Casting Out Nines

Finally, a professional sociologist has done some actual research on the concept of the digital native. Her view is a little more measured than others‘. From this interview: 

Q. Why do people think young people are so Web-wise?

A. I think the assumption is that if it was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.

The importance of having empirical findings about digital literacy among young people — as opposed to anecdotes and assumptions that tend to affirm what we want to believe — is that the more we assume, the less we teach. As Prof. Hargittai puts it: 

Q. Are there implications for workplace readiness?

A. There are positive outcomes for those who know how to work and employ tech information, and those who lack information will confront a different situation. In terms of a link with demographic differences, those people who seem to be more savvy are the ones who tend to be in more-privileged positions. There will be an increase in social inequality if this divergence continues this way.

I’m not a fan of the concept of “privilege”, but it’s plain to see that some demographics have better access to technology than others. And it’s all fun to suppose that students these days are technologically literate and then craft way-cool tech-centered curricula around that assumption. But the problem is that the students who are not technologically savvy — whom Prof. Hargittai identifies as “Women, students of Hispanic origin, African-American students, and students whose parents have lower levels of education”, which is to say, an awfully big percentage of the people we teach — end up getting left behind while we have our fun. 

Academic dishonesty is not only easy to catch, it’s a horrible miscarriage of the mutual trust upon which all of education is built, and students who willfully engage in it deserve all the punishment they receive, if not more. There’s simply no rationalizing it, and I don’t think we in higher ed do nearly enough to eradicate it. 

I bring this up because of virusdoc’s comment, just made on an old post: 

Resurrecting an old thread, but I just graded my first ever take-home essay test (open-book, open web, but no collaboration allowed and students were instructed to make sure their ideas and words were their own).

Out of 30 tests graded thus far, there were two students who boldly copied and pasted huge blocks of text from multiple websites into their test answers, without so much as an attempt to change any words or even alter the font from that in the website. It was horrific. In addition, I uncovered one clear example of two students who almost certainly shared answers. One of them had screwball, left-field answers for two questions in a row, using examples that weren’t in our text and I hadn’t discussed in lecture. This was odd, but I dismissed it as a singularity. Several tests later, another student used exactly the same screwball examples for the same two questions. (no other student has used these examples). Further comparison of the two students’ tests side by side reveals multiple verbatim quotes in their answers, and several of the answers that are not verbatim are structurally highly related.

I never anticipated senior level students would a) cheat so frequently, and b) do so in such stupid, obvious ways.

Yee-ha for higher ed!

Yep. I’m actually a little (pleasantly) surprised that I haven’t had a clear-cut incident of academic dishonesty yet in my own courses this semester. But that could be because I’ve taken to designing my courses specifically to avoid assessments with a high risk of cheating or plagiarism. I have very little in the way of take-home assignments that are worth very much.

That doesn’t seem right for higher education. Profs ought to be giving assignments that are challenging, engaging, and therefore take time and effort outside of class. But when we do that, there’s all this rampant and ridiculous cheating that takes place. So we profs feel this intrinsic pressure to make most of our grades come from timed assessments which are easier to manage, but which by definition operate at a lower cognitive level than the kinds of assignments we would like to give (and which college students ought to be getting). So cheaters and plagiarists are ruining not only their own education, but the education of others as well. 

I don’t want to leave the impression from my earlier post that making a college education worth something is all on the students. It’s most certainly not. There are three other factors, at least, that play in to making a college education valuable and not just 4+ years of wasted time:

1. The faculty. Faculty have to teach and manage courses so that all students are challenged and pushed, to their intellectual limits, and also that being “intellectually inclined” as I interpreted that term earlier is rewarded. Not just making classes hard, in other words, but setting classes up so that there are amazing intellectual insights and learning experiences — and those are almost always gained by hard work.
2. The curriculum. The curriculum that students encounter has to also reward intellectual inclination and demand that all students
3. The administration.  Administrations have to manage human resources and the curriculum (and all the other stuff involved in running a school) with a view towards the question “Does decision X make the learning experiences of our students more intense and rewarding, or less?”

Phrased in the negative, you can’t have a vital college experience if your faculty are mainly interested in making students feel good and avoiding generating a lot of work for themselves; or if your curriculum is set up so that there’s no real incentive or push for students to be intellectually inclined (i.e. where the slackers end up being the heroes of the student culture and not the achievers); or if your administration doesn’t work to foster an institutional infrastructure that drives toward intellectual pursuits. You can put the best students on the planet into a college like this and absolutely nothing will happen except you’ll have a bunch of very bored and frustrated students.

Indiana, usually a non-factor in Presidential politics because the lateness of our primary, has suddenly become a hot place to visit by Democratic candidates. But it looks like Hillary will have to keep on looking for a place to stop in South Bend tomorrow:

South Bend school officials have rejected a request by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to hold a rally in the Washington High School gym on Friday.

South Bend Community School Corp. board President Sheila Bergerson says Clinton’s visit would have interfered with the school day. She says plans called for juniors and seniors to attend the public rally.

School board members denied the request Wednesday night. Bergerson says she worried that the school corporation would give the impression it was endorsing Clinton.

Kudos to Washington HS for saying “no” to a disruption in the school day. And anyway, how is it that Presidential candidates can commandeer publicly-funded schools, during school hours, for campaign events? (Obama held a rally at Plainfield High School a couple of weeks ago, but it was on a Saturday.)

I’m going to be in South Bend tomorrow for the sectional MAA meetings. I wonder where Hillary will end up? I recommend here, although it would be hard to get up and rally the troops afterwards.

From George Leef in this post at Phi Beta Cons (responding to this earlier post):

The fact is [sic] the matter is that some bright and energetic young people do extremely well in life without ever earning a degree, while on the other hand, many others who get their college degrees wind up doing jobs that call for no academic preparation whatsoever. Formal academic coursework is of little benefit to students who are not intellectually inclined, and as our K-12 system deteriorates and graduates increasing numbers of disengaged students, college will do less and less good.

It seems like there is a growing refrain that unless a kid gets a college degree, that kid has no chance of getting a job that will earn a living wage, and  that kid will be something of a liability rather than an asset to society. Barack Obama was in Indy a couple of weeks ago and said this almost word-for-word; I believe his exact wording was “The days when a person could earn a living wage on a high school degree are over.”

That may be true, but it’s not an if-and-only-if proposition. A college education is no guarantee of anything, and in fact it’s useless if it is expended on people who are unprepared for college and uninterested in learning. The real value of a college education is realized only when it is joined by students who are well-prepared and, as Leef says, “intellectually inclined” — which I take to mean having a good work ethic and some modicum of a desire to learn for the sheer pleasure of learning, rather than some mistaken idea that college = job.

Just a few days after getting this request for introductions to mathematics for someone with an advanced degree in a humanities field, I received another email with a similar request. I’ll just quote from it:

Do you think you might be able to suggest some books or websites, for someone who had no math aptitude, to learn math? It is a great personal sadness to me that I was never able to master the subject. The older I become the more I wish I could understand it!

I was able to do basic arithmetic as a child but became lost beginning with algebra. If there was one thing that stands out in my memory it was staring at a word problem mystified as how to solve it, or staring at an algebra problem not knowing what sort of formula one should apply to solve it. In short, I suppose my greatest liability was the inability to see patterns.  I still believe that math could have been fun and challenging with the right teacher rather than overwhelming. Any suggestions on your part would be greatly appreciated!

This person has just finished graduate school in the arts, and the person’s last contact with math was “a sad dalliance” with a statistics course, which the person failed twice.

I get the sense from this email and the other one that there are actually a lot of people out there who are closet math lovers, or math-curious at least, who would like the chance to become literate in mathematics now that they’ve made it through school. That’s a far cry from the usual anti-math sentiment we math people get all the time from most people we meet.

The comments on the other post were so good, it makes sense to open the comments here for suggestions as well. Fire when ready!

The Wired Campus is running a series of articles on using Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform, as a classroom tool. Here’s the first article (interesting stuff in the comments there), and here’s a followup with a short video from a Twittering professor. And here’s a more lengthy article from Chronicle.com.

Twitter does appear to provide good backchannel discussion opportunities for those who are motivated to use it productively, and as a corollary there are some interesting out-of-classroom student interaction possibilities there. But my experience with any form of online communication is that students like it if they are pushing the information to people of their choosing (such as IM) but not if class stuff is being pushed to them (such as Twitter or even regular email). Control of information is a really big issue with students, and it profoundly creeps them out sometimes when professors presume to include them in backchannel conversations about class.

On Thursday I’ll be heading south, out of the deep freeze of late winter in Indiana to lovely San Antonio, TX for the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics (ICTCM). This is my first time to an ICTCM, and I’m genuinely excited about going. (Which is something I can’t say about very many conferences I have attended.)

I’ll be giving a talk at 1:10 on Friday about some stuff that I have been doing with wikis in my upper-division classes lately and about the potential role of wikis in advanced math courses in general. Of course, my talk’s time slot is only 15 minutes long, and they tell me the talk should really only be 10 minutes long, so my talk is going to be more of a conversation-starter (at least I hope so) than it is anything nearly comprehensive .

Earlier on Friday, I’ll be attending a workshop on Camtasia, which I am considering as a replacement for Snapz Pro X as my screencasting software. I’ll have more to say about screencasting and screencasting software a little later. It turns out that our IT department at the college use Camtasia to do tutorial videos, and they apparently like it very much.

And apart from those two things, which constitute sort of the official reason I am going to the ICTCM, there will be lots of other fun stuff happening. For one, I’ll be meeting up with other edubloggers — notably Maria Anderson from Teaching College Math Technology Blog and Scott Franklin from Natural Blogarithms. If you’re reading this and will be there with nothing to do Friday night, join us in the lobby of the hotel and have dinner and hang out.

Also, since the Camtasia workshop and my talk all happen between 10:30 and 1:30 on Friday, the entire rest of the conference is wide open for me to attend other stuff. They haven’t posted the full schedule at the ICTCM web site yet, but the 45-minute workshops look pretty interesting, and there ought to be a huge diversity of short talks like mine. And don’t forget the vendor exhibits, which are always among the coolest things at math conferences.

In the spirit of educational technology, blogging, math, and all the other stuff that makes Casting Out Nines more or less what it is, I’ll be blogging the conference as I go, including photos and video (hopefully; I’m taking the camera, at least). You never know exactly how much down time you’ll have at a conference, but I hope to keep a steady stream of posts coming from Thursday through Saturday.

As I told my linear algebra class yesterday, this is not only a math conference but a technology conference too — so this is the sanctum sanctorum of geekhood. Don’t you want to be along for the ride?

A key element in being a college-educated person, especially in mathematics, is what athletes call mental toughness. This term can be a pop-psychological artifact with no real meaning, but if you look here and here and other places on the web, the general idea is that mental toughness is a combination of resilience in the face of minor and major failures; the ability to cope with difficult and numerous demands; confidence; focus; and  determination. Or better yet, it looks like this:

I believe mental toughness is key because, in college, you are preparing yourself for the rest of your life out of school, where the edges are harder and the difficulties far greater than just doing well on the next exam or getting a decent grade in your calculus class. Real people in the real world have to handle adversity, especially the particular adversity that comes from having ideas, thoughts, and proposed solutions shot down in flames.

College is an excellent training ground to develop mental toughness, and in mathematics that development is particularly acute because of the clarity with which right things are right and wrong things are wrong. Math students, especially math majors, ought to have the toughest minds around, because they have been tested and pushed to their utmost, they have summoned the intellectual honesty to admit it when their work has flaws — sometimes major ones — and they have developed the habit of working on through the injuries to finally win the match, so to speak. They should not be the ones who, when confronted with flaws in their performances, simply take it as a personal offense and fold up, unable to summon the will to keep on working.

So, a question:

How can an academic course or program, accomplish this task, when the very thing that catalyzes mental toughness - adversity couple with reality — is seen as offensive and humiliating? I can understand it if the professor is visibly and intentionally acting to humiliate or intimidate students; but if the prof is impassively and objectively pointing out problems in a student’s work, and the student feels that the prof is intimidating and humiliating them, then what is to be done? Does the prof overcompensate and become a sort of Barney-like figure, exuding love and goodwill while at the same time pointing out that does not, in fact, equal ? At what point should the student just take his/her lumps and deal with it?

Having been on the Promotion and Tenure Committee now for two years, and having the job of reading reams of course evaluations for not only myself but many of my colleagues to determine how good a job (or not) they are doing at teaching, I have a new appreciation for just how bad of an evaluative instrument the typical student course evaluation really is. I say let’s ditch the whole system and start over.

I suppose I should elaborate. The whole point of any kind of evaluation on anybody is to gather information. And I think of information the way Claude Shannon did, i.e. information is that which reduces uncertainty. Alice does an evaluation of Bob for some official purpose because the people in charge do not themselves have a clear idea of what Bob is doing, and it would be a little biased to have Bob evaluate himself, so Alice goes in to provide some kind of substantive information that clears up the picture and reduces the uncertainty of the people in charge. Maybe it’s not a single Alice but a whole roomful of Alices, all of whom have been taking a course from Bob for the last 9-10 weeks. With all that information, you might have some outliers in the positive end (”He’s great!”) or the negative end (”He’s awful!”) but on the average you should get a pattern of information that provides a little more certainty as to the kind of teacher Bob really is.

Except most of the time, you don’t get the kind of information you want, or for that matter any kind of information at all. There are all kinds of problems with the evaluation form itself most of the time. The questions that ask students to give a numerical response are often ill-posed, inappropriate for students to be answering, or simply absurd. Examples:

• Ill-posed: “The professor handed out a syllabus on the first day of class.” This (or pretty close to it) is a question on our evaluation forms, and students are asked to give an answer on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). But this is obviously a binary question — either I gave the syllabus out on the first day of class or I didn’t. You don’t “strongly agree”. Or what if I don’t hand out a paper copy but rather post it to our course web site and show students where it is? This question is kind of innocuous, so the fact that it yields no useful information due to its ill-posed nature is OK in some ways because you can just ignore it if you’re the prof or the P&T committee. But if we’re ignoring it, why is it on there in the first place?
• Inappropriate: “The professor’s teaching methods are appropriate for this class.” Another item off our evaluation form, and I have a hard time believing most students have any idea what’s an “appropriate” teaching method or not, unless they are junior or senior education majors who have done some crossover thinking about what high school teaching techniques work for the college classroom (and what teaching techniques are ineffective in K-12 but still effective in college). If I were a student, I’d interpret “appropriate” to mean “amenable to my lifestyle”, which is not what the question has in mind at all. So again, you might get a strong pattern of data from a question like this, but it actually increases uncertainty rather than decreases it. If a prof gets evaluated really badly on an item like that, does it mean that his teaching methods are really inappropriate, or that they are but students don’t care for it? We don’t know. More uncertainty.
• Absurd: I could go on and on. I’ll mention my favorite, which was mercifully removed from our course evaluations some years ago: “My instructor senses when some students are not understanding.” Pardon me? Sensing? I’m not a frickin’ Betazoid, folks.

Written comments are a little better but not by much. You get some very useful written comments sometimes, but you also get very many comments that are way out of context or simply unintelligible. A student may have gotten a test back with a bad grade the day of the evaluation — possibly even in another person’s class — and walk in with a chip on his shoulder and selectively ignore a semester’s worth of hard, quality work on the professor’s part just to make a point on the evaluation. The professor gets this and wonders who this person is and what class they thought they were evaluating. The P&T committee reads this and wonders what the deal was, and there are lots of questions about what really happened and what was really going on — again, the uncertainty level is raised, not lowered.

In the worst cases, students will create a meme that continues throughout all the comments on the evaluations for a single class. It’s easy to spot because it’s as if the students were copying down the same slogan onto different evaluation forms. “The professor thinks this is the only class we are taking” is one you see, verbatim, multiple times on the same evaluation — a sure sign that students have decided to group-think rather than honestly give their reasoned assessment of the course in light of everything that has taken place. This is just as bad when the meme is positive as it is when the meme is negative. When students, many of whom have been studiously avoiding being honest with the professor about their difficulties with the course or coming to office hours to talk about things, get together and adopt a slogan rather than give their own honest opinions, it raises rather than reduces uncertainty for the professor and the P&T people.

So like I said, I advocate a wholesale, unilateral rejection of the student evaluation system as we know it. There’s no point in holding fast to an information-gathering system that actually requires more information to interpret the results of the system than the system itself generates.

I do think students need to have a voice in evaluating their professors, so I wouldn’t recommend simply not having student evaluations in any form. But my ideal form sounds a little like what I used to do when I worked for the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University. My job was to go do a “small group analysis” (SGA) for TA’s in different departments. We’d have the TA end class 20 minutes early, and then I would go in and lead a discussion among the students where they had to voice, in person and out loud, their thoughts on a series of well-designed questions about the TA’s teaching. (I’ll try to go find a copy of the questions I used.) I took notes and directed traffic. The SGA’s were great because the students who had issues which were merely personal issues disguised as real pedagogical problems were often shouted down by other students who felt those issues were as ridiculous as they sounded. For example, a student would complain that homework wasn’t returned fast enough. “What are you talking about? He hands them back within four days, and anyhow you don’t even come to class but once a week, so what do you know?” the others would say. I saw exchanges like this, usually less pejorative but always very revealing, almost every time I did an SGA.

That’s information — a comment arises from one student and is put into context by another, and it all appears on one set of notes that the TA gets. And it takes no more time from class than the usual evaluation session. (At Vandy, students did traditional course evaluations too.) You have to hire and pay for people to run the SGA’s, but personally, I’d do it for free at my current job if I knew that I’d be getting a more sane and informative evaluation process out of it.