The rise and rise of the quants

It was in James Boyle's keynote at Beyond Broadcast 2006 that I guess the term behavioural economics was first raised for me. Apologies for y'all for which it is old hat. Then Christopher Lyden's Open Source podcast on Economics Reimagined helped the penny to drop, if indeed it has. Lyden's chat with a number of behavioural economists opened my eyes widely. David Leonhart's piece in the NY Times refers to them as intellectual imperialists. It is apt. What is behavioural economics? Quoting Lyden: Economics used to be about markets and predictions: tax rates, interest rates, fiscal policy, monetary policy. In short, about money. But with the advent of behavioral economics, economists began to realize that markets are simply aggregations of human choices, and that to understand these choices — imperfect, often irrational or counterintuitive — is to act as a psychologist. For this insight the economist Amost Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize together in 2002. If economics is not necessarily just about money, then, but about human behavior, it can be applied to any number of other fields. In the Times article, brand-new economist Emily Oster applied her talent to the field of AIDS research to solve a problem that epidemiologists couldn’t. Oster is one of many, a generation of economists looking for new fields to conquer. Put very bluntly, given buckets of data, not collected for a specific research purpose, i.e. an experiment, and given ever growing computer power, the opportunity to fashion interesting questions of social importance and to use existing data to examine them gives you, very crudely, behavioural economics. One of the folk in the Lyden conversation was interested in the question, why poor kids do poorly at schools. Now folk with interests in this area will be aware of the little war that has been raging in Australia about this. Very simply, them who say it is all about school effects and them who say that socioeconomic background is very important. Enter player three from left field with none of the history but access to a lot of data and the economic routines to explore/examine and tease out patterns. To me, this is an interesting shift for those folk who dabble in the broad church we call research in education. Anyone for economics 101?

Breakthrough ideas for education in 2007

The Harvard Business Review has published its 20 breakthrough ideas for 2007. The list makes for some interesting reading, at least for my quirky tastes but it got me wondering what would a similar list for education or perhaps schooling look like? Is there an educational imagination out there? Perhaps the notion of breakthrough and education are antithetical? As Heather-Jane Robertson wrote some time ago: "The only thing you can do quickly in education is damage" Heather-Jane Robertson (1998) No More Teachers. No More Books. The Commercialization of Canada's Schools, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto.

Old influences, happenstance and the whirl of fun ideas.

I was reading a blog (I should write an old blog mate's blog but I have never met the blogger and would never want to attach any kind of chronological measure to folk one stumbles over online). Nevertheless, for folk who enjoy the odd bit of good fun around curriculum, schooling, computing and so on then Arti's little blog is a heap of fun. I was responding to a post about Starbucks and the NZ curriculum and was pointing out my own preference for drawing on business ideas and thinking. I do this because, generally there is a lot of good, hard-nosed thinking goes on about teaching, learning, leadership, change etc. It was also how I stumbled so long ago into the fun little habit of scenario planning after reading Stewart Brand's the media lab (which is also where I stumbled over the size/problem of so-called global money!!!). But back to the Artichoke post and Arti, true to form, goes beavering away and pulls up some stuff about Semler that I had not heard about, Semler's Escola Lumiar. From the bits you can find online it sounds a bit like KPS schools on steroids. Some quotes from the Telegraph report: "One of the things that is very silly - and I hear from educators all the time - is that schools essentially teach kids to learn. They don't need school for that. Learning is what they do best. We kill it for them." "We are trying to prove that by giving kids freedom, they will in the end be better educated, with much more residual knowledge than the kids in the disciplined schools. They can have a much happier existence and be much more prepared for life if we don't teach them the stupid things that traditional schools do." and Armed with University of Chicago statistics showing that 94 per cent of what we learn in school is never used in later life, he decided to ditch what he calls the "unsuccessful teaching methods" used in millions of schools around the world.

My (bad) digital habits

As a pseudo/semi-functional academic, I am always interested in ways of tracking contemporary writing, ideas (memes) in and around the stuff in which I have interests. i/e/ how to drink from the fire hose without drowning. One little trick I have been exploring is to do a Google Blog search for the key words/phrases and to copy the 100 RSS feed into my RSS aggregator. I end up with an always updated set of posts, many of which often point me to a publication I have missed, a conference, or call for papers, and even occasionally some useful commentary. And you can filter and search the inputs from this into the aggregator with the search facility in the aggregator.

Widget's for blogger

As you probably know, Google owns Blogger and has a neat widget for posting, so this is a small test of how well it works. 

For something that probably reflects my weird online reading habits than much else but I must say a good deal of this is a darned good read. It is stuff from The Edge and it a collection of short speeches, transcribed or available in mp3 format that were given to mark the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Maybe some quotes to whet the appetite. From the book: "They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines." from the book River Out of Eden: Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don't. From Dennett: First I want to remind you of what Francis Crick called Orgel's Second Rule. "Evolution is cleverer than you are." Now what Crick meant by this jape, of course, was that again and again and again evolutionists, molecular biologists, biologists in general, see some aspect of nature which seems to them to be sort of pointless or daft or doesn't make much sense — and then they later discover it's in fact an exquisitely ingenious design — it is a brilliant piece of design — that's what Francis Crick means by Orgel's Second Rule. a virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude From Krebs: I first came across the notion of an intellectual plumber when I was sitting in my then Oxford College, Pembroke, next to Simon Blackburn, the philosopher now at Cambridge. I turned to him and asked, "What's the point of philosophy anyway, Simon?" And he said, "Well, think of it this way, John. You're just a biologist, you sometimes have leaks in your thinking, and what you need is an intellectual plumber to patch up those leaks, and that's what philosophy will do for you. " From Ridley... size doesn't matter: From this end of the telescope, human beings look like they have quite a big genome, but if you turn the telescope around and look from another direction, the human genome looks rather a small one, compared with that of grasshoppers, which is at least three times as large, or deep-sea shrimps, which have ten times as much DNA as us. From McEwan My son, William McEwan, last year completed an undergraduate biology course at UCL. When he was studying genetics, he told me he was advised to read no papers written before 1997. One can see the point of this advice. In the course of his studies, estimates of the size of the human genome shrank by a factor of three. Such is the headlong nature of contemporary science. But if we understand science merely as a band of light moving through time, advancing on the darkness, and leaving darkness behind it, always at its best only in the incandescent present, we turn our backs on a magnificent and eloquent literature, an epic tale of ingenuity propelled by curiosity. and from Dawkins at the end: So what are the general principles of life, wherever life might be found? I just want to suggest some candidates, as a sort of stimulus to get other people thinking of others. First, Darwinism itself. I've mentioned that. I think it's universal. Can't prove it, but I think it is. Second, digital genetics, with very low mutation rate. Does it have to be DNA? Presumably not. Does it have to be a polynucleotide? Possibly not. Does it have to have a triplet code? Almost certainly not. Et cetera; those are the kinds of questions I'm trying to ask.

On the immutability of skool

I have maintained for a long time now that it would be nigh on impossible to invent the curious system we call formal education from scratch. In one sense this simply reflects the impossibility of reproducing human history in another place/space and obtaining the same or similar outcome. It also reflects my strong view that this is a system that has gone so far past its use by date that it has become some kind of mesmerising theatre. But it is more than that. When you stop to consider just how much stuff is attached to the various formal education systems that are now deployed the beast takes on proportions that are truly difficult to comprehend. Appreciating the sheer size of these systems and here I don't merely mean the buildings, but also the many people who work in them or rely on them in some way for work plus the administrative support for them. But there is more. There is all the other stuff attached to them as well: parents, governments, varous other social institutions and so on. This makes these things darn near immovable, unreformable, and likely to be only slightly amenable to edits. All of this makes the various claims that have been made from time to time in relation to reform, revolution and re-invention of school such nonsense. All that matters is the ritual. The performance of school. We dare not ask the dangerous question, "what if it did not exist?" Apart from creating a lot of child minding work, it might allow the young to set more of the agenda than has been the case so far and which, might be characterised as a one hundred plus year performance of the Sabre-Tooth Curriculum. J.A. Peddiwell (1939) The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum, New York, McGraw-Hill.

Noticing the sun coming up each morning

I have yet to get to writing more about computers, learning n stuff like that on this little epistle-machine and I have misplaced the prompt that triggered the frustration expressed in this post which I wrote and then cleverly deleted by using a browser that does not seem fully compliant with what Blogger wants. In any event, I will scribble a little about what I recall I was going to scribble about. There is now a huge industry of writing about, puzzling about and in general making noise about using computing and related technologies in the noble pursuit of supporting teaching, and by extension, the thing that goes on in peoples' heads that we call learning. The L word, one of my top ten "catch-all verging on meaningless" terms of all time. What is so interesting is that folk continue to write about this stuff as if it is something new, different, wonderful. News Flash. This has been going on since the late 70's and before then if you want to include some of the pre-microcomputer stuff. And, most importantly, there has been precious new to say about it. Perhaps the most annoying elements in this well intentioned but fundamentally flawed work is the never ending attempts to "integrate" these technologies into school classrooms. That these efforts have never worked in any sustainable way; that they have cost the blood, sweat and tears of so many self-sacrificing teachers; that there is precious little to show for a quarter of a century of effort, are lost on the mindless "researchers"/"policy makers" who keep insisting that it must be possible. I won't bore the tiny audience about why this might be so but there is clearly sufficient empirical data to suggest just how stupid this is. Folks. The sun keeps coming up each morning. Folks. Trying computers in classrooms hit their limit in the 80's all that has changed is the technology. The more powerful technology, aka schooling will keep winning. As an aside, this may the lasting noteworthiness of schools, that as a social institution they are one of very few that have remained largely untouched by the massive deployment of all manner of digital technologies across the planet. The other, more depressing side of this stupidity is that while we focus attention on such mindless goals as integration into classrooms that the world beyond schools has and continues to change profoundly. This has to be the focus of attention, not the stupid assumption that getting kids to learn computer skills in their Geography class will somehow prepare them well for this world. It's fiddling while Rome burns. This is something of a rant but underpins the origins of my interest in doing school differently, taking seriously the very real challenge of how to prepare kids for a world that is so dependent upon things digital. Now is not the time to be certain (or as Tom Peters puts it: "If you're not confused, you're not paying attention."), particularly when it comes to such important questions such as how do we prepare the young of the tribe to deal with the "interesting" mess they will inherit from us?

Joining dots

It is one of those consequences of the Western approach to "stuff" that after millenia of working out how much fun it is to split things up, chop em into little "disciplined" pieces and categorise, label, identify and code anything that can be that there is this now very strong sense that "dot joining" is important work. Maybe it's one of those huge cosmic correction things. Doing too much of one thing inevitably leads to a huge press to reverse it. One hopes that the fascination with global money and its deployment to make more global money in any way possible will go the way of the categorisers. But here we are not quite talking geological time scales but not far off them. Science fiction has much to answer for in providing templates and models for maddies to try and produce. How else does one explain that decisions to provide money to the needy by a particular government has to be OK'd by pension fund managers in the US (OK. I skipped a few dots) But it is this kind of dot joining wse need more of. On the other hand, the well rehearsed joined dots around schooling, i.e. in shorthand, schooling is good for the young is in drastic need of unjoining. Describing schooling as a colleague of mine once did as organised child abuse seems closer to the mark than all the nonsense that is currently claimed for this period in a young person's life. Maybe there is an entropy balance here. You can only unjoin as many dots as you join. A kind of joined dot bank where the balance is assiduously maintained. Go join some for me.

On the virtues of loopiness

Intellectually I am drawn to the loopy, the "enfant terribles" of the academic world. I figure that folk who keep repeating, reinforcing particular epsitemologies, ontologies are, more or less, intellecutal sycophants. We enjoy an enormously privileged position in being paid to think and also to contribute to the well-being of the citizens of this country/planet. Being an intellecutal "yes person" does not cut it. It seems to me that merely echoing others, acquiescing to the status quo mindsets is, effectively, squandering public monies. If we can't convey to our students the importance of skepticism, curiosity and even bloody-minded resistance to status quo ideas then we don't deserve the monies the public provide us. I hope there is no need to rehearse what status quo thinking has delivered to the youth of this and other countries. What to me is curious is what holds, what are palpably silly ideas, together. For example, the nonsense around literacies that "rages" in the public media in Australia at present. Pathetic neo-liberal nonsense versus precious old left nonsense while the kids of this country are ignored. Well, not exactly ignored, both camps claim to represent the youth and as far as I can tell the youth are saying, to both, "huh?" (which is a polite translation of what is actually being said). There are multiple nonsenses, many of which come from a well meaning bunch of elderly folk making decisions on behalf of the young. Mostly the oldies get it wrong but hey, they were well intentioned. I have often suggested that if you started from square one, ground zero, it would be impossible to invent the stupid, unfair, absurd, inefficient, stiffling education system we currently enjoy and what is worse we export this nonsense to countries who can ill afford such wasteful "luxuries". We live in what is argued to be an "evidence-based" world. Anyone care to offer any evidence that the current system does much other than impress on the young that they are stupid, dumb, can't cut it? Where is the evidence that "the system" actually prepares the young for the contemporary world? Much huff and puff, zip evidence. There is much to be said for systems that encourage and nurture idiosyncracy, loopies, people who will think way outside the tiny little square that claims to capture all of human wisdom. It would be ok to have a uniform system if we lived in a 1950's world where much was predictable, linear, not much different from the year before. But we don't. We need a system that supports people to think, to challenge, to be rewarded for being loopies (well argued loopies). In a dangerously unpredictable world, educational certainty is a handicap we can well do without. A system whose sole purpose would be to produce eccentrics would do more to secure the future of humanity on the planet than the deadeningly dull certainty and conformity of the educational here and now.