Semester is all but over and this poor neglected blog needs an update.  Actually, it needed an update as well as an update, but that’s another story.

As I sit here catching up on the last of the marking and preparing for the exam marking, I’m pausing to consider the reflections that my undergrad students submitted (as well as the ‘official’ evaluation, which I hope to never use again, but that’s another story, which I will get to later).

I must preface these remarks with the caveat that I’m making some big assumptions about ‘Gen-Y’, ‘Net Natives’ and any other label that could be applied.  That said, I’m constantly amazed by students. Sometimes you get students so engaged that they take up what I give and spin it back to me in ways that I never considered.  These students are few but they make it all worthwhile.  For instance, one of the things I purposely do is not give a precise definition of ‘Informatics’, because I really want students to start defining their world for themselves.  We give hints and clues and show them examples, but the definition is really up to them.  Which is why this kind of reflection really impresses me:

[Informatics] involves answering the fundamental questions, looking into why we do things and how we take technology and things around us to get it done, it looks at communication and thinking as well as the construction of ideas, templates and data in addition to systems, theory, traditions and recording. It is endless as to what informatics can teach us and it is important that we grasp the concept as it can’t be defined into a phrase and regurgitated.

That student will go far in Business.  Another student came to similar conclusions:

The importance of information presentation, sharing, visualisation, contextualisation and manipulation is now more important to me than ever before. I believe that informatics will become increasingly important, as the link between people, information, and technology becomes more engrained in society.

I’m not sure that the order of those tasks is right, in fact I think it should start with manipulation and end with presentation, but all of the key points are there – the whole range of what we want students to learn.  These are impressive outcomes and make me glad that I do things in the way that I do.  It kind of makes up for the two or three students who feel the course is a waste of space, but that’s another story.

Which I really should think about.  Apparently, at least one student did not like that I use the phrase “but that’s another story” as much as I do and I have been seriously thinking about why I say it so much, particularly in this course.  It occurred to me that that phrase is almost a verbal hypertextual link.  It’s the kind of link we see and then we may open the page in another tab for when we have time to follow it up[1].  I don’t think I’ve realised just how much the web has influenced my thinking, but it’s really evident in that phrase.  And it really became evident when someone wrote in the ‘official’ evaluations that I should stop saying it.  They were quite emphatic and used UPPER CASE with all of it’s implications.  But it wasn’t until then, that I did realise the kind of mesh thinking that I do – it’s the kind that is needed to help students, at least those who are engaged, to make the leap to higher levels of thinking about technology.  It’s the kind of thinking that is needed not just in business graduates, but in all graduates and, quite possibly is one of the things missing in our current crop of politicians.  Linear thinking is not really helpful for solving the complex problems that we face.  It’s the kind of thinking that leads directly to the our current method of ‘official’ evaluation, where students, shielded by anonymity, get to throw whatever shit they feel is their due because the bucket that is their head wasn’t filled in the way they think it should have been. I find it quite incredible that we rely on these evaluations. It’s not like they have studied teaching and learning for over a decade and reflected upon the range of ways in which people learn.  There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance between having to elaborate what you learned and ticking a box, the unthinkingness and the immediacy of the ‘official’ evaluation gives rise to a petty approach to evaluations which leads to a simple, ‘I don’t like this course so I’m going to give it a low evaluation’ or ‘I got a low mark, well, take this you doody lecturer’[2].  But the reflection, where students are not anonymous gives much richer feedback, for example:

I don’t feel that the science/language of informatics content was at all relevant in the business setting. Discussing the debate of whether you can use facebook or dailybooth at work was not particularly useful. Ditto being shown a lot of fun websites early in the semester was not a great use of lecture time. If I go to a lecture, it’s because I want to learn new skills and important information relevant to my degree. Discussions of where the internet is headed do not have a lot of relevance for my career in business or many others’.

While I tend to disagree with most of this, the student has elaborated a great deal of information about the way some students view technology[3] and it is this view that we try to get students to rethink.  Language is important everywhere and the future of technology is directly responsible for where business may be going.  In fact, there are so many stories of business leaders missing the point, which leads some to contemplate the idea of ‘felony interference with a business model’ as being a chief reason for many industries’ problems.   Perhaps, if we keep going down this ‘official’ evaluation pathway, we’ll end up with academics being charged with ‘felony interference with student thinking‘ which simply beggars the imagination and that, hopefully, will never be another story that I allude to.

1. I currently have about 5 tabs of that category open write now, and I’ve only got 18 tabs open [↩]
2. yes, that is my interpretation of the low evaluations [↩]
3. the student actually received a good mark because they elaborated their views quite well and did get me thinking about ways to improve the course [↩]

I received an email from the Dean of Teaching and Learning the other day, and didn’t quite get around to responding.  Someone mentioned that they had dobbed me in for this particular email, so I responded in the positive.  The reason for the email is secondary, because I took the opportunity to blow my own trumpet, something I am not really good at.  But apparently it worked.

I included in the email an apology for not responding and gave a link to the reason.  That reason was the time spent on developing the presentation for the lecture this week.  I think that was a good move, because, now, at least one person is impressed by the work that I do.

My next trick was to try to embed the outcome of all that activity here.  One plug-in installation later and here it is.

Specifying the size in the code didn’t seem to have an effect, so if that’s too small, you can view it full size.

Can you hear my trumpet?

I managed to finish the lecture on Naming, Knowing and Deciding.  Gee, but that’s a big lecture.  I think it must be the one where we introduce so many concepts it’s not funny.  And all of them have Big Words – epistemology, ontology, heuristics, perception, cognitive biases – oops that’s two words.  It’s quite the packed session.  But we do it that way because we’ve introduced a few things gradually, now we have the big reveal.  As in – this is how complex it can get.

One of the examples of cognitive biases we’ve been using for ages concerns the risk of death by shark attack or falling aeroplanes … in the US.  There’s an aswer there somewhere.  How the one we expect is not the really one.  But I get tired of that example.  I spent a bit of time faffing around with the ABS causes of death for 2006, but couldn’t find any data on death by falling aeroplane nor by shark attack (they are such frequent occurrences).  So I picked some random, okay, not random, causes of death and because I have a new toy, I animated it.

The demonstrates that you are three times as likely to die from falling (over or off, I’m assuming), than you are from being assaulted or drowning combined[1].  Three times.  Okay, the actual proportion of these deaths are 0.1% for drowning, 0.2% for assault, and 0.9% for falls.  So they are all fairly unlikely events.  But when was the last time you saw the headline “Man dies from falling over”.  We do occasionally see, “Woman dies from fall off” or vice versa.  I’m pretty sure some of the deaths are from falling ever, but we don’t expect to die from that.  We do expect to die from drowning and possibly from being assaulted.  Cognitive Biases at work!

1. although it would really suck to be assaulted while drowning [↩]