Intersecting sets

100 cast iron figures along a 3 kilometre stretch of beach. Bloody gorgeous.

See also http://www.icpuzzles.co.uk/gormley/

http://www.andrewmccafferty.co.uk/album.php?album=1143244800atitle_Crosby%20March%202006

After a day spent in the centre of Liverpool, looking a city that had chosen to turn itself into a building site in the cause of luxury apartments, executive offices and retail experiences, it was reassuring to know that it is possible for man to enhance his natural environment as well as desecrate it.

Think sinuous female forms and sumptuous fabrics. Think Klimt. Then think again - yes, the portraits of women were stunning, but there were also a series of beautiful square landscapes and a series of quite shockingly explicit drawings of female nudes. This exhibition really gave a good sense of Klimt’s broader range. 

Klimt may be the headline act, but think of this as more of a festival, where you go for the all round experience. Yes, you get Klimt’s greatest hits…well, some of them…but this is really just part of a broader whole. I came away with a much greater understanding of Klimt’s place in the Viennese Secession of late 19th and early 20th Vienna; the relationship of that movement to the British Arts and Crafts movement and to later developments in art deco; and a series of further names to look out for, such as the architect, Josef Hoffmann.

A few minor criticisms of the curatorship - some of the lighting was very intrusive, with spots and trip lighting reflecting harshly on the glazing of the landscapes, and it was unfortunate that the Beethoven frieze had to be separated out on a separate floor to the main exhibition.

I managed to fit in two visits - one just after the gallery opened when I had the absolute luxury of having the gallery almost to myself…once I had explained to the staff how to swipe my member’s card, and reassured them that I really didn’t need to join the early morning crowd in a crush to see the Beethoven frieze for the second time!

I loved the TV series and loved this book even more. A series of incredible essays about eight great artists and their greatest works. The pictures are expertly put into historical context. The art criticism is straightforward and accessible - every few pages I would be turning back to an illustration and, in light of Schama’s commentary, I would realise that I had seen something new in a painting. That, in fact, is the beauty of the book - whereas on TV, you are at the mercy of a director and judicious use of a pause button, with the book it is possible to spend time really looking at the illustrations and return to them in the light of the text. Schama’s writing is also such that it is still possible to hear his rather distinctive voice when reading.

At heart this is a story about the misunderstandings in a relationship between a father and son, and their doomed attempts to achieve better things in their world.  The story is set in nineteenth century Oxford and there are recognisable reference points in the University’s physical and intellectual landscapes, such as the building of scientific museums and the debate about evolutionary theory, but, like Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, it is Oxford with a fantastical edge . A fairly slight afternoon’s read, enjoyable but not memorable.

A workshop organised as part of an HEA Pathfinder project. The aims of the day were to bring together quality managers and e-learning managers to identify issues in quality management that arise from the use of technology in learning and teaching, and identify ways in which quality management procedures could be made more effective in this regard.

I attended with a particular agenda - we have an integrated approach to learning and teaching at Bath, supporting the use of e-learning where it is pedagogically appropriate to do so, but we are also clear that there is a balance to be struck between an integrated approach and the need to ensure that reflection on and evaluation of e-learning as a particular strand of activity isn’t lost. As part of this, I am in the process of doing summer updates to some of our guidance documents, so I was hoping to use this day be able to underpin existing quality management principles and processes with further practical questions that can guide staff who participate in quality management processes to ask the right sorts of questions (whatever the mode of learning).

The workshop was a good opportunity to think through and discuss the issues outlined above with colleagues in other institutions across fields of expertise - discussing quality management with people from e-learning backgrounds has been helpful in defining my own thinking.

There were aspects of the research as presented that I found were less than well defined and evidenced. In places, e-learning was used interchangeably with distance learning. The use of the term ‘technology enhanced learning’ contains, for me, an a priori assumption of the value of technologies, when surely the very question that the quality management process should ask is ‘does technology enhance learning?’. Similarly, some causal links were implied, e.g. between low survey response rates and distance/e-learners, when the case study presented could also easily have been interpreted as illustrating poor survey practice (e.g. not closing feedback loops). I’m afraid such issues of definition and evidence did present me with something of a barrier in terms of credibility.

One thing that was notably missing from the event was a focus on students and their learning. Overall, there was a focus upon outputs rather than outcomes. I noted that a number of references were made to enhancement of e-learning as if this were an end in itself rather than a means of enriching the student learning experience. Similarly, in reports of group discussions on annual monitoring and periodic review, there was a tendency to concentrate on the processes and their outputs (e.g. reports) rather than the outcomes (e.g. focusing upon the ongoing improvement of the student learning experience). The fundamental question that all quality managers ask in relation to assurance and enhancement is ‘What does this mean for the student learning experience?’ - if we lose sight of that in e-learning or any other mode of learning, then quality management becomes a bureacratic exercise detached from the reality of student and academic experience.

What do I take away from all that? I’m reassured that the fundamental principles of quality management can be applied across e-learning, so I’m back to thinking about the sorts of support and guidance that can help people along their way:

• the periodic review process at Reading seems to place emphasis upon an ongoing collaboration/conversation between services and departments prior to periodic review - so advice can be sought from an institutional e-learning team that can support the self-evaluation by the department and inform the ensuing recommendations. I see this being a useful approach - the idea of establishing a dialogue and shaping the review so that it can be of most use to the department;
• simple questions that might be shaped for guidance documents for approval, monitoring and review of programmes, not necessarily just e-learning, but also part-time study and distance learning: how are you going to deliver this approach? What support is in place for staff and students? What are the resource implications (including staff development - do staff have the necessary skills)?  What is the evidence that this approach is of benefit to students? What is the impact of this approach/its benefit in preference to other modes of learning? How do you know that this is the best way to do it? Why are you proposing/taking this approach? The questions are very open-ended but can elicit a sense of how far a particular proposal/approach has been thought through, what further advice might be needed, and how far assertions are evidence-based.

One of the recent themes of my work-related musings has been trust or rather public mistrust of higher education (see http://intersectingsets.wordpress.com/category/higher-education/). On the most recent edition of Thinking Aloud (2 July), I heard a discussion that helped me to place this on a more theoretical level.

It was a discussion with Onora O’Neill (who gave the 2002 Reith lectures on aspects of trust and mistrust) and Marek Kohn who has just published on trust, self-interest and the common good.  Laurie Taylor asked if trust was disappearing in contemporary society.; what we mean by trust and does monitoring increase paranoia? You can see why my brain made the connection to the subject of trust and the public estimation of universities/higher education.

For O’Neill, capacities for trust and mistrust go hand in hand. We each make judgements to place trust or not. For her, systematic gullibility or suspicion are ‘defective’ because they represent a position of not placing trust or mistrust with intelligence. While an element of mistrust may itself be healthy, she regards a position where suspicion is the default reaction as an unfortunate place to end up.

Kohn comes from an evolutionary position on the human capacity for trust. He argues that as societies develop, traditional norms lose their strength, and we have to develop codes to govern behaviour. Thus corporate/organisational behaviour is being professionalised in a particular way according to particular standards. This abandons trust in favour of a box-ticking approach, checking behaviour aganst criteria.

O’ Neill supports this line in part but takes a more nuanced view. She argues that people are discriminating in their bestowal of trust and mistrust. Even in intimate relationships, they will place trust in people for some things and not others. Thus we are not well served by general questions such as ’do you trust doctors?’. Where this discrimination breaks down is where the background communication is distorted, and here she points to the trend in public and professional life to elaborate systems aimed at demonstrating trustworthiness, but do not support decisions about placing trust - and rather those very systems destroy trust and alienate through box-checking. There is an issue that we cannot have a large and complex society without having the basis on which to make indirect judgements about placing trust (highlighting a related issue about the scale of our institutions) and so we need to think about what evidence we use to support those indirect judgements.

 So what do I take away from all of that? The parallels with the position of universities was striking. For universities to be questioned about what we do is healthy, but it strikes me that our current position on a number of fronts bears the hallmarks of default positions of suspicion and of cultivating trust rather than trustworthiness. Are we concentrating too much about trustworthiness at the expense of cultivaton of trust? It is possible to see how the recent expansion of the university sector and the widening participation agenda have been factors here - as the scale of operation has changed, norms become codified and the possibility of trust based on direct experience lessens.

Taking on O’Neill’s point about discrimination, perhaps I have been formulating my own questions in the wrong way. This is not about saying what can universities (collectively) do to cultivate trust, but rather asking how can we restore/invent the pattern of communication that enables members of the public to discriminate - to exercise their nuanced judgement about placing their trust in particular institutions for particular things (the teaching of X, the research of Y). Ask me how this might me done in practical terms at a later stage!!

As a rhetorical device at the start of the programme, Taylor solicited the reactions of a fictional focus group to the statement ‘Trust Me’, recording the escalating hilarity of that statement coming from a doctor, politician, journalist and a sociologist. If he had asked for a reaction on a more generic basis - with an academic or a university saying ‘trust me’ - how loud would the canned laughter have been?

It’s always interesting to see how media debates about Higher Education develop. For example, a number of recent reports have questioned degree classification, the External Examining system and the impact of internationalisation:

Degree grades arbitrary
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7469396.stm

Degree system ‘rotten’ and ‘unreliable,’ says university watchdog
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/majornews/2185378/Degree-system-’rotten’-and-’unreliable,’-says-university-watchdog.html

The Head of the QAA (aka the ‘university watchdog’) has gone into print to
clarify his position:

Quality: easy to say harder to put into practice Read Peter Williams’
opinion article in the Guardian on academic standards in UK higher
education.
www.qaa.ac.uk/news

And if you want to be really assiduous, you can track back to the source of this latest standards scare - three in a series of innocuous looking reports that summarise the lessons to be learned from the previous cycle of Institutional Audits, highlighting good general standards and some areas for improvement:

Three Outcomes from institutional audit papers published
QAA finds much solid achievement but some worries in assessment and
marking practices, external examiners reports and the rapid growth in the
recruitment of international students to higher education.
www.qaa.ac.uk/news/media/pressReleases/23_June_2008.asp

So, what can individual universities, and the HE sector as a whole, be doing better to develop and reinforce public confidence in our quality and standards?

http://www.love39steps.com/facts.html

The 39 steps - in summary 4 actors play over 130 roles in 100 minutes. It’s spell-bindingly fast, funny and inventive.

On one level it’s a ripping yarn - the story of the unfeasibly handsome Richard Hannay, suspected of murder and on the run from the police. It is also a funny and affectionate homage to the spy and thriller genres. Add in the incredible staging - one actor can typically be playing two characters on stage at any one moment - and the comedic value of playing upon the low-tech nature of the props - and you have a fabulous night at the theatre.

A decent, multi-layered plot - linking New York on 9/11 with the discovery of a body in a storm drain in Brighton, a body in a car in Australia, and a woman in peril. There is mild amusement to be had in working out the connections between the various strands - not exactly demanding in this case as they are fairly heavily signposted.

On one hand, I enjoyed what seemed like a realistic portrayal of ‘real’ police - individuals with moods, habits and backgrounds. However, this portrayal only extends to the ‘real coppers’ - the descriptions of the female boss and the new rival superintendant were the broadest brush pantomime baddies. I was also less than comfortable with the portayal of women - a recurring theme was the description of the female characters in terms of their attractiveness - or often, in terms of Grace’s attraction to them. It could be argued that I’m missing the nuance of the writing here, and that I am being presented with the unvarnished thoughts of an all too human male police officer. However, it jarred uncomfortably.

This scores well on my crime cliche-o-meter. Grace has the Jessica Fletcher/Murder She Wrote touch - wherever he goes at least one of his colleagues is placed in peril or is injured. Helpfully on the cliche front, this doesn’t endear him to his boss.  Just as the icing on the cake, the case of the disappearance of his wife years earlier still haunts his private life.

Okay, not actually about knitting - but this is a review of Wanted, a film where the plot centres on a fraternity of weaver-assassins (!?) whose hits are identified by the Loom of Fate (!!??). The Loom of Fate weaves fabric with imperfections - the imperfections are a binary code identifying the next victim. Needless to say I tried to imagine the Britflick version, where a confraternity of knitters caused carnage based on a dropped stitch or two.

Leaving gaping holes in the fabric, sorry plot, aside, this was a fairly mindless way to enjoy a couple of hours at the cinema. The effects were son of Matrix; Angelina Jolie’s eye make-up possibly weighed more than she did; and the acting honours go to Morgan Freeman, who said the following with a straight face:

Sloan: It a choice, Wesley, that each of us must face: to remain ordinary, pathetic, beat-down, coasting through a miserable existence, like sheep herded by fate, or you can take control of your own destiny and join us, releasing the caged wolf you have inside. Our purpose is to maintain stability in an unstable world - kill one, save a thousand. Within the fabric of this world, every life hangs by a thread. We are that thread - a fraternity of assassins with the weapons of fate. This is the decision that lies before you know: the sheep, or the wolf. The choice is yours.