What’s wrong with education.........

As a few people are still speaking to me and using up my time I thought it might be an idea to aim at that most sacred of cows the system known as education.  From my previous blog on the use of ICT you will gather that I don’t necessarily follow fashion in these matters.

Is context helpful?  It usually is.  My experience spans higher education, further education and professional courses, with a little bit of training thrown in.  It crosses across numerous institutions.  Thus the context of this blog is aimed pretty much at all post sixteen education, though as I have a daughter at school I won’t let a lack of direct experience restrict me.  For structural purposes only I’ll start at youngest and lowest level and move forward.

I enjoyed my school days, mostly because no one seemed to push me.  I’m yet to determine if that was a good thing.  Now it seems that there is a constant barrage of tests.  That said there also seems to be a meandering curriculum.   I’m pretty much of the opinion that you need to read, write and count as a starting point and remain fairly shocked by some of what I see emerging at 16.   Teachers seem to work hard but I suspect they are overloaded with top-down initiatives.  Whether it be the Olympics or sustainability, enterprise or culture it seems that there is a reluctance to let teachers just teach the basics in a context that suits them and their students, allowing themes to emerge rather than be forced. 

This translates nicely into the post-sixteen sphere.  Here we are confronted with students who often have poor literacy skills.  Now you might say that literacy isn’t everything; that many have gotten by without it.  The problem is that we are now in the twenty first century where a failure to access and comprehend written material severely limits your engagement and understanding of society and politics.  In fact being able to access this is a basic human right.  So what is the national post 16 reaction to this?  Well it’s impossible to recap all that was missed and still achieve success so people tend to retreat to simpler forms of assessment.  Add in the silver bullet of ICT and we have the perfect answer.  Students can be set reports to write, given clear instructions and guided towards the answers on-line.  Call it all ‘research’ and it actually sounds like something cerebral is occurring – I prefer to call it a typing course.   So now we have a group of students emerging who find it difficult to conduct unguided independent study, who confuse research with following instructions and still have limited ability to construct a rational argument.

Enter the hallowed halls of higher education.  What now?  Well against budget cuts, higher fees, reluctant staff and students as described what can we do?  Traditionally theory was presented, discussed, assignment set and research conducted.  Why is that failing?  Well first presenting theory to individuals who have never had to think independently is destined to be a struggle.  The discussion will then of course also be limited, as will the understanding of an assignment that is not explained in such a detailed way as to leave little to the imagination and as for research, see previous points.  Our response?  Well distance learning jumps in here a little, or at least a hybrid version of it.  Place all the materials on-line so they can dip in and out when required.  Guide them tightly toward the right sources and set tasks based on them (ps – the best bit is it’s cheap).    And as for those that do turn up we have retreated to a version of education I last spotted in Beth’s kindergarten.  We lack inspirational lecturers capable of holding the interest of a class, a class who are less interested than ever.   In order to produce a method that management systems can measure we adopt strange hybrids of exercises, tasks and simulations.  We believe that this somehow links theory to practice, forgetting that no one has ever introduced the theory in anything but the most trivial of ways and that the simulation is as representative of reality as COD is of being on the front line in Afghanistan. 

Do I have solutions or is this just a random rant?  Well I do actually, nice simple ones.  At 16 plus we need to restrict the use of ICT to being one of unguided research only and only ever for a maximum of 25% of the day, preferably less.  As for HE we need to reassert the role of the lecturer, to celebrate it, to give it centre stage if you like.  To love theory and application and translate that love in our delivery.  To celebrate knowledge and understanding. To be passionate.

 

 The use of ICT in education..........

Turn away now as I am likely to cause great offence with this blog.  You see we have a lot of investment, financial and human, dedicated to the use of ICT (I’m using that broadly to cover anything electrical!) as both a saviour and a necessity of education and I’m about to try and drive a coach and horses through that.

To me, a simple economist, products and services really triumph when they fill a void.  Anything short of void filling and the best we get is a sort of branded or marketed swapping with minor benefits.  The telephone filled a void, there was no way to talk to someone at a distance, video phones don’t – I get no real added value from seeing someone’s face (beautiful though it may be).     This is the premise I am going to use to explore education.  I want to test whether emerging ICT fills voids or simply replaces. 

Let me begin with a win for ICT.  Text and e-mails provide a means of instantly delivering a message that does not have to be read immediately.  The closest we had to this was a letter but a letter cannot be sent cheaply.   Students had to leave a note, leave a message that someone wrote down or send a letter.  Basically there was no easy access to academic staff (or visa-versa).  The e-mail/text means that academics and students are contactable 24/7 even if they sometimes don’t answer.  The volume of communication has increased and, especially with the advent of smart phones, communication and tutorial style advice has grown to the benefit of both sides.   There would have been no way I could handle so many requests without this technology – my institution benefits from increased productivity and students gain greater access.

Compare this to PowerPoint and Prezi.   What benefit exists here?  I would argue that it is possible to out-deliver most academics using a chalk board, to deliver a more concise, informative and interactive lecture without the use of electronics than with.  The PP approach fills no void and instead consumes time in development that may be better spent on scholarly activity, providing, at best, a prop for the poor communicator and allowing the good to become lazy.  Of course I can embed video and the like – but have you ever watched the students instead of the video when it plays?  Watch next time and you will see they glaze over within a 30 seconds or so.  The screen is dull, lifeless and soulless.  They do not engage with video and simply let it wash over them – how else could they tolerate the drivel that masquerades as TV.

Taking it back out of the classroom what are we to make of the web?  In theory this is a replacement for the library (private or campus).   The web has enabled greater access to journals and ebooks, policy and practice and what, honestly, has this resulted in?  Instead of better referenced and deeper essays and reports we see instead a proliferation of plagiarism requiring us to be more and more vigilant.  This comes in a large part from a misunderstanding we have about education.  I know me, and probably you if you are still reading, have a love of learning and a love of knowledge but I am afraid that the majority of students want a degree and a better job.  Where we trip up is that when we talk as a community of practice we are amongst our own kind, people who love knowledge.  This is not a bad thing, a vet may go in to practice because of a love of animals, but he shouldn’t expect the animals to love that practice and its processes.  For them it’s a means to an end.  I love the web for the access it gives me to information and often read a wiki on the film I am watching whilst I am watching it – but we are a rare bread best directed towards accumulation and dissemination of knowledge – we are academics because we are obsessed with learning, our students are often students for a completely different reason.

This takes us on neatly to the next use of ICT.  Moodle, Pebble Pad, or whatever you call your virtual learning environment (VLE).  Students report greatest satisfaction with these when they reduce the students need to think independently or time plan.  When the system contains all the papers and links they need and reminds them of where they should be.  When it breaks the task down for them in such a way they do not need to plan.  What then has this replaced or what void has it filled?  Well I believe this is a replacement activity.  It replaces the students need to take responsibility.   There is a fine line here.  I certainly use electronic calendars and are able to do more as a result.  But that is the difference.  I do more not less as a result.  We have equipped students with access to resources on the web, access to VLE’s and have, often, at the same time reduced the size of tasks.  What we have not seen as a result is a deepening of learning.  Rather we have seen less engaged students as they drift instead towards leisure and PT work.

I can easily imagine a future where universities provide virtual courses for students.  Where students swipe information from one page to another with a stroke of the iPad, answering questions at the end of a ‘learning episode’ and accessing information whenever it is convenient instead of the discipline of lectures.  What I doubt is whether this will produce graduates with the kind of enquiring and challenging minds we need.  It will produce degrees though and, of course, that is what the customer often wants.

This blog was first published as a reply on www.ieeg.net 
More definitions?

We all know that academics are capable of dedicating huge effort to defining terms.  In fact at if we allowed them to police a riot I’m sure the first three days would be spent defining what exactly we mean by riot.  But I’m going to jump in here and argue that we don’t even have so much as a coarse filter in terms of enterprise – and that we at least need a colander.     

I have vague memories of the late 80s and during this time there was a big push in the UK towards self-employment.   I don’t think we emphasised the terms enterprise or entrepreneurship in the way we do now (though there was the Enterprise Allowance Scheme).  This move towards self-employment was designed to massage unemployment figures and to ease supply side constraints.  In fact we called it ‘self-unemployment’ and I was one.   In my industry we saw lots of staff shift from being ‘on the books’ to being subbies – sub-contractors.   This was not especially enterprising of them as it basically meant they did the same work, for the same construction firm, with a slightly higher hourly rate but no sick pay and no holidays.   I think that model is still with us and can be seen in the artisan and the consultant.  I think it explains a lot of the ‘jobbing’ style activity that sees people working for many firms.  I think it explains your plumber still.  I would call activity that involves very few or no employees and is reliant on selling a service or home produced product as self-employment.

Some of these self-employed have the capacity and drive to grow, to establish enterprises.  This growth is enterprising behaviour.  Closely aligned is a similar growth drive that relies less on the service or product based skills of the start-up individual.  Perhaps they take advantage of arbitrage and invest in physical stock in clever ways.    Perhaps they take the mass of hairdressers we seem to churn out and turn an old MacDs into an out of town drive through hairdressers (don’t try that – it’s an attempt at humour).  This potential spotting and risk taking behaviour is classic entrepreneur.

Finally we get the slow, careful and calculating business people.  The ones who benefit most from MBAs. The Warren Buffet and Alf Roberts (UK soap opera) style approach.  These often take established business and make them more efficient.    I sit here nowadays.

To me, what matters here is how this translates to education.  We have this last group well catered for, though the syllabus needs constant updating and tweaking.  The first group, the self-employed, need basic technical skills relating to tax and legal requirements of running a business.  The middle two are the two we need to push.  The growth individuals are the ones that we lack.  Of course it would be great if everyone could be in this band but they are not going to be.  What we need is to ensure that enterprise education is delivered by people who understand it’s about creativity and growth; not business plans; not tax; not legal entities.    People who realise it’s as much about the woman down the road who has grown to have six staff and a £1m turnover in two years as it is about an unrepeatable Branson or Jobs case study.  People who realise that a day spent with artists may be more beneficial than a day spent with an economist like me.  

 

Values and valuing.............

As an economist I am often asked to place a value on things.  I’m sure you are familiar with the adverts that claim ‘you’re worth it’ or that something is ‘priceless’ (though with an APR).  I’m also sure you’re aware of the transfer fees of soccer players (I’m aware they are high – that’s about it).  What do we mean by and how do we get to a money value?

I have had the pleasure of teaching environmental scientists economics and when I suggest valuing nature I generally got shrieks of derision.  I have worked with social scientists and had similar results.  On reflection it may just be me of course.  Let’s try a little thought experiment first though before I condemn myself.  If I was to suggest valuing a species of bug you may sensibly contend it is priceless.   Fair enough, you may find it hard to believe but I share that sentiment.  However sentiment is an emotional reflex and whilst I embrace emotions you shouldn’t build policy on them.   This idea of priceless implies without price and I assume by that it is not mean it has no value but that its value is infinite or very great.  But is it?  Would we use all of the Earth’s resources to save this bug, would we divert all our funding toward it?  Of course not and this is a silly suggestion on my part but it does prove a point.  We are looking for a value between zero and a number less than very big.  We’ll come back to this.

How about something more business orientated?  Brand value is a nice easy one (to measure – blooming hard to truly create).  Brand value is simply the value of a business less its breakup value and any royalties, patents etc.  In other words very similar to goodwill.  If you do some research on these terms you will see some scholars over complicate it (in my view) but basically if it is not adding value to the assets you own it is just a name (so be careful of these brand building offers – they’re probably just selling you a list of contacts to direct market to).  Jumping to company value we have simply share price times the number of shares for listed companies (and didn’t I laugh at the irony when the London Stock Exchange argued its shares were undervalued).  Otherwise, or if we adopt a sensible value based investing strategy with listed companies, we simply estimate and discount futures cashflows.  Not exactly rocket science.

What makes these two things easy is markets exist for their sale.  In the absence of markets we have to start estimating.  This is also quite straightforward, if somewhat approximate in outcome.  There are two basic methods.     First we can simply ask people and use this to build up a demand curve.  We call this contingent valuation (expressed preference).  Survey a collection of people asking them to estimate what they would be willing to pay to save our bug (or for that matter to prevent construction of a new road) and then extrapolate these costs to the relevant population.  Buggy is looking quite safe now – if on average people would pay just £1 as our little bug belongs to the world he gets to be worth about £7billion.  Likewise if on average we would pay £10 per year towards UK arts then the Arts Council ought to get about £630,000,000 - or £200,000,000 more than they get now.   The other method we called revealed preference.  This one we base on observing actions.  Two of the methods are travel cost and hedonic.  Travel cost can be expanded to include opportunity forgone.    Each year thousands of people travel to visit National Parks – add up all that cost.  Others live in or near them and forsake higher salaries to do so – add up all of that.  As you can guess the results can and will be significant.  Hedonic on the other hand is one of the easiest to understand.  A house in an estate in a suburb may be worth £150,000 and the same style of house not far away but near the coast £200,000 – clearly the coast adds £50,000 and of course there are many houses near the coast (for example).  So we have seen there are a few ways of valuing nature and the priceless that are quite straightforward, open to debate and actually show that these ‘priceless’ things are often grossly undervalued mainly because we avoid putting a cost to them .  Add to this the benefits to both physical and mental health, to culture and to country ‘brand value’ and you can see we have often been badly let down.

OK I have skirted around things here and left out some of the maths – let me know if you would like more details.  Is anything priceless?  Well yes it seems some things are.  The poets were correct to value love and friendship above all else, after all we have seen some amazing acts of selflessness in this area.  Diamonds may well last forever but they are mere trinkets and baubles next to people.

   

         

‘Social media’ - what’s that all about...............

A couple of things have prompted me to write about social media, well in truth it’s been spinning around in my mind for weeks and has leaked out I guess.   I have been considering the two questions, key questions I suppose, namely what is it and what purpose does it serve.  Sounds easy to answer but I’m not looking for one-liners here.

 The name is interesting in itself.  Social as in socialise I assume and media to mean the fact that it’s web technology based – but of course that’s  not what media means it’s just what it has become in this context.   So we use web technology to socialise, or do we?  What are we doing with these applications?  Luckily it seems to break into three products and three reasons – well almost.  FaceBook for silliness, LinkedIn for serious and Twitter for tweets.  Notice I have left out Google+ - as of yet that has failed to emerge as a real force – in fairness though it has only been a few weeks.    

Let’s turn our attention to each in turn starting with the big bad boy FaceBook (FB).  FB is funny.  You have ‘friends’ and you ‘like’ things which is kind of sweet.  You can chat and you can private message (which seems to merge with chat) but most of all you have a wall you can post your ‘status updates’ on.  These are fascinating and seem to fall into a couple of groups.  First we have the mums and their ‘isn’t my life hard’ ‘isn’t my life wonderful’.  There seems a whole narrative around ‘bloody kids’ and ‘little angels’ and this all from the same person depending on what’s happening.  Next you have the ‘my life is like sooo cool xxxxx :-)))’.  These tell you about where they are going, who with, how much was drunk and how sick they were.  The flip side of this is the downers.  The status update that just consists of L or of “I don’t believe it”.  Desperately wanting someone to ask what’s up.  Then comes the quaint family updates, nice and safe.  Then there’s the Twitter refugees (I’ll come back to that).  These guys are lacing messages about politics, music and semi-serious debate with mischief.       Each group seeks a different response.  The mums sympathy, the cools ‘I’m like sooo jealous xxx’, the quaint simple a ‘like’ and the debaters a debate.  What’s great about FB is they sometimes get missed up.  Occasionally these groups merger with humorous results.    Throw in a media event and sparks fly.  Quickly we find out that ‘hanging is too good for them’ and such like.  All entertaining if you are bored and all rather pointless (but that’s ok to relax I thionk).  Businesses use it at their peril.  I am interested in my friend’s business but only secondary to them.  I’m not keen on a constant sell and I soon drop business links that post too often (sometimes this can translate to once). 

Next comes the also ran.  LinkedIn doesn’t seem to know what it does.  There is little point logging on or turning on the (now quite hideous) app.  We all put our CVs there, often Apprentice style ones with wonderfully massaged titles and descriptions and then that’s it.  Boring updates from businesses trying to sell something and unwanted emails about ‘great offers’. Seriously I fail to see the point.

Next comes the rather nutty Twitter.  It shouldn’t work! But somehow it does.  It’s a bubble bee.  I can only speak in 140 characters, I can only show pictures by loading them somewhere else first and I can say little on my bio – but it’s somehow fun.  Of course it has its populations just like FB.  There are the serious social media missionaries trying to sell WiFi and Twitter to the world so we can all tweet everything everywhere all the time so we all know everything in a democratic way (I’m thinking Oscar Wilde here: "The trouble with Socialism is that it takes too many evenings.").  Then we have the social media consultants, ever tweet a sales pitch.  Promises that I can get more followers (they’re not friends here), I can get more traffic, I can write better blogs (maybe I should read those).  Then we move on to the FB style debates, the people who post links to the Guardian and the BBC, news with a comment.  It’s amazing what clarity people can in 140 characters about such a complex issue.   Yet amongst all this Twitter seems the most fun for me.  That said I have certain tastes, I enjoy debate and insight, I tire of parties, holidays, purchases and hearing about people’s problems.  It’s probably best we all keep separate – we have probably evolved these uses.  They represent emergent behaviour.

Of course through all this I get it wrong.  I read recently you were meant to construct alter egos on-line.  Sort of sentient avatars.  I just blunder though it all warts and all style.  Sharing what I find interesting, making jokes and having random thoughts – very random at times which I am unable to contain.  But if you spent an hour with me you would realise that’s just what I do.  Maybe I need to read those tweets about working on my on-line presence?

 But back to business.  How and where does this fit into the social media world?  Well so far it seems to produce its own business.  Like an island full of only antique dealers all making a profit it seems to sell to itself.  I have never yet followed through a link to an advert.  As for the idea I take advice from my friends and that sells – sorry no more so than in normal conversation.  In fact a reason question by me about travel to an airport and cost of parking resulted in a friend offering me her garage.  Now that’s a friend and a big failure for the ‘business’ of social media. 

Smiley face and lots of kisses, emoticons and some acronyms I have to look up.