Making a Difference

You may have already heard about the NeverSeconds blog or the 9-year-old who created it to rate her school's cafeteria food. How after just a few blog posts, the photos and descriptions got national and then world attention. She got the food situation improved (with help from dad), and has created a way for other kids at other schools around the globe to become involved with school food. It's an amazing story. Here's one of her food reviews (source):

Today's meal was on the menu as Cheeseburger and ice cream/biscuit but as you can see I got an ice lolly. I prefer ice cream. I wish they had stuck to the menu. I did get 2 croquettes though only 3 pieces of cucumber when I said no thanks to the peas.  

Food-o-meter-7/10
Mouthfuls- eating and counting and chatting to friends is hard!
Courses- main/dessert
Health Rating- 2/10
Price- £2
Pieces of hair- 0!

This story has made the rounds framed as a human-interest bit, which of course it is. But for me there's a larger story.

This couldn't have happened without the Internet and cheap consumer technology. Imagine just a couple of decades ago what it would have required for a 9-year-old to photograph her lunch every day and share her musings with hundreds of thousands of other people. And now we don't even notice the technological miracle--that's not the story at all. The story is not that this schoolgirl is a prodigy either. It's that she cared about something enough to do something about it, and it made a difference.

This winds back to my point about the medieval mindset that still permeates much of our educational systems: the "prepare and certify" model (see this post for more). In treating students like they are machines on an assembly line, we overlook the fact that they are already capable of doing very cool things, as this 9-year-old demonstrates. Yes, we have to prepare them by helping them learn about the world in ways they wouldn't do accidentally. But we can also lead students to an even more important realization: they can already begin to change the world with the preparation they already have.

The young nutritionist created her project because of intrinsic motivation, not because of a school assignment. Now it stands on its own for anyone to look at and assess as an accomplishment. This is very different from a classroom assignment with purely extrinsic motivation, which results ultimately in a letter grade assessment that gets averaged into others, losing most of the evidence that the event ever happened. As with most 'preparation' activities, it would be entirely transient--a momentary hurdle to be overcome on the way to a very distant graduation from university and ultimate 'certification' in the form of a diploma. I hope the contrast between these is sufficiently stark that you may wonder about how we might do things differently. At the very least, it ought to generate some doubt that it really requires more than twenty years to prepare a human being to be useful in society.

A Social Media Metric Arrives

In "The End of Preparation" I wrote that:

The method of assessing a portfolio is deferred to the final observer. You may be interested in someone else's opinion or you may not be. It's simply there to inspect. Once this is established, third parties will undoubtedly create a business out of rating portfolios for suitability for your business if you're too busy to do it yourself.

It turns out that third parties aren't waiting on portfolios. If you read the I-ACT article, you may recall that participation in professional social networks like mathoverflow.net are part of what goes in my ideal portfolio. These professional networks are not developed yet for every discipline, but there is a company using lowest-common-denominator social networks to rate your overall social impact. The site is Klout.com. Here's what they say:

People have always had the power to influence others, and that power is being democratized with new social media tools. Klout's mission is to provide insights into everyone's influence. We measure your influence based on your ability to drive action in social networks. We process this data on a daily basis to give you an updated Klout Score each morning. Here are a few of the actions we use to measure influence:

I didn't want to give them my Twitter or Facebook password so they could calculate my score. In any event, it can't be very large on their log scale from 1-100:

The average Klout Score is actually 20, not 50. As your Score increases, it becomes exponentially harder to increase your Klout. That's why you see so many 20s and not as many 90s!

I learned about Klout from Reddit (see comments there), which points to a Wired article "What Your Klout Score Really Means" by Seth Stevenson. The article describe the experience of a candidate for a VP position at a marketing agency:

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that [the candidate] could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” [the candidate] says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

At present, using such a crude instrument probably only damages the hiring process, and is awfully shortsighted. But this is just the beginning. For mathematics, you can already browse mathoverflow.net to see the reputation on this social site devoted to research-level mathematics. The user with the highest assigned reputation is Joel David Hamkins. Take a look at his page there and see how rich it is with information about his professional life.

Means to What End?

The title for this article comes from a 4/22 Commentary in the The Chronicle entitled "Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams" by David Jaffee. Here's a bit of it:

If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose.

I put in bold the headline quote so you couldn't miss it. Instrumentalism is the idea that predicting cause and effect is more important than "understanding reality," and I'm not sure it's exactly the right concept for this argument. But the argument is still valid, and summed up in this ubiquitous practice:

On the one hand, we tell students to value learning for learning's sake; on the other, we tell students they'd better know this or that, or they'd better take notes, or they'd better read the book, because it will be on the next exam; if they don't do these things, they will pay a price in academic failure. This communicates to students that the process of intellectual inquiry, academic exploration, and acquiring knowledge is a purely instrumental activity—designed to ensure success on the next assessment.

This is the "prepare and certify" model that I dissected in "The End of Preparation." In theory, the preparation (the cause) enables students to be functional in graduate school, employment, entrepreneurship, performance, public service, or some other worthy human endeavor after graduation. The reason I don't think our prepare/certify model is instrumentalism is because it's rare for anyone to check this connection between the preparation and its ultimate impact. That's mainly because it's so hard to do. Yes, we get studies about how much an undergraduate degree is worth in terms of life wages, but that doesn't say anything causal about the education itself (correlation is not causation).

The whole article is worth a read. Maybe I'm saying that because it reaches the same conclusions I have:

Authentic assessments involve giving students opportunities to demonstrate their abilities in a real-world context. Ideally, student performance is assessed not on the ability to memorize or recite terms and definitions but the ability to use the repertoire of disciplinary tools—be they theories, concepts, or principles—to analyze and solve a realistic problem that they might face as practitioners in the field.

I have gone further and tried to show how we can do that. See "I-ACT: An Alternative to Prepare-and-Certify."

If you have some time to read it, there's a provocative article on the philosophy of science that is related to instrumentalism (my assessment), and does have a connection to the subject matter, albeit from the perspective of natural selection: "The Interface Theory of Perception: Natural Selection Drives True Perception To Swift Extinction" by Donald D. Hoffman. Here's the abstract:

A goal of perception is to estimate true properties of the world. A goal of categorization is to classify its structure. Aeons of evolution have shaped our senses to this end. These three assumptions motivate much work on human perception. I here argue, on evolutionary grounds, that all three are false. Instead, our perceptions constitute a species-speci c user interface that guides behavior in a niche. Just as the icons of a PC's interface hide the complexity of the computer, so our perceptions usefully hide the complexity of the world, and guide adaptive behavior. This interface theory of perception o ers a framework, motivated by evolution, to guide research in object categorization. This framework informs a new class of evolutionary games, called interface games, in which pithy perceptions often drive true perceptions to extinction.

I have added emphasis to the point I think connects to the current context: the way we think of the world, how this forms cause-effect models and the language we construct to process it, collectively form an "interface" that guides behavior in a niche, as the author puts it. If the 'niche' is negotiation of short-term hurdles using short-term memory and becoming skillful at doing minimal work to earn grades, that's a very different thing from being productive in the grandest way humans are capable of: through art and rhetoric, leadership and service--the effects we are actually hoping for when betassled students walk over the stage.

Memory Games

A while back I wrote "Memory as SLO," about the possibility of developing short term memory as an intentional learning outcome. I came across an article that has a particular program for doing that. It seems like this would be a relatively easy bit of research: randomly select some first year students and have them go through a program based on the methods describes.

Read it for yourself at NYT in "Can You Make Yourself Smarter?" Here's a quote:

In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced [this method] also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as “fluid” intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things. The implication was that playing the game literally makes people smarter.

Teaching and Assessment (Video)

This is a long video, but worth the time.