1970: Week
2 -- Learning is not a counting noun… so
what should we count?
D Cormier's comments
We had super fun
first week. Contributions were emotional,
exploratory, smart and surprising… what else
could you want from a week? One of the major
themes that I heard during the week and,
interestingly, at the conference where I talked
about it, was measurement. We live in a world
obsessed with measurement. We’ve had many
beautiful examples of ways to visualize what is
happening in Rhizo15. I’ve seen a number of
conversations around ‘success indicators’ and
‘ways in which i feel good about what I’m
doing.’ When we forward the learning subjective,
what does it make possible?
Get out there and count! What
can we measure that isn’t learning? Think about
all the other facets of the human experience…
can we do better? What about all the fancy tools
we’ve seen… can they help? Should we throw it
out all together? Can we help people measure
themselves? Is there a better way of looking at
it? Be theoretical. Be practical… but GRADE ME
Opponents of rhizomes stress
counting eg outcomes. What of
interactions? What can be measured? Come up with
something collective and cool – for
administrators and students. What is worthwhile?
Map the rhizome?
This is such a familiar topic that I think people
found it hard to add much to the normal sorts of
discussion The appeals to visual depictions and
other 'fancy tools' will be discussed later. The
applicability of measurement to areas like the
emotional, or self-measurement might help better
clarify the issues, and the reference to grading
raises an important practical context. But
thinking of that context makes the ethical
emphasis --should we count etc -- pretty well
irrelevant to practice. In practice we do count,
measure and grade,and a better focus might have
been to discuss what is gained and lost by this
ubiquitous practice. Given that most of the active
participants were in education, I was hoping to
see some discussion about how student assessment
was actually accomplished by most of them. In
particular, as I suggested in a rather terse post,
is it possible to really persist with
student-centred, non-judgmental stances in
pedagogy when it comes to summative assessment? If
there is conventional summative assessment, there
is hierarchy, whatever the friendly and impersonal
relations we might pursue in classrooms.
Most practitioners know it is a very dubious
business, I would have thought. Despite all the
paraphernalia of criteria and moderation, for
example, a great deal of subjectivity
remains. Participants might have been asked to
think about this subjectivity -- is it 'good'
subjectivity, or just bias?. Bourdieu's work springs
to mind for me, showing how 'objective' assessment
really reproduces habitual judgements about
'style', bodily hexis, accent and other forms of
social class and gender judgements. That would be
the way to challenge 'objectivity', in my
view, not by referring to some humanist
subjectivity that is being trammeled by
measurement. I cannot think of a more deadly
criticism to make of modern universities than that
they do not assess students objectively.
What might be less well-known is that assessment
policy often assumes a level of quantification
that is not really applicable to assessment data.
Once things have numbers attached, those numbers
can be added, multiplied or divided regardless of
whether this makes sense in the real world. Thus I
can average all the street numbers in my street,
or, if I code male gender as 1 and female as 2, I
can get an average gender. In student assessment,
it might be possible in the real world to think
consistently of 4 or 5 categories of student
answer -- outstanding, very good, good, poor and
fail, say -- but using a percentage scale to grade
student work assumes there are 100 categories.
Percentages then lend a spurious numerical quality
to those grades and it is common to produce
weighted averages, sums, ordinary averages and so
on as if everyone knew what they were percentages
of, so to speak.
Of course, there is an assessment device where the
use of percentage scales does make sense -- the
100 question test, say with 100 multi-choice or
yes/no questions. Those that got the right answers
in all 100 would get 100% , if you only got half
right you would get 50% and so on. Such a system
would be anathema to most UK academics though and
would attract all the usual complaints about
trivializing learning and so on. So instead, they
keep the marking systems based on that sort of
test, preferring to trivialize when they
mark but not when they set the questions!
Using software like EXCEL to do the sums involves
further assumptions, so that if we use it to
create standard deviations of our distributions,
choosing the first option, SDP (routinely done in
my institution), the software produces a result
based on the assumption that the data comes from
at least 100 cases and is a representative sample
of the population for which the SD is being
calculated. This was not usually the case in my
experience. Nevertheless the SD value was solemnly
discussed at Exam Boards, SDs of different course
were compared -- and so on. It became a sign of
virtue to deliver a 'low' SD for some reason.
Those who had been wised up simply removed the
zero scores from the raw data and achieved what
was wanted.
Deleuze and Guattari might be of assistance in
explaining how this sort of objective practice
persists, and what underpins it, if anyone wanted
to pursue the issue through them (I think there
are some perfectly good and rather less convoluted
critiques of positivism which would be just as
good). I think there are two possible lines: (a)
the argument that intensive differences with
ordinal numbers produce extensive empirical
systems which are then 'metricated';
similarly (b) numbers are handy to differentiate
and distribute resources organize people, say
among nomads, but they tend to be captured by the
State, and this is crucial for the development of
capitalism.
Option (a) can be found argued extensively in the
more abstract philosophical works like Deleuze 2004. We are
asked to consider arguments that are very
difficult to summarize but apparently what
we need to consider is ‘the original, intensive
depth which is the matrix of the entire space’
(62). Every
couple and polarity [as in binary distinctions]
‘presupposes bundles and networks, organized
oppositions presuppose radiations in all
directions ’. We need to think of a conception of
time unconstrained by any human figures, like
circular structures, time unfolding itself, and
ceasing 'to be cardinal and becom[ing] ordinal'
(111) -- that is non-metric, intensive time. The
individual subject is understood, wrongly , as
possessing species characteristics as such, but
should be seen instead as result of individuation
consisting of ‘fields of fluid intensive factors’,
producing all the individuated forms , acting as
'pure ground' (190).
Chapter 5 argues that it is intensive processes
that produce extensity, the ordinary metric,
measurable world.
Intensive processes can only be assigned
any dimensions ordinally, [ordinal but not
interval measurement] and in particular are
indivisible.
There is an intensive version of depth and
distance—the latter is more easily grasped as
proximity. Together,
they constitute an intensive spatium, a
field of potentials that produce the real world.
Embryology is now understood as involving a
series of intensive differences between the
fluids which the embryo or egg sac contains,
while thermodynamic systems can also be grasped
intensively, as 'differences of level,
temperature, pressure, tension, potential' (280).
Qualities
are best seen as signs of the equalization of
intensive differences in extensity -- and so on.
If modern physics and biology work with intensive
differences indicated by ordinal numbers, it seem
ludicrous that educationists should insist on
fully metric interval scales in the name of
greater scientificity.
Option (b) should be more accessible to fans of
ATP, and the same sort of philosophical
argument about ordinal numbers is apparent in Chapter 12 on the nomads.
Thus we find that nomads used numbers first, as a
principle of organization: numbers are always connected to war
machines , as a matter of 'organization or
composition'(428); number
acts 'as an inscription written on the earth'.
This is contrasted with the development of 'metric
power', the political use of arithmetic as in
imperial bureaucracies operating taxation and
election systems, and, later, political economy
and the organization of work. Numbers in
capitalism are used 'to gain mastery over matter,
to control its variations and movements' (428).
Metrication becomes a central component of the
all-conquering capitalist axiomatic.
In nomad societies, there is autonomous arithmetical organization
described as 'The Numbering Number' (429) , and it
relates to conditions of possibility and
effectuating the war machine. State armies
require the treatment of large quantities, for
example, but war machines operate with smaller
quantities with autonomous arithmetic, describing
the distribution of something in space, rather
than dividing space itself. 'The number
becomes a subject', it is independent of space:
this happens only with smooth space,
however. Numbers move through this smooth
space. The geometry of smooth space is
'minor, operative' (430), 'a geometry of the
trait'. Nomadic numbers
are movable. They do not just measure.
In nomad culture, the number 'is the ambulant
[camp] fire'. Numbers suggest directions [as
in the flow between two intensities?].
Numbers are not used to organize armies on the
march [rendered by our heroes as 'The numbering
number is rhythmic not harmonic'] but are
important in fighting [think of the old Maoist
slogan 'March divided, fight united'].
Sometimes random numbers are important [with a
quote from Dune on how to walk without
attracting the attention of the Great
Worms!]. Numbers becomes ciphers [that is
nominals, with all their other characteristics
made irrelevant -the ability to subdivide them,
for example]. Ciphering belongs to or
possibly leads to an esprit de corps and
leads to characteristic strategies such as ambush
and diplomacy. When it takes the form of a
war machine, this numerical organization looks
impersonal, but 'it is no crueller than the lineal
or state organization' (431). Numbers are
used to select leaders from lineages and to direct
action against the state apparatus: in this sense,
they are themselves a deterritorializing activity
which cuts across lineal territory. We
always encounter complex and articulated numbers,
rather than some large homogenized quantity.
That is probably enough. D&G might be used as
a sledgehammer to crack the nut within which lies
the argument that it is not numbering itself which
is oppressive, that numbering does not have to be
abandoned to the ludicrous claim that human
subjectivity cannot be measured. Clearly it can be
-- the issue is how and with what numbers? Even
qualitative researchers cannot operate without any
numbers whatsoever: they tend to use 'soft
quantification' in statements like 'most of the
group', 'the most frequently raised issue', 'many
people felt' and so on. Most people use the
same sort of device when they describe their
feelings -- they feel 'better', 'more deeply in
love', 'acutely depressed', 'very unhappy' and so
on. Is it really oppressive to ask them to specify
in a bit more detail what they mean -- rate their
feelings on a 1--10 scale, say, just like doctors
ask us to rate the pain we feel after injury?
If you want to see some real controversy, try some
of the work in sports psychology --devising a
scale for 'motivational climate' say (notes here).
Or, of course, learning styles (notes
here). All sorts of conditions, including
anxiety and all aspects of performance, are
metricated in the form of scales. Are these
particular scales valid? Should they be opposed
to a subjectivism that claims that motivation,
anxiety and so on are entirely subjective (and
welcome, creative?) states. Is there a defence
in that such scales might 'work' nonetheless?
A late post to the group indicated the real
issues. A participant wanted to devise measures of
the participation rates in his online course...
back to menu page
|
|