Education and Administration – Page 12

People remember 10% of what they read…? – a knol by Rutger van de Sande

I heard a keynote at the GRAND 2011 conference who mentioned a “learning pyramid” which purports to show that lecturing is the worst way to teach.

I went looking for the research behind this and it seems that the pyramid is a hoax. People remember 10% of what they read…? – a knol by Rutger van de Sande is a short study that tried to figure out what were really the percentages. Van de Sande’s study came up with different numbers: Hearing: 36%, Reading: 51%, Seeing: 35%, Hearing and Seeing: 54%, Discussing: 50%, Experiencing: 70%, and Explaining: 58%.

Other blogs and essays on the subject include: Will Thalheimer‘s blog debunking the pyramid. There is an article in Education titled, The Learning Pyramid: Does It Point Teachers in the Right Direction? (that I haven’t read) that looks at the source for the numbers. Finally there is a long blog post on the subject by David Jones. He says that the “research is generally referenced back to the National Training Laboratories in Bethel Maine.” The NTL has apparently lost the original data.

This then raises the question of whether lecturing is really so bad.

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.

History of Project Management page

On the web I came across this page on the History of Project Management on the web site lessons-from-history.com. Most histories of project management are pathetic, this is more substantial. The page and associated pages come from a forthcoming book on The History of Project Management.

The Latin word projectum means, “to throw something forwards.” The word “project” originally meant “something that comes before anything else is done”. When the word was initially adopted, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project was called an object. This use of “project” changed in the 1950s when several techniques for project management were introduced: with this advent the word slightly changed meaning to cover both projects and objects. However in certain projects there may still exist so called objects and object leaders, reflecting the older use of the words.

As an alternative view, you might try What Monty Python Taught Me About the Software Industry which applies selected key gems of Python wisdom (like “I’m not dead”) to the software development process.

The Management Myth

Wandering through The Atlantic I came across an article I loved back when I first read it. The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart (June 2006) has a subtitle that says it all, “Most of Management Theory is Inane …” Stewart compares philosophy to business degrees and comes to the conclusion that philosophy should take over.

The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

Digging Into Data: Second Round Announced

The second round of the Digging Into Data has just been announced and they now have one more country (the Netherlands) and eight international funders. (You can see the SSHRC Announcement here.)

The Digging Into Data challenge is an international grant program that funds groups that have teams in at least two countries so it is good that they are expanding the countries participating. What is even more extraordinary is that they have one adjudication process across all the funders (rather than an adjudication process where each national team has to apply to their own country’s program – which never works.)

I was part of one of the groups that got funding in the first round with the Criminal Intent project. I’ve found the collaboration very fruitful so I’m glad they are supporting this for another round.

Home – Kule Institute for Advanced Studies – University of Alberta

Today I went to the inaugural meeting on the Culture, Media and Technology theme of the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies (KIAS). KIAS is a new interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Alberta set up with generous support from the Kules. The inaugural director Jerry Varsava took us through the background and activities of the institute. Some of the key features of the institute are:

It is led by the Faculty of Arts, but supports research generally in the SSH area
It organizes activities around themes of which there are now three including Culture, Media and Technology
The initial activities/programmes include funding for research clusters and interdisciplinary seminars
There is also support for external collaborations, doctoral dissertation completion fellowships and for post-doctoral fellows

The key is the cluster grants that are designed to support interdisciplinary teams.

I should mention that I am on the Administrative Board.

MA in Experimental Digital Media at Waterloo

Thanks to David I found out about the University of Waterloo’s new MA in Experimental Digital Media. The MA looks like something you could do in 12 months, but it isn’t clear. The MA doesn’t have a thesis – instead it has project which can be a prototype with commentary:

The Project is the culminating point of the program, in which students demonstrate a mastery of critical theories and theoretical concepts by embodying them in digital artifacts, environments, or practice. Projects will entail the design, conception or production of objects-to-think-with, evocative objects that focus attention on key cultural and theoretical issues in the humanities.

In many cases the project will remain at a design or prototype stage, although the manufacture of the object is by no means ruled out in principle. The design or prototype itself will be accompanied by a commentary of 40 pages in which the student will describe the theoretical and cultural context of the project and its aims, analyse its feasibility and its functioning, describe its cultural and rhetorical significance, and indicate its possible lines of development.

Bill of Rights for Collaborators: Recommendations Off the Tracks

Paul pointed me to recommendation by the Off the Tracks workshop for a Collaborator’s Bill of Rights. This document nicely starts a discussion about collaboration and credit which is important to the digital humanities. The comments are also worth reading. For example, Adam Crymble raises questions about where we draw the line between collaborators and other forms of support or inspiration. Does an RA for a prof who writes a book deserve to be credited as a co-author? Is the builder of a tool like Omeka a collaborator? My philosophy is generally:

Credit should be discussed at the beginning of a project with RAs, colleagues and programmers. As most of my projects now come out of labs where groups of people meet, we try to discuss credit at the start of any particular project.
In general most projects don’t lead to one outcome. Interdisciplinary projects will often lead to papers written up for different communities. Working with CS folk we have a general rule of thumb that we can each propose and write papers (conference and print) as long as inform others at the start of the writing/proposing and recognize the key players from the other side. Thus I am encouraged to present/publish in my community and I get to be first author on any paper I initiate. The same is true of grad students and other faculty.
Listing co-authored papers on a CV for purposes of merit, promotion and tenure leads to problems at the level of Faculty Evaluation Committees. At U of A you are explicitly asked for each item for which you want merit to specify whether you had co-contributors and what your role/percentage of work was. I try to avoid in my own CV specifying percentages of contribution even though that is encouraged. Instead I try to describe the role I played in a collaborative paper in a consistent fashion. Some of the roles include “led the project”, “wrote the paper”, “edited the paper”, “programmed the site”, “managed the usability research” and so on.
A couple of the comments to this post mention the constraints on programmers and research assistants to starting projects. This is perhaps one of the major reasons I left a nice job in university IT support to take up an academic position – I was tired of waiting for others to initiate projects or trying to be a tail that wagged them. This is the fundamental split in our academic caste system that we have to overcome in the small workings of our labs. In my experience it is often to my advantage to ask research assistants to take leadership and propose things within the context of a research area. The more ideas, the more directions taken, the better the research coming out.

Interdisciplinarity

Thanks to Humanist I came across this Chronicle of Higher Education essay by Myra H. Strober about fostering interdisciplinarity, Communicating Across the Academic Divide (January 2, 2011.) Strober has written a book about interdisciplinarity titled, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought whose conclusion she summarizes in the essay,

The three common explanations for a lack of faculty interest in interdisciplinary work are that the academic reward system militates against it (hiring, promotion, salary increases, and most prizes are controlled by single disciplines, not by multiple disciplines), that there is insufficient funding for it, and that evaluating it is fraught with conflict. These are significant barriers.

However, while doing research for my new book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, I found an even more fundamental barrier to interdisciplinary work: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture.

I am chairing a committee that is developing a vision for the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Alberta. We have been talking to people, running brainstorming events, and writing up case studies to identify the barriers to interdisciplinarity just in our Faculty of Arts. One thing that is clear is that there are a tremendous number of faculty/students who want to try interdisciplinarity from team-teaching across disciplines to blowing up departments. One of the things that hinders many is the extra effort it takes to get out of the department, to find people, to find the support mechanisms, and to navigate the bureaucracy (which is really oriented around departments.) We need a “front desk” type function where you can get advice and mentoring.

Digitization Day Conference Report

On Thursday we held the first University of Alberta Digitization Day. The idea was to bring projects on campus that are digitizing research evidence from texts to 3D objects. We also invited a number of units on campus that provide research computing services like Library that runs an Education and Research Archive (ERA).

See my Digitization Day Conference Report. At the end is a list of issues that came from the final Lightning Round. Also, I have put up a list of useful links in the Histories and Archives area of the CIRCA wiki.