Inadvertent Anti-Learning

For the past couple of weeks I've watched a lot of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament.  Even with Illinois' decisive loss to UConn, certainly very disappointing for Illini fans, I continued to watch other games.  The commercials for these games remained remarkably constant, with the usual suspects being fast food commercials, insurance commercials, and car/truck commercials.  There was one commercial that didn't fit this mold and I wondered why it was there.  This one was from Grammarly Business and was about using AI to resolve an office scheduling problem.  Twenty years earlier, when I was a campus administrator, that sort of problem would have been solved by the secretaries working together.  Now there is an automated alternative, la-de-da.  But the commercial implied the solution was beyond human capacity.  It's that thought which triggered the ideas in the rest of this post.  

Let's move on and talk about learning.  A few years ago I featured the following graphic in a post called A Simple Model of How Adults Learn.   (In turn, that post was part of a Website I called the Non-Course, which I developed during Covid in an attempt to encourage college students to learn on their own and develop the reading habit.  Alas, it was just me blowing off steam and had no other impact.)

There is nothing original in this graphic.  You can find the ideas previously expressed in a paper by Kenneth Bruffee called Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind."  Evidently, a way to externalize one's thinking is to engage in conversation with another person who wants to do likewise.  Yet writing, a different form of externalization, can also be considered as conversation, in this case with an imagined reader.  And if ingest happens via reading, then the reader can be thought of as being in conversation with the author.  Ditto for reflection, which is internalized conversation. 

Personally, I have found this conversation metaphor extremely useful in considering how we learn.  And it has helped me in affirming a belief I've had for some time.  The meta skill we want to see develop in the learner is the ability to produce a coherent narrative, one that takes account of the relevant points, sequences them in a way where others can understand the ordering which in turn makes the narrative comprehensible, and in total offers an explanation for the topic of discussion. 

How does one develop this meta skill in the learner?  That too is no mystery; it takes a lot of practice of the right sort.  I have seen it called "effortful study" but I believe most now refer to it as deliberate practice.  This conveys the idea that the practice must be challenging to the learner, but the learner must view the goal of the practice not so far out of reach as to be impossible to attain.  The deliberate part is comparatively new to our understanding, but that practice is needed in learning is hardly a new idea.  The following quote dates back to the 17th or 18th century.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Sir Richard Steele

To make these ideas more concrete, much of the deliberate practice the learner should engage in must require transfer - which means using the new idea in a novel context. A successful adult learner has developed the habit to practice transfer whenever exposed to a new idea.  This is a way that the learner can test whether the idea is really understood.

My sense is that many college students don't get it about transfer.  Instead, they cave into the extrinsic motivation provided by the goal of getting good grades in their classes.  This then serves as a justification for much of their study time to be devoted to rote.  Further, it does so in a way where the time devoted to study is manageable.  As I like to tell students, real learning takes as long as it takes.  The deliberate practice with transfer I mentioned in the previous paragraph likely would be rejected by many students as too time consuming.  I wrote about this more than a decade ago in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?  Though I don't have any current data on this and my own teaching experience ending after the fall 2019 semester, my guess is that, if anything, the situation is even worse now.  

With college schooling so considered, I want to turn attention to informal learning outside of courses and to formal education at the K-12 level,  or perhaps only the K-5 level, where extrinsic incentives may be weaker or entirely absent (at least one can hope that to be the case).  Is it poor pedagogy that's the problem?  Or does technology detract from the deliberate practice that nascent learners need?  When I was a kid there was both Why Johnny Can't Read? and a view that watching television was making kids illiterate.  So, at this level of abstraction, these questions have been with us for a very long time.  

More recently, technologists and social scientists have gotten together to consider this and related questions.  It's not quite a quarter century ago when John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid published The Social Life of Information.  (An updated version came out in 2017.)  I read the original version a few years after its release, when I was doing campus edtech, and found it a godsend in that it put the emphasis where I thought it should be, on the social practice that the technology induces.  (A few years later in a post called Learning Technology and the "Vision Thing" I referred to this as the Umpire Theory of Technology.  I still subscribe to that today.)  The sociologist Sherry Turkle was more explicit about how the technology blocks the requisite deliberate practice in a New York Times Op-Ed called, Stop Googling. Let's Talk.  

Now I want to get get at the word inadvertent in the title of my post.  The discussion above suggests a new technology may have a differential impact on people depending on how far along they are on their own personal learning curve.  Mature learners may react differently than nascent learners.  Do the designers of the technology anticipate this?  If not, this differential reaction is what I mean by inadvertent.  The last time I taught, fall 2019, students who were in the classroom before class started either had their phones out or their laptops out, with the former far more popular.  (There was one iconoclastic student who would have a paper book out.) None of the students tried to engage me in friendly conversation before class.  I have no difficulty asserting that mobile technology has severely limited the deliberate practice that students need at Externalization (the lower left box in the diagram) and it probably has also limited the deliberate practice at Ingest.  

But I'm behind the times.  What about AI in this regard?  I can only guess at its impact.  To date most of what I've read about it is on student cheating and its possible detection on written assignments.  I don't have a good sense how students will use the technology in other contexts.  And I, for one, don't want to banish the technology in favor of pure thought. But I do want to hope that students are getting some important deliberate practice with Reflection, though I fear that even prior to AI many students were not engaged in this way.  

It is hard to know what is going on in someone else's mind.  The best we can do is to engage them in conversation and inquire about that.  The technologists have had their day, and then some.  It's time for the sociologists and the evaluators to take center stage and take their best stab at what's going on.  Maybe some of it will support the cheer-leading for the technology.  But, and this I think is the critical point, the cheerleaders should acknowledge the need for such an effort and accept the results, regardless of what they turn out to be.

Sports Forecasting

Predicting the future based on the past
Hoping the pattern will continue to last
But for something truly new, what can you say?
Which is why we watch all the games they play.
#LearningFromMistakesIsItselfAnInnovation

Pod System for the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

Illinois is in the East Regional but is playing in Omaha Nebraska. While on Thursday it played the second game that finished in the afternoon, today's game starts in the evening.  It is the second to last game of the day.  I puzzled about this some and then went to the ESPN Website for today's schedule of games.   For the purpose of this post, which might be more interesting to an economist than a basketball fan, the interesting columns are Location and Time (all those times are Central, as I have it set to my own preferences in case I want to watch the game).  There isn't a column for region, but that information is provided in smaller font under the match-up. 

There are four sites for the games today.  (Note there are NIT games listed as well.  I'm not including them in the discussion here.)  Those sites are Charlotte NC, Pittsburgh PA, Omaha NE, and Salt Lake City Utah.  From the perspective of time zones, the first two are in the East, the third is in the Midwest, and the fourth is in the Mountain zone.  There is no location in the Pacific zone.  This must somehow be related to why some of the conferences are realigning to include a few west coast teams.  But I definitely don't have the full story on that

A naive view would have the Locations and Times correlate, but it seems that today the correlation is negative as the first two games are in Salt Lake City.  I will give my conjecture on why that is below.

Another issue is whether any of the sites really offers a home court advantage for the favorite team.  North Carolina is playing Michigan State in Charlotte.  Here is a Google Maps view of the drive between Chapel Hill and Charlotte.   There and back seems do-able in the same day, with watching the game in between.  It might require the designated driver to not imbibe at all, but it is still do-able.  Also, I don't know this for sure but I'd speculate that UNC fans are distributed all around the state (except in Durham) and one might make a similar quick study for other locations that have a significant number of fans.

Here is a similar Google Map for the drive between Ames and Omaha.    It's a bit longer than the other though not by too much and if the weather cooperates it is definitely do-able.  (One point of geography I learned from this is that Ames is further north than Omaha.)

Now to the conjecture.  I'm not sure how the tickets get distributed to the schools but I assume that each school gets its own allotment, which in turn get allocated mainly to season ticket holders.  And then there are some tickets held for sale to the general public.  Some locals may want to go to the game.  Within the first group, tickets to the first two rounds are issued and those fans get hotel accommodations or something equivalent, hoping their team will make it to the second round.  

But, of course, half the teams lose in the first round.  That's the nature of the beast.  What happens to the tickets that fans of losing teams have for the second round?  Intuitively, they will resell them to fans of the winning teams.  That might very well happen face-to-face right after the first round game concludes, or there are scalpers who serve as middleman to get the market to work.  The NCAA would like as many seats filled as possible for the second round games.  That must mean there are many fans at those games who weren't present at the first-round games.

Salt Lake City is in the middle of nowhere.  For the sake of this argument, I would say that very few will drive there just to see a second round game.  The vast majority will fly and given the vicissitudes of air travel these days, they will fly in the day before.  Making the games early there might allow these fans to fly out day of the game.  

For the games that are later today, those who aren't driving will fly out tomorrow.  That includes Illinois fans who have gone to Omaha, whether driving or flying.   

I don't know how big the Iowa State fandom is, but it will be interesting to watch and see whether they fill up the arena for their game.  If they do win this game, those who aren't driving back tonight might stick around to watch Illinois play Duquesne and get a sense of the Sweet Sixteen match-up.  

I do suspect that the Michigan State vs North Carolina game will be pretty much like a home game for North Carolina.  There will be some Michigan State fans in the stands, but they will evidently be a minority.   

And if this analysis is making some sense, I would expect the Pittsburgh arena to be less than full of fans.  It's drive-able for Oakland fans but not really for the other three schools, definitely not for Oregon.  And with three double-digit seeds in this region, you have to wonder about how intense the fandom is about seeing the game. 

The NCAA in coming up with this system has to balance fairness to the teams with filling the seats for the games.  Because the driving distances are greater in the West, the later requirement creates a bias against west coast teams.  

Tomorrow Purdue gets the home court advantage with a game in Indianapolis.  So I don't want to say that the bias is for certain conferences.  But I think there is too much advantage to teams that get number one seeds.  

Yesterday, in the Northwestern vs. FAU game, I thought the refereeing was terrible, and that was a game without the locational bias, as the game was in Brooklyn.  Since I still remember Illinois playing Kentucky in the Elite Eight back in 1984, with that game played at Rupp Arena, I really don't want fan pressure to be a one of the important variables that impacts the refs.  But given that filling the seats is a need, I'm afraid that sometimes we're stuck with that.

The Writer Does The Work So The Reader Doesn't Have To

Once having chose
To avoid brief prose
With rhyme on the nose
Then eschew adipose.
#IfYouInsistOnOnlyTheGistRhymeOffersATwist

Faux Spring

The trees in the park with their dry brown leaves tinking
What is it possibly that Mother Nature is thinking?

Go outside for a walk and find something odd
Then decide whether it's already time to turn the sod.
#ItAllDependsOnTheDirectionOfTheWind

Should we call it an upset?

Along the plateau of reasonably good teams
None wants to be number one
That honored station a burden or so it seems
Taking away all of the fun.

So now we must wait till the Tournament plays out
In order to learn who is boss
At which point the critics surely will pout
They just squeaked by without a loss.
#WhoNeedsRankingsAnyway

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/39566531/creighton-knocks-uconn-ending-huskies-14-game-win-streak

It's Time For Some Indoor R&R

Here's a snow burn
From winter's return
Weather forecasting we learn
Is something to spurn.
#TheMeltIsSaidToStartSunday

A Belated Response To: College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.

A Facebook friend posted a link to this NY Times Magazine piece by Professor Stephen L. Carter along with some kudos about how the piece captured the poster's views of what college should be about.  In days of yore I would have read much of the Times Magazine already, but recently I find I read much less of the paper, doing word games instead, reading fiction (most recently a Raymond Chandler novel), or simply goofing off.  Some of this is that recently I often feel I'm not learning from what I'm reading.  Another part is that the reading seems a source of stress that I would be better off to avoid.  In this case I started to read the piece, found I disagreed with the author on fundamental points, and then stopped reading.  But I wanted to share my contrary views.  They have appeared in this blog over the years and in other than the present context.  It's not just a knee-jerk reaction now.  So, yesterday morning I finished reading the piece and after that I began writing this response to illustrate my thinking on these matters.  In doing so, I will make heavy use of earlier posts I've made.  If the reader is so inclined, those can be read as well, and in this way I can keep the current post to modest length. 

Here are the criticisms in a nutshell:

The piece is far too idealistic in its conception.  It needs a more realistic sense of the student/learner and about the source of learning blockages.

No doubt, Professor Carter was a precocious learner as a student.  I believe I was a precocious learner as well.  Such learners will have a well-honed curiosity before they enter college.  They likely will have an intellectual social life, fed by extensive non-school reading and other activities that challenge them.  I've written about this in a post called PLAs Please (a play on words explained in the piece).  Nowadays, long-form reading is on the downs as is face-to-face conversation, a consequence of the "progress" brought to us by online technology. College for precocious learners is giving these students what they already want.  But by no means are these students the majority of those in college.  What about educating the others?

There is another dimension to this issue often described as students lacking a sense of agency.  Hanna Rosin's piece in the Atlantic, The Overprotected Kid, gives a good first pass as to the primary cause.  Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz, explains how this lack of agency manifests in college.  The last semester I taught, fall 2019, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed were filled with stories about student mental health problems.  But then the focus was on the lack of mental health professionals on campus, not on how learning is structured.  The problem persisted through Covid and may have gotten even worse then.  Are students who lack agency nevertheless able to express their curiosity?  

Professor Carter doesn't talk at all about fear and how fear can inhibit learning.  Here I want to focus only on one sort of fear, the fear of looking stupid in public, in front of an authority figure such as the instructor or in front of one's classmates.

Even if questions and comments are welcomed by the instructor and that is evident to the students, it is quite likely that most students (I'm using the classes I've taught since retirement as my sample) won't ever raise their hands to participate.  For those who attend class regularly, how does one explain this?  I want to note that in the mid to late 1990s when I was leading the SCALE project on campus that introduced some online learning into the face-to-face classroom, many of the instructors we interviewed at the time told us that they were trying out online to help address the "shy student problem."  The issue has been with us for some time. Free speech de jure does not mean free speech de facto.  

This issue about the learner's fears inhibiting learning surely means that the idealistic approach misses the boat on the gains from hearing diverse opinions on a matter.  I wrote about this in a post called, On learning to argue with people where we disagree - what's possible and what isn't.  The safety needs that the learner has must be accounted for properly as a precondition.  This point is very much like what Maslow argues, that the Being Needs and Self-Actualization are in dialectic with each other.  In contrast, the idealistic approach of Professor Carter focuses solely on Self-Actualization and ignores the Being Needs entirely.  Now, I would claim that the fear of looking stupid is universal, while the fear a black student has in a classroom of predominantly white students is not.  Perhaps the non-universal fears have commanded too much attention.  But ignoring the universal fears is not the right answer.

There is then what might seem a pedantic point, but since such a big deal is being made of Free Speech,  the classroom isn't the place for it.  Office hours might be, but so few students nowadays attend office hours.

I wrote about this in a post called, There really isn't freedom of speech in a well functioning classroom.  The classroom presents an asymmetric situation where the instructor has authority. Hence, the instructor regulates student speech. Students expect this.  This isn't a big deal, until somebody tries to politicize the fact.

Provincialism (or closed-mindedness if you prefer that expression) persists, on campus and throughout society.  Given that, how should an effective classroom manage the situation?

I wrote about this in a post called Provincialism and Freedom of Speech in the Classroom.  I want to link this idea to something else I learned from the book What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain.  Once the learner has a well-established world view, if the learner then confronts evidence that challenges this view, the learner is apt to reject the evidence rather than to adjust the world view to account for the evidence.  This itself might be a kind of self-protection.  You might call it anti-curiosity.  My understanding is that it can be overcome only very slowly and needs a lot of patience with the learner.  

This might give one reason why so many students seem to want to get through their courses (with high grades, of course) without being fundamentally changed in their intellectual outlook from taking those courses.  Further, it is my belief that the approach feeds the mindset of students where they are less sensitive than they otherwise might be to the needs of their fellow students.  Such sensitivity, were it the norm, might obviate the need for regulation from on high in this dimension.

I would add that this feeds the apparent mercenary tendencies of so many students, which Professor Carter briefly rails about, but then moves on.  I'm afraid there are real economic forces at play - largely the income inequality in society at large and the high tuition at elite universities that mean those mercenary tendencies will persist for later generations of college students unless these fundamentals are reversed.  

* * * * *

I could raise other related points, but let me close here.  I think I've made enough of a case for my main bone of contention.  The purely idealistic view of college, it's purpose and how it should go about achieving that purpose, does a disservice by abstracting from some real needs that have to be addressed for any reform to be successful.  As a former professor, I know that I would often cast myself as the typical learner in my classroom. In retrospect, that was an error on my part.  We know our own experiences and thus seemingly can base our teaching approach on those experiences.  But the vast majority of our students won't go on to become professors.    It behooves us to better understand the experiences of our students to frame our teaching so as to account for their experiences.  How can we really reach them so they learn and not just in a surface way?

No Unbeaten Teams Left

No team wants to be ranked number one
Each then tanks on the road.
The burden makes basketball less than fun.
Emotional circuits on overload.
#PurdueAndHoustonBothLostYesterday

Fodder for a Loren Tate Column

Recently, Loren has been giving readers a stroll down memory lane (and for most of us he's also going into history before we were around) about Illinois sports, trying to tie past to the present where possible.  Here is an example that might prove especially relevant, should Illinois beat Purdue in basketball tomorrow night or, even if not, should be it be a tight game in the closing minutes.  

The example comes from the Lou Henson team of 1983-84 that made it to the Elite Eight and lost to Kentucky (some say they were robbed by the ref's bad non-call near the end of the game).  The point of interest, however, happened before the season began.  Forward Anthony Welch was lost for the year due to injury.  Lou needed to replace him, but his available personnel didn't have another small forward to step in.  So, instead, Lou moved Doug Altenberger to small forward from shooting guard and had Quinn Richardson take over for Altenberger.  In effect, the team played with three guards, later to become the norm, but it wasn't then.  It is unlikely that Lou would have come up with these changes on his own had Welch not been injured.  Yet this team performed extremely well, tying for the Big Ten title with Purdue. 

Now I'm not saying that losing Welch back then is the same thing as losing Terrence Shannon now. But might the Illini without Shannon actually be better than they were before, perhaps because the pieces fit better and/or because the players better understand their roles?  That question might be asked after tomorrow's game.  For that Lou Henson team, losing Welch made them better.

* * * * *

Now I want to make a different comment, also based on Illinois history, this time reacting to something that Brad Underwood said regarding caring about the point spread in a game, even when it's not close, because it matters for the NCAA's NET rankings. Screw that. Every time that the Illini have gotten far into the NCAA Tournament, the games Illinois played at Rupp Arena in 1984 were an example, a key player was injured and that hampered team performance.  Brad Underwood should focus on minimizing the impact of injury on Illinois Basketball players from here on out.  

I'm not a medical doctor, but it's evident that playing increased minutes raises the risk of injury and/or increases the risk of exacerbating a prior injury.  Both Coleman Hawkins and Quincy Guerrier have prior injuries that are still relevant.  Consequently, to me its obvious then that Dain Danja should get more minutes, subbing for one of them while he's in the game.  I understand that this changes the nature of how the Illini play, because style-wise Dainja is quite different from the other two.  But the team needs to figure out how to be effective with Dainja in the game and figure it out now.  It shouldn't wait till one of the others gets seriously injured again. 

* * * * *

Here is one last point.  Where the current team has looked bad it's been against full court pressure.  Northwestern didn't try that at all.  If Illinois doesn't see it much more in Big Ten play, how does it prepare for that in the NCAA tournament?  

My own view on this is that Domask, as good as he's been with booty ball, is not that great bringing the ball up because he has a tendency to turn his back to the defense while he's dribbling, which gives the double team an advantage of surprise.  Indeed it seems to me that none of the starting guards are very strong in this area.  The guards coming off the bench may be better in this dimension.  

Maybe this says something about the playing time they get.  But maybe it says more about how practice goes.  How much of it is preparing for the next opponent and how much of it is preparing for the NCAA Tournament, without knowing who that opponent will be?  I don't think it is too early to be asking that question.