Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Kevin putting it out there

  • Wolfe on Darwin and Chomsky

    I thought I had decided not to read Tom Wolfe’s latest The Kingdom of Speech, I had read a few reviews and remembered his declining quality since A Man in Full. I have read everything of Wolfe’s except The Painted Word, and found Back to Blood a warmed over Bonfire of the Vanities in Miami, following the same pattern as Man in Full and Charlotte Simmons. I liked his fiction better than his non-fiction. So I was surprised when it showed up in my Kindle. Ah, I had pre-ordered it before reading reviews. Spring break, why not read it? It IS about linguistics, my field.

    I was pleasantly surprised. It was a wonderful 192-page rant. He is a great storyteller and a master wordsmith. His arguments sound really really plausible It is also a great lesson in critical thinking, about how a great author can get you to see one side of an argument.

    Kingdom of Speech (KoS) has a style that harkens back to Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, but without the energy. In the 70’s he lampooned the liberal elite and their infatuation with the Black Panthers. In KoS he tries something more dangerous, lampooning Chomsky the linguist by way of Darwin and ultimately science as a whole. He doesn’t get away with it, but it is still an entertaining read. And he makes it all sound so plausible.

    Wolfe starts with Darwin, and tells a story of another theorist, or scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, who, according to Wolfe, beat Darwin and had solid evidence to boot, of the theory of evolution. Wallace was the outsider who collected evidence (a bug-catcher) in the Amazon Basin and Malaysia, and presented it scientifically as a theory. Darwin, who spent 20 years in an armchair came up with the theory only after seeing Wallace’s manuscript of an article, racing to publish at the same time with help from insiders. Then he tells a parallel story of Chomsky, tying the two together with the idea that speech is the only thing that makes man different from other animals.

    Chomsky in this telling, is the armchair theorist and his Wallace is Daniel Everett, a linguist who studied a small tribe in the Amazon. Like Wallace, Everett used real data to support his claims, but was dismissed by Chomsky who was better connected. Chomsky rode the wave of scientificalization (great word) of the 50’s, but has this idea of a biological seat of language in the brain that is unrealistic, only changing the theory when pressured by other linguists or anthropologists.  An example:

    Thanks to Everett, linguists were beginning to breathe life into the words of the anti-Chomskyans of the twentieth century who had been written off as cranks or contrarians, such as Larry Trask, a linguist at England’s University of Sussex. In 2003, the year after Chomsky announced his Law of Recursion, Trask said in an interview, “I have no time for Chomskyan theorizing and its associated dogmas of ‘universal grammar.’ This stuff is so much half-baked twaddle, more akin to a religious movement than to a scholarly enterprise. I am confident that our successors will look back on UG as a huge waste of time.

    High drama, but the facts do not bear out the assertations. We see Wolfe focus on one part of the science only, and like his supposed target, ignore any kind of data that gets in the way of a good story.

  • Games in Class

    I have two games lined up for classes when they begin next month. I have been reading and exploring on ways to up the experiential level in a boring class setting.

    Classcraft looked cool at first. Making classroom behavior into a group-based RPG fit right into my small group structure for teaching and interaction.  I considered my audience of college women and started to doubt whether they were familiar with MMORPGs. They could always ask their brothers, or even fathers. I asked in my class and happily about 25% (6/24) had played a similar type game on their Playstation or phone before. I was also wary about the thing being just a juiced up behaviorist trick, with the gold stars wrapped up in a pretty package. Not after the research. It is used in 20,000 schools. Granted, most of those are Jr. hi and HS, but close enough. The features lead to team-building and if my students can do that in English, perfect. I can build in using English as part of the settings as well. There are random events which spice up things, and make them more real. The only thing that still worries me is the reliance on competition, of which my students don’t have much of. Yet. Good for my first-year speaking and listening class.

    Fantasy Geopolitics is a game to stimulate conversation about the world, about geography, and mostly about the news. I know my students are not familiar with Fantasy Football, but the concept I think they will latch onto quite easily. Instead of making up a team of football players at the beginning of the season, students choose a “team” or collection of countries (for my class, each student can pick 6). Then each class thereafter they can trade countries instead of players during the weekly “draft” at the beginning of class. The neat thing is that the countries are all rated by how much they appear in the New York Times. So instead of getting a hot running back for your team, you will be looking to see which countries have wars, revolutions, economic upheavals or other reasons to get in the news. After the first 3 weeks or so, goes the research, students start looking for signs that a country is ready to burst onto the newsfront, an embroiling scandal or whatnot. Each week, students are then rated on how much their exposure goes up or down. This means students need to keep reading each week. We use Newsela for graded reading access to news, but students can also look at authentic headlines in the NYTimes. The developer started with a Kickstarter campaign, but now the game resides at FANschool.org. They have other version of politics in general, and one for elections, but my students need geopolitics more.

    Both of these games were featured in one of the best games for education books I have read in years. The Game Believes in You by Greg Toppo has a dozen chapters, each using an exemplary software to show how games belong in and improve education. I will show my colleague who teaches English Literature the endless runner game Stride and Prejudice. Still in development is Eoghan (pronounced owen) Kidney’s VR (virtual reality) adaptation of Jame’s Joyce’s Ulysses. This has been in development for 3 years since getting money on FundIt, similar to Kickstarter, and it looks like a group at Boston U is starting up something similar called Joycestick (get it?). We can learn empathy and great storytelling through Inanimate Alice. Another way to center your thinking and do literature at the time is the game Walden, a game, now out in Apha ($18). We live in Thoreau’s world and learn to become more self-reliant and negotiate society on our own terms. Finally, we learn how to throw trucks and run like a chicken using our brains and an EEG collar as the only interface. What this really does is work like Ritalin or Adderall (the games are still in trial) to focus attention.

    Each of these games is an example of a different kind of software, each addressing a different kind of learning. The book is highly recommended. As soon as I finish reading the book, off I am to develop the first two to fit into my class, and have fun with the others.

  • Homework Exchange

    I am at a tech conference for teachers (Japan Moodle Moot) and over lunch I was throwing out ideas to see if they resonated with others who use Moodle for teaching. Gordon Bateson was answering follow-up questions about his morning presentation on Badges.

    This conference follows a week where the faculty admin from our Boston campus came to explain how the accreditation process goes on in the US. They use SMART (Business guru Peter Drucker’s 5 criteria for setting goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound (with a time frame). The course content is broken down into tiny bits, each with its own set of standards (actually, there are 4 sets, as Boston breaks the students into 4 levels). This requires a lot of work, but does force people (teachers and admin) to clearly define what they want to go on in class.

    One of the interesting admonitions from the consultants in Boston was to make sure that time was not the determining factor, only one of 5 parts. Also not about how much work is done, but how much learning gets done. I applaud this.

    It is looking like this kind of goal-setting (curricula and syllabi) are coming to Japan. Word around the Ministry of Education is that it is the next big thing after “active learning” runs its course.

    I was put in charge of our sadly neglected self-study center, repurposed as an unofficial event room called the English Room. We need regular activities next year (starting in April).

    With all these ideas, and Blockchain (technology behind BitCoin) applied to Education, I came up with an idea. Homework Exchange.

    It seems with our students doing so much of the same kind of homework, it gets less efficient. It also adds to the teacher load. An Exchange among department members (espcially in our language learning skills courses) would give students an opportunity to do things with other students outside their groups with teachers doing stuff they are good it. Here is how it works.

    I like playing board games. I set up Monday lunch as Gamer’s Lunch. Any student who comes can get recorded. If a teacher assigns that as a kind of speaking homework for their speaking class, she gets credited. But, for a teacher to assign an activity, they in turn have to offer an activity of their own. Say, watching a 10 minute video and leading a discussion. You build a series of activities, students get a lot more practice and teachers share the load.

    There are a lot of logistics to work out, but it does satisfy the Ministry’s current guidelines for homework, 45 minutes a week per credit hour. (Unrealistic in itself, with students carrying a load of 24 90-minute classes, plus the homework, that makes for a 54 hour work week.) But hey, they might have some fun for at least part of it instead of doing fill in the blanks.

    I see this starting as a face-to-face thing, then moving from a small group of volunteers to the faculty in the department, then across departments, at which time it will need to go online. Fortunately, tomorrow has a presentation on sharing activities in Moodle, at 9 AM. Takes an hour to get to the conference. Time for bed.

  • Ballot sent

    largeAlthough I had some reservations, I now see that Hillary Clinton may be our best President ever. She is certainly the most capable administrator ever elected to the highest office. Unfortunately, she needs work as a candidate. But she has come a long way through her three debates, and is likely to triumph. Key, though, is the ability to take the win downballot, to the Senate and House, and make gains (or better, a majority) there, to punish the Republicans for 20 years of racism and inaction.

    I could go on here, but find this guy, a leftist, outlines my position better than I could.

    Colorado had a three interesting initiatives on the ballot, all of which I voted for. Single Payer healthcare, no slavery for prison labor, and making initiatives on the ballot more difficult to create. Will let you know the total results after the election.

  • Moving to Medium

    mediumlogoThere is a new blogging platform, one that I think is better than WordPress, and I am moving there for future posts. I will add pointers here, but the content will be there.

    Why am I releasing total control over my feed here, with my own domain name and wordpress installation? Two factors, curation and convenience.

    Medium was developed by one of the co-founders of Twitter. Understanding social media and applying it to content, Evan Williams put together a platform that allows any user to blog, limits the format options to make the content the draw, and allows for readers to decide easily what should be highlighted and promoted each day. Add to that paid authors of note, like Steven Levy on Crypto War Redux, to draw the public.

    There are other alternatives to Medium, outlined at Lifehacker, but they don’t put the author at the center, supported by the readers, in a symbiotic relationship that is an evolution from what publishers used to do. Medium acts as a medium, but is, in its current state, almost invisible. Something I like.

    As an occasional blogger in the days of fading RSS use, I cannot expect people to come to my domain to read what I have to say; it gets lost in the shuffle of a million other blogs. With Medium, I have a chance that they may get linked or looked at more often. As well as the convenience of web-based posting. Find me at https://www.medium.com/@tokyokevin

    UPDATE: about a year later. Medium is going through some changes. I am back here. Sorry about the leave.