstraub/Courses/Grandma.htm
which was a copy from http://biology.ecsu.ctstateu.edu/People/ConnRev
which has now moved to
http://nutmeg.easternct.edu/~adams/Resources/Grannies.pdf
It has long been theorized that the week prior to
an exam is an extremely dangerous time for the relatives of college students.
Ever since I began my teaching career, I heard vague comments, incomplete
references and unfinished remarks, all alluding to the "Dead Grandmother
Problem." Few colleagues would ever be explicit in their description of what
they knew, but I quickly discovered that anyone who was involved in teaching
at the college level would react to any mention of the concept. In my travels
I found that a similar phenomenon is known in other countries. In England it
is called the "Graveyard Grannies'' problem, in France the "Chere Grand'mere,"
while in Bulgaria it is inexplicably known as "The Toadstool Waxing Plan" (I
may have had some problems here with the translation. Since the revolution
this may have changed anyway.) Although the problem may be international in
scope it is here in the USA that it reaches its culmination, so it is only
fitting that the first warnings emanate here also.
The basic problem can be stated very simply: A
student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the
student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.
While this idea has long been a matter of
conjecture or merely a part of the folklore of college teaching, I can now
confirm that the phenomenon is real. For over twenty years I have collected
data on this supposed relationship, and have not only confirmed what most
faculty had suspected, but also found some additional aspects of this process
that are of potential importance to the future of the country. The results
presented in this report provide a chilling picture and should waken the
profession and the general public to a serious health and sociological problem
before it is too late.
As can be seen in Table 1, when no exam is
imminent the family death rate per 100 students (FDR) is low and is not
related to the student's grade in the class. The effect of an upcoming exam is
unambiguous. The mean FDR jumps from 0.054 with no exam, to 0.574 with a
mid-term, and to 1.042 with a final, representing increases of 10 fold and 19
fold respectively. Figure 1 shows that the changes are strongly grade
dependent, with correlation coefficients of 0.974 for mid-terms and 0.988 for
finals. Overall, a student who is failing a class and has a final coming up is
more than 50 times more likely to lose a family member than an A student not
facing any exams.
|
|
Current
Grade |
|
Next exam |
A |
B |
C |
D |
F |
Mean |
|
None |
0.04 |
0.07 |
0.05 |
0.05 |
0.06 |
0.054 |
|
Mid-term |
0.06 |
0.21 |
0.49 |
0.86 |
1.25 |
0.574 |
|
Final |
0.09 |
0.41 |
0.96 |
1.57 |
2.18 |
1.042 |
Table 1: The mean number of family deaths/100
students for periods when no exam is coming up, the week prior to a mid-term
exam and the week prior to finals. Values are corrected for the number of
students in each grade class and the relative frequency of mid-terms and
finals.
Figure 1. Graph of data in Table 1, showing the
relationship between exam, student grade and FDR. The equation for the simple
linear regression on each is shown, as is the correlation
coefficient.
Only one conclusion can be drawn from these data.
Family members literally worry themselves to death over the outcome of their
relatives' performance on each exam. Naturally, the worse the student's record
is, and the more important the exam, the more the family worries; and it is
the ensuing tension that presumably causes premature death. Since such
behavior is most likely to result in high blood pressure, leading to stroke
and heart attacks, this would also explain why these deaths seem to occur so
suddenly, with no warning and usually immediately prior to the exam. It might
also explain the disproportionate number of grandmothers in the victim pool,
since they are more likely to be susceptible to strokes. This explanation,
however, does not explain why grandfathers are seldom affected, and
clearly there are other factors involved that have not been identified.
Nonetheless, there is considerable comfort to be had in realizing that these
results indicate that the American family is obviously still close-knit and
deeply concerned about the welfare of individual members, perhaps too much so.
As some colleagues have expressed some degree of skepticism over my
interpretation of these data, I have extended the scope of my research into
the phenomenon. Using readily available sources (including the National Census
Bureau and The National Enquirer ) have examined the relationship
between education and family structure. Interestingly, there appears to be no
correlation between FDR and the size of the extended family (Table 2). Either
large families worry less on a per capita basis than do small families, or
there is a single "designated worrier" in each family, who bears the brunt of
the danger. The exceptionally high death rate among grandmothers (24 times
greater than for grand fathers) suggests the latter explanation is correct. If
not, then people from very small families would be well advised to discourage
other family members from attending college, since the potential risk becomes
excessive with so few members to share the danger.
|
Number in family, excluding
student |
0 |
1 |
2-3 |
4-8 |
8-15 |
16-30 |
30+ |
|
Mean FDR |
<0.01 |
0.66 |
0.71 |
0.62 |
0.73 |
0.64 |
0.68 |
Table 2. Mean FDR for all exam periods and all student
GPAs over the last decade. Families ranging in size from 1-30+ show no
significant correlation (0.04) between family size and FDR. The figure for
students with no family would have been zero, except for a single family-less
student (a member of the baseball team) who tragically lost at least one
grandmother every semester for four years.
The problem is clearly far more pervasive than
most people realize. For example, if one examines the percentage of the
population attending college and the mean divorce rate on a country by country
basis, there is a very strong positive correlation between the two. The United
States has the highest percentage of its population attending college and also
the world's highest divorce rate, while South Yemen is last in both
categories. Although this study is still in progress and will form the basis
for a future CSU grant proposal, it seems results already are becoming clear.
As more people go to college, their families find that, for safety reasons, it
is wise to increase the number of grandmothers per family. Since there is
currently no biological way of doing so (though another grant proposal in
preparation will ask for funds to look into the prospect of cloning
grandmothers, using modern genetic engineering techniques), the families must
resort to in creasing the pool by divorce and remarriage. Sociologists may
wish to use these data to examine the effect of education on family structure
from a new perspective.
Figure 2: The mean FDR/100 students for all exams and all grades of
students for the years 1968-1988. The best fitting curve shows an exponentially
rising curve, with the equation shown in the figure.
While the general facts of this problem have been
known, if not widely discussed, I have recently become aware of a potentially
far more dangerous aspect of the whole process. This trend came to light when
a student reported two family members dying prior to an exam.
Examination of the numbers of deaths over the last two decades clearly showed
a "death inflation" When the figures for all students and all exams are pooled
for each year, a disturbing outcome is seen (see Figure 2).
The FDR is climbing at an accelerating rate.
Extrapolation of this curve suggests that 100 years from now the FDR will
stand at 644/100 students/exam. At that rate only the largest families would
survive even the first semester of a student's college career. Clearly
something will have to be done to reverse this trend before the entire country
is depopulated. Three possible solutions come to mind:
1. Stop giving exams. At first glance, this
seems to be the simplest answer to the problem. Like many simplistic solutions,
however, it fails to consider the full ramifications of such a course. Without
exam results, all medical schools would be forced to close their doors, having
no way of distinguishing worthy students. The resultant dearth of physicians in
the next generation would throw so many other professionals (tax accountants,
malpractice attorneys, golf pros, etc.) out of work that the economy
would go into a nosedive. Regretfully, this solution must be abandoned since it
is more dangerous than the original problem.
2. Allow only orphans to enroll at
universities. This is an extremely attractive idea, except for the
shortage of orphans. More could be created of course, but this would be
morally wrong, and in any case would replicate the very problem we are trying
to avoid i.e. excessive family deaths.
3. Have students lie to their families.
Students must never let any of their relatives know that they are at
university. (Initial field tests show that keeping just the grandmother
ignorant is neither feasible nor safe for the rest of the family.) It is not
enough merely to lie about exams; if the family doesn't know when the exams
are, they may then worry constantly and this may lead to even higher death
rates. The only solution is that the family must never be aware that the
student is even enrolled at a university. Students must pretend they are in
the armed forces, have joined some religious cult, or have been kidnapped by
aliens. All of these alternate explanations for their long absences will keep
the family ignorant of the true, dangerous, fact. Although it might be argued
that such large-scale deceptions could not be maintained for long periods, the
success of many politicians suggests otherwise.
It will take time to discover whether any of these
solutions are feasible. In the interim, the problem is clearly far too
important to be ignored. Following the government's lead on so many similar,
potentially catastrophic problems (global warming, the ozone layer, and ocean
pollution), I propose that a commission be established to study the problem in
more depth. While the state is deciding on the make-up of such a committee and
what its charge should be, I would urge all members of the academic community
to start keeping their own records. If faculty throughout the country were to
send me summaries of their own knowledge about this matter, I could compile a
follow-up report for publication in a year or two.
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Informal learning
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Formal learning is doing a course for accreditation in an institution.
What is informal learning? Several dimensions.
List 2: Independent dimensions?
- Intention. Does the learner intend to learn (formal)? We learn our first
language unintentionally (informal); and our first maths in the sense of the
Piagetian conservations. N.B. deep learning is characterised by learners
saying they are not trying to learn but trying to understand
(informal?).
- Teacher intention or learner intention? Is the topic one required by the
teacher (formal), or desired by the learner regardless of the teacher
(informal)? (Is the choice of content intrinsically or extrinsically
defined?)
[The two dimensions above are in fact independent. You can have cases of
learning that is not intended by the learner, but is intended by the teacher,
who conceals the intention fromn the learner. In fact, probably most
professional kindergarten "instruction" is of this kind.]
- How far is the learning scripted? i.e. are the learning activities formally required, or informally and perhaps unconsciously chosen. A course
might:
- Have a certificate but nothing else fixed e.g. a PhD.
- Certificate and curriculum (and exam): no other activities required
- Some learning activities required e.g. compulsory lecture attendance,
but most time spent individually in the library etc.
- All learning activities organised, no homework required.
- How much is the learning connected to the learner's own experience?
Formal = disconnected, abstract; informal = connected to existing personal
experiences. In Laurillard's model, formal would in this sense be an
incomplete, unsatisfactory learning process compared to informal.
- Implicit pre-requisites. All courses assume things, usually never
articulated e.g. that the learners understand English, that they can read,
that they can write, that they can write essays. That they are skilled in
group interactions neither talking all the time nor being quiet all the
time. That they spent thousands of hours tinkering with mechanical things in
their childhood. These pre-requisites are often acquired informally: there
are no courses on them.
Thus these things are learned, and are essential to formal learning; yet are
informally learned in every sense. If we implicitly assume these things,
we exclude students without them [
CMU ref:
ref1
ref2];
but if we don't assume and build on them, then we a) get enormously less
learning done; b) patronise students; c) fail to connect to their own
experience and prior learning.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/index.html
- Mending cars: a childhood spent doing things mechanical.
- The learning is assessed or not. (Cf. extrinsically or intrinsically
motivated.)
- The learning is assessed in a fixed way e.g. unseen exam, vs. "informal"
learning with much more open kinds of assessment.
- The learning is accredited or not.
- Learning objectives are fixed, vs. negotiated, vs. invented by the learner.
- Learning activities are fixed, vs. negotiated, vs. invented by the learner.
- Teacher does exposition OR teacher doesn't (but just sets objectives,
structures/supports activities by learners to find materials). [Betty Collis
definition]
- Teaching has an informal atmosphere, in the hope that learners will bring up
their relevant personal experiences that relate to the subject. [Christine
Sinclair's definition]
- Formal = accredited. Informal = intentional but not accredited. Non-formal
= what we all do in picking up information as a side effect of other
activities. [Peter Sloep definition]
- Intentional learning, or not.
- Discussion over coffee: not organised by teachers, but important contribution
to officially set objectives. I.e. the learning activity is informal, the
learning objectives are formal.
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Good online medical help
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
The issue is: where can you trust online for medical advice?
New Scientist had an article based on published studies reviewing medical
quality of online sites. That plus another pointer are listed here.
wikipedia
in fact was found to have high accuracy on medical matters, with the
possible problem being incompleteness (not just in coverage, but in mentioning
possible side effects or drug interactions).
medlineplus.gov
USA national library of medicine
www.nhs.uk
www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk
mayoclinic.com
Mayo clinic (non-profit organisation)
www.webmd.com
Written and reviewed by doctors
www.healthtalkonline.org
Unlike the others, gives what it feels like for the patient and relatives.
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Pros and cons of mistakes
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
- It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you
know for sure that just ain't so. [Mark Twain]
- Everything, no matter how evident or obvious, should be doubted,
questioned, viewed with suspicion....There is much to be gained from the
discovery that one has been deeply, persistently, and utterly wrong.
[David Mermin, "Boojums All the Way Through: Communicating Science in a
Prosaic Age"]
- xx
- xx
- xx
- xx
- xx
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Thoughts for the day
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Time management: "... the tumult and boredom of everyday life -- itself
an unceasing and futile pursuit, consumed by plans"
"Our job is not to be teacherly, but enabling"
What if they drop out after a year? Will they have 0.25 of each graduate attribute?
Sarcasm at work: "How are you?" "Exhausted from happiness."
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Proving a real no difference
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
How to show no-difference convincingly.
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Favourite papers
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
This page is about various collections of very best / favourite published
papers.
Jo Ferrie's favourite papers in/on qualitative research
- Potter,J. & Wetherell,M. (19xx)
- Reynolds, J. and Wetherell, M. (2003) 'The discursive climate of singleness:
The consequences for women's negotiation of a single identity'. Feminism and
Psychology, vol.13 no.4 pp.489-510.
- Piliavin,I.M. & Rodin,J. (1969) "Good samaritanism: An undergound
phenomenon?" Journal of personality and social psychology
vol.13 no.4 pp.289-299
My favourite Education papers
- Bloom ,B.S. (1984)
"The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective
as One-to-One Tutoring "
Educational Researcher Vol.13 No.6 (Jun. - Jul., 1984) pp. 4-16
- Sfard,A. (1998)
"On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One"
Educational Researcher Vol.27 No.2 pp.4-13
- 3 papers on essentially the same study:
Wood, D. & Middleton, D. (1975) "A study of assisted problem-solving"
British j. of psychology vol.66 no.2 pp.181-191
Wood, D., Bruner,J. & Ross, G. (1976) "The role of tutoring in problem
solving" Journal of child psychiatry vol.17 pp.89-100
Wood, D., Wood, H. & Middleton, D. (1978)
"An experimental evaluation of four face-to-face teaching strategies"
Int. j. of behavioral development vol.1 pp.131-147.
- Chi,M.T.H., Roy,M. & Hausmann,R.G.M. (2008)
"Observing Tutorial Dialogues Collaboratively: Insights About Human Tutoring
Effectiveness From Vicarious Learning"
Cognitive Science vol.32 pp.301-341
The biggest published effects in Education
Chick sex
Mazur
Hake
(bloom 1:1 tut)
- Crouch, C.H. and Mazur, E. (2001), "Peer Instruction: Ten years
of experience and results", American Journal of Physics,
vol.69, no.9 pp.970-977
Also available at
http://mazur-www.harvard.edu:16080/publications/Pub_263.pdf
- Hake,R.R. (1998a) "Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A
six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics
courses" Am.J.Physics vol.66 no.1 pp.64-74
PDF copy
- Two descriptions of one study.
Biederman,I. & Shiffrar,M.M. (1987) "Sexing day old chicks: A case study,
an expert systems analysis of a difficult perceptual-learning task"
JEP: Learning, mem & cog vol.13 no.4 pp.640-645
Baddeley,A. (1997) (2nd edition) Human memory: theory and practice
p.336 (Hove: Psychology Press).
- Bloom mentions a 2 sigma effect for 1:1 tutoring compared to normal
school classroom teaching achieved by 2 of his PhD students:
Anania, J. (1983). "The influence of instructional conditions on student
learning and achievement"
Evaluation in Education: An International Review Series
vol.7 no.1 pp.1-92 (or pp.3-76)
Burke, A.J. (1984)
Students' potential for learning contrasted under tutorial
and group approaches to instruction
(Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1983)
Dissertation Abstracts International, 44, 2025A.University of Chicago).
Not so much best, as illustrating quite different experimental logics
- Experiment without a theory: a real effect but no explanation.
Perkins,K.K. and Wieman,C.E. (2005)
"The Surprising Impact of Seat Location on Student Performance"
The Physics Teacher vol.43 January pp.30-33
xxx
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Patient experience, medical education, public health
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
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When pictures are worth more than words
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
A rare case where pictures actually do tell a story without a single word.
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Public health approaches to mental illness
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
This is just a brief note on the growing
attempts to apply a public health approach to mental health i.e. avoid slow,
expensive, and ineffective psychiatrists, and get people's better awareness of
the issues to improve health. It is also broadly related to
positive
psychology.
Public mental health
In general, the biggest saving of human life and health have not come from
improvements in treatments by doctors and hospitals, but by "public health"
measures that prevent disease: clean water, sewage systems, vaccination
programmes. Recently the idea has emerged that a similar approach to mental
disease might work far better than the current system of slow, expensive, and
not very effective treatment by specialists.
An impressive study showing this reported a reduction in suicide rate of 33%
from a series of such "educational" measures:
Kerry L Knox, David A Litts, G Wayne Talcott, Jill Catalano Feig & Eric D Caine
(2005)
"Risk of suicide and related adverse outcomes after exposure to a suicide prevention programme in the US Air Force: cohort study"
British Medical Journal
vol/no.327 p.1376 pp. 20 Dec 2005.
doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7428.1376
There is some local research in this area:
1
2
3
Self-help for depression
robo therapy
Self-help podcasts from the university student counselling service.
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Quantitative vs. Qualitative
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
My real position is that Quantitative vs. Qualitative is not quite the right
way of posing the issue
(see here).
However here's a great quote anyway:
"In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any
subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods
for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can
measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know
something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it
in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be
the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to
the state of Science, whatever the matter may be."
Lord Kelvin, PLA, vol. 1, "Electrical Units of Measurement", 1883-05-03
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Dimensions of reflection
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Reflection is a significant concept in education, partly because it is a
compulsory component of some courses; and partly because almost all of us
assume that if we only think hard and carefully about something we do, then we
will get better at it. However I have seen no evidence that this belief is
justified; and furthermore, it is far from clear that people mean the same
thing by the term as each other, or indeed that anyone understands what
exactly it means.
Partly as a consequence, I have several web pages on reflection:
- A set of older notes, about the idea of reflection in education.
http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/reflection.html
- This page, which
a) adds some more notes on how to categorise different
types of reflection; b) some witticisms; c) Points out that one of the very
few, if not the only, well known example of actually improving behaviour by
thinking about it is the 12 steps programme. But the 12 steps are as eloquent
in how important it is to get the person to accept that they are not in
control of their behaviour, nor of many of their thoughts. This must be
thought-provoking, to say the least, for proponents of reflection.
- [A new page] which will look at technical ideas of reflection in computer
programming design, which suggest both how to analyse what is involved, and
that there may be something quite general (and hard to think clearly about)
in the whole business of thinking about behaviour in the world.
Dimensions for categorising types of reflection; and other notes
N.B. "Reflection", besides light bouncing off surfaces, just means
"thinking" in general English. But when used technically in education, or
about "reflective practitioners" i.e. as an attribute of professional life,
then there are different and contrasting senses even here.
- Private or for an audience.
A private diary, or a logbook forming an official record.
- To improve a skill, vs. about self, IDs, values.
Former is core Kolb/Schon idea of feedback. Latter is about understanding
oneself, connecting feelings to ideas for better mental self-consistency.
The core idea is to improve a skill by adding conscious thought about it,
reviewing results and changing one's tactics.
A different idea is about improving not a skill, or professional practice, but
developing one's "self".
- [similarly] about programming (say), learning, one's feelings values etc.
This is the same point.
But learning perhaps is an important third case, since learning may be
unreflective (even unconscious); yet will reflection improve it?
Many assume so. However this is not proven.
On the one hand, a lot of the literature of "metacognition" assumes that
consciousness of one's learning styles and methods will lead to improvements,
yet the only good evidence is that a much smaller idea of metacognition
works: getting information on how well you have learned something, and what
specificially you need to work on more. This is NOT reflective: it is just
specific feedback information.
On the other hand, interviews I've done show that students develop enormously
in the elaboration and effectivness of their study behaviour, developing very
long term plans involving various different kinds of activity.
- Disciplinary differences on whether you feel that explicit discussion of
feeling is good or bad. (Not good in sci/eng: truth is beyond feeling;
required in EngLit to present ideas as personal; and perhaps in religion; and
in sociology to construct views as ethically superior.)
A longer, but older, set of notes on this is here:
http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/reflection.html
Witticisms
"Know thyself? If I knew myself I'd run away."
Goethe
"Only the shallow know themselves."
Oscar Wilde
(Cf. it seems that part of our definition of
"creativity" is that it be
surprising: even to the creator.)
Being effective by being realistic about our weakness at reflection: the 12 steps
One could look at the 12 steps programme as all about applying reflection
remorselessly in order to correct one's behaviour.
See the wikipedia article for a summary, refs, etc.
What is interesting about seeing this as a paradigm of reflection is:
- It is about modifying one's behaviour by thinking about it.
(Weak ideas of reflection just analyse and understand one's behaviour but
don't get round to changing it.)
- But it is explicit, and indeed stresses, that the person is not in
control of their behaviour: an apparent total contradiction to the whole idea
of reflection.
- In fact, it is the most famous example of managing oneself, partly as you
would manage an animal. That is, not by adjusting the inside view, but by
working around the faulty mechanism, the way certain things trigger bad
behaviour regardless of reason and intention, etc.
This is a much more sophisticated tacit model of being a human being and
controlling its behaviour than the simple one that all you have to do is
observe it and understand it.
The 12 steps (APA version):
- Admitting that one cannot control one's addiction or compulsion;
- Recognizing a greater power that can give strength;
- Examining past errors with the help of a sponsor (experienced member);
- Making amends for these errors;
- Learning to live a new life with a new code of behavior;
- Helping others that suffer from the same addictions or compulsions.
The original 12 steps:
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become
unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us
to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of
God as we understood Him.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being
the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make
amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do
so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly
admitted it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact
with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us
and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried
to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all
our affairs.
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Romer's 12 principles for HE quality
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
This is copied from:
http://www.qvctc.commnet.edu/people/qualed.html
A review of research by The Education Commission of the States
reveals the 12 attributes below as critical. These are drawn from
Making Quality Count in Undergraduate Education , led by
Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado, with Peter Ewell, Dennis Jones, and
Charles Lenth. The report is available for $13 from ECS
Distribution Center, 707 17th St, Suite 2700, Denver, CO 80202.
An adaptation of the report is in the AAHE Bulletin, 4/96
[1996, April ?? vol.48 ]
What Research Says about Improving Undergraduate Education Peter EwellĘ
et. al. AAHE Bulletin, April 1996
See also: Angelo, Thomas A. (1999, May)
"
Doing assessment as if learning matters most"
AAHE Bulletin 51(9), 3-6.
Quality is fostered by:
A culture that values:
- High expectations
- Respect for diverse talents and learning styles
- Emphasis on the early undergraduate years
A curriculum with:
- Coherence in learning
- Synthesizing experiences
- Ongoing practice of learned skills
- Integration of education and experience
Instruction with:
- Active learning
- Assessment and prompt feedback
- Collaboration
- Adequate time on task
- Out-of-class contact with faculty
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Rowntree's 17 proposals for better assessment
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
(Here are other
lists of assessment principles.)
Rowntree,D. (1977)
Assessing students: How shall we know them?
(Kogan Page: London)
In 1977, Derek Rowntree published a book that ended with 17 proposals for
improving how assessment is typically done in Higher Education.
In 2007 few have been adopted, and those that have, have been forced on
academics directly or indirectly by legislation. The shameful conclusion
seems to be that politicians know better than universities what is good
educational practice.
Here are my paraphrases of those proposals.
The items that have been implemented are marked √.
(Of the 17, numbers 10,14 have been essentially implemented; 9,12 are in progress,
pushed from outside the universities, although we'll have to see whether they
do become effectively implemented.
To raise quality further, my own priorities would be: 1,5,7b,17.)
- Articulate the assessment criteria; including trying to express our
implicit assessment-constructs.
[N.B. this is urged by Sadler, and is an important focus in the
REAP project.]
- Use more varied assessment methods. Make them educationally relevant.
- Give credit for what learners learned, as well as whether they learned what
we intended.
[N.B. this proposal is constructivist, conflicts with Biggs' "alignment"
principle, and with the instructivist assumption that teachers know in
advance everything that a learner should learn.]
- Assess "naturalistically" i.e. use assessment processes and products that
are themselves educationally valuable. [Projects have always been like this.
Even exam essays are related where the essay form is central to the discipline.]
- Give learners maximum feedback
(not just a grade or rank, but summative of their traits/qualities).
- When criteria are judgmental, say (to learners) whether their performance
is being compared to norms, criteria, our expectations, or the learner's own
previous performance.
- Colleagues may have quite different perceptions.
- Accept this, don't converge unnaturally; report divergence.
- Give back exam scripts.
- Resist drifting to criteria that attract consensus marks:
stay with the educationally relevant ones.
- (√) Support portfolios: including both products and assessments
from many including peers and self. [The growing requirement to support
"personal development portfolios" is beginning to address this.]
- √ Report results only to learners (i.e. not made public).
[Data protection act.]
- Focus on eventual, not average or early, state (unless describing
improvement rate).
[I.e. simply averaging over continuous assessment undermines the value of
assessment as a measure of a learner when they graduate (let alone
afterwards).]
- Emphasise learners' strengths, but mention weaknesses.
- (√?) Don't conflate i.e. no portmanteau grades. Prepare a
multi-dimensional profile: with considerable narrative content.
[There is currently a move to transcripts, not simply a single overall degree
category.]
- No pass/fail except for professional competence certification. (The
reader of the report should make the judgement of how good is good enough.)
- √ No comments in confidential references that you wouldn't have
learners read. [Freedom of information act, at least in Scotland.]
- Be explicit in references that the assessment is about specific things;
that it is not about permanent qualities;
require that you are given some understanding of how the reader will use the
report; get the relevant qualities from the reference-requester.
- If we predict learners' future qualities, follow up and see how right we
were(n't).
- Give health warnings on certificates (transcripts) i.e. about the limits
on how much weight to give accreditations as a measure of the person.
E.g. "Relying too heavily on other people's opinions can damage your sense of
reality."
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S-shaped curve for uptake of innovations
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
It is often said that innovations or new practices are taken up in an
S-shaped or sigmoid curve. That is, there are broadly three phases. First
just a few take it up: early adopters, the first few percent, over a long slow
initial period of low usage; the first low slope of slow increase, and low
total use. The third phase is also a low slope and slow increase, but high
total use: these are the last reluctant ones. The second, middle phase has a
high slope of rapid increase.
This view is attributed to Everett M. Rogers, and is described in his textbook
"Diffusion of Innovations" (1962; 4th edition dated 1995; The Free
Press; New York) e.g. ch.1 p.11 fig.1-1.
In fact you will get a sigmoid curve for cumulative adoption if the underlying
rate of new adopters (new adoption events) forms a normal distribution (and
if there is no significant rate of people dropping the innovation).
Rogers also talks of pro-innovation bias: from the tendency to study only those
innovations that in fact did spread and become ubiquitous. Clearly such cases
are no guide to what determines uptake in general.
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How many senses do humans have?
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
[There's a New Scientist article, 29 Jan 2005 by Bruce Durie, on how many
senses we have.]
The only wrong answer is Aristotle's answer of 5:
vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell.
Defensible answers are:
- 3: the number of physical types of stimulus: light (photons), chemicals
(smell, taste, and internal sensors), mechanical (touch and hearing).
- 9: vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, pain, mechanoreception (balance
etc.), temperature, interoreceptors (e.g. blood pressure, bladder stretch).
- 21
- 33
Of course the real answer is that this is the wrong way to look at it.
Sensing doesn't cause perception: real perception is all about integrating
information across senses, across time, across space if you are (as is normal)
moving around partly in order to perceive better.
External chemical sensing; Senses of smell; Olfaction
Of the chemical senses of external stimuli, it (currently) appears there may
be 4 different sets of sensors:
- Taste.
- The taste buds on the tongue detect 5 different flavours.
- Most perceived taste comes from Olfaction on exhaled air
from the oral cavity.
- Olfaction by the Olfactory bulb and nerve, analysing airborne molecules
inhaled by the nose.
- Trigeminal: airborne molecules are often also detected by other sensors
in the whole nose and oral cavity, transmitted by the trigeminal nerve,
perceived as hot/cold, but combined as part of an odour percept.
- Vomeronasal: there is some but insufficient evidence, both behavioural,
anatomical, and from brain scans, that humans have a further set of detectors
which in animals respond to pheromones, whose sensing we are unconscious of
but which do affect us. (We are largely unconscious of some other things,
such as a shortage of oxygen in the air, which undoubtedly have huge effects
on us.)
The theory of how olfaction works is still undecided, but it seems clear
enough that it is like colour perception in that:
a) There are a number of different receptor types
b) the same stimulus (odour molecule) reacts with several receptor types at
once; so that
c) it is the ratio (relative strength) of responses that tells a person which
odour it, rather than having one receptor type per detectable smell.
Dogs (bloodhounds) vs. humans: sensitivity to odours 10 million to one.
Human sensitivity to a strong odour can be 9 parts per trillion.
A silkworm moth can detect a single molecule of pheromone.
There are some cases of significant differences in what humans smell:
like "colour blindness".
Leffingwell,J.C. (2005)
"Olfaction:
Update no.5"
Leffingwell Reports vol.2 no.1
G protein molecular nanomachine
Caraway vs. spearmint
Limonene: one example of chirality
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5/12 stages/steps
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
5 stages of grieving
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Despair
- Acceptance
12 steps
The 12 steps (APA version):
- Admitting that one cannot control one's addiction or compulsion;
- Recognizing a greater power that can give strength;
- Examining past errors with the help of a sponsor (experienced member);
- Making amends for these errors;
- Learning to live a new life with a new code of behavior;
- Helping others that suffer from the same addictions or compulsions.
See
here for more / the original 12 steps.
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Stats jokes
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
"The plural of anecdotes is not data" Lee Shulman.
"Homeopathic samples" Karon Mcbride.
What is true, is that at the dilutions used in homeopathy,
Avogadro's number tells us there is unlikely to be
even a single molecule left. However we have to be careful joking about this.
Apparently chemists take seriously that solid particles of a certain crystal
type, once created in a lab, can appear in labs on other continents and force
the same chemical to take that crystal form, even when not wanted. Avogadro's
number tells you this is quite possible. Every breath you take probably
contains one molecule that was exhaled by Julius Cesar: not in his lifetime
but in the very last breath he took as he died.
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Teaching and Learning: their nature in pictures
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Generating feedback to students
What course feedback from students tells you
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The three different parts of (HE) teaching
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Click to show the picture bigger.
It is conventional to divide the main functions of an academic into three:
teaching, research, and administration; and to note that ability at one is
unrelated to ability at the others. (I.e. an individual may be good or bad
at them in any combination.)
"Teaching" itself also consists of three or four quite different tasks, and
again, being good at one bears no relation to ability at the others:
- Curriculum design: deciding the content and outcomes.
Selecting the topics that will be taught, and probably selecting or writing
the texts and other materials. Product design.
- Course design: Designing the learning activities. Process design.
- Delivery:
- Setup: preparation, planning.
Preparing for delivery of one instance of the designed
activity e.g. room booking, slide creation, handout photocopying,
Just in time teaching (have to read student quiz results or requests for
explanation before the lecture in order to decide what to address);
...
- Presentation. Implementing the specified design.
N.B. this is delivering the performance of the teacher's actions: it cannot
deliver learning, which is a learner action. The same mostly applies to setup
too.
(Also known as: presentation, delivery, implementation, instantiate, run,
execute, perform, realise, enable, perform.)
Note that the first requires a subject expert whether or not they are a good
teacher, the second might be informed by memories of what you found useful in
learning this yourself, the last may be best done by an actor. Yet most
attempts to measure the effectiveness of a teacher measures only the last; and
much HE staff training focuses on that. To measure the first cannot be
done by comparing exam results which only makes sense for identical curricula.
Measuring the second requires alternative course designs to be compared, and
when done, these are not usually attributed to the people who did the design.
In the REAP project, and in other literature, dramatic improvements in
learning outcomes can depend on course design i.e. redesigning the learning
activities. The literature on presentation often reports that while students
have reliable opinions distinguishing what they prefer, it often doesn't
change learning outcomes for students working for credit (as opposed to
audiences only listening for interest).
N.B. these 3 roles are independently applied at many levels or time scales:
- programme
- course
- session (occasion)
- activity
- learning object
Didactique
"Didactique": in general, this refers to expertise in teaching one subject
and the issues that are not general across all subjects.
In other words, a reminder that teaching, like research, is discipline
specific.
If this is applied to curriculum design, then it implies appreciating the main
difficulties in learning this particular topic and regrouping and or
sequencing the topics to improve this. Common issues are threshold concepts;
common prior (mis)conceptions; whether to begin with applications (because
they are authentic and can connect learners to motivation) or basics; dealing
with two topics together because they always arise together in everyday
experience e.g. a physicist might teach Newton's laws in one course and
friction in another, but the main barrier to believing in Newton's laws is
that almost all our experience is of contexts with friction where motion does
NOT persist in the absence of forces.
An extended diagram
Click to show the picture bigger.
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Fast, cheap, and good: The cost-quality tradeoff triangle / quadrilateral
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Most of the education literature, especially that related to pedagogy and/or
technology, maintains a prudish silence about money. This renders it largely
irrelevant to practitioners and policy makers. For instance many people
believe (even if wrongly) that the ideal learning situation is to have
unlimited 1:1 time with a personal tutor. That is pedagogy solved then.
In fact education is like almost all design or construction: it is subject to
a triangle of factors. You can optimise for two at the expense of the third,
but you can't maximise all three at once.
The traditional triad of factors are:
or in project management:
But if you follow Phillips (1996) and Reeves (1992) then for education,
time is fixed (you can only use what is ready in time for the course),
and the triangle is:
- Cost (on budget?)
- Quality (of the learning and/or learning materials)
- Scope: the quantity (amount of curriculum covered)
So really in general there are 4 factors.
Sometimes you would prefer to maximise or minimise a factor (e.g. the cheaper
the better); but sometimes, it is that you have to stick to a pre-determined
value e.g. it must be ready by a deadline (but little reward for being early);
must not exceed the budget (but you'll only lose any money left over).
Sometimes you can convert money to time by hiring more people or buying in
parts; but more often there isn't the time for that (recruitment and training
take time), which is why cost and time are separately listed.
Sometimes you might consider varying all 4; but often a job in effect
specifies some factors, leaving only some to be varied. You can say then that
the fixed ones are top priority, the variable ones less so.
Eg1 Time and errors in a simple task. Errors -> quality. E.g. washing the
dishes: quantity is fixed (you must do them all); cost is fixed (no money, you
have to do them); the tradeoff is between doing them fast or doing them
carefully.
Eg2 Quality first.
Sydney opera house; writing Fawlty Towers. Things you've done often have
fairly well known standard time and costs; outstandingly creative things
have unknown time and costs. The opera house ran over budget by about 10
times in both time and money, but the quality left the city with a landmark
that is recognised round the world from a glimpse. Cleese once said it took
them about 3 times longer to write the Fawlty Towers scripts than the standard
BBC allowance (in time and money); but these are the shows that are still
celebrated decades later, while others done on time and to budget were never
re-run. These are cases of putting quality first.
When a project (e.g. a road bridge) involves safety, it often means
safety-quality has to be put first (or the project cancelled without
completion).
Eg3 On time and to budget. What this means, but doesn't say, is that quality
is put last.
Perhaps unexpected corollaries of this in HE are:
An HEI requires written feedback to students to be returned within a
fixed time. There is no extra money, nor time for the staff doing it, so
quality goes down (fewer comments).
A course tries giving comments not in writing, but by recorded audio: it
is easier for staff to say what they mean than to write it; and the quality
and quantity of personal feedback went up (Merry & Orsmond, 2007).
The Roman engineer and architect Vitruvius spoke of a triangle, or triad, of
qualities that a building work should have. No mention of tradeoffs, but of
requiring all three.
- Strength ("firmitas") or perhaps "well founded" or "robust", "firmness".
- Utility (commodity)
- Beauty (delight)
These are 3 sub-aspects of quality.
Phillips,R. (ed.) (1996) Developer's guide to interactive multimedia: A
methodology for educational applications (Computing centre, Curtin
university of technology, Perth, Western Australia)
Reeves,T.C. (1992) "Evaluating interactive multimedia" Educational
technology May, pp.47-52.
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The three parts of learning a new practice
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Often in learning, you are really only learning how to talk about and reason
with a new idea. However when you are learning a new approach to existing
habits (e.g. a management course for managers; a slimming course for eaters; a
safety course for lab technicians who have already years of experience), then
there are 3 parts to the learning: getting the ideas, going over your familiar
environment learning how to recognise how the ideas apply to it, going over
your familiar behaviour and deciding how and when it must now be different.
Standard impoverished HE teaching really only addresses the learning and
teaching of new concepts at the public, general, abstract level. The learner,
if good, will be able to recall and use the main terms, and explain what they
mean in both formal and paraphrased ways; and perhaps apply them to examples
of the kind dealt with in the textbooks. In some cases, this then has no
impact: someone may go to such a course, but their managers may be dismayed
that it has no effect on how they do their job.
The triad
A triad of phases of learning is what is required (spending approximately
equal time on each) for learning to make a direct difference to the learner's
life:
- Introduce (and exercise) conceptual learning, as in ordinary
teaching.
- Have each learner then go over concrete situations they have already
experienced, and learn to recognise how the taught concepts do or do not apply
in each situation.
- Have each learner go over their normal routines and decide where,
when, how to insert different behaviour into them.
Where interactions with other workers are important, then how to
change one's own actions in this context will also have to be addressed at
length for any practical effects of the course to materialise. Food safety
training in supermarkets is difficult to implement where a store is
undermanned (so no time to do cleaning) and managers are under pressure to
reduce food wastage (throwing away cooked food that is too old). Introducing
a new accounting practice is unlikely to be something a single person can do,
since accounts are the interface between many different people and unilateral
changes will break communications.
Examples
- Slimming. First teach concepts such as (kilo)calories. Then to
recognise snacks as food as much as meals; then that all drinks except water
contain calories. Then to go over one's daily eating routines and decide what
to change.
- Bioethics. First concepts such as utilitarianism. Then go over a
set of classic experimental work in biology, reviewing it for ethical issues;
and ditto for applied work (in farming, in pharmaceuticals, ...). Then for
actions the learner might be involved in, and when they would act e.g. in
doing an experiment because the university asked them to, because a funder
asked them to, jobs, ...
- A health and saftey course for chemistry research students. First the
(legal) concepts. Then perhaps photographs of various scenes in labs, with
the task of spotting what aspects of these typically very cluttered pictures
violate which safety principle, if any. Then reviewing each student's actual
or planned procedure for their own experiments with a view to modifying them as
necessary.
Applicability
This triad may be least applicable to learning undergraduate subjects where
the student has no existing practical experience e.g. elementary particle
physics, classical literature. It will have the most applicability where the
subject is practical AND the learner has already developed habits. E.g.
health and safety in the lab for chemistry students, bioethics for biology
students, new accountancy practices for experienced administrators, hygene
(food safety) for experienced family cooks now moving into a catering job,
continuing professional development (CPD) courses for teachers with years of
experience, slimming or addiction personal retraining, cognitive behavioural
therapy.
The point is for any activity where we are already reasonably experienced and
practised, we do not think out what we do from first principles, but rely
on "habits" and practised ways of acting. Merely learning new concepts does
not itself touch our behaviour nor perception. If we want the new concepts to
touch our behaviour or perception, then we need to specifically exercise these
in connection to the new ideas.
An alternative triad
The above triad is what someone designing a training course needs: three
aspects, all of which need substantial time and effort from both teacher and
learners. More theoretically, we might say (as
Laurillard does) that all (good) teaching and learning has
both abstract, general aspects and personal, practical ones; but that there
are in fact three different major kinds of the latter:
- Doing paper exercises e.g. essays, numerical maths examples.
- Going over all the situations you have met or might meet, and practising
recognising where the concept appears or applies in them.
- Going over all the activities you have or might carry out, and working
out what you will do differently in order to be consistent with what you are
learning.
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Reading, discussing, writing
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."
This aphorism suggests that studying, in fact I would say Higher Education (HE),
rests on 3 activities; reading, discussing, and writing.
Since Bacon is often cited as the first to publish an explicit scientific
method, we should consider whether this formula is a general educational one
and not limited to essay-based Arts subjects.
It comes from an essay by Francis Bacon in 1625, and in 1753 Samuel Johnson
wrote another essay elaborating on it (local copies).
Together they make the case for the importance of each, and how omitting any
one leads to weaknesses: all three are required for rounded learning.
We might say that they correspond to receiving ideas, interacting about / with
ideas, and generating one's own detailed idea.
This is about book learning (of declarative / conceptual ideas),
in contrast to the learning of practical skills
(as in triad 1 and triad 2).
Currently it may constitute a relevant and insightful critique of HE where
there is far too little discussion by students of ideas. The measure of this
is the number of minutes per day a given student is actually speaking about
some intellectual idea. (Listening to discussion may have some other value,
but does not count at all under this heading, as Johnson's essay makes clear
if you look at it with this question in mind.)
If we take this as a serious educational rule, then for each course we need to
consider an even division in times spent on each of reading, discussing, and
writing; and also an equal weight of assessment for each.
We might say that reading, discussing, writing correspond also to receiving,
negotiating, generating ideas; and to interaction with an expert, peers, and
oneself (reflection).
(A rather different explanation, more psychological than educational, would
explain discussing vs. writing in terms of extraversion/intraversion.
Susan Cain on the power of introverts (20 mins).
"There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best
ideas." Correct: but the point from Johnson is that everyone is better for
having both skills, not either/or; and regardless of the personal disposition
measured by the personality dimension.)
Thinking
Confucius discusses the role of "thinking": shouldn't thinking (which we could
call "reflection" if it makes us feel better) be part of education?
"I used to sit alone thinking about this and that. Sometimes I even forgot my
meals or bedtime. Still I gained very little. Later I shifted to reading
omnivorously, but I did not benefit a great deal either. At long last I came
to see that reading in a mechanical way without using my brains was no use. On
the other hand, if thinking is divorced from the reality and no due attention
is paid to reading, one will continue to feel puzzled by many things. One
should constantly review what he has learned and combine reading with
thinking. In thus making use of the theories one has learned to guide his
thought and help analyze the problems at hand, progress will be achieved."
I suggest that writing, from the standpoint of learning, plays the part of
thinking: the effort of writing forces careful thinking.
Johnson says nothing about anyone else having to read what you write: the
point is the precision and order that writing demands of you.
In that case, Confucius (two thousand years earlier) was also pointing out the
complementary requirements for reading and writing in successful learning.
Finale
Confucius talks (at least in one translation of the Analects) of
thinking, reading, and teaching.
("Keeping silent and thinking; studying without satiety,
teaching others without weariness: these things come natural to me." [Analect
7.2])
If we can equate thinking and writing with
respect to their benefit to learning, then this is writing, reading, and
teaching; or doing it oneself (by thinking or writing), seeing it (by reading
another's expression of it), and teaching (i.e. discussing it with another
person). This suggests a close analogue between Bacon's aphorism for
conceptual learning, and the practice-oriented surgeon's aphorism for skill
learning: "see one, do one, teach one".
- Thinking, reading, and teaching. [Confucius]
- Writing, reading, and teaching.
- Writing, reading, and discussion.
- Reading, discussion, writing. [Bacon]
- Read it expressed by another, discuss it with another, write it oneself.
- See it done by another, teach it (talk about it with another), do it oneself.
- See one, teach one, do one.
- See one, do one, teach one. [Surgical training, triad 2]
Summary notes, as a table
|
Read |
Discuss |
Write |
| Bacon |
Reading |
Conference |
Writing |
| Confucius |
Reading |
Teaching |
Thinking |
| Surgical analogue |
See one |
Teach one |
Do one |
| The inner activity |
Knowing (understanding) |
Developing answers to critical challenges |
Self-correction of facile success in argument |
|
|
|
|
| Virtue (if done the right amount) |
A full man |
A ready man |
An exact man |
| If done too little, then to compensate you need: |
Cunning to conceal your ignorance |
Quick wittedness |
A big memory |
| If done too much |
Sloth |
Affectation |
"The humour of the scholar" |
|
|
|
|
| Benefit(2) |
Delight |
Ornament |
Ability |
| Benefit(2.2) |
Amuse yourself |
"Talk well" for others |
Taking decisions, disposition of business. |
| Benefit(3) |
? |
Grace |
Method |
References
Francis Bacon (1625) "Of studies" in Essays (essay 50 of 58).
Samuel Johnson's (1753) follow-up "On studies"
(first appeared, untitled, in number 85 of The Adventurer, August 28, 1753).
They can both be found in books of their essays.
Local copies in one PDF document
See here
and here for web copies of Bacon's 1625 essay; and
here for Johnson's.
Confucius: the second quote was from Analect 7, on learning.
The analects are Confucius, as written down by his followers.
A.C.Muller's (1990, 2011) translation
A different translation
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VLEs: best and worst features
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Worst
Having all material protected. Even with guest logins unrestricted, this
still means Google can't find it, and others feel unwelcome and may not enter.
However this means a student can't find it using normal internet access and
Google: instead they must go to a meeting and write down without error the
URL. So immediately VLEs are in practice only accessible to those who attend
F2F meetings and lose the normal benefits and convenience of the internet.
Colleagues can't view the material without special effort, prospective
students can't see it, etc. In reality, only a tiny part of a course really
needs protection (e.g. individuals' marks): the design is the inverse of what
is appropriate.
Hiding course info from prospective students, from those with glitches in
their signups, from colleagues
Above all, from Google so even legit students can't easily find it.
Basically, all courses have public and private aspects, so cannot have all the
course info in one place, and VLEs thus fail in their primary idea of a single
tool for putting on a course.
Restructuring them so that default is visible to the world, and page
by page access control. Only hide a few things e.g. grades; and write access
to forums.
For students, should support them having one place to login for
several courses; and a single feed combining notices/msgs from all these.
Hides bboards; prevents the serendipity of Ruskin getting Grayling joining in.
[dougiamas reply: but you could invite grayling. A truly T-centric reply]
One stop place for students for all course docs.
Best
In a talk, Martin Dougiamas listed the following approximate sequence in which
teachers (academics) typically started to use different types of activity
(feature) in Moodle (and no doubt this applies to other VLEs too).
The conventional negative spin on this is "Isn't it awful, you introduce a VLE
and staff just use it to dump their slides on it". (This ignores the fact
that most students welcome this if, as often, they weren't getting access to
the slides before.)
However a positive spin could be: "In the medium term, most HE staff are going
to move through this developmental progression, and end up at the top end: far
beyond where most were before in their teaching. So VLEs are a slow but
powerful scaffolding that is improving teaching practices in HE."
- Put up the handouts
- Add a passive Forum
- Add Quizzes, Assignments (reduce management)
- Use Lesson, Wiki, Glossary, Database maybe
- Use the Forum seriously and actively
- Combine the activities into sequences
- Think more deeply about learning activities / design
- Use the Survey module, Workshop maybe
- Sharing ideas, active research, reflection
What most of us most immediately recognise here, is that the first thing staff
do is dump their slides on line: requires no real work.
Next, we see forums created but no student activity on them.
But next again (maybe a year or two later) staff discover how to stimulate
student discussion.
Further on in the sequence, I can see echos of issues I've seen
elsewhere: for instance going beyond isolated learning activities and thinking
about piecing them together so that one leads to another (e.g. write your
first draft of an assignment, students read each others', give each other
comments, revise their own).
And at the advanced end (the bottom), I see forms of "contingent teaching"
where what the teacher picks up from the class changes what they do. Here (in
Moodle) it is about using the Survey to get feedback on student views and ways
of learning, just as Just In Time Teaching uses student answers to a
quiz to determine what the next class will address.
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How to refer to it.
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
"Web 2.0" is the buzzword in EdTech for 2006.
For a briefing, try
wikipedia.
For one version of meaning and history, try
O'Reilly's long and interesting article
Here, a brief note for myself. Web 2.0 is a new buzzword, and is not of course
used consistently. It has about 4 areas of overlapping meaning.
The different senses
- Underlying technology. XML (not HTML), ... Web services, not software
products.
- The read/write web, not the read only web. First experience of the web was
that anyone can author, and everyone can read it (the document created by some
author) really easily, and find it pretty easily using search engines. The
emerging second experience of the web is of anyone can contribute to a single
document or service.
The web as a platform, supporting a different set of practices. Not an
architecture at the software level. E.g. iPod <-> itunes on a desktop
PC. No software updates on the web: the source/service/doc just changes [rss
to notify actively if required].
- Social software (not all web)
- Ease of use. It has long been striking that web pages evoke an
ultra-impatient user behaviour. Statistics are quoted suggesting that the
average length of time a user stays on one web site is about 2.5 mouse clicks.
This is frightening for commercial sites: that is how long they have to
interest or satisfy a customer before they are gone (typically not to return
for 6 months). Google is the commercially most successful web site; and google
has an ultra-simple main web page.
A major feature of the "web 2.0" type web things is ease of use (for writing
as well as reading). Blogs and wikis: one click and you are editing the
page.
In contrast, VLEs require you to log on before you can do anything, then
insist you use their editor, their email etc. instead of it being integrated
into your own software and own user skills. Sinilarly many commercial
websites require you to logon, thus obstructing the user, preventing their use
being integrated seamlessly with the rest of your activities, etc.
Great quotes, phrases.
- "An attitude not a technology"
- "Turning from a model of permissions to a model of accountability"
- It's about syndication not coordination: not controlling what happens at the
other end.
- "xx"
Last changed
24 Jan 2007 ............... Length about 300 words (4,000 bytes).
(Document started on 27 Dec 2006.)
This is a WWW document maintained by
Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/best/wikip.html.
You may copy it.
How to refer to it.
Wikipedia
By
Steve Draper,
Department of Psychology,
University of Glasgow.
Just to hold some pointers to articles on wikipedia.
wikiP itself
My nomination for the best written wikiP entry:
usage of which and that
Why wikipedia must jettison its anti-elitism
Larry Sanger 31 Dec 2004 Kuro5hin
NPOV (neutral point of view) rule for wikiP and
talk page and
tutorial
Jaron Lanier "Digial maoism: the hazards of the new online collectivism"
and
some responses
more responses
more responses
PsyDict project
wiktionary
Open source / copyright
GNU licence:
about
text of license
free software
Stanford (web) philosophy encyclopaedia:
itself (UK mirror)
itself
wiki entry on it
scholarpedia
wikiP education project
Wikiversity
Wikiversity
