Rene’s Assessment

Open Source

I’m extremely pleased with the news that the UK government has decided to get serious about backing open source software. While some of this may be inspired by a perceived cost saving, it is also clearly inspired by the increasing understanding of the value of openness and open standards. A very important part of this new policy is that it seems to finally recognise and address the need to look at procedures for tendering and procurement that do not disadvantage open source software unfairly. A more detailed discussion about this, if you are interested, can be found on the OSSWatch blog.

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I watched a talk from Barry Schwarts yesterday. The talk (see below) was dressed up in a lot of obama and economic downturn, but deep down there were some very valuable truths about education.

I completely agreed with the notion that we are killing excellence, compassion and creativity by insisting on conformity and procedure, “health and safety” being the favorite example on every body’s list I would imagine. The arguments in favor of rules and incentives are often hard to counter, but I think Barry did this exceptionally well.

Rules might prevent mishap, but they guarantee mediocrity

Incentives ensure that any decision is made with only self interest in mind.

I think there is a lot to be learned from those 2 statements, in particular when it comes to our assessment system. A lot of people might think Denis Rancourt is taking things a bit too far by giving all his students an A+ at the start of their module, but I do think there is something to be said for taking away the abundance of rules (the assessment criteria and marking scheme) and the incentives (the grades) to then unleash true unburdened curiosity and learning. Would we rather our students learn a little that we feel we can quantify and evidence, or a lot that we have less control over? Is it the degree that has value, or what has been learned?

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There is a lot of discussion at my University at the moment about intellectual property rights. The discussion has many dimensions, from our internal learning object repository, via access policies to course areas in our VLE, to the licensing and sharing of educational resources with the rest of the world; Open Educational Resources. The latest feedback that I received on this latter discussion is that the University is  “not in the business of creating open educational resources”.

…That is of course correct.

HP is not in the business of making printers, they are in the business of selling ink cartridges

Google is not in the business of creating a search engine, they are in advertising.

The reasons we create learning resources aren’t very different from the reasons for Google to create a mobile platform, or a web browser. They are means through which they can enhance their core business, or strategically shape the domain in which they operate in their favour. It is not however a way to make money. Google needs open, standard compliant browsers to promote a ubiquitous Internet. Chrome is a part of the strategy, and so is their support for Firefox, or the development of Android. These aren’t assets, they are tools. Universities need high quality engaging and accessible learning resources in support of teaching and learning. If they already exist, we should reuse them. Where we feel that there is room or need for improvement, we might choose to do so, if that supports our business. Because we are in the business of coaching and accreditation. Some of us might even be in the business of knowledge creation. We are not however in the business of building learning resources, open or otherwise.

Somehow though, I am afraid that is not really what was meant…

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I attended a very interesting seminar this afternoon by Zoltan Dienes about unconscious knowledge. While the seminars  focused more on how to assess unconscious knowledge, it was the underlying models about knowledge and decision making that caught my attention. Zoltan presented 4 basic ways of making decisions:

• Guessing
• Intuition (based on a subconscious understanding)
• Rules (based on a conscious understanding)
• Memory (based on identical previous situation)

Modes of decision making

It struck me that each of these are a compromise between accuracy and generalisability, as depicted in the illustration on the right. In formal education we tend to focus on rules. It all seemed logical at the time, but now I can’t help but wonder why.

I’m quite ok with ignoring guessing and memory, they represent extremes of the spectrum that either have very little accuracy, or very little applicability. But intuition actually seems very valid, especially ina world in which rules and facts are changing at an ever increasing speed.

Intuition is crucial in domains where rules are non-existent, or too complex to support a timely decision. But it is also important to recognise that intuition can be a precursor to a more  conscious understanding of rules. In both cases, experience, wether actual or through games and simulations, are crucial media for learning. Ideally this learning should include at least 2 very different experiences based on the pattern we wish to develop. In the case of the further development and refinement of this intuition towards rules, these games could be followed by a meta game, or game analysis, in which rules are reconstructed.

This model is a replacement of the model that uses facts as a precursor to rules. That model perhaps had some validity in a more static world, requiring a highly specialised workforce. But today I think this has little value, and we are better off developing our instincts, then ourknowledge of facts.

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