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Buzzwords Are Stifling Innovation In College Teaching
jyosim writes: Tech marketers brag about the world-changing impact of 'adaptive learning' and other products, but they all mean something different by the buzzword. On the other side of it, professors are notoriously skeptical of companies, and crave precise language. Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, says the buzzwords have thus become a major obstacle to improving teaching on campuses, since these tribes (professor and ed-tech vendors) must work together.
The fascination (bordering on obsession) with abstraction has extended to language use in tech. Euphemisms, abbreviations, and jargon are rife.
In education, there is no room for buzzwords. They want to know exactly what the meaning of your buzzword is so they can use that, the meaning, instead of your buzzword. Think of it as refusing to use contractions in proper speech.
Here's a buzzword with no common meaning: Online classes.
Does it mean:
The class meets in a traditional classroom, but assignments are submitted electronically?
There is no class meeting? Only assignments are posted online. There is no lecture and students work independently?
The class meets online in realtime?
Only a recording of the classroom lecture is available online?
FWIW, I am a community college prof and have seen ALL of the above describe "online" learning.
This faculty comment pretty much sums it up:
"Curiosity, imagination and critical understanding are reduced to rodent responses in an academic Skinner-box."
Sadly, this might acually be better than sitting in a 300-student lecture taught by an adjunct.
I work at a startup that keeps advertising that we use "big data"
I'm 100% certain 6GB of data does not qualify as "big data"
Let alone that about 10% of the data is bad.
(But I'm not the one trying to hawk this snake oil to investors.)
It's not something that just "capitalists" do; spinning and BS are part of every known organization. We saw it in the Soviet Union also. Humans, especially those who strive to move up in an organization or power structure, are overall aggressive and selfish, and playing games with language is part of this process.
Even if students don't want to play language games themselves, they should be exposed to spin and understand its usage and techniques in order to navigate the real world.
Table-ized A.I.
The problems occur when you use those specific terms with NON-insiders.
A doctor should simply say arm bone, or at least "ulna - a bone in your arm", when talking to a patient.
Similarly, a competent businessman will strip out the specialized terms when talking to specific people. If you are selling software to a business, do NOT say 'enterprise', say business.
The only reason insiders use insider terms with outsiders are:
To hide something - a lie, incompetence, overcharges, etc.
Because they themselves don't understand the term and are reading from a script.
They are REALLY BAD AT COMMUNICATING.
For example, When I talk to my father, I don't talk about object oriented programming, I talk about re-useable software parts.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I took web development in college. I was shown microsoft .net, dreamweaver, photoshop, virtual machine, ms office suite etc.
I use NONE of these tools as a web developer. I use nodejs, I type my script by hand, I use svg or css vs images when possible, gimp is a great editor, virtual box does exactly the same thing, ms office suite can kiss my ass I don't use a single part of it for anything at all.
My education could have targeted the best tools to rapidly put together a high functioning website. What I got for my 2000 dollars per semester was apparently to purchase an advertising campaign from software companies.
Colleges and these people selling stuff should not be going hand in hand because it screws the students by taking their money then instead of giving them quality they just get a long dragging advertisement campaign and since the college gets paid it really doesn't care once your out the door.
You get defrauded students when you put these two types together.
There's always a lot of buzz about tailoring learning to each individual and a lot of the literature suggests that it isn't terribly effective in that while students might enjoy the lesson more, but they won't actually learn more. What I'm more worried about is that if you don't expose students to other ways of processing information and learning that they'll become unwilling to try acquiring any knowledge that can't be presented to them exactly as they would like it.
Instead, we should be teaching students how they can more effectively process information provided to them even when it's not in their preferred style. Otherwise they'll eventually end up in the real world and be unequipped to handle things as they find themselves in an environment that doesn't really give a damn about what they prefer and isn't going to waste time coddling them.
I'm more worried about stifling the students and throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at various learning environments or other projects that don't actually improve education when they money could be spent on hiring more instructors or tutors so that they can have more one-on-one time with students or provide additional instruction as necessary.
FTFY
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Marketing terms, not substantiated by evidence, used by corporations and entities advancing their own agenda (profits), trying to control the conversation about education (again, without evidence).
This is self serving corporations either selling a product, or trying to control the direction of education for their own ends.
This has nothing to do with "teaching" or "education" or anything which is founded in evidence.
Which means you should treat this for what it actually is: marketing puffery by people who stand to gain something.
This is about as nuanced and insightful as when HR wants a checkbox of tech terms they don't understand, and it gets used to say "anybody with this checkbox can do this job". It's to allow incompetent people to manage task-based workers with no understanding of the task.
Which is great if what you really want is cheap, outsourced labor instead of an actual educated workforce.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The actualization of a tribes core concepts isnt synergizeable without touchstone verbage or as you call it "buzz words." For example, just last fiscal i was strategizing with a subject matter expect to disintermediate out-of-the-box solutions through our learning teams. She actualized that clicks-and-mortar partnerships should streamline frictionless functionalities toward the change agent, and I maintained mesh magnetic communities would then incentivize real-time niches for the students or as we know them, learning partners.
its all very simple really and at the end of the day, the "student" comes first when taking classes like Bird-Dog 2.0 convergence of the disintermediate intuitive web-readiness burning platform.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Not just higher education. There are a lot of complex problem domains out there and simple buzzword-answers don't model the situation well enough to be useful. That being said, there is a strong human desire for simple solutions. Hence you can always find somebody in management who will believe the sales pitch. It's always somebody in management not necessarily because they are mentally inferior but because they aren't dealing directly enough with the underlying problems and, therefore, aren't constantly reminded of the complexity in the same way as those engaging in active contribution.
Tech marketer's word systems are causing a paradigm shift in the industry.
All Fields use acronyms, buzzwords, and other specialized or specific language. Higher Education itself does this too, I'm not sure why the problem?
I don't know how many universities I have worked at that have: Internationally-renowned, innovative, real-world, collaborative, state-of-the-Art, adaptive approaches with small classes, a seamless integration and an Immersive experience at this Premier Institution.
Part of buzzwords intelligence is knowing when they are buzzwords, and reacting accordingly. Sometimes you need a buzzword to connect, sometimes you need to put it aside and come up with something fresh (although then this shortly becomes the new buzzword).
is that "these tribes (professor and ed-tech vendors) must work together". Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of ed-tech innovations are half-baked me-too schemes with no proven impact on knowledge transfer. The few systems that have serious thought and input from educators behind them can spread by word of mouth. Teaching is enjoyable but hard work and relatively expensive to provide at a high level of qualilty. Too bad.
Anyone who has spent any time at all in a Graduate program knows that academics is rife with buzzwords as well. This is particularly true in liberal arts and the so-called `soft sciences', but you can find plenty of examples in engineering & CS as well. What are words like `Hadoop', `Scala' and `Wavelets' if not buzzwords? No you say? They refer to specific technologies and processes you say? Guess what, that is what the marketer says about phrases they use as well.
Every professor dreams of when the acronym given to his/her pet algorithm or idea becomes a standard buzzword.
When I was in grad school, I used to play a `count the buzzwords' game with my lab-mates. We'd pick a paper at random from the latest IEEE transactions and count the buzzwords, loser was the one who picked the paper with the most buzzwords and had to buy lunch that day.
If a sales person comes in speaking BS to an enginner they do not make a sale.
So professors are the same?
The sales people should learn English instead of Buzzword BS.
They are the ones tring to convince people the have something worth buying.
An article about buzzwords calls professors and tech vendors "tribes?" How chic.
What makes you think that professors must work with ed-tech vendors? Professors got along for hundreds of years without ed-tech vendors. Ed-tech vendors will starve without professors. I only see one "tribe" here who "must" work with anyone else; the established and advanced tribe can do just fine without their savage and exploitative vendor neighbors.
I don't buy the idea that imprecise buzzwords are the root of this problem. It seems an overall lack of understanding of new teaching methods is the problem.
The first half of the article talks about how people don't know what these buzzwords mean. But the second half doesn't even mention buzzwords again. It talks about a societal gap between current educators and education innovators. This is a problem I can agree is slowing adoption.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
example:
UCS=Unified Communication System
UCS=Unified Computing System
Both are very Strong Tech. but could only be understood in CONTEXT.
for example
Having a conversation about a phone issue could sound similiar to a conversation about a compute node that has just been installed.
Thus, the context of the conversation (communication versus computational) would have to be carefuly monitored.
Imaging having a conversation of My UCS cluster wont talk to my UCS infrastructure inhibiting my ability to receive voice mails in a timely manner..
Try to peice that one together..
Uses "impact" as a replacement for effect in the same sentence.
I might agree that most of the problem isn't buzzwords, but it's also not lack of understanding. It's skepticism. These "new teaching methods" are unproven, and lots of them are starting to show the cracks in their shiny. Just yesterday we had a story about Udacity not living up to expectations.
There's an interesting statistic that shows computer science professors are the least likely to use learning software like Blackboard. Why? It's not because they don't understand the technology. It's because they've already integrated web pages, email and other technology into their teaching, and are justifiably skeptical about the push-button "solutions" like Blackboard.
Professional knowledge in a subject is slightly more complicated than a buzzword can describe. But we seem to be evolving a culture of cite-reference-and-we're-done (it's good to cite references, but you're not done). Albeit we do have the cheap storage and vast information retention capabilities to the masses, but even major comedy productions go the route of, "Hey remember this other funny thing?" and that's a joke now (this describes the entire reddit culture as well, person A ("x was on y") => person B ("haha" || "booo" || "cool" || "kill yourself")). So yea, we need to realize learning everything about one thing isn't easy, it sucks, but if you want to, you need to climb the hill, oh and here are some bite size pieces of cool information to get you motivated. Unless we build genetic knowledge like insects, then yea it would be totally easy.
I might agree that most of the problem isn't buzzwords, but it's also not lack of understanding. It's skepticism. These "new teaching methods" are unproven, and lots of them are starting to show the cracks in their shiny. Just yesterday we had a story about Udacity not living up to expectations.
I agree that skepticism is the root of the problem, but education can also help with that. For one, most people feel that if 90% of educational innovations provide no benefit, that is a failure of the industry. But in my opinion, if even 1% of these innovations are effective and scale-able, it will be revolutionary. As long as the other 99% at least don't hurt education.
The education industry could learn a lot from the angel / VC funding industry. You only need 1-10% successes to make the 90-99% failures worth it as long as the success are sufficiently scale-able. There are 50 million new students (in the US alone) each decade who can take advantage of even the smallest innovation that comes from companies trying to change things.
Instead most educators, and skeptics in other industries, focus on the 90+% of attempts that fail. Citing some story about Udacity failing would be similar to citing the failure of Friendster when claiming no social media company could ever be successful. Stopping people from thinking this way is one way education can solve this rampant skepticism of educational innovation.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Anyone who works in higher ed is well versed in it. Entire careers have been made from speaking the language fluently. Posting anonymous to preserve mods.
There's an interesting statistic that shows computer science professors are the least likely to use learning software like Blackboard. Why? It's not because they don't understand the technology. It's because they've already integrated web pages, email and other technology into their teaching, and are justifiably skeptical about the push-button "solutions" like Blackboard.
This explanation for why they don't use push-button solutions like Blackboard is what gives me hope for finding new education innovations. Because they are still integrating technology, they are just doing it on a more personal and customize-able level. Current innovations mostly go for low hanging fruit, which usually involve simplistic and push-button solutions. But as adoption grows and skepticism subsides, innovations will become far more specific. That takes more funding and a higher chance of failure, so the industry just isn't that mature yet.
Or at least that is my hope.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The education industry could learn a lot from the angel / VC funding industry. You only need 1-10% successes to make the 90-99% failures worth it as long as the success are sufficiently scale-able.
Try telling that to the students who have had an appalling low standard of education because of the 90-99% failure rate of all the new things they had tried on them. Education involves humans and so experimenting with it is somewhere in between the venture capital model you mention and medical science. Nobody would accept a 90-99% failure rate for medical innovations which get as far as being tried on patients!
Clearly education is not life-critical as medicine can be but, unlike medicine, there is really no way to determine whether a new technique is effective other than to try it on students. So while education is more risk tolerant than medicine it is nowhere near as risk tolerant as VC industry funding.
I must say that it makes me want to go rabid when i talk to some recent college or high school graduates. They have absolutely no clue as to the degree to which they are profoundly uneducated. Try this simple question : If I mention to you a triangle with the long side being five inches and one side being three inches and the other four inches what subject am I likely talking about and what name would you associate with such a triangle. Now that question would be fair of any B grade ninth grade student. But chances are you won't see most college grads being able to deal with the question. Then ask them what the area of the 3,4,5 triangle is. They should be able to answer quickly without using a pencil or calculator. If they are English speaking ask them about Shakespeare's opinions of Samuel Johnson and watch the comedy that follows being that they were not contemporaries with Shakespeare passing before Johnson was cogent. And then if you really want to suffer some will not be able to tell you what position George Washington filled during the CIVIL WAR.
Buzzwords are almost a universal way to prove and demonstrate that you don't understand anything! For instance ask someone who uses the word "Big Data", how much data that means as a size in GB, TB, PB etc... or ask someone to explain "The Cloud". All of these words are stand ins for real concepts that are hard to grasp and hard to learn, so instead of educating yourself and sounding like a professional, you can use words like "Big Data", "Cloud" and countless others, sound intelligent but have no clue what you're talking about. When ever I interview someone for a job at my company, one BIG strike they get against them is for using a buzzword without being about to explain what it means.
Bullshiters need to stop bullshitting and people with genuine experts at hand needs to use their expertice to tell if new buzzwords are bullshit or not (they usually are, most buzz it created by bullshiting).
This discussion is sure disruptive.
That only works if the instructor specifically makes a point of ridiculing the use of the specific buzzwords.
Part of the trouble that I've observed in groups is that at least a slight majority of the group will go with the slickest, most optimistic presentation or performer and will be taken-in to agree even when they either have no understanding of what's going on. These same people will often accept buzzwords despite there already being generic terms for what's described. Worse, after drinking the kool-aid these people get upset if one attempts to correct the misconception.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The worst thing is that these people probably most often get to be influential managers later, because they speak the language.
-- Cheers!
PHB's gotta learn PHB-ing somewhere.