The Becker Blog

Although it is not new, I came across this today.
Corrosive Leadership (Or Bullying by Another Name): A Corollary of the Corporatised Academy?
by Margaret Thornton

The literature reveals that the incidence of bullying is increasing in corporate workplaces everywhere. While the data is scant, it suggests that bullying in universities is also on the increase. Interviews with Australian academics support this finding. It is argued that the trend has to be understood in light of the pathology of corporatisation, which is designed to make academics do more with less. The focus on productivity parallels the harassment to which workers in the private sector may be subjected in the hope that they will work harder and maximise profits. Avenues of redress are considered which show that dignitary harms remain inchoate as legal harms. While common law and anti-discrimination legislation regimes may occasionally offer a remedy to targeted individuals, it is averred that these avenues are incapable of addressing the causative political factors that induce corrosive leadership.

There were a few things that particularly resonated with me – sadly, I have first hand experience. It took them five years, but I finally had to leave a job I LOVED to save myself. From what I hear, if anything, the place I left is getting worse. Read the rest of this entry »

What is a Game?

Games are classified in many different ways and even after going round and round repeatedly, we still can’t seem to agree on what a game actually is.

Here are a few examples:

Some examples of casual (or mini) games: (posted by Clark Aldrich on seriousgames May 20, 2007

> Tips on Tap: http://www.webcourseworks.com/tipsontap/
> Binary numbers: http://forums.cisco.com/CertCom/game/binary_game.swf
> Other Cisco games: http://www.medcalf.com/games/cisco_games/

“Tips on Tap” isn’t so much a game as a contest – here the object is to see how quickly you can click the right things in the right order. The addition of scores and time constraints seems to make this into a game. I tried it – un-doing an action is difficult and frustrating.

The “Binary Game” isn’t really a game at all, in my opinion. It is an exercise – in fact, it is a worksheet. True, there is a score, and the challenge is to see how fast you can solve the problems. It appears that the introduction of scores and time keeping allows this electronic worksheet to be viewed as a game.

The “Cisco Games”, while posing more complex (and possibly interesting) problems suffer from functional complexity as well. I did not find the gameplay intuitive. Of the three groups, I’d consider these the most game-like, although I am currently at a loss to explain exactly why. If we remove the time pressure what do we have left? In many cases, what we have left is a puzzle. If we remove the score-keeping, it appears to stop being a game.

[My name is Katrin. And I am a scientist. ]

Note:  no disrespect is meant to any of the real 12-step programs.

1.        We admitted we were powerless over science—that our lives had become uncorrelated.

2.        Came to believe that an authority better published than ourselves could restore us to our senses.

3.        Made a decision to turn our data and our labs over to the care of professors emeriti /as we understood them/.

4.        Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our notes.

5.        Admitted to social constructivists, to ourselves, and to principal investigators of related projects the exact nature of our data.

6.        Were entirely ready to have journal referees remove all these defects of our submitted papers.

7.        Humbly asked those better funded than us to remove our shortcomings.

8.        Made a list of all persons we had corrected, and became willing to cite them in all our papers.

9.        Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure their annual reports.

10.    Continued to take personal inventory and when we were found out promptly corrected it.

11.    Sought through analysis and verification to improve our conscious contact with /real data/, asking only for validity in our sample and the power to publish it.

12.  Having had a rude awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to department heads and granting agencies, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I’ve been struggling with my youngest son’s school of late.

Again.

Still.

I’ve been struggling with schools, on and off since my oldest first started school – seventeen years ago in 1990. My kids are bright, creative, and independent. Schools like compliance.
I’ve also been struggling with university, on and off for thirty years. As they say, “Same S*%T, different pile.” I’m independent too, though it turns out my biggest ‘problem’ is that I have integrity. Universities like compliance too.

We have a new principal.

Nothing changes.

Almost every teacher will say they want kids to become independent and think for themselves.

What teachers really want is for kids to independently agree with them. And to stop bothering them. They especially want parents to leave the ‘teaching’ up to them.

Teachers don’t want bright kids who question authority and who expect their teachers to be willing earn their respect. Teachers also don’t want kids or parents who call them on their ‘white’ lies. [I happen to think there ARE no white lies. Only lies.]

Thanks to the mini-feed from FaceBook, I saw this Blog from Mark Guzdial. It is a MUST READ for anyone concerned about the enrollment malaise the computer science departments continue to face.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKUURHQRKBJYSU

Here’s an excerpt: “Colin Potts, a professor here at Georgia Tech who works in software engineering, has said that the goal of software engineering is to remove all the fun out of programming. When I mention that quote to other software engineering researchers, they often agree with it. The goal of software engineering is for the creativity to appear in the design, and the actual programming should be akin to construction—a simple activity of putting together the pieces.

It seems to me that the cause of the student’s disdain for “programming” and for the decline in CS enrollment lies there. As civil engineers need armies of construction workers to build their designs, and as mechanical engineers use armies of factory workers to produce their designs, so do software engineers use armies of programmers or coders, people who are explicitly not software engineers, to produce their designs. Few students go to college to become construction or factory workers. Why should it be surprising, then, that few Western students want to go to college to be the Information Age equivalent workers?

Education historians and theorists have argued that the current US educational system was designed to produce factory workers. They say that we need to revise our system to produce knowledge workers for the future. I propose that our current undergraduate computer science programs are designed to produce coders for software engineers. We spend our time, especially in the early classes, focusing on coding standards and writing good, clean code. Rarely, and certainly not until the upper division courses, do we emphasize creativity and novel problem-solving techniques. That meshes with good engineering practice. That does not necessarily mesh with good science practice.”

Brilliant.