Posts by Bart Janssen
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My apologies for a long response to Gio. I obviously did not say what I meant. This isn't meant to derail but I kind of think it's important - well to me anyway.
The fact that you can study education doesn't make education a science.
Um yes but that doesn’t make it not a science either.
The results of those observations aren't easily repeatable and there is nothing like a laboratory setting, for starters.
That isn’t true as is demonstrated by any of the social sciences and any of the sciences that study humans directly.
Not wishing to argue about whether education is a science here, let’s just agree to differ on this., what you measure and how you measure it is going to tell you some things about certain educational outcomes, but not about education itself. By which I mean that you can measure numeracy and literacy, and do so with some (not a lot) of consistency, but that is not what education is about.
Sorry I obviously gave you the impression I thought education was about letters and numbers. Far from it. Nor do I believe the ... er science of education considers education to be about numbers and letters.
What I was trying to say was that it’s a bitch to try and measure quality of education because what the hell you measure is tricky. The value of art history to a mechanic is indefinable and yet you want to define it in order to measure how well the system is allowing/enabling the mechanic to learn art history.
And that doesn’t even begin to look at the social engineering functions of the education system which are vital to society.
And yet if you want to improve the system you need some way of assessing changes to determine if they have achieved what was intended.Being at school also means learning to be a social being and the skills you need to adjust in a number of different contexts and situations. You simply cannot measure any of that.
Of course you can Gio. You do every day with your own children. You can’t do it cheaply because it takes time to make the assessments and it takes time and effort to put those assessments into terms that can be analysed properly. It's hard but not impossible.
But if you adopt the view that education is a science, you'll also invariably focus on the things you can measure and those things only
Why? What makes you think scientists are only capable of measuring easy things?
There are values, exposure to different cultures and social groups, a sense of community and cooperation, learning extracurricular skills, acquiring a better sense of oneself. Very little of this can be measured, but as a parent you get a pretty good sense of it without too much difficulty really.
You are right about all of this except that you can measure it. Just not easily and certainly not in terms that fit conveniently in an executive summary. It is the very complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about that makes education a science and not a newspaper headline.
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... because it's not true.
Huh? Care to explain Gio? There is a lot of scientific research on education and some quite lengthy degree courses in education. So I'm guessing you have a problem with defining education as a science?
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1) The education system in New Zealand needs to improve.
Not because it isn't already a very good system that produces a well educated population, but because it will always be able to do better. That is the nature of education, we are constantly learning new ways to teach and train our children and those methods will improve the system. And we need to teach new skills and behaviours as society changes.
2) In order to know you have improved the system you need to be able to measure the performance of the education system.
Simply put if you make a change then you need to have some way to measure if the change improved the system.
The whole thing falls apart at this point because defining what is "good performance" is a moving target based on changes in culture and society. Even worse the actual methods to measure performance are pretty much constantly in flux. Not because educators are whimsical fools who can't settle on a measurement system - but instead because they are actually knowledgeable and skilled in their profession and realise that no measurement tool is perfect and hence are constantly trying to improve the measurement tools.
So yes you need some kind of standard to measure performance and no it won't work properly and yes you have to keep trying.
And most importantly if all you want to read is the executive summary then you aren't competent to make any decisions.
What most folks haven't really adapted to yet is the idea that education is a real science in the same way physics and medicine are sciences. Because we all play a part in education of ourselves and our children we assume we are as knowledgeable as the experts. An assumption that is patently false.
It is entirely possible for a parent to become sufficiently skilled to do a better job of educating their child than your average teacher, especially if that child is not average themselves. But that doesn't mean the parent is skilled at building an education system that can improve the skills knowledge and enjoyment of life of the population of children. That requires a whole other level of skill that takes years of training and experience.
That also means that your average person is about as competent to judge the "education system" as they are to judge the methods used to improve soil sustainability in Iowa.
It would be nice if some enterprising journalist took the time and effort to try and bridge that knowledge gap. It is after all something of quite significant interest to most folks.
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It never fails to raises the hairs on my neck, seeing thousands of people move like that in unison. ... somewhere someone has a sexual fetish about it.
It should have a name synchronophilia maybe?
We once got dragged to a college football game in the US and it was as bad as you would expect a sport designed for TV to be when viewed live - But at halftime the marching band came out - wow they were really cool and I'm pretty sure I saw a few guys in raincoats with cameras set up to stream live to the internet.
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Will I be hauled through the streets and battered to death with tire jacks if I say that AC/DC are truly awful?
I used to like the song Dirty deeds, partly because it took me a long time to figure out the lyrics.
Then my wife pointed out that their lead singer is Donald Duck ...
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I tell high school students who want to work in science that English will be very important to their ability to do good science. It would be nice if The Media took a similar approach to maths for journalists.
Simply put, n=12 for a human disease is nothing more than anecdote. It shouldn't get published anywhere and Lancet deserve the smacking they (belatedly) got. There is a really really good reason why clinical trials for new drugs require the use of such large numbers of participants - it's because drawing a conclusion from a small number can lead to deaths.
And yet journalists are happy to draw conclusions from small numbers and they clearly don't care about the deaths to which their actions lead.
I totally understand how hard it is to get the facts right especially if it is outside your field of expertise. And I understand that journalists will almost always be outside their field of expertise. It doesn't make me less grumpy about it.
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So if a parent happened to also be a professional care giver they would be paid for their time by the government (our money) for care of any person except their own child.
A business-like care giver would then logically not care for own child and only spend their time caring for other people's children, allowing other care givers to care for their own child.
The lunacy of this example should make it obvious that all care givers should be paid for their time regardless of their relationship with the person needing care.
BTW this situation is not farfetched as parents often become professional care givers because of their own family experiences.
In the end it simply comes down to choices. Does the government of the day choose to fund this or that. And also the choice of the public (us) to accept that the government's money (our money) is being spent the way we want it to be.
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Next out of the rumor mill... The iWant.
Already exists. However not much use in NZ last time my wife checked.
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"Not designed for business"
This is an interesting point. It argues that business is a driver in and of itself and that it is, in some cases, the most important driver.
But "Business" doesn't exist. It isn't a thing itself. Companies operate to do something, usually to make money. They don't operate to maintain "business". If a tool doesn't work for "business" that doesn't mean the tool doesn't work for the company. The tool may well make the company more efficient or better able to sell at the cost of disrupting "business".
It is really really easy to assume that what is good for the processes and bureaucracy that we call business will also be good for the company. Sometimes that just isn't true.
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choose the tool suited to the task at hand, not because of what it looks like or how it makes you feel.
Actually no.
This and this are both devices for smoothing wood. They are different in many ways and there are times when perhaps the electric version is more efficient.
But there are no times when the joy of using a Lee-Nielsen can be ignored. How it makes you feel when you use it is tremendously important.