Two contrasting stories about the use of virtual technologies for research and teaching have been hitting the headlines in the United Kingdom this week.

At Durham University, Dr. Patricia Easteal, a law lecturer at the University of Canberra in Australia, has accepted a "virtual sabbatical" in what is believed to be the first sort of fellowship of its kind. Dr. Easteal will conduct her five months of research and teaching with staff and students at Durham, using online tools such as Skype, YouTube, blogs and wikis. She plans to teach her students via Second Life. Unfortunately, for all the freedom of cyberspace, there is no overcoming one feature of real-life geography: the 11 hour time difference between Australia and the UK means that some of her lectures and contributions will have to be pre-recorded.

One acerbic commentator on the Times Higher Education is less than impressed, though, complaining that this may just be a "grandiloquent claim" about a "virtual fellow," when academics have long been used to exchanging knowledge internationally. At Durham, Dr. Westmarland, the lecturer in criminal justice who devised the project, has acknowledged that there may be technical hitches, and that this is a test case for how effective virtual tools are for collaboration at this level.

However, Demos, the UK government think-tank, might well have applauded their efforts. In a recent report entitled The Edgeless University: Why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology, the authors find that whilst social networking and the mobile internet are commonplace among students, such tools have not yet made many inroads into the university classroom. The report argues that with their expertise universities ought to be well placed to filter "the noise of information and knowledge" that envelops students, and so should be eager "to capitalise on the connections and relationships made possible by the new information technologies." Whilst acknowledging that individual academics (such as, perhaps, those mentioned earlier) have been trying to break new ground, investment in online learning and research technologies now needs to be more strategic and sustained.

A new task force set up by the British Government, chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library, aims to help with this. Backed by a new Open Learning Innovation Fund of up to £10 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the group aims to enable universities "to develop greater expertise in online teaching and create centres of excellence for the delivery of online learning."

What do readers here think? Have universities been a bit slow off the mark in making use of the internet for networking? Or should we be a bit sceptical about the effectiveness of things like the "virtual sabbatical"?

[Note: This is a cross-post from the Graduate Junction Blog]

Labels: Technology, The Edgeless University, University Life, virtual learning

One of life's pleasures as a schoolchild was to come in dripping and chill from a winter's rugby or football game, and to win the squabble for the hand driers in the changing rooms. I would clamp the collar of my rugby shirt over the blower, and blast hot air down the top, turning the wet mud on my torso to a cracked, brown glaze, which could then be picked off and flicked at my peers. Like the hot showers that would follow, though, that warmth would last only for thirty seconds, and one had to build up a resistance against pushing the button just three times, two times, just once more.

As an adult, though, and an environmentally conscious one at that, I have a bit of a problem with hand driers. Just consider the huge energies and infrastructures required simply to deliver that brief spurt of air from the hand drier. In a huge concrete furnace, coal burns and smoke churns, whilst a dash of power runs down miles of cable, passes through substations, filters through a transformer box, so that a stream of electrons will get jammed in a small coil of resistant wire, which will warm a stream of air - and all simply to dry your hands. The hand drier is a metaphor for the egocentrism of our lives, as we exploit power and fabricate devices to do jobs that are essentially unnecessary. For there is a way of drying hands that has been used for centuries, and that involves nothing more than a shake of the excess water, and a little patience in the air. Of course, in the modern day, we grumble that we simply do not have the time.

If the hand drier has a benefit that maybe, just maybe, outweighs its energy-sucking pointlessness, it is its social one. Mirroring the pleasure of hand driers as a child, the hand drier offers a way of cutting oneself off from the human world. As an adult, stuck in one of those dreaded conversations facing the wall of the urinal - stare straight ahead; don't dare to look sideways at your pissing conversationalist! - there is no better way of signalling an end to chat that hitting the blast of the hand drier, its hot air drowning out that of the unwanted interlocutor.

Labels: Environment, hand drier

Over at the American Spectator, the British philosopher Roger Scruton has been having an eloquent grumble about the state of the humanities, entitled Farewell to Judgement.

Scruton complains that in an attempt to justify their coexistence with the sciences at universities, the humanities have faced a crisis of legitimation. If the sciences offer knowledge that explains the world, what can the humanities present as their raison d'etre? The response has been an ideological turn, with the humanities justifying themselves by their political radicalism. As Scruton notes, this led to a problem for English studies, which is the informed cultivation of something that might otherwise be seen as a leisure interest:

Unlike women's studies, which has impeccable feminist credentials (why else was it invented?), English focuses on the works of dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today. So maybe such a subject should not be studied, or studied only as a lesson in social pathology.

The brave new world faced by English studies is not one recognised by Scruton's generation. For him, literature offers a way of perceiving those human universals that, in a writer like Shakespeare, transcend historical circumstances to sympathise with a deep human nature, even if the superficial politics look very different to ours. When Shakespeare invites judgement, it is not a political one. Instead:

We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty. And that is how you justify the study of English, as a training in this other kind of judgment, which leaves politics behind.

Scruton says that the other aim of English studies was the judgement of "taste," established through careful emotional criticism, taught by the likes of R. P. Blackmur, F. R. Leavis, William Empson and T. S. Eliot, "who had raised the study of literature to a level of seriousness that justified its claim to be an academic subject." Now, however, Scruton laments that:

When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?

Scruton seems to have things both ways. On the one hand, he argues that literature offers access to human universals, whilst on the other he complains that because Jane Austen cannot tell us about contemporary ideology or power struggles, the point of studying Austen - if we are going to focus on political rather than aesthetic values - is lost. Resolving this double standard of universality points us to the factor Scruton overlooks in his lament about the state of the humanities.

Whereas Scruton perceives that judgements of value and politics must be mutually exclusive, so that Jane Austen both is and is not universal in her value depending on which side you come from - the political or the aesthetic - I do not see any such binary. I do not see the binary because I am, in my own critical and teaching approach, a historicist. Historicism allows one to perceive the universality of underlying aesthetic or humanistic values, without this entailing that political values must be similarly universal; or, to look at it another way, just because political values today are historically different does not automatically mean that the work must be aesthetically compromised.

Take the case of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As most famously expressed by Chinua Achebe, this novel that has come in for a great deal of political criticism, because of its alleged racist tendencies, as Conrad refuses to offer black characters a voice, other than those of cannibal grunts. It is an ideal case of Scruton's "dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today."

Except my students - like myself - do still read and enjoy Conrad today. They are very adept at perceiving that even if Conrad's political values may be suspect, this is not to say that his aesthetic values should automatically be condemned. Students generally recognise that his artistic techniques in representing Africa as an inscrutable, dark place of the Earth - what Leavis called Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery" - must be held in aesthetic admiration, even if the political work to which those techniques are directed, the denigration of Africa as a "dark place of the Earth" and the consequent elevation of European culture as one of enlightenment, may be troublesome from a postcolonial point of view. Students appreciate that Conrad's stylistic traits, such as "delayed decoding," his use of a frame narration, and metafiction, are a masterful way of allowing Conrad to represent Africa in his own way, and to convey his personal, sensual impressions to us as readers who have not necessarily travelled up the Congo. We may not like what he says, or allegedly says, about blacks, but we can admire the way he says it as part of the wider impressionistic purpose of the novel. The crucial intervention here, between political and aesthetic values, is historical awareness, the understanding that Conrad was operating in a different political framework to our own time and that, because we could not have expected him to be of a postcolonial mindset in the late nineteenth century, we can accept that he did the best possible aesthetic work he could under his different circumstances. What would be most surprising of all about Heart of Darkness is if a novella first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, read solely by European civilised males, were to be actively anti-colonial. I should add, as a caveat, that I do not agree with Achebe that Conrad was a racist, and my own view - which I will not elaborate on now - is that he very cunningly undermines the status of his anticipated readership. But even if a modern student or Achebe do think Conrad's political values were wrong, and are inscribed as such in the novel, that does not preclude one holding a different view of his aesthetics. To keep the aesthetic and political in mind simultaneously, what is required is a historical consciousness, as well as a critical acumen.

Which leads me on to another problem I have with Scruton's argument. Scruton later laments that:

Departments of musicology are now “into” pop music and Heavy Metal, and refrain from creating the impression among their students that they regard the Western canon as anything more than a piece of musical history. I recently had the experience of teaching a course on the philosophy of music to young people in a British university, and was acutely aware at every moment of the resentment that now greets any criticism of pop.

This is symptomatic of the humanities' opening of that door to modernity labelled "cultural studies," where instead of looking at dead, white artists, literature, music, art departments encourage their students to look at what is going on in the contemporary cultural world. The problem with cultural studies is its tendency to conflate popularity with quality. Further, as Scruton shows, because pop music is popular amongst those studying it critically, any suggestion that it might not be as good as Bach or Beethoven is taken as a personal affront, thus making judgements of value very difficult. The only thing that can be done is the relative comparison of one pop artist against another - which students readily do in pubs and bedrooms - rather than saying with critical acuity that this pop artist is inferior to Bach.

I appreciate Scruton's criticism here, but his view is based on an experience of cultural studies done badly. There is nothing in principle wrong with studying the contemporary. However, it is only by tapping in to the historical moment in which a particular work of art is produced - asking, why this piece of art, why this style, why now? - that we can hope to perform the separation of politics from value that Scruton desires. Politics can be taken more broadly than just ideology, to mean the social, technological, economic factors that inform a person's beliefs and experiences in any given moment. At its best, the aim of cultural studies should be not primarily to look at what is popular per se, but to ask how that popularity acts as an indicator of what is significant in a culture at any given time. This allows cultural studies to model a moment clearly, and to use this as the basis for making value judgements.

Given the things that matter and inform a contemporary society, which works are doing the best job at this time of responding to, elucidating and - if politically radical - seeking to change that moment? Scruton is right in that cultural studies can fall for the trap of thinking that if something is popular, it must be good. But if, as I believe it should do, cultural studies makes its first point of attention the historical circumstances of the time, and only then asks what works are doing the best job within these circumstances, it can achieve the aesthetic value judgements which literature, music or art departments used to do in the days of Leavis, Eliot et al. Whether looking at canonical works, or looking at the present time, then, the important factor that Scruton overlooks in perceiving a tension between politics and aesthetics as the subject of study is the way in which the historical can mediate between the two objectives. It provides a bedrock from which value judgements of older works can be made, even if their politics seem alien, and from which value judgements of the contemporary can be made more objectively, even if they seem too familiar and a part of who we are, and thus beyond any potentially stinging aesthetic criticism.

Labels: aesthetics, cultral studies, English Literature, Roger Scruton

I've just posted a new review of a book that has been around for a few years, but that was recommended to me recently by a friend. My acquaintance heralded his writing style as being a beautiful example of scientific popularisation. Sadly, I disagree, as the book makes some howlers in its attempt to make history accessible. The full review is available here: Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming, by Gale E. Christianson

Labels: climate change, Gale E. Christianson, Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming

I am currently marking my way through 70 exam scripts, for a couple of the introductory English Literature modules at my university. This blog post is the confession of this examiner, perhaps a bit risky if you find out who I really am, but nevertheless I hope worth making public as a way of demystifying a process between the end of the exam and the publication of marks that students do not often see or even understand.

If I remember my own, not-too-distant days correctly, students might want to imagine that examiners treat their scripts as sacred objects. A student has attended numerous lectures and read numerous books over the year, poured over revision notes long into the night, and then spent a few hours hunched over a desk in some dismal hall, frantically trying to pour out knowledge in the hopes that that brief exam will do justice to all the hours of work put in over the previous year. With this much invested on a few sheets of paper, surely examiners deal with them reverently, in a darkened room, with the white paper subject to the glare of an anglepoise lamp, as the examiner interrogates and teases that script to give up its worthy marks?

The reality is somewhat different. Naturally, I look after exams with the utmost care, and mark them as conscientiously as I can. However, there are certain unavoidable practicalities of marking, and of human psychology, that mitigate against any such pure, religious process described above.

The big practical issue is time. With a large number of scripts to be marked in a brief period, it is simply not possible to spend hours on each one. It would be nice if I could read an essay carefully, and then go for a walk, take a shower, and massage my temples as I try to weigh up whether to give it 66 percent or a 67. But that does not - it cannot - happen. Even marking a qualitative, essay-based subject like English, having read an essay I tend to place my mark quickly and instinctively. At my university, we work from very detailed guidelines that explain the characteristics that should be present in an essay for it to merit a First, 2:1, 2:2 or lower, with each band sub-divided into two, for example, a high 2:1 (65 to 69 percent) or a low 2:1 (60 to 64 percent). It is very rare that I ponder deeply what percentage to give an essay. Essays usually fall easily into a band, and the pressure of having perhaps a week to mark 50 scripts leaves me little time to deliberate at length whether it needs a 64 or a 63.

People often grumble that an essay-based exam cannot be marked as objectively and as fairly as something like mathematics, with a right or wrong answer. Certainly the personality of the marker may have an effect on a percentage point here or there. But on the whole it is always surprising from my examiner's perspective how easily papers drop into one of these assigned bands. The moral for university students, then, is not to lose sleep over percentages. It is the band that says everything about what sort of student you are, even if you are frustratingly just on the borderline. In many ways, a 69 percent is the most horrible mark an examiner has to give - and in the last few days I have been heard shouting at papers, because I was frustrated that a good student was not quite there, and could see that with a little nudge and feedback the student could go on to improve in subsequent essays. But my 69s are below that glass ceiling not because a few tiny details were overlooked by me, the examiner, not because I was tired, or because my football team had just lost, but because it read, argued, reasoned, discussed, evidenced in ways which said 2:1.

With this caveat about the band being everything, I will admit to some of the other factors that an examiner faces that may well lead to small variations in marks.

Imagine this scenario. I have just read two First-class essays. The third essay I mark is going to have to do something impressive not to look weaker in comparison (for those of a mathematical bent, this is an effect called regression to the mean). Perhaps I will dock it a few more marks than I might have done if marking it in isolation, because it compares worse against the previous efforts. But in the alternative scenario, marked after two solid but not particularly remarkable 2:1 essays, perhaps suddenly essay three looks better than that localised average. I know that I must be guilty, at times, of marking relative to other essays, rather than against the single standard of the mark scheme.

Luckily, there are a few ways to negate this effect. One of the most hotly debated is that fad of the 1990s, the bell curve. Perhaps I get a run of three weak essays before lunch, and then suddenly give three Firsts after lunch. Is it that I am in a better mood after my break? Is it that I have remembered those three earlier, average essays, so that those that come later are bound to look more positively in their light? I do get anxious when runs of unusually high or low results happen - as they have done this year - and that is why I find the bell curve a useful check. I may perceive that my marks are being affected by local circumstances, but taking a larger sample of my marks, I can see that they have fallen out in a normal distribution. Usually, there is a statistically good range, with a smattering of 2:2s and Firsts, and the majority bunching around the mid 2:1.



The reason that the bell curve, or normal distribtion, comes in for debate is that it is tempting to mark for the curve, rather than to construct the curve on the basis of marks. Out of ten essays I have given three 66s. Better make the next one a 59 or 71 just to smooth out the graph. This is a real risk for the individual examiner, whilst institutionally it may be tempting to adjust marks across the board to create a smooth curve with its apex at the point the university suspects most candidates should be at. In my institution, with most students coming with excellent A-levels, we would expect more high 2:1s and Firsts than another institution with a lower achieving intake, so our marks tend to have a peak around the high 60s.

Now I do not know - or have reason to believe - that my own institution does any sort of retrospective adjustment to bump our averages higher than the national baseline for English Literature degrees, but if they did the problem would be clear. Just as I get funny moments marking when there have been no Firsts for ages then three come along at once, an institution could quite feasibly have consecutive year groups which seem to achieve comparable marks, until one year is comprised of an unusually bright or slightly less well-performing group. By shoving that bell curve to fit expectations based on previous experience, the institution is engaging in a sort of social engineering, making results fit students, rather than the other way around, so that the unusually bright or underperforming group is down or upgraded unfairly. This is precisely the sort of complaint about "grade inflation" long levelled at A-Levels and GCSEs, and increasingly at universities. But as an examiner, I can sympathise with the faith in statistics and the normal distribution, because it offers subjects like English an objective foundation for marking, helping to cancel out those personal factors that do come into play, no matter how hard one tries to contain them.

The bell curve aside, students need to remember that the mark they get is not dependent on the individual examiner because other, less controversial, controls are there to restrict the impact any one examiner can have. I have admitted that time, my mood, marking an essay relative to previous results, the effect of statistics, all can affect what percentage an essay achieves, even though I would hope that these would not affect which broader band an exam falls into. But once they leave my hands, exams are filtered through layers of double-marking, moderation by other examiners from within the institution, oversight by external examiners outside of the university, anonymous exam codes, board meetings, appeals procedures, publicly displayed marks so that it is possible to see how each year's exams compare to previous ones and, finally, individual students can request copies of their exam papers and examiner's comments under the Data Protection Act. These controls too ensure that, when the best-willed examiner gets a mark an entire band out, it should be an isolated incident.

However, this last control - allowing students to see and hence to interrogate their own papers - is also controversial. My own university does not exactly make public the fact that students have a legal right to see their scripts after they have been marked. Personally, I think this right should become an expectation among students, who are still often fearful of approaching departments with what seem like trivial requests. The National Union of Students has a policy that feedback should be provided on exams, and have issued stickers for students to put on exam papers stating that "Exam Feedback Helps Me Learn." From an examiner's perspective, although in many cases it is not possible to indicate specific places where students might improve (again, partly because time pressure makes it impossible to write detailed comments), there are many papers about which I do note specific stylistic issues that could be quite easily addressed. Making these comments, though, seems like shouting into the wind, if students are never going to get the opportunity to see them. Having gone to the effort to mark a script as an examiner, why not at least allow students to get as much from your work as possible?

Besides the adminstrative burden, the reason universities are reluctant to provide exam feedback is, I suspect, from a fear of litigation or of students picking examiners up on every point to gain even more marks. Even if the fear of litigation is a little hyperbolic, the idea of student's challenging their papers may affect the exam process unduly. Those students prepared to go through the technical process of questioning their results may end up with better marks than those who are mostly concerned with studying their subject for the pleasure of it, and who are not so end-focused, and who simply accept the results given to them and look to the following year. In a system where exams are always open to challenge, results might become partly determined by a student's ability to work the system, rather than their ability in any given subject. On the other hand, is this issue not precisely the problem with exams overall, that not only are they testing knowledge but they are also testing one's ability to sit exams and to have good "exam technique" in the first place? Allowing students to interrogate and receive feedback on their own marks at the end of the process only mirrors the effect that happens in that artificial period called "exam season" at the start of it. At this time of year students who may have done less work all year sit down to cram and prepare model answers just to pass the three essay questions on an exam, whilst students who have conscientiously studied broadly throughout the year continue in their model approach to their subject in a way that does not always help them to focus on the specialised nature of an exam. As an examiner, I usually have a pretty good hunch which students have prepared to pass a few questions on the exam, and which have enjoyed studying their course as a whole, but it is a very difficult thing to prove, and it is not possible to adjust marks based on a hunch.

From my examiner's perspective, then, encouraging students to seek the written feedback from their exams would be a positive step, because it would add a qualitative report to the process, allowing those students who have worked well throughout the year even if not reflected in the pure exam percentage to seek guidance on how to improve. These sorts of students are more likely to incorporate these comments into their more holistic approach to the subject (such as their desire to write well), than those who simply aim to pass the exam as a technical challenge, and so hopefully some sort of levelling might be achieved.

If you are a student reading this post, then, I hope you feel some sense of schadenfreude. If you have been sat there feeling fed up about the fact that you have to work through exams which seem a disproportionate measure compared to the way you have worked throughout the year, it is worth knowing that this examiner at least feels the same way about marking the exams. It may be slightly disturbing that I have drawn attention to the human frailties of the marking process, but on the other hand I hope too students appreciate firstly that it is bands, not single percentages, that are the most important indicator of ability, and secondly appreciate the lengths institutions go to in order to mitigate against any widespread effect marks can be consistently misjudged, even though probably every examiner misplaces a percentage point here or there, and even occasionally gets a band wrong.

The trouble is, exams remain the most efficient system we have for testing even qualitative subjects like English. The good news is that even though there may be candidates who can work the exam system to their unrepresentative benefit, and even though examiners of essay-based subjects may be unable, as ordinary human beings, to mark every essay to its perfectly deserved percentage, on the whole, the system, tumultuous though it is during the early days of Summer, does work.

Labels: English Literature, essay marking, exams, University Life