Tryangulation

Is anyone doing the math?

I try not to dwell on bad news here too much, but scrolling through the Turkish news headlines from the weekend was like reading a nightmare of a math exam on fractions, ratios, and irrational numbers.

Haberlerin Türkçesini okumak isterseniz başlıklar üzerine tıklayın.

15:2000
15: The number of free places offered by a test prep center in Midyat in Southeastern Turkey. Three students from each of five different levels were to be awarded a free ride to the dreaded university entrance exam and a glimmer of hope.
2000: The number of students who applied.

150/1000
Just an hour's drive away from Midyat, in Batman, the police chief told children to come back the next day for free shoes. The police, with the support of local businessmen, were prepared to distribute 150 pairs of shoes. 1000 children showed up.  We commend them for their sensitivity and generosity, but suggest that next time they take an introductory statistics course first.

4 786 < 40 000 < n
The National Ministry of Education held placement exams for teacher applicants, with plans to allocate 4786 new teachers. Nearly 40,000 applied. The real question is this: Next year is the first year of the new 4-year high school curriculum (it used to be 3-years). Next year for the first time every high school in the country will have one more grade. We've known this was coming for four years, but to my knowledge there has not been a corresponding 33% increase in teacher training and recruiting (and would even 40K have been enough?).  I can say with a little more certainty that there has not been a nationwide increase of 33%  in physical space. I think someone misplaced a decimal.

2008 - 2000 = 32
A subcommittee of the Turkish parliament directed inspections of the shipyards at Tuzla on the Sea of Marmara. Eighteen have died in accidents at the docks in the last eight months; 32 since 2000. The inspectors found hundreds of violations of regulations concerning safety, fiscal reporting, employment of foreigners, and provision of social security. Maybe these perpetrators of the human condition could benefit from IB math practice exams that require you to "Show your work."

Are you ready to check your answers?

Sorry. The traditional solutions no longer work. You'll have to find new ones.

Happy birthday, Ewan!

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies with in us."

            -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of my favorite education bloggers just celebrated his 30th birthday. He says he won't be depressed about it, so I guess I won't be depressed either, and won't try to do any comparisons. Ewan made a quick list of milestones with accompanying ICT references, kind of like what I did a couple weeks ago on the event of my arrival in Turkey, which reminds me again of how long, and how short, life can be.

Ewan, the quote is a little birthday present from me, and a reminder to us both that it's not so much what we know as who we become.

My how they've grown!

Getting trumped by your students can be a good thing.

Our debate club is organizing an international youth summit fashioned after the Model UN. The three students from the steering committee met with me briefly today, and we got into a debate whether they should use PBWiki or Wikispaces or Basecamp to organize tasks, project communications and other management issues. These students have been using wikis and Basecamp for a couple years now (since they were 15), and it warmed my heart to have such a constructive conversation about choosing a tool according to the job at hand.

While I was away some changes in our accounting department resulted in our Basecamp account being frozen for nonpayment.  Soon after I got back I was bombarded with pleas to get it turned on again. I got the payments straightened out, and five days ago it was up and running again. In that time 17 students (and zero) teachers have logged on and gotten back to work.

So I thought that Basecamp was the best tool for their needs with the youth summit. They didn't agree. They're running the show and proved that they knew better than I what they wanted to do so, as an advocate of project based learning and authentic work and all that stuff, I had to acquiesce to their decision.

In other words, I lost the argument.

So here's three gold stars for I, B and A. And thanks for later telling me that I'm cool. I feel all better now.

Don't be afraid to leave something out

The first rule of listener-friendly PowerPoint use: please don't tell me everything you know.

There's been a lot already on the Web by professional communicators about the use and misuse of PowerPoint (links at the end). The main point is that cluttered slides with lots of images and lots of words inhibit learning.

Now we have a Harvard scientist telling us what we already knew: if you put less in your PowerPoint presentation, your audience will remember more. Stephen M. Kosslyn, psychology professor at Harvard University, explains how to apply cognitive science to your slides, emphasizing visual depictions of information and basic rules of simplicity (read more here).

Before coming to this school, I worked in a public sector agency where we regularly gave briefings to foreign visitors. The briefings were prepared by the public relations team and were designed out of a fear of omission (the darker side of the obsession to impress). Each year the briefing grew longer and more complicated as more projects and other accomplishments demanded inclusion in the presentation.

By the time I left that job, the briefing (we should have called it an elongating) took more than two hours and had hundreds of narcotic slides, many of them full of large numbers, others with nearly a hundred words in miniscule, illegible type. At the end we had aides ready with plenty of Turkish coffee to revive the victims, but it was too late. When the presenter would ask for questions, there was usually just dazed silence, followed by acute memory loss (what did slide #87 say again?).

The fear of omission is cultivated early. When students are required to give a presentation or write a research paper, they feel pressure to demonstrate how much they know about the topic. This feeds the mistaken logic that says that a fact not presented is a fact not known. The purpose of the presentation is focused on the presenter and a motivation to impress or to avoid embarrassment. On the other hand, a well designed presentation focuses on the listener and how she can be enlightened or persuaded. A presentation that is just for the presenter is a waste of everybody's time.

We let students show off their ability to embed animations and create whizbang slide transitions, when we should be teaching them how to communicate. We need to shift the emphasis from displaying information to enabling learning, with an emphasis that is less about what goes on the screen and more about what goes into --and stays in-- the listener's brain.

Here are some more resources for more effective presentations:

Seth Godin: Really bad PowerPoint

Tryangulation: Put your PowerPoint on a diet

a del.icio.us potpourri of links by me

photo by zen

Higher education official proposes an alternative to the university entrance exam. 

(English summary follows)

Radikal'dan: ÖSYM Başkanı Prof. Dr. Yarımağan, üniversiteye giriş için tek sınav yerine 12 temel dersten birer sınav yapılmasını önerdi. Üniversitelerin hangi ders sınavından öğrenci alacağına kendilerinin karar vermesi gerektiğini söyledi... Ortaöğretimi bitiren öğrenci sayısında hızlı artış var ama yükseköğretim kontenjanlarında hiç yükselme yok. Türkiye, her yere sınavla girilen ve sadece çoktan seçmeli sınav yapan tek ülke kaldı.

Haberin devamı: Radikal-çevrimiçi / Türkiye / ÖSS yerine 12 dersten sınav

The President of the Center for Student Selection and Placement (ÖSYM), under the administration of the Turkish Board of Higher Education, has proposed an alternative to the notorious universal university entrance exam, the ÖSS.

The proposal is to do away with the ÖSS, and instead institute yearly comprehensive exams. Universities would have the choice of which subject exams to use in their accepance criteria. For example, a university's construction engineering program may use the scores from physics, Turkish, and mathematics for selecting students. Exams will include a variety of question types, even (gasp!) open ended questions.

I've written previously about this exam (most recently here), a 195-minute multiple choice exam that decides everything about a student's eligibility for state universities and majors. Teenagers' lives revolve around test preparation (even in their high school classes). Since the high school-age population continues to grow, but the number of university slots continues to stay the same, the exam is competitive in the extreme. Sad, since the exam is good for little more than measuring students' ability to take tests.

Doing away with the ÖSS is a step in the right direction, but replacing it with multiple annual exams for twelve years could be a step back, since we can safely assume that classroom education will still be focused on exam performance.  It looks like another step toward European harmonization is the testing to death of students before they get into university.

Many years and a few terabytes later

This weekend marks 10 years since I first set foot in Turkey. Funny thing, as I started doing the math, I realized that I have several converging milestones that illustrate some lessons about knowledge and learning, with a little help from a computer.

If you want to skip the history and jump ahead to the moralizing, just scroll down.

1973. Thirty-five years ago I took a computing class in high school. It was basically a mash-up of binary code, the mechanics of card punching, and the virtue of cards as a sortable database record (although I don't recall learning the 'd' word then). Our final exam had problems like converting between binary and decimal numbers, and reading the alphanumeric codes in cards like the one in the photo. Of course we students never actually touched a computer. Let's hope that today all teachers can see what went wrong. I still got an A, but I had a lot more fun in my music independent study and hanging out with friends in my Rambler.

1982-83. Twenty-five years ago I used an Osborne portable computer-in-a-suitcase to work on indigenous language publications in Guatemala. It looked like something out of an old spy movie, with the world's smallest green screen, and couldn't handle more than one keystroke per second. I originally went to Guatemala to get away from a problem (even though the civil war in Guate was at its peak!), but while there I had to face up to some things inside me, and in a manner of speaking start over and move on.

1988. Nearly 20 years ago, in Guatemala again, I got my first Toshiba laptop. It had two 3.5 inch floppy drives: drive A to run your programs, and drive B to hold your data disk. That same spring I nearly died of typhoid fever and malaria (at the same time), which resulted in me learning a lot about the fecal-oral vector and the most effective ways to kill flies (my record was 72 in 10 minutes).

1998. After finishing my masters in development administration in '96, we were back in Houston using our Packard-Bell PC for international job searching. I was designing CVs with graphics on WordPerfect for Windows 95, and attaching them in email to people I was meeting on usenet and --get this-- the World Wide Web, which can never be fully appreciated by anyone who has not used Gopher, a system for online information retrieval that closely resembled climbing in and out of very deep abandoned wells. 

Thanks to the web I networked, followed up on leads, and finally made contact with a friend of a friend who offered to set up some appointments for me in Ankara. We met up ten years ago this week. My appointments led to other contacts, and after I returned to the US I was able to use email to keep in touch with those new contacts. A year later one of them wrote to offer me a job and the rest is, well, history.

That was the short version of my digital odyssey. Through the years I also learned a few languages, a few musical instruments, and I even learned how to teach. What's better, though, is that I learned how to learn: how to work up a guitar piece, how to form linguistic questions in a new language, how to do field research, how to read the look in my wife's eyes.

Here's my take away after 35 years at the keyboard of life:

Knowledge is a means towards doing what you really want. You don't learn databases just because they're there. You learn them because you're data's in a mess and you can't see the patterns. You learn MS Word because you need to update your resume. You learn Spanish because you want to sing like Enrique. You learn music remixing because you want to impress your girlfriend. The corollary to this is:

If you already have what you want, learning slows down. Learning is the most basic form of change management: no change, no learning; no learning, no change.

Latin America was my gig for nearly 20 years, and living there was practically second nature. Turkey is so different that after we came here we had to learn an incredible amount from scratch, including how to live together as a family in our new environment. But here we are, living here for eight years and doing a lot better than just getting by. That's because:

The more stuff you learn, the more you (should) learn about yourself. Which, by the way, is not a new idea. You really get to know yourself when you're uncomfortable (that is, experiencing change). You find out what motivates you and what doesn't. You reconsider the goals you set for yourself back when you were on easy street. You figure out that what matters most is not what you know, but who you are. So...

Don't act your age. I was 45 when I learned Turkish. I was nearly 50 when I learned how to blog, wiki, and Skype. Now I am enjoying these new skills and sharing them with others. Good thing, because our kids in the US are tethered to Facebook and use email, like, never (it's sooo 1999). I have to confess that I've had a lot of personal trials in the last year, and I felt the wear and tear of the last 30 years catching up with me. So now I'm learning that you need others near you to help you wake up again and undo some of that maturity (this is why God created kids). Get renewed, like it says in these lines from Stephen Dunn.  And speaking of the butterfly effect...

It's all connected. My first trip to Guatemala in 1976 was led by my human geography professor. He's one of the world's best teachers, and we still keep in touch. In fact, I wonder if the personal bond is both cause and result of our collaborative exploring. I loved his class and the study trip, but by far the biggest lesson was that geology, topography, climate, social organization, technology, were all connected. Everywhere. Sociology, biology, psychology. Body, mind and soul. It's all there, and they're all in us.

When studying linguistics I learned about splitters and joiners. Some people are better at seeing contrasts (splitters) and some are better at seeing similarities (joiners). I am definitely a joiner, building bridges of comparison, analogy and metaphor, from what I know into what I am learning. I think that has made life a lot more fun. Which is a good thing, because...

It never ends.

When the test is all that matters

Wes Fryer's post A contrary view of education and NCLB is a well articulated rebuttal to President Bush's remarks on education in his State of the Union address this week.  I left a comment on Wes' post that contrasts the education systems here and there, in particular the emphasis on testing. ,I decided to pull together a few old posts in case people in the US wanted a little more information about the university entrance exams (ÖSS) here. Call it a distant mirror.

TED establishes foundation for a new university (Feb 2007).  Far more university candidates than openings causes severe competition in the ÖSS, so that fractions of points can make or break a student's chance for the school or major of her choice.

Education news from Turkey (Dec 2006). Money spent on the entrance exam and in exam prep courses is nearly one-third of the amount spent on higher education itself, and that more and more high school students see secondary education as a vehicle to exam success rather than as education per se.

(Translated from Turkish) The value of a life gains 15 minutes (May 2006). Research by the Turkish Education Association shows that in the last nine years, the number of private ÖSS exam prep institutes increased by 154%, and the number of students enrolled in these institutes increased by 198%. Of these students, 43.7% considered the quality of instruction at these institutes to be acceptible, and 48.1% of students said that passing the ÖSS without attending one of these institutes would be very difficult.