Computers and Education – Page 10

GRAND 2011 Conference

I’m at the GRAND 2011 Conference. GRAND is a Networks of Centres of Excellence funded project that brings together researchers across Canada and across disciplines to study gaming, animation, and new media. I am part of two subprojects. In one we are developing smartphone augmented reality games for learning and health. In another we are developing gestural and performance games. Our fearless leader, Kellogg S. Booth (UBC), opened today’s events talking about the network.

Having organized large groups and participated in others, I’m impressed by how GRAND gently gathers us. We are coerced by the network, though we do have to report carefully.

See my conference notes for more on the conference.

Education: The PhD factory

Thanks to Slashdot I came across two articles in Nature about the excess of PhDs in the West. Education: The PhD factory (you need a licensed login) says that the “world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?” This story is largely based on an OECD Working Paper titled Careers of doctorate holders: employment and mobility patterns (PDF).

The other Nature article is an opinion piece titled Reform the PhD system or close it down by Mark C. Taylor. He argues that the system should be changed drastically, at least in the US.

A Vision Of Digital Humanities In Ireland

I just got back from a conference in Ireland titled, A Vision Of Digital Humanities In Ireland (this link is to my conference report). The conference was preceded by the announcement and unveiling of DHO Discover. Shawn Day (in photo above) demonstrated the new discovery tool that brings together metadata about 6000 objects across different digital collections in Ireland. The conference was a capstone event for the Digital Humanities Observatory which is now coming to an end.

what you are missing – bookforum.com / in print

Bookforum has a thoughtful review of Jane McGonigal’s book, Reality if Broken, titled What You Are Missing: The utopian visiion of one ardent proponent of gamification by Clay Risen (Feb/Mar 2011). Risen is critical of the view that we can transform learning by gamifying it.

Like a lot of hard-core gamers, McGonigal believes that game worlds offer something better than reality: “In today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy.” One could say the same about a drug high—indeed, McGonigal often mimics the chatter about marijuana’s world-altering potential common to freshman dorm rooms. Still, if she’s right, it’s only because, as real as some games look and as human as some of their characters appear, games are by design not real. Huge chunks of the human condition have been left out. Decisions have been simplified. Despair, anger, jealousy—emotions like these are engineered out of the gaming experience, not because game companies want to turn us into zombies, but because that’s what we demand: escape into a simplified existence from the messy disappointment of reality. Simply put, video games can’t help us change the world if they’re designed to divorce us from it.

I share the skepticism about the transformative power of gamifying things. Some of the issues we need think about are:

Anyone who has taught K-12 has already tried gamifying with stickers, friendly competitons, using games and so on. It is already in the portfolio of a good teacher to try to make things playful.
Games and simulations may work to teach some topics but it is likely that they won’t work for others. Flight simulators are examples of simulations that are clearly useful, but they work because we can actually model success on a computer. We cannot, however, model success in writing which means that games for writing are limited to gamifying things, not actually providing useful feedback.
If we gamify things then we risk making gaming the least fun thing around. Gamification sounds like an Orwellian plot to dress up exploitation as play. Most people will see through it at the expense of serious attempts at serious games.
Play is not work. Work dressed up as play is still work. At the end of the day it is a waste of money to dress things up instead of facing work as work.

Crowdsourcing Knowledge

Today we held an event at the University of Alberta around developing a new form of collaboration. Peter Robison from the University of Saskatchewan organized the day’s discussion and we had participants from across the country, though most were from the medieval editing community in Western Canada.

Peter started us off by arguing that we need intelligent documents and the way he is doing that is working with RDF. He believes “the interface is the enemy” of researchers trying to study across documents. He believes that XML/TEI isn’t enough; we need intelligent documents that carry assertions that can help other users of the data. I’m intrigued by this idea of “assertions” and I know Allen Renear has been working on what can be said about a document.

Dan O’Donnell argued that we should think about interchange rather than interoperability. He pointed out that most people want access to the data of others to do their own analysis and repurpose for their own. Brent Nelson talked about his Digital Donne project and bringing traditional researchers into digital projects. He then talked about his cabinet of curiosities project. Allison Muiri talked about her Grub Street project and legal issues around involving a larger community.

One issue that we went back and forth on was the place of interface. I’m convinced that the idea of the separation of form and content is just one assertion among many. In some situations it makes sense to talk about separating interface, in others it doesn’t.

One thing we are all struggling with is essentially the human processes. Computers are really not the issue, what we need is support for changing the research culture:

– How do you get participation?
– How do you encourage openness to interchange?
– What will our universities allow us to do?
– How will we get credit for what we are doing?
– How can we run production services or who can run them for us?

Yin Liu talked about how we are here because we have failed. This was in response to Peter’s claim that we were here because we had all succeeded. Yin also said that she would like to no longer list herself as a digital humanist but as a medievalist. The time may come when we are all digital humanists – that, of course, is the culture change we are interested in.

Meagan Timney talked about linking – linking of people, linking of digital humanities to traditional disciplines, linking to training of undergraduates. Dean Irvine talked about how to pitch editing outside of the humanities. Training became a keyword – editing is a way to train students in informatics.

We ended by brainstorming about a partnership that could bring together many of the players in Canada while providing an inclusive culture for new scholars. What could a new type of organization look like?

UK: Graduate employment not where you expected

The Guardian has a story about (university) graduate employment and unemployment, Graduate unemployment at highest level for 17 years (Jessica Shepherd, The Guardian, November 1, 2010). What interested me was the statistics about how different types of degrees fared.

Those who had studied Chinese had the highest starting salary at £24,540 a year, while fine art graduates started on the lowest wage at £14,625. …

The government describes engineering degrees as “strategically important” for the economy. But 11.9% of civil engineering graduates were out of work six months after they graduated, as were 11.8% of mechanical engineering graduates. Geography and psychology graduates were least likely to be unemployed. Some 7.4% and 8.3% were out of a job respectively.

The author is well aware of the irony that the statistics don’t support the British government’s assumptions about which programs are valuable and therefore worthy of funding support. Arts and humanities are likely to see deep cuts. As for informatics, the article reports that,

Graduates with degrees in IT fared worst. One in six – or 16.3% – were unemployed six months after graduation. The previous year, 13.7% were out of work after the same period.

Cluster hires in digital humanities

Thanks to Michael I have found out about two different cluster hires in the area of digital humanities/new media:

UI’s next cluster hires will be digital public humanities | Iowa Higher Education. The University of Iowa is hiring a cluster of 6 positions over 2 years in “digital public humanities.” These will be partly funded by the Provost and partly by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. This is their second cluster.
Georgia State University has a Second Century Initiative that targets areas for cluster hiring. Faculty and deans submit thematic proposals that are then evaluated. “New Media” is the theme of one of the eight winning proposals. There are 4 positions around New Media including New Media and Documentary Investigation, Interactive Media Design, Digital Humanities and Digital Music Technology.

There are a number of interesting facets to these cluster hires:

Universities are no longer hiring just one digital humanities person to get things going – they are hiring clusters of related positions. As the digital humanities and new media fields evolve it is becoming clear that no one person can cover the entire field. This is a sign of maturity and the explosive interdisciplinarity of the digital. Further, it is now clear that a university can’t expect to do digital humanities at a leadership level with just one person.
These positions look like they will go into traditional departments while still staying linked in an interdisciplinary thematic area. Much could be said about the advantages and disadvantages of this model (how exactly do you keep the hires from spinning back into their discipline in order to get tenure?), but politically it is much easier to sell to departments in times of stress. This way departments get some renewal, even if the person hired is for a new interdisciplinary area. Ideally the person also acts as a catalyst in the department linking them into the thematic area.
Digital humanities is being integrated into new media, electronic music, and interactive media design. This makes sense since the digital humanities has always had a constructive and creative side. It has been a field that is about the poesis – the making – of multimedia works as much as about the critique of cyberculture. In our practices and need for infrastructure we have more in common with visual artists, composers, and new media designers. The Multimedia program I help develop at McMaster took exactly this approach and we were a richer unit for it.

Lecture Capture: Research on its Effectiveness

Does recording and then podcasting lectures help learning? I always expected it would be a waste of time that might encourage students to fall behind. According to research I am wrong.

From an email newsletter that I like about teaching called Tomorrow’s Professor I learned about a report from the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching on Lecture Capture: A Guide for Effective Use (PDF). The authors, Erping Zhu and Inger Bergom, make some interesting points:

There is no evidence that student attend less.
Students can concentrate on listening instead of taking notes when there is going to be a podcast posted. This is a good thing – note taking is not learning.
Students use podcasts to go over difficult ideas – they can back up and replay. They use captured lectures to review (instead of notes?)
Videocasts can be more effective than live lectures because students at live lectures can be distracted by the prof (or others), while with video they can concentrate on the slide.

Until now I didn’t think capturing lectures would be worth it, but watching students slavishly take notes at the expense of learning has always bothered me. Telling students to not take notes doesn’t do any good. If they can count on podcasts or video then they might relax and think about the issues.

Institutions In The Digital Humanities

At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.

One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:

Access to a social lab with specialized workstations, digitizing equipment and software. Labs with lots of computers will be underutilized (unless you use them for training) as most of us have our own laptop; what is needed is the specialized stations to support conferencing, and specialized tasks like video editing, book scanning and so on.
Access to digitization facilities to able to acquire evidence for research.
Access to support that can quickly set up basic off-the-shelf web research utilities from distribution lists, blogs to wikis.
Access to a virtual machine where projects can install the tools they need for specialized projects and not have to worry about standarization or conflicts with other projects. Providing humanists with a locked-down CMS which you can only use to publish static pages does not allow us to use the wealth of open source tools and languages out there to create innovative research environments. Neither should security or standardization rule any longer. Humanists should be able to get a virtual machine set up with sufficient storage for any project that has the programming support needed.
Finally, and most importantly, access to good advising and technical support so as to be able to develop projects, apply for funding, and get project management support without being a humanities computing expert.

Alex Sévigny responds to Wente

Alex Sévigny, who I worked with closely at McMaster, has written a good response to Margaret Wente’s column in the Globe about What is the most pressing problem facing Canadian universities today? (Tuesday, April 13, 2010) Alex, in What’s wrong with Canadian universities – part 1 argues that it is not professors who are the problem, but funding levels that have been frozen at 1990 levels. Wente’s column title “Universities are sitting ducks for reform” makes it sound like it is simple – stop paying for research and you can get a lot more students educated for a lot less money. Alex’s answer is that the profs are not making that much when you think about how long it takes to educate them and how hard they work. He concludes with,

Canada needs a powerful, national vision for post-secondary education. And it needs it now. Post-secondary education is the key to prosperity from today until the year 2100.

The policy-maker who comes up with one will be remembered as one of this century’s great visionaries.

TOMORROW – why education matters.

Since reading her column I have been thinking about how I would reply, and here are some of the things that need to be considered before we shoot any sitting ducks,

Education is a provincial jurisdiction in Canada which means that the federal government is constrained in how it can show leadership. The Federal government can and does invest in research (think research councils, CFI, graduate scholarships and so on). This means that the province may not save that much by cutting support for research (as Wente thinks they will) since it isn’t coming from the province.
The big problem is that health is eating out every provincial budget and it is the “third-rail” of Canadian politics. As health budgets rise faster than inflation the amount left over for other mandates is less and less. It may be time to move higher education to the federal level just so it can be protected from health (along with everything else.)
The problem with so many enthusiastic sitting-duck solutions to the university is that they all isolate one function in a complex institution and say that that is what universities should do and nothing else (and therefore we can save money by not funding the others stuff.) Universities are like cities – they serve many functions in an integrated fashion. Modernist architects thought it would make sense to separate the functions of the city (people live in one area and all stores are in another) and then plan cities rationally. As a result we got such stupid ideas as downtowns with no residents to spoil them and shopping centers you can’t walk to. Separating out the functions of a university may seem rational, but would lead to all sorts of inefficiencies. The obvious example is separating out the research function. Much of the cost of research in the university goes to things like better libraries, support for graduate student research assistants, support for postdoctoral students, support for conferences and support for labs that are also used for teaching and training. There is a massive efficiency when you have both the teaching and research function paying for good laboratories, good libraries, graduate students and so on. If you remove the research function you will get a large high-school without the learning resources funded by research. And … we will still have to pay for the research function if we want any creativity, innovation, new knowledge, and design in Canada. Another way to put this is that we should beware of simple solutions when dealing with complex phenomena like universities that are some of the most persistently successful institutions known to humankind.
Wente, like many, takes a swipe at the humanities in her column. She writes, “Natural sciences will fare better than the humanities because, as U.S. commentator Walter Russell Mead remarks, taxpayers are not going to subsidize research in critical literary theory much longer.” Another simplistic prediction based on a isolating a tiny part of what happens in the humanities. I suspect taxpayers will continue to pay for educating students to do such basic things as read for themselves, think for themselves and write effectively (for themselves or others.) Without literacy nothing else makes sense and critical theory and literary theory are part of that. After all, do you really want students being taught to read, think and write without some theorizing about what that means? For that matter, do tax payers really want literacy taught by people who don’t themselves read and write critically? Actually, given how less and less is coming from taxpayers, the issue is more what parents paying tuition want and, as the liberal arts colleges of the US has shown, they will pay quite a lot for small classes, lots of critical thinking, and yes, even critical literary theory taught by those evil professors who get to do research. Another sign that this is true is that parents and students still seem to prefer universities to colleges despite all the evidence. The prestige of the university degree is tied to the quality of the professoriate. The colleges don’t systematically support research and so they get a different form of teaching engagement. To be honest, I suspect that there is better teaching going on in many of the college programs – smaller classes, more attention, and more creative opportunities – but parents and students are still voting for universities as they are currently run in large numbers. Maybe they haven’t heard that the universities are soon to be colleges without the trades.
An often unspoken belief is that the humanities are not the best use of funding, however, some universities are discovering that they are the most cost effective disciplines educationally. You don’t need the labs of the sciences, you don’t need the studios of the arts, you don’t need the expensive business profs of commerce and you don’t need the small classes of medicine. If we want to educate tens of thousands of more students cheaply we should expand the humanities. (See The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit in the Chronicle for more on why the economics of education favor the humanities.) The reason the humanities is cheap is that in many universities the undergraduates are taught in large classes by sessionals who are paid worse than high-school teachers (they are paid by the course). The profs are doing administration (hiring all the sessionals every term), teaching graduate students, and supervising very large classes that have lots of teaching assistants (who are paid even less than sessionals, though not always.) If we ran universities like the colleges with a provincial instructors union that insisted on fair contracts and manageable class sizes it would probably cost more than the current system that exploits all the recent PhDs who do the sessional teaching. That’s what the York strike was about, and we will see more such strikes if we institutionalize a class of poorly paid instructional staff as a way of saving money.
Which brings me back to research in the humanities. Research in the humanities and social sciences is crucial not just to basic literacy but to Canada’s global engagement. Take any national newspaper and most of the stories in the front section have to do with things that we research. You simply can’t send Canadians to fight in foreign countries without a reserve of expertise about the languages, histories, cultures and politics of the world – and that is why we need research. Universities are the only institutions that maintain global expertise across a broad range of cultures, literatures, histories and politics so that we have the knowledge needed for business, diplomacy, international relations and, yes, even war. The humanities and social sciences are the ever refreshed encyclopedia of the human world. This expertise is maintained through research and training of graduate students. Axing research in the humanities and social sciences would dramatically reduce Ontario’s ability to participate in a global economy and politic. Ontario would be the sitting duck if the only research conducted on human and social matters was done by ideologically funded think-tanks or the accounting firms that specialize in expensive consultations that give politicians the answers they want. Margaret Wente, of all people, should know this, trained as she was in the liberal arts, working as she does for a newspaper that trades in the type of knowledge the humanities and social sciences prepare us for.

In short, if we listened to the enthusiasts, which Dalton McGuinty is unlikely to do, despite what Wente says, there would be minimal savings cutting the research function, there would be a dramatic loss in knowledge capacity, and all we would get is very large high schools with underpaid staff that eventually would unionize and strike until working conditions were decent, something that should happen anyway, but without the loss of research on the way. In the meantime Ontario would lose the best and brightest to other countries, because the university was the first truly global institution.

It is probable that Wente overinterprets McGuinty when she spins his call for “honest conversations” into a functional focusing on mass education. McGuinty knows that universities are self-administered and resistant to orders; I doubt he will hack at the universities given his support of K-12 education. I suspect he wants to know how the province and the universities can best handle the extra 20,000 students anticipated. They might explore a number of ideas like:

Have a conversation with the high-schools and bring back grade 13 (and then see if the universities will bring back the 3 year degree)
Work with the colleges to offer more 2-year diplomas (and connect them with university programs to provide a pathway for students who want to go on.)
Create more joint college/university programs that provide hybrid academic and professional training.
Let some of the universities privatize. With the savings you would get by not funding the now private universities you could fund a new university in Toronto (which is where the demographics say the university seats are needed.) Alternatively you could ask the University of Toronto to develop another campus, as they have worked out most of the kinks to a multi-campus system.
Provide seed funding for a provincially run system that attracts foreign students to Ontario’s universities and make sure the foreign students are paying the full cost.
Start a number of charter small liberal arts colleges that can compete with the big universities by providing different patterns of education (as in small classes.)