tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post8235554433946696271..comments2023-10-30T12:26:15.822+01:00Comments on Research as a Second Language: The Dumbassification of AcademiaThomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-35740426055510500222012-09-12T22:30:05.048+02:002012-09-12T22:30:05.048+02:00Thanks, everyone, for your comments. I'll have...Thanks, everyone, for your comments. I'll have a follow-up post up tomorrow.<br />Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-45692631891721403102012-09-12T21:55:19.592+02:002012-09-12T21:55:19.592+02:00I was presenting only my interpretation of Adam...I was presenting only my interpretation of Adam's text, not defending his position. I agree that memorization of facts is an accomplishment. I disagree that we undervalue it. If anything, we overvalue it, reducing educational assessment to testing for the presence of facts in students' brains. This leads me in the direction I take Steve to be going. It makes some sense to think of advanced information technology as an enhancement to our natural fact-carrying capacity. On the other hand, as one might also say of writing, it does tend to leave the part of our brain that might have contained those facts looking for something to do (perhaps even leading to a kind of atrophy). We should question whether that's a good thing. But the larger issue still seems to me to be the reduction of education to learning facts. This move is what inclines us to think of using technology instead of brain cells as cheating. Again, I agree with Steve that allowing or prohibiting the use of such technology says nothing about the pedagogical goal of teaching judgment. It's silly, for instance, to tell students they shouldn't use Google to conduct their research. The trick is not to restrict them paper versions of the Philosopher's Index (if it even still exists in that form); it's to teach them how to conduct research using the new technology.JBritthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00150956277796127091noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-63137483077483854232012-09-12T21:26:52.146+02:002012-09-12T21:26:52.146+02:00Let me intervene because I was the one who tweeted...Let me intervene because I was the one who tweeted Adam’s article, which appeared originally in the North Texas Daily News, remarking on the smartness of the argument. <br /><br />I meant what I said because I took Adam to be providing a transhumanist reductio of the increasing identification of academic authority with the catching of cheaters, plagiarists, and others who somehow get around the rules of the game. Perhaps because academics control so little of the political economy in which they operate these days, regression to an old school sense of discipline can appear attractive, especially given the high-tech fraud detection devices at the academic’s disposal. <br /><br />Against the backdrop of those assumptions, Adam, with a somewhat TED-ly tongue in cheek, is arguing that academics should go with the grain of student usage and treat the high tech as an <i>enhancement</i> to student performance. After all, not all students are equally adept at using search engines to plagiarise just the right text that gives them an optimal score on an exam question. The classic pedagogical problem of reaching a discriminating judgement still applies. <br /><br />What’s changed is that the stuff you’re discriminating is now located outside rather than inside your head – the ‘mind’s eye’ has been effectively distributed between you and the ‘cloud’. If the academic still thinks that such prosthetic cognition makes life too easy for the student, then the burden is on the academic to raise her game and re-create the relevant level of discrimination in the new media. <br /><br />Nobody disagrees with the project of disciplining students’ minds in certain ways that enable them to make discriminating judgements. But the introduction of new technologies tests the academic’s own ability to discriminate that end from the means by which it is achieved. <br /><br />The problem with the doping scandals surrounding competitive athletics is less to do with the drugs themselves somehow undermining the sense of gamesmanship than with their lack of general availability, which does undermine it. By analogy, it should be less of a worry that students have smartphones than that not all of them do.Steve Fullerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02282125191991729151noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-72803004563748971692012-09-12T19:49:13.099+02:002012-09-12T19:49:13.099+02:00@JBritt: As Jonathan also rightly suggests, I thin...@JBritt: As Jonathan also rightly suggests, I think we undervalue the accomplishment of "memorization of facts". If someone can account for all the characters, scenes, and conflicts in Hamlet, that shows something. If they can also recite (from memory) some of the key soliloquies, that also counts for something. It doesn't prove that they can "think" about Hamlet's motives and doubts, but it is unlikely that they can "regurgitate" these things without having learned something about the play.<br /><br />It's no easy matter to "store a fact in a body". When someone succeeds, it's as impressive as being able to play the violin. Both admit to differences in the degree of mastery, of course.Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-61892426776831823692012-09-12T19:06:38.899+02:002012-09-12T19:06:38.899+02:00I don't want to spend a great deal of time qui...I don't want to spend a great deal of time quibbling about whether I misread your post or you miswrote it, but you left the distinct impression that you think we're living in a new "2.0" reality that the educational system better get hip to.<br /><br />It did not seem like you think Humanity 2.0 is just so much hype and old-school education focused on developing individual competences is worth defending.<br /><br />If you think closed-book written examinations or take-home essay exams where collaboration is not allowed is still a perfectly good way of testing student abilities, and that the abilities that these forms of examination test are worthwhile having, then I can just inform you that you've not expressed yourself very clearly.<br /><br />Also, by my count, on your interpretation, roughly half the post is tongue-in-cheek.<br /><br />In any case, though I don't want to endorse "machine-like assessment regimes" as anything but a necessary evil given limited resources and mass enrollment, I think your argument is still very flawed. There is no contradiction in machine-grading a multiple choice exam about what, say, Hamlet did and did not say and when he did or did not say it (in order to test whether or not the students know the play) and expressly forbidding them to use machines when taking that exam (which would simply defeat the whole point of examining them).<br /><br />We want to know "what's in their heads", but only because we are making some (quite plausible) assumptions about what they might learn from getting it in there.Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-61290163363140208922012-09-12T18:10:48.166+02:002012-09-12T18:10:48.166+02:00I am not “hyped” about letting students use these ...I am not “hyped” about letting students use these technologies. I am dismayed by an education system where they feel tempted to do so and are rewarded for doing so well (that is, not getting caught). <br /><br />My point is that education ought to be structured such that machine-thinking (the stuff the hive does so well) is not its purpose. The stuff about humanity 2.0 is tongue-in-cheek. You miss the irony here, so I’ll spell it out: our education system is increasingly set up to reward this dumbass (your words, and I agree) image of what it means to be an excellent human being. Everyone is worried about students who earn this reward illicitly by ‘cheating.’ I am concerned about the reward itself and what it says about education. <br /><br />The analogy to Tour de France is cute but you misuse it. Note what I say in full (you only quote the last part, presumably so you have an easier straw man to wrestle): “If the goal of education is simply to get through the maze, then it does not matter how one gets there.” But my point is that of course the goal of education should not just be about getting through a maze. Similarly the goal (purpose, telos) of the Tour de France is not just to get up the hill and across the line as fast as possible. The purpose of education and the Tour is to develop, display, and honor human excellence – and for this it most definitely matters how one gets there. <br /><br />The disanalogy with the Tour de France is that in that case no one wants to see a motorcycle race (it is clear that that is not the point). But in education (and this is where the analogy breaks down) we have the dysfunctional system where we have turned it into something like a motorcycle race but insist on not letting students use motorcycles. To make it clearer by dropping the analogy: we lazy educators have adopted a machine-like assessment regime that rewards machine-like thinking but we’ll be damned if students go about using machines!Adamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05658985227327961661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-28830769579685939642012-09-12T17:10:27.201+02:002012-09-12T17:10:27.201+02:00Right, a Shakespearian actor could simply call up ...Right, a Shakespearian actor could simply call up the soliloquy on a smart phone and hold it up as though it were Yorick's skull. You wouln't need to cram that poetry into the poor actor's brain.Jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09371893596402673898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-68070483624580802072012-09-12T16:43:19.314+02:002012-09-12T16:43:19.314+02:00A Tour de France on motorcycles would be cool--but...A Tour de France on motorcycles would be cool--but only with a strict no-additives-in-the-gasoline rule.Andrew Gelmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02715992780769751789noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-33633140436740188562012-09-12T16:10:53.663+02:002012-09-12T16:10:53.663+02:00I think you've misread Briggle. His point, as ...I think you've misread Briggle. His point, as I read him, is that asking students to cram facts into their heads that can then be 'tested' as right or wrong is lazy education. What we should be doing is teaching students how to think -- which has very little to do with whether the 'facts' they use in thinking are stored in their bodies or in cyberspace. In other words, we are distracted by all the new ways students now have at their disposal to 'cheat'. Instead, it is we (educators) who are cheating them by requiring only the memorization of 'facts'.JBritthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00150956277796127091noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-11862367819865097392012-09-12T15:06:45.622+02:002012-09-12T15:06:45.622+02:00Even before this newfangled internet!
"Knowl...Even before this newfangled internet!<br /><br />"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries."<br />— Samuel Johnson (Boswell's Life of Johnson)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com