Communication Good, Communication Bad

Two articles in the Chronicle at the top of the most viewed list are interesting to contrast. First is "Turnaround President Makes the Most of His College’s Small Size" about G. T. Smith as President of David & Elkins College:

[I]n higher education, Mr. Smith is known as a turnaround artist, a man with the talent and disposition to take a failing college and transform it into a winner.

Quoting Smith, they give the reason for his success as "The underlying thing for me is relationships—hardly anything important happens that doesn't have to do with relationships." For example:

After years of stagnant enrollment at Davis & Elkins—which had developed a dismal local reputation, according to some local high-school counselors—the freshman class was up 50 percent this fall. As of November, the number of applications was more than seven times higher than at this time in 2007, and eight students had already put down deposits. Consider that those numbers came after the college had canceled its advertising campaign and done away with mass mailings in favor of a highly personal approach to recruiting students: getting to know their names, their parents' names, their dogs' names, and conveying the message that at this college of 700 students, you're part of a family.

A bit off-topic, but equally fascinating is his take on the changing landscape of higher education, which I've speculated wildly about in these virtual pages. Pres. Smith's version:

"We can't in a Pollyannaish way say, 'The liberal-arts college will always survive.' We are all under threat or under siege," he says. "It comes down to whether you are going to look at your future based entirely upon your past or what others are doing, or whether you are going to look at the fundamentals, the principles, the basics, and have the discipline to stay with those."

That was "Communication Good." Now the other one.

A while back I blogged happily about the backchannel--the emergence of live chattering by text, Twitter, blogging, etc. during presentations, class meetings, or any occasion where people have the means and time. It's the 21st century version of passing notes and whispering.

Today's references are:

• Chronicle: Conference Humiliation: They're Tweeting Behind Your Back
• Chronicle blog: Tweckling Twitterfolk: Chronicle Readers React to the New World of Twitter Conference Humiliation.
• SocialMediaGroup: Just because it’s a crowd doesn’t make it wise
  

You can gather from the titles what happened. In the case of the last article on the list, a presenter at Web 2.0 Expo was giving her talk with a huge screen in the background showing the conference Twitter channel feed. When some tweeters started making disparaging comments on the backchannel, she didn't understand why the audience was reacting oddly to her talk, and got understandably flustered. The other articles talk about other instances of this "tweckling," a neologism I find kind of cute, even if the behavior is reprehensible.

Interestingly, browsing Technorati for "backchannel" only produces positive-sounding hits, with advice for speakers on how to build one, for example.

The moral of the story? It would be ridiculous to try to generalize anything based on these two completely different articles about communication, so I can't resist. The difference is between high-bandwidth, high-stakes (personal responsibility for words) communication and low-bandwidth, low-stakes (essentially anonymous) communication. It's not that the first is good and the second bad, just that they're very different. And the no-man's land in between--email--is the worst of both worlds: high stakes and low bandwidth. Ever had a joke or off-hand comment interpreted differently than you intended it? Add to that the ease of someone sending your email to a third party, and the potential for mischief multiplies.

One of the articles notes that some conferences post rules of etiquette for the backchannel. Of course, if the tweeters are anonymous, this isn't going to have much effect. In the end, though, there isn't true anonymity on the Internet. Pretty much anything can be traced if there is enough interest in doing so. Best policy, in my opinion, is: if you think it's important to say it, put your name on it, be clear, and be polite. I probably fail on the second point, but it's a work in progress. The best payoff would be to get almost as much mileage out of low-bandwidth communication as Pres. Smith gets out of high-bandwidth communication. That's a powerful idea that could spawn a sea of consultants: maximize the effect of short, text-based, remote communication.

Of course, this is the Internet; someone's probably wrote a book on it already.

High Five

Dialogue, I've claimed before, is exponentially more powerful than monologue in making assessments, or heck, just communicating. More about that here. Combine that idea with the powerful force of natural selection working over time on language, and we have conditions where the current state of language can tell us about what collections of ideas have similar meanings.

Language relates to the real world through the sloppy everyday empiricism we use to get by, and we abbreviate and share the most important parts in our speech. Communication theory plays a role, for example by creating economic reasons to keep the most common words short. That's probably why we say "yes" and "no" rather than "affirmative" and "negative" unless we're trying to impress someone. There is a whole archeology of ideas hidden in our everyday speech.

As an example of this hidden order, consider that farm animals have short names: dog, cat, cow, horse, mule, ox, and so on. If aliens landed from Alpha Centuri to study our linguistics, they would probably conclude that we had spend a lot of time thinking about and using those words, leading to the conclusion that farm animals were an integral part of life way back when. If we could "reboot" the language and create the vocabulary from a tabula rasa, I'm guessing farm animals would have two or three syllable names. Maybe "Chicken McNuggets" would end up with a one-syllable denomination: "gah" or something.

Note: another fun fact for cocktail parties is that the names of the animals stayed Olde Englishe (cow = Kuh, Germanic), whereas the names of the dishes prepared from said animals tend to be French, like beef = bœuf. One might guess that at some point in the past there was a successful French invasion...

It's good to keep this idea in mind when we talk about complicated fuzzy human traits, like intelligence. Yes, you can create rubrics and definitions and tests and correlations, but the actual meaning of the word is not yours to manipulate--it has become what it is in the public linguistic space because the idea has some meaning already. It isn't precise, but it doesn't need to be precise to be useful.

When we did the core skills survey of thinking and communications skills (the Assessing the Elephant schtick), I didn't insist on a common rubric--in fact encouraged the definition of "creative thinking" and the rest to be customized to the course content--nor did we do any work to try to get raters to "agree to agree" about what ratings should be. Reliability had to be whatever was the latent worth of the words in natural language. The advantage of this is that you don't have to spend much time on validity--the results are as valid as everyday speech, which is ultimately what all the complicated psychometric tests have to be judged against anyway. We got about 50% agreement on ratings on a four-point scale. This is far higher than chance, implying that there is meaning to the ratings.

With all this as background, you'll see why I was very happy to stumble upon research I should have known about but didn't: The Big Five personality traits, based on something called the Lexical Hypothesis. From Wikipedia:

This is the idea that the most salient and socially relevant personality differences in people’s lives will eventually become encoded into language. The hypothesis further suggests that by sampling language, it is possible to derive a comprehensive taxonomy of human personality traits.

This is such a cool idea. Wow. It's worth reading the short history of the research here. The result is that there are now considered to be five main dimensions that emerge from this lexical analysis. The claim is that these are stable across demographic and cultural lines.

The five traits are listed below, straight from the Wike article. They have obvious relevance to anyone seeking to use noncognitives to improve quality of student experience and outcomes. Quote:

• Openness - appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
• Conscientiousness - a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior.
• Extraversion - energy, positive emotions, urgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.
• Agreeableness - a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
• Neuroticism - a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability; sometimes called emotional instability.

I don't know if there's similar research on cognigitive functions. Are there emergent dimensions to concepts like intelligence, cleverness, smartness, brilliance, creativity, etc.? Note that this methodology is the polar opposite of defining intelligence to be something and then trying to validate it on the back end.

And here, also courtesy of copyright-free Wikipedia, is the (very) high five I promised in the title. It made me happy.
Image source: Wikipedia.