Quantity and Quality in University Teaching

some minor notes on quantity & quality (university, why?) Text

4:00 2:30 5:00 3:00 4:15 8:00 4:00 4:00 1I am a technologist. In thinking about why I might have been invited here, and what I wantedto say, I realised it was important to remember why I use technology in my teaching. It putsthe tools of production, of making, into the hands of my students. Making matters. I’m ahumanities academic. We have a sort of Cartesian schizophrenia where we accept theseparation of mind and body. We have ideas. We write words, abstractions. We don’t muchcare about layout, fonts, though if we’re any good we do care about words and sentences.You don’t eat in class because it is simply too carnal, and never submit an essay on colouredpaper if you want to be taken seriously. This separation of the corporeal body and the idea iswhat I have worked against in all my teaching, and a lot of my research practice. Newtechnologies let students be creators, contributors, peers. Most importantly, they let us allmake different things, differently. It is in this differing that learning happens.

exercise caution Beware of carpet baggers from the south. What I am going to wonder and wander about is teaching. Been invited here before, I liked my ivory tower too much. What’s a university to do, educationally? 2The things that make a difference for someone in Melbourne are quite different to regionalareas in most other parts of Australia. Last time I was at this conference Carol almostcertainly wanted me to talk about video blogging, RSS and the like. But I talked about muchmore experimental things that video could do. Not that practical.There is little structure. Just some ideas. I am doing and performing one of the ways in whichI think things can be done differently. A mix of little and larger ideas, anecdotes andprovocations. I tried it in different orders and there isn’t any that works much better thananother. Your experience of it should be mixed. Some of it will be a bit like a silent movie.

LIKE A BLOG

like a blog This is a style of ‘thick description’.3

like a blog This is a style of ‘thick description’. What I am talking about comes from my experience as a media academic and educator.4Media is one of the key sites undergoing radical transformation right now. It is exciting, Ithink it is extraordinary to be a part of it. Media is at the pointy end of things and rightnow I get to watch once solid institutions melt to become archaeological relics.

like a blog This is a style of ‘thick description’. What I am talking about comes from my experience as a media academic and educator. I work in a post industrial media ecology.5Industrial means things needed a lot of capital, and a lot of specialisation. Expensive tomake and access to the means of making media, let alone ﬁnding an audience, was highlylimited because it was so scarce. It was scarce because it was expensive. The postindustrial has reversed all the terms of this economy.

like a blog This is a style of ‘thick description’. What I am talking about comes from my experience as a media academic and educator. I work in a post industrial media ecology. I think all of us do.

like a blog This is a style of ‘thick description’. What I am talking about comes from my experience as a media academic and educator. I work in a post industrial media ecology. I think all of us do. It is an ecology more than it is an economy.6It is an ecology not an economy because it really is a network. There are asymmetries, bitsthat are bigger, more important, have bigger impact, but it is still interconnected andinter-related and the relations between the parts are more important than the partsthemselves. The links to a site are much more important to Google than the site itself.Relations matter, and this is an ecology. A simple premise from this is that relationsbetween students are as important, if not more, than the relation between the teacher andthe students.

MY TRIBE

my tribe I work in media studies, and more recently honours education across media and communication. 7All tribes have particular ways of going about doing things and of understanding their world.The most powerful of these are those that have become internalised to the extent where thevalues they express appear normal, natural, and just, well, common sense. Whatever we callthem, they are ideologies, and while we can’t escape ideology I think it is imperative to try tobe aware of them and to recognise the coercive force they have. There is an ideology ofeducation attached to being an academic. One thing I’m doing here is naming some of it, andwondering about its legitimacy.I have been instrumental in rebuilding the media studies curriculum at RMIT in Melbourne. Ihave also led curriculum renewal for a large honours program within a school of media andcommunication. Aside from disciplinary speciﬁcs the heart of this has been to appropriate arange of strategies and methods from design education and practice and bring them into thetraditional humanities curriculum.it is an effort to dissolve that cartesian distinction between thinking and doing .

my tribe I work in media studies, and more recently honours education across media and communication. It is a luxury, yet this luxury lets us conceal an awful lot. 8The luxury is that I get students with high academic skills. The sorts who can write a 2000word essay overnight and do pretty well. But these students are good enough, and wellenough acculturated to the learning regimes of measurement as assessment that it letseducation at university be lazy. Provide some content, set the reading, talk to them about it,write an essay, mark it. Really it sounds a bit like an autopilot doesn’t it? For academically inclined students it is easy to game the system, and these are the ones thatwe hold up as exemplary, to show that we are good teachers (these are our high distinctionstudents). But they’re high distinction students in spite of us, not because. And they’re highdistinction students because they mirror the values of us as academics and that is what weprivilege. It does not follow that they are the best students, if best might mean they havelearnt or achieved the most through your subject, or have changed their understanding insigniﬁcant ways.

my tribe I work in media studies, and more recently honours education across media and communication. It is a luxury, yet this luxury lets us conceal an awful lot. I am not an education academic, though I have been to education conferences.

my tribe I work in media studies, and more recently honours education across media and communication. It is a luxury, yet this luxury lets us conceal an awful lot. I am not an education academic, though I have been to education conferences. Education academics appear to be as socialised into conservative academic norms as any other discipline or professional body. 9. Conferences run the risk of being the place where tribes reinforce why they matter tothemselves, on their own terms, in their own language. Or, as Kevin Kelly more or less put it,“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” We are as guiltyof this as any other institution. It’s what tribes do.

SCARCITY

scarcity I studied media in the 1980s. I went to university to ﬁnd;

scarcity I studied media in the 1980s. I went to university to ﬁnd; a scholarly community, a video camera, an edit suite, a reference library, experts, and somewhere to argue about ideas.

scarcity I studied media in the 1980s. I went to university to find; a scholarly community, a video camera, an edit suite, a reference library, experts, and somewhere to argue about ideas. I can now find the community online, the camera is in my pocket, the edit suite is on my laptop, the library begins with Wikipedia, and I can find outstanding blogs. 10The university defines itself via an economy of scarcity. if you wanted these things, you hadto go to where they were. They were scarce because they were expensive. This is an industrialmodel. Universities, to be very crude, had intellectual capital and the tools that went with that(library, video cameras, edit suites). This is not the self definition used, but it is the reasonwhy universities could self define in the way that they did.

scarcity I studied media in the 1980s. I went to university to find; a scholarly community, a video camera, an edit suite, a reference library, experts, and somewhere to argue about ideas. I can now find the community online, the camera is in my pocket, the edit suite is on my laptop, the library begins with Wikipedia, and I can find outstanding blogs. Most of my students today go for the same reason I did, fetishising the technology.

scarcity I studied media in the 1980s. I went to university to find; a scholarly community, a video camera, an edit suite, a reference library, experts, and somewhere to argue about ideas. I can now find the community online, the camera is in my pocket, the edit suite is on my laptop, the library begins with Wikipedia, and I can find outstanding blogs. Most of my students today go for the same reason I did, fetishising the technology. Staff do the same. 11In the media program I teach in students still subscribe to this model. This scarcity is partlyan effect of competitive entry - it is academically hard to get in to - but more importantly itcomes out in their fascination with thinking that they must use the best equipment and thisis how what they are doing matters. A technical fetish is used to generate scarcity. Stafflargely approach it the same way. This is a quantitative model where high quality equipmentis mistakenly thought to be related to high quality learning and outcomes. It is quantitativebecause it is about tech standards. In other words they approach this as if we are still in anindustrial model.This happens everytime someone uses the "but it is what industry uses" argument.Lets be clear, a good film or book is not really good because of the tools used to make it.

scarcity In 1980 it was enough for the university to offer these things. Quantity was sufﬁcient because of scarcity. Now?

BEINGACADEMIC

being academic I got to be an academic because I am smart.

being academic I got to be an academic because I am smart. Yet at primary and secondary school you get taught without being socialised into being teachers. 12The sort of smart I am was easily recognised by teachers at university because it was more orless smart in an academic way. I was a mature age student and keen to learn. I seemed to getthe importance of the ‘reﬂexive’ in art and theory and ﬁtted right into this sort of academicenvironment. I was a high distinction student. When I became an academic people like mewere my best students. These were the ones I taught to. They got theory. The ones whoenjoyed my classes and had smart questions. They Iet me think I was pretty good at thissince look how good they were. But they were like me when I was a student. I was already likethat before I came to the university and apart from providing the place, the university didn’treally do that much more. It certainly didn’t teach me how to be like that, how to get theoryand use it. It provided access, because access was scarce. They were industrial times.

being academic I got to be an academic because I am smart. Yet at primary and secondary school you get taught without being socialised into being teachers. At university good teaching too easily becomes socialising our students into becoming petite academics, little ‘me’s’. 13For too many university academics this is the model of good teaching. We use the values andstandards of our own profession - a humanities academic - as the default pedagogical valuesfor our students. The essay, abstract theory, the conventions of citation and the short road tohell that is plagiarism. As academics these are the socialised norms of my workplace which Iself identiﬁed with as a student. But it doesn’t follow that my students self identify with them,nor that these are inherently the most valid elements of what university education is. In anutshell too many of us in university treat the attributes that drew us into the academy as thepedagogical values of learning in the academy. This is a nonsense. The vast majority of mystudents are not there to learn how to be academics, and most will never write an essayagain, ever.

being academic As someone with this particular sort of ‘smart’ it turns out I’m good at explaining things. I’m an associative thinker (which is one of the reasons I work in hypertext) and can join up stuff for others.

being academic As someone with this particular sort of ‘smart’ it turns out I’m good at explaining things. I’m an associative thinker (which is one of the reasons I work in hypertext) and can join up stuff for others. But notice what has already happened.

being academic As someone with this particular sort of ‘smart’ it turns out I’m good at explaining things. I’m an associative thinker (which is one of the reasons I work in hypertext) and can join up stuff for others. But notice what has already happened. 14Even my simple explanation privileges my expertise. My ability to explain. No one told methis might not be the way to be a good teacher. This helped me think I was a pretty goodteacher. A qualitative change for me was the shift from understanding that it was not aboutﬁnding clever ways to explain complex ideas to others, but that my teaching could be thepractice of learning and discovery and making knowledge in itself. That my ‘black box’ oftheory and doing could be opened and named, prodded, and shown. (And that each studenthad their own ‘black box’ of learning and knowledge which could be opened, named,prodded and grown.)

being academic As someone with this particular sort of ‘smart’ it turns out I’m good at explaining things. I’m an associative thinker (which is one of the reasons I work in hypertext) and can join up stuff for others. But notice what has already happened. I had become habituated to using my academic norms to judge the academic merit of my students. 15The mistake, like so many other beginning university teachers, is to then think that thesevalues, the ones I self identify with, are those that matter to everyone else there. But for thelargest group, our students, they don’t.

QUANTITY & QUALITY

quantity and quality I have been thinking about quantity and quality. 16Quality is my response to why go to university. What I have called a quantitative view i thinkinforms most uni teaching that I see and hear.

quantity and quality I have been thinking about quantity and quality. A quantity is something that has number, scale.

quantity and quality I have been thinking about quantity and quality. A quantity is something that has number, scale. It is pretty easy to measure (it is something that is measurable).

quantity and quality I have been thinking about quantity and quality. A quantity is something that has number, scale. It is pretty easy to measure (it is something that is measurable). It is delightfully empirical. 17Quantity, for better or worse, has underwritten most assessment for most of my peers.Essays are measured by length, either words or pages, not by ideas or problems. Teaching isa series of weeks, not topics (the weeks come first). When was the last time you heard astudent ask about comments on their work, rather than what mark they received? Because ofthis assessment is, first of all, an economic transaction. For us and for them. (“It’s only worth10%”.) The best students do the maths, the worse don’t.numbers are how we measure, so when I teach students how to define their own assessmentcriteria I insist they be empirical, because otherwise they don’t have any way to measure theirachievement. Later, with experience, they can do different.

quantity and quality I have been thinking about quantity and quality. A quantity is something that has number, scale. It is pretty easy to measure (it is something that is measurable). It is delightfully empirical. A quality is an attribute that is independent of quantity, of scale.

quantity and quality I have been thinking about quantity and quality. A quantity is something that has number, scale. It is pretty easy to measure (it is something that is measurable). It is delightfully empirical. A quality is an attribute that is independent of quantity, of scale. How many kids I have is a quantity. How I feel about them is a quality.

quantity and quality I have been thinking about quantity and quality. A quantity is something that has number, scale. It is pretty easy to measure (it is something that is measurable). It is delightfully empirical. A quality is an attribute that is independent of quantity, of scale. How many kids I have is a quantity. How I feel about them is a quality. This is independent of quantity. (Though a change in quantity can cause qualitative change.) 18A quality is a quality independent of how much of it there is. The redness of a red is that redregardless of much of it I have. You measure quality by things like intensity, and to turnquality into a quantity, into something that can be measured, is hard to do.I think university learning needs to move from a quantitative to a qualitative model, thoughthis is different to the quality assurance models that we have.For me learning should provide a qualitative change in understanding for those involved. Thisis not the same thing as knowing more about something. It is knowing something differently.Often it might be something small, but its consequences are large (it is an ecology).I also think our teaching models, which in spite of everything remain largely content driven,are a consequence of our assessment regimes. Not the other way around. I think if you weregiven permission to assess qualitative outcomes, real qualitative ones, then what and how weteach would change dramatically, and quickly.

quantity and quality 19I did mention on the previous slide that quantity can lead to qualitative change.This graph shows an example of this. It is something I ask my honours students to do at theend of their honours year. The horizontal line is neutral, above it means something for thebetter, below something for the worse. In this one the green line is their knowledge abouttheir topic. Purple the course their research has taken in relation to where they thought itwould go. The pink their understanding of what research is as a practice. What I look for is asteep line up, somewhere. When that is there then there’s been a qualitative change in theirunderstanding. For this student this happened partly around their project (the purple line, itwas an experimental audio drama) but most strongly around their understanding of researchas a practice, the pink with two big shifts through the year. This is a case of where quantityleads to qualitative change as the scale of honours, the number of words required, helps ashift in understanding.

quantity and quality “How do you know you are assessing what your students have learnt?” From here it was but a skip and a jump to turnitin (.com). It is an untenable and irrelevant arms race that has nothing to do with learning, but a lot to do with the acculturation of students into the habitus of the university (as if they care). 20This is an example of what I’m talking about. Here quantity is all dressed up as a qualitativeoutcome. Bah, hooey.Here the “quality” learnt was that over 3 years the students learnt how to cite and write morelike an academic. Why do we think students are at university to learn how to be academics?.These students were in a discipline related to medical imaging and diagnosis. When they arelooking at my MRI scan I don’t give a toss if they can write like mini-me academics, I want toknow that they have outstanding diagnostic skills. As an educator I see little connectionbetween one and the other. This makes one of the most common mistakes in universityeducation where we mistake the values that matter for us as academics - that is ourprofessional values - with those that matter educationally. This is academic narcissism. Beingable to write, academically, matters to me much more, than my students. And I imagine notto most medical imaging professionals in their daily practice.

quantity and quality “How do you know you are assessing what your students have learnt?” From here it was but a skip and a jump to turnitin (.com). It is an untenable and irrelevant arms race that has nothing to do with learning, but a lot to do with the acculturation of students into the habitus of the university (as if they care). Evidence of copy and paste does not tell me what has been learnt. 21My question at the end was simply how do you know the students don’t know the copy andpaste material? He said he didn’t. His work is celebrated in the university as an exemplarymodel of technological enabled learning.

quantity and quality I think there are simple category errors happening that confuse quantity with quality. More does not equal better. Whether this is oversight, compliance, auditing, assessment, access, contact. Doing more (quantity), in universities, is not a solution. It is doing differently (quality). My problem is that if a university has deﬁned itself via scarcity, what is my job, now? 22From my point of view he has built a complex academic compliance machine that rewardsbehaving like ourselves. Cite often, cite well, cite properly, and we reward that. I think it is asigniﬁcant effort of time to simply acculturate students to our own values, which we thenparade as good teaching.This is an example of using a quantitative tool (turnitin.com) to achieve what are mistakenlythought to be qualitative outcomes. The measurement was the decline of unattributedcitation, this is just about metrics. This is to be socialised into a normative set of standardsthat matter to academics, but not necessarily to these students. What I am railing against isthe way the academy normalises this sort of coercive power as pedagogy and legitimate. It isthe stuff of ideology.

quantity and quality I think there are simple category errors happening that confuse quantity with quality. More does not equal better. Whether this is oversight, compliance, auditing, assessment, access, contact. Doing more (quantity), in universities, is not a solution. It is doing differently (quality). My problem is that if a university has deﬁned itself via scarcity, what is my job, now? And what is ‘quality’?

PARADIGM CHANGE?

paradigm change 23This is the Lytro camera. Will be available next year. Rather than focussing light onto a planeit captures the entire light ﬁeld. This means after the photo is taken you can vary the focus ofthe image. Forever, for the photographer and the viewer. This is a paradigm shift, the sortthat is possible when the computer is used not only as a channel of delivery but as afundamental actor in the doing.

paradigm change I am the ﬁrst or second person in the world to have started videoblogging.

paradigm change I am the ﬁrst or second person in the world to have started videoblogging. However, my idea for videoblogging is quite different to what it has become.

paradigm change I am the ﬁrst or second person in the world to have started videoblogging. However, my idea for videoblogging is quite different to what it has become. I still think video for the internet age will happen.

paradigm change I am the ﬁrst or second person in the world to have started videoblogging. However, my idea for videoblogging is quite different to what it has become. I still think video for the internet age will happen. Like blogs did for writing.

paradigm change I am the ﬁrst or second person in the world to have started videoblogging. However, my idea for videoblogging is quite different to what it has become. I still think video for the internet age will happen. Like blogs did for writing. With blogs we have trackback, blogrolls, pings, blogs and blog posts. It is a network sensible thing made up of whole fragments. It is porous and granular. 24We now take for granted what a blog is, but it is worth remembering how large a change theyrepresent for writing practice. I remain fascinated with their cinematic qualities, whichrevolves around how they are whole fragments. A post is always whole, like a shot. But like aﬁlm a blog is made up of a serially arranged collection of posts, if you don’t have posts youdon’t really have a blog. The key thing that blogs formalised is an architecture that lets thesebasic units remain addressable, singular and whole after becoming part of something larger.this is a qualitative change for writing.

paradigm change I often meet staff who tell me blogs don’t work with their students.

paradigm change I often meet staff who tell me blogs don’t work with their students. Students complain about having to do yet more blogging. They keep multiple blogs for different subjects. They are told what to write and assessed on just these.These are all bad models of blogging in university.

paradigm change I often meet staff who tell me blogs don’t work with their students. Students complain about having to do yet more blogging. They keep multiple blogs for different subjects. They are told what to write and assessed on just these. The same can be said about the essay, but no one, students or staff, ever ask why another essay has to be written. 25The essay is part of the ideology of the institution, hence it is unquestioned. As is the tutepaper. The exam. Vary from these and the students are as likely to get ansty as other staff. Itis not because they are conservative, it is because they have been so squashed by everythingto have simply gotten to university in the ﬁrst place.Remember it is about difference, about not repeating the same.

paradigm change I often meet staff who tell me blogs don’t work with their students. Students complain about having to do yet more blogging. They keep multiple blogs for different subjects. They are told what to write and assessed on just these. The same can be said about the essay, but no one, students or staff, ever ask why another essay has to be written. If you don’t blog how do you imagine you could teach with a blog?

paradigm change I often meet staff who tell me blogs don’t work with their students. Students complain about having to do yet more blogging. They keep multiple blogs for different subjects. They are told what to write and assessed on just these. The same can be said about the essay, but no one, students or staff, ever ask why. If you don’t blog how do you imagine you could teach with a blog? It is a verb and a noun.

paradigm change Blogging requires a change in practice. This is a qualitative change.You can get there via quantity, but numbers by themselves won’t do it.

paradigm change 26With a practice such as blogging there is resistance from students as it is simply different tothe forms of academic practice and assessment that they have been conditioned to. It is justmuch messier than what they have learnt counts as learning. However, much like the graphsfrom the honours students there is always a tipping point, and once you get over that tippingpoint blogging more or less takes care of itself. To get over that tipping point requirescoercion, or seduction, and the strongest forms of coercion and seduction you have as ateacher is assessment. So you need to spend a lot of your assessment budget on these thingsat the beginning, and later you more or less get this budget back again to spend on otherthings. Self assessment works the same way, too. As does the use of other, alternativeprotocols and technologies.

AFFECTIVEPEDAGOGY

affective pedagogy If scarcity is no longer the reason to go to university, what is? What is the ecology of the post industrial? What do they learn from me if not my expertise? What is this idea of ‘quality’?

affective pedagogy University today should provide an experience that changes how I understand what I understand. To learn how to ‘be’ a learner in my discipline. To learn a vocabulary of tacit knowledge that is ready to hand. Quality is not quality assurance (which is an audit culture’s effort to make the quantitative appear qualitative). It is a qualitative change in understanding, a difference that makes a difference in how something is known. 27This comes out of my interest and appropriate of design research and education where tacitknowledge, knowing how, is recognised as a quality, as hard to teach, hard to learn, hard toassess. But it is also recognised that it is tacit knowledge that provides the schema that letyou deal with difference, with wicked problems, with change, with the way things always talkback. To learning how to listen for and have a conversation with this ‘back talk’, the way yourmaterial, your stuff and ideas always push back. Learning how to ‘be’ I take from a recentcomment by Stephen Downes about the point of getting a university education. This is notabout content but a mode of engagement with learning and disciplinary knowledge that helpsyou become a member of a tribe, with the proviso that you also recognise the problems thatthis has.

affective pedagogy This qualitative change is what I think Meyer calls a threshold concept and can include Perkins notion of troublesome knowledge. With information so near to hand knowledge, in a university, should always trouble.

affective pedagogy A threshold concept is: transformative probably irreversible integrative potentially troublesome

affective pedagogy How? We shift towards other, differing, new making — how we make (social, shared, public, personal, aggregative), what we make (mixed media, logical forms outside of the teleological, writing with, not to, media), and who manages the making (students and teachers as collaborators). A qualitative change in the forms used to express knowledge, in what counts as knowledge, and how it is conducted. 28So this is simply a call for learning studios, kindergartens if you like, with an emphasis onmaking, but in a tertiary context. A making with a meta level of reﬂective and criticalengagement that is modelled, expected, performed, assessed, and scaffolded all the waythrough. That measures and rewards the sorts of change in learning that should be rewarded,rather than just knowing a lot.

paradigm change 29As I ﬁnished this I thought there really isn’t much I’ve said. So I took a breath andremembered that in universities most of what I’ve said is radical and met with blank stares ofmisunderstanding and miscomprehension. Even down right hostility. For instance mystudents assess their own participation in a subject. They do this extraordinarily well, withrigour and responsibility. I have a protocol about how I do this, which I share with others.Most refuse to believe that it works. It does. Universities no longer can rely on privilege (whichis just another form of scarcity) but once you take away all the ways we think we matter,educationally, I think there is not a lot left. The emperor, if you like, is not wearing anyclothes. It is for us to step up here because we all know learning does matter. It is not onlythat governments don’t get it, neither do many of our administrators, our peers, or ourstudents. So think about one thing, one small thing, that could be achieve a qualitativechange for your students, and do it. Don’t ask permission, ask forgiveness.

thank you Adrian Mileshttp://vogmae.net.au RMIT University

http://tlvconference.com	74
http://tlvconf.wordpress.com	22

Quantity and Quality in University Teaching

by vogmae

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

2 Embeds 96

Statistics

Quantity and Quality in University Teaching Document Transcript