Turns out the union didn’t like PeerScholar, a system for facilitating peer-reviewing in large classes.
From the National Post:
Congratulations to the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which has achieved another milestone in its ongoing quest to propagate the belief that public-sector unions are inherent, dedicated enemies of growth and innovation. In Friday’s Post, Emily Senger and Kathryn Blaze Carlson described CUPE’s successful grievance against the developers of PeerScholar, a new online application created at the University of Toronto that allows students to file short papers which are then graded and annotated, in an environment of mutual anonymity, by fellow class members who have completed the same assignment.
CUPE, which represents teaching assistants at U of T, took the view that, in the words of spokesman Mikael Swayze, “If students are doing marking, then they’re in our bargaining unit and must be paid.” In
short, the union — in blocking the use of PeerScholar within an enormous first-year psychology class — was merely defending its own interests against a low-cost alternative to having TAs grade written material.
Perhaps no one could hold that against CUPE if the only harm done was to make higher education more expensive. As a society, we claim to care a great deal about keeping university accessible to the poor and affordable for the middle class; sometimes do-gooders will even say that our future competitiveness and prosperity depend on it. But these people can be ignored. If we did care we would never, under any circumstances, give a labour cartel a veto over a professor’s conduct of his class.
We also claim to care a great deal about the quality of education — another premise that CUPE has pretty well refuted. In the case of Professor Steve Joordens’ psych class, the alternative to having written assignments peer-marked was not to have written assignments marked by unionized TAs, but to have no written assignments at all. He will now have to return to the same traditional practice followed in most introductory psych classes: basing grades entirely on machine-readable multiple-choice exams. This has always been a feature of psych classes that lazy, sly undergraduates liked, because it favours guessing ability over grasp of the course content and skill at writing and argumentation.
The very possibility of bringing about change to the factory-like environment of undergraduate survey courses was a major breakthrough for Joordens, who developed Peer-Scholar with his grad student Dwayne Pare. Peer grading may sound like a loopy idea, but early research by Joordens and Pare showed that for a simple assignment involving a written reaction to a set text, peer grading is statistically indistinguishable from “expert” grading by trained graduate students — if you have enough peers.
The magic number for maximum validity appears to be about six, so the PeerScholar interface makes each student grade six colleagues’ papers after they hand in their own. The peer grading is formally made part of the assignment, and students get the benefit of comparing other work to their own. Students who felt their grade was unfair were permitted to appeal to a teaching assistant, on condition that they had to live with the new grade whether it was higher or lower.
PeerScholar was a research project worth pursuing for its own sake, but the Ontario Superior Court’s support for CUPE’s grievance means that the Joordens/Pare research will be very difficult to reproduce scientifically, under real-world conditions, inside Ontario. It also means that PeerScholar, as a made-in-Ontario software application, will be hard to sell to colleges and universities where teaching assistants are unionized. And the potential for Peer-Scholar to improve the quality of large first-year survey classes may never be realized. How often does a labour union, with one single action, harm science, education and business all at once? What an astonishing hat trick of ignorance and greed; doff your lids, readers.
I’m happy to say I had a hand in this article.
History computer games have become an economic and cultural phenomenon, and historians should seize the opportunity to participate in their development. Players of history games are interested in the past and in the big questions that drive historical scholarship. In this way, games have the potential to draw players into the discipline if we can discover the best way to express history though simulation. But what research do we draw on as we study how to accomplish this transformation? This essay is the product of a meeting of historians, educators, and gamers who joined previously separate lines of inquiry to identify literature and models that we believe form the foundation for developing a theory of good history through gaming.
Résumé:
Les jeux vidéo à thème historique sont devenus un phénomène économique et culturel, et les historiens devraient saisir cette occasion de participer à leur développement. Les personnes qui jouent à des jeux historiques s’intéressent au passé et aux grandes questions qui mobilisent la recherche historique. Par les jeux, il est peut-être possible d’attirer les joueurs dans la discipline, si nous parvenons à découvrir la meilleure façon d’exprimer l’histoire par la simulation. Mais à quelle recherche faisons-nous appel quand nous étudions les moyens de réaliser cette transformation? Cet essai est le produit d’une réunion d’historiens, d’éducateurs et de spécialistes du jeu qui ont relié des pistes de recherche jusque-là indépendantes afin de repérer les études et les modèles qui, croyons-nous, serviront de base à l’élaboration d’une théorie de bonne pratique de l’histoire par le jeu
If you’re an archaeologist interested in social networks in the past, what better way to keep on top of things than to see what’s going on in the present?
The Collective Dynamics Group at Columbia have a raft of papers online concerning their research – check them out.
The Group’s mandate is:
is the application of modern mathematical and computational techniques to problems relevant to the social sciences. Examples of current projects include the structure and evolution of social networks, the dynamics of disease epidemics and cultural fads, the role of social information in financial markets, and the use of the Internet as a tool for social science research. The group consists of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from mathematics, sociology, and economic
Some of their major projects:
Interpersonal Influence, Contagion, and Collective Decision MakingPeople constantly influence each other in all facets of life. Social contagion is the spreading of ideas, rumors, and behavior through a population via interpersonal influences. Collective decisions are generated by a social contagion process which is (often greatly) augmented by the machinery of mass media. Consequently, understanding interpersonal influence is crucial to understanding the behavior of both individuals and groups. Our projects on influence are divided between online experiments and conceptual mathematical models. We have developed a generalized model of contagion that reconciles and extends previously disparate models of contagion from the social and biological sciences. We are interested in standard biological contagion alone since the collective behavior of people is almost always important in how diseases spread. For example, motivated by observations of the SARS outbreak in 2002, we are exploring the effect on a contagion’s spread due to people moving between subpopulations with some frequency. We are also currently developing an online experiment which will explore interpersonal influence in `cultural markets’ (markets for cultural products, such a books, music, celebrity, etc) and how individual behaviors aggregate to produce collective outcomes.Social Search, Collective Problem Solving, and Organizational RobustnessThe ability to solve problems collectively is central to the long term stability of any group of people, from a small business marketing a new product to nations confronting global economic crises. Real world collective problem solving is inherently a decentralized, distributed activity. When faced with a novel, ambiguous problem defined at the group level, individuals must determine how to coordinate their actions with others by exchanging ideas, knowledge, and questions. A key aspect of this coordination is search. How do invididuals find others who can at least partially answer or rephrase poorly specified problems? We approach this issue of what we call social search by building conceptual models and online experiments. For example, we have constructed a simple, sociologically plausible model of social networks that shows them to be searchable under general conditions. This is the so-called Small World hypothesis, the notion that two random individuals can find a way to connect to each other through a small number of intermediary contacts. For the past few years, we have been running a global small world experiment, where people send email to friends and acquaintances trying to find a sequence of contacts leading to `target’ individuals. In related work, we model modern organizations as reinforced hierarchical networks of individuals searching for information bearers among their peers. Being effective at collective problem solving leads to a tradeoff between specialized efficiency and flexible robustness.Structure and Evolution of Social NetworksWe explore social networks through data acquisition, theoretical model building, and online experiments. In the past few years, there has been a tremendous growth in the study of networks-at-large. While much is now understood about technological and physical networks, less is known about large-scale social networks. And for good reason: accurately determining who knows whom and to what degree is a difficult and highly time consuming task. However, with the advent of digital communication, we are now able to record vast numbers of interactions between individuals in large populations. In principle, certain channels of communication, such as e-mail exchange or instant messaging, can be recorded completely. Our current data acquisition projects focus specifically on collecting real-time e-mail interactions in combination with demographic data for large institutions. At the same time, we are working to build simple models of dynamic social networks, guided and informed by real data and online experiments. We also construct abstract models of evolving social networks to study basic concepts such as the emergence of cooperation. Our work is computer intensive and we have developed a suite of network analysis routines that will eventually be made publically available.
I don’t think I’ve written about this project yet, but it’s one that I think is very interesting and worth watching.
Tom writes,
I am currently working on an MSc dissertation, at the University of
Southampton, which aims at devising a critical method for applying
social network analysis to ceramic distributions. The inherent
structure of a complex dataset containing Roman table wares from the
Eastern Mediterranean will be analysed. But before we get to the
analysing stage we need to address some issues concerning the general
use of network analysis within an archaeological framework: what
networks are present in archaeological data? and how do we impose a network on
archaeological data? How do we define such networks? How do we avoid
uncritical assumptions when defining networks? How do we interpret the
results of an analysis of archaeological networks? And how do we link
the results of a networks approach in with other approaches?
The project outline, dataset description and preliminary method are
available at: http://archaeologicalnetworks.wordpress.com/
This website also includes a blog which is open for project related or
archaeological network discussions. Feel free to have a look at the
site and start discussions, any feedback is more than welcome!
I’m sure Tom would love to hear from anybody doing similar work, or having similar research interests. Drop by his blog!
… and indeed, a host of languages. From the Alpheios website:
The Alpheios Project’s current initiatives include:
- the development of computer tools for reading classical texts
and learning classical languages- the creation of a million word treebank of classical Greek
- examples of how literary texts can be collaboratively enhanced,
made more accessible to a wider variety of readers, and
rendered more amenable to comparative analysis.- examples of how computer analysis of texts and corpora can
contribute to literary research and language pedagogy.We are initially focusing on the six classical languages with the most
extensive literary traditions:Greek and Latin, Chinese and Sanskrit, and Arabic and Persian.
Several others are under active consideration, including
Akkadian, Hebrew, Pali, Avestan, Old Japanese,
Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Old High German,
Old Castilian and Provencal/Occitan.These may be developed as the resources for their lexical and
morphological analysis become available, but we wish to point out that
our programs are designed modularly to facilitate the addition of new
languages with minimal effort, and all our code will be open-source
to encourage others to create similar tools for their own languages.
From the Conference Organizers….
Interacting with Immersive Worlds 2009 is only a few days away. We are excited by the remarkable response to the conference, and are looking forward to hearing presentations by delegates from Canada, the United States, and Europe. We are especially thrilled to welcome four remarkable keynote speakers:
Janet Murray, author of the seminal book, Hamlet on the Holodeck
Espen Aarseth, one of the world?s leading game theorists
Geoffrey Rockwell, a leader in multimedia education who directs the country?s most successful digital humanities research project
Debora Todd, a bestselling author and game designer, writer and producer.Read more about these remarkable speakers, and see the full conference schedule at: http://www.brocku.ca/iasc/immersiveworlds/index.html
You can register, until Friday, June 5, at:
http://www.brocku.ca/iasc/immersiveworlds/register.htmlSee you on June 15!
The Interacting with Immersive Worlds 2009 Organizing Committee
I was a participant last year, and it was a great conference. Can’t go this year: baby daughter to look after!
Still have folks in your department who dismiss games as…, well, games? Then you need to check out this article in the latest edition of the Escapist. Todd Bryant has been experimenting with using games like Civ IV in history classes. This is no unthinking use of the game, though. For Bryant, the value lies in exploiting the gap between ‘real’ history, and the way that history is modelled (or argued, as it were: see Bogost) in the game:
A student came to my office last week and asked for help setting up a LAN game of Civ IV in one of the college’s computer labs. He was going to play my Age of Conquest mod scenario with some friends that afternoon. While I showed him in the menu how to set up a multiplayer game, he shared his strategy to play Spain and attack the Aztecs. It’s a bad idea.
[...]
For the class, students had to play the game in addition to their readings and discuss whether the scenario accurately represented the period. One of the key concepts students should have learned about was the role of belief systems as described in the book “The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other.” In essence, the book and the game make the same argument: Had the Aztecs viewed the world differently, their clash with the Spanish conquistadors would have been radically different.
He goes on to describe exploration of language teaching through immersing students in a German server for World of Warcraft. Mein Gott! Das ist wunderbar! (all that I remember from a freshman German class; that and a song set to the Blue Danube… perhaps if I’d been gaming language, things would be different…)
There are people doing similar things with Latin, as it happens (I had experimented with old school text adventures for Latin teaching, but this might be a bit more *sigh* exciting) … sign the petition now!
How neat to watch my game venture onto/into new realms – When on Google Earth is now on Facebook.
I’m online enough as it is already; guess I’ll have to start using that dormant account after all.
At a number of places I teach, we use ANGEL as our LMS. One can of course upload content into Angel, and have students look at it – powerpoints, recordings, images, whatever. So far, so ho-hum. One thing that I am concerned about though is ownership of any materials that I have created that I upload into Angel. Depending on where you work, this could get dicey.
So I’ve recently starting using ‘box‘ to upload and host my audio lectures, and deliver them to the students in Angel. I could of course just upload into my space here on wordpress, or onto any number of servers I have access to. But that’s fiddly – and box is free. No messing with ftp. AND, the link to the files is a secure one, so I don’t have to worry that somebody will stumble across my lecture via Google.
Similarly, slideshare does a great job of delivering slides (and it will sync audio to them). When I first started playing with slideshare, anything you put on there was public, but I see now that I can control the privacy to a degree. After you upload your slides, you can set a contact list of people who are allowed to see them. This is a bit more fiddly than box, but if you’ve got the course roster handy, maybe not so much of a problem. And of course you can embed the slides a la youtube, so integration into Angel should be straight forward.
Of course, I haven’t tried that yet; there’s usually some kind of kink needing straightening.
Because these things sometimes contain interesting nuggets:
State of E-Learning in Canada
May 21, 2009CCL’s State of E-Learning in Canada was written to improve Canadians’ understanding of e-learning—particularly of its challenges, limitations and benefits—so that Canada may move forward in appropriate and relevant ways. [...] Why should we care about e-learning?
E-learning can substantially increase our access to knowledge and information and, as studies suggest, improve access to education, formal and informal learning, and employment opportunities.
The proportion of courses delivered online in Canada is one of the highest among countries studied; however, research suggests that Canadian post-secondary institutions have been slower than those in many other countries to incorporate significant online components into their programs. Likewise, e-learning has not become a standard feature of employee training. Various surveys show that by 2005, the percentage of workplace training delivered online ranged from 15% to 20%
And the report itself:
News Release
E-Learning Profiles
Report (PDF, 779 KB)
Executive Summary (PDF, 95 KB)
Fact Sheet (PDF, 110 KB)
From the Canada Council on Learning website.
