Archive for March, 2006
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Thank you Ann Arbor!
Ann Arbor is kind of full of itself, and this is a case where the exception most definitely does prove the rule. Not that I mind, necessarily (and the original posting is quite sweet), but it differs in this way from most other places where I’ve lived, with one exception.
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I think I would move to this city, if it existed
Treehugger: Velo-City: Cycle Tracks Will Abound in Utopia
Those of us who try to ride bikes in the winter often wonder why cars get their own big right-of-way, transit riders get expensive underground subways, pedestrians get an elaborate network of underground walkways, and we, if lucky, get a white line on pavement marking a so-called bike lane filled with snow or cars. -
Adventures in Ethics and Science: What (not) to do when the system is broken.
Adventures in Ethics and Science: What (not) to do when the system is broken.
Although it was back in the dim mists of the Cretaceous era, I don’t think I ever harbored fantasies of wreaking revenge on my graduate advisors and professors. The closest I ever came (as far as I know) to experiencing this from the other side involved extended discussions with someone (a mathematician, as it turns out) who was interested in returning to graduate school in psychology or education. Over some months of occasional discussions, it became clear that this person had ideas about what graduate school entailed that made me very worried about the possibility of this working out. After deciding that this wouldn’t work out, I (and at least one other person) got vaguely threatening email messages about this, and as far as I know that was that.
I think there are two systemic sources of this problem, or at least two that can be easily changed. The first is the time that it takes to get a degree. In the UIUC Psychology department, students are guaranteed 6 years of support. I used to decry the fact that this sometimes was a negative factor in recruiting, interpreted as meaning that it takes 6 years to graduate vs. 4 or 5 years elsewhere. Ironically, the recruits’ complaint is probably correct—although there’s no reason it had to take students 6 years to finish, it almost universally did, with a few students taking longer.
Both Michigan Psychology and the Combined Program in Education and Psychology) try hard to get students done in 5 years, with occasional students taking longer. That requires a fairly high level of supervision and involvement from both faculty and students, but I think it really does make a positive difference.
What accounts for the difference? Sadly, perhaps, it’s because graduate tuition ends up being much more expensive here than at Illinois (where any grad student who’s appointed as an RA or TA gets a tuition waiver that’s not charged to the department). The financial viability of our graduate programs and the ability to admit new students depend on getting students to achieve candidacy relatively
early and finish up more or less on schedule. So there’s pressure on both faculty and students to ensure that students move through with dispatch.The School of Education is in the middle, or perhaps the early middle stages of developing a similar culture, and I can see some of the reasons that lead to lengthy graduate careers and alienation. If students must find their own funding (at least in some cases), then it’s easy for faculty members to admit students they may have doubts about and not to push students to get over the inevitable stumbling blocks that arise in the course of graduate education. Furthermore, as students learn more and are acculturated to a program, they are more valuable as colleagues, and faculty may not feel so motivated to push them out the door toward their own independent careers, even if that’s the best thing for them.
Graduate school is a time of great ambivalence for most people; I know it was for me. Like ripping off a bandage, though, I think it’s something that should be done as quickly as possible. An academic career inherently involves life-long learning, but as much of that should be done as an independent, autonomous researcher or faculty member as possible.
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John Bransford
I’m listening to a talk by John Bransford, which is quite thought-provoking. I think this posting will involve a set of links to follow up on later.
He began with a plug for his Science of Learning center, known as LIFE (learning in informal and formal environments). He began with a time-line graphic arguing that people spend at most 18.5% of their waking hours in formal educational centers (assuming they go to college). He also showed a cute video by Father Guido Sarducci on the 5 minute university, which would only teach what students remember from their college years—you can watch it here. (Later he argues that this argument ignores the data on relearning, which suggests that there’s more than 5-minutes’ worth of learning in college).
He has a cute “Pink Panther” example (Peter Sellers version) about the problems that schemas can lead to when conditions change (in this case, dismounting from parallel bars where the dismount leads you to fall down a set of stairs.He discussed some fairly standard insight problems, like this one: “Two men played games of checkers. Each won 5 games. Explain.” Also discussed the issue of “failures of success”—people continuing strategies that used to work despite changed conditions.
Relatedly, he discussed the issue of “premature automaticity” and the idea that it leads to ultimately poor performance.
These are interesting concepts, and ones that I’ve thought about in the context of selecting and training graduate students. I’ve seen a number of examples, begining with my own grad student days, of people who showed up with a great deal of experience and expertise and very little educability. I wish I knew how to measure that, although I think there are often clues in letters and statements about the extent to which people are open to new experiences vs. seeing education as an opportunity to validate what they already believe and provide them with credentials.
He also discussed a virtual private island the group had bought in the Linden Lab Second Life virtual world, called Terra Vita
Bransford is enormously bright and productive. I do worry about part of the rhetoric underlying his arguments. You always need to worry about who gets to take credit for the unexplained variance. That is, if everything you can’t predict from what people are taught in school or from performance on tests is attributed to informal learning or other factors, you’re writing a check you probably can’t cash. That is, there will be some aspects of learning that can be attributed to schooling, some that can be attributed to informal experiences, but doubtless also a very large idiosyncratic amount of learning (and failure to learn) that results from how different individuals choose to spend that time (e.g., writing a weblog posting instead of listening more carefully to the talk). -
Seth’s Blog: The best presentation…
Seth’s Blog: The best presentation might be no presentation at all. I think I’ll adapt this to my teaching from now on.
Part of a continuing series of posts on PowerPoint…