Whose money are you spending?

Money makes the world go around – or so we’re told.  But where does it come from and where does it go to? How come some of us have considerably more of it than others?

Take for example, Charlie McCrevy. Page 2 of today’s Irish Independent tells us about his payout when he leaves his EU office:

• Resettlement allowance of €19,909.89
• Transitional allowance of €358,378 payable over 3 years, working out at €119,459.50 per year
• Lifelong pension of €50,000 per year
• Moving costs to pack up and fly his family back to dear ole Ireland, business class

This is on top of an Oireachtas pension of €52,213 and a ministerial pension of €75,003 for his stint as finance and enterprise minster.

Whether he has done a good / bad / indifferent job is irrelevant given how massive this payout is. Can anyone possibly do a wonderful enough job to justify a payout that is as enormous as this. As a point of comparison consider that one year of the transitional allowance and one year of the lifelong pension would pay off in one swoop they mortgage that I will require the next 20+ years to pay off.

Where does this money that Charlie will be paid from come from?  Who decided that he is worth this amount of money? Who decides that his position merits this level of financial reward?

An example closer to home where the Irish taxpayer can really feel it, concerns our Ceann Comhairle (chairperson of our Parliament) John O’Donoghue and his extravagance with tax-payers hard earned tax.  The official Government jet was used to jet off to Cannes, the Heineken Cup final and the Ryder Cup event – all costing the taxpayer a cool €32,450.

The O’Donoghue expense that really caught the public’s attention, however, was the €472 limo ride to go from terminal 3 to terminal 1 in a London airport. The sheer extravagance of paying so much for a service that can be obtained for free via airport shuttle buses is just too much in these recessionary times.

As a point of comparison, consider the salary that drivers of such shuttle buses might be paid. While such information is not publicly available it’s fair to say that they would not reach far enough to even contemplate paying €472 for a service that can be obtained for free.  Would you pay €472 of your own money for a service that is obtainable for free? Would you pay €472 of someone else’s money for this service?

Spare a further thought for the shuttle bus driver. On a trip to London recently, I wandered around the Science Museum. On show was a prototype of the new driverless taxi, a series of which are soon to be deployed in Heathrow airport to ferry passengers around various destinations within the airport. Passengers tap in their requires destination to an onboard console and off the taxi goes on its merry track to that location. I wonder how much the airport is saving by not having to pay drivers.

Some nice folks getting their pic taken beside the driverless taxi

As I am on the subject of money and whose money is being used for what. I’ll leave the last word to the very contentious issue of third level fees. Our minister for finance indicates that students should be responsible for their own college fees.  Whether right or wrong, there is negative reaction to this from certain quarters.  Have these quarters asked themselves where the money is coming from to fund their currently “free” fees?

Nothing is ever really free. Even if the students themselves (or their parents) aren’t paying the fees, someone is.  Everyone who pays taxes is funding these fees. Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or does it matter?  There seems to be mixed reaction to this, much of it arising from how directly people feel the fees are coming out of their own pocket. It all comes down to whose money is being spent – your own or some mysterious others? The aggregate of the tax of a very large number of people loses all personal meaning and, put simply, is meaningless in comparison with ones own earnings and how that is spent.

 

The questions children ask?

Young children have an interesting view of the world and their process of figuring it out has always fascinated me. They seem to pick up so much with apparently limited language and cognitive skills.  How many words are in the vocabulary of a typical 7 or 8 or 9 year old? Yet, they come up with really interesting questions about the world around them that often challenge adults.

My 7-year old niece recently stumped me. She wanted to know how come her Daddy and my good self are from Limerick. I simply could not come up with a suitable answer fast enough. I couldn’t come up with a good answer at all. What was she getting at? Was it a question of geography, the origins of life, accidents of birth, the Pale vs. life outside thereof, being trounced in GAA by a neighbouring county, or something else?

Kids asking questions that their parents can’t answer is nothing new. At the risk of going out on a limb here, I wonder if this lack of answers is a contributor to lack of interest in science in later life. It requires a formal campaign of time and effort to encourage students to study science at third level at least in this country. Would this be needed if the little ones had their questions answered and talked about in a fun and informative way?

A recent study of childrens’ questions is food for thought.   4 out of 5 parents couldn’t help their offspring with questions like this lot.  Thinking caps at the ready, what answer would you give to the following 10 questions posed by the young folk. Googling the answer is not allowed. All answers have to be “child-friendly”? You have to answer right-away.

1. WHY DON’T ALL FISH DIE WHEN LIGHTNING HITS THE SEA?
2. HOW MUCH DOES THE SKY WEIGH?
3. WHY CAN’T PEOPLE LEAVE OTHER PEOPLE ALONE?
4. WHY AREN’T BIRDS ELECTROCUTED ON WIRES?
5. WHAT IS TIME?
6. WHY IS THE MOON SOMETIMES OUT IN THE DAY, TOO?
7. WHY DID GOD LET MY KITTEN DIE?
8. WHY DO I LIKE PINK?
9. WHY IS WATER WET?
10. WHY DOES MY BEST FRIEND HAVE TWO DADS?

How did you get on?

Not easy, are they?

In my opinion these aren’t just very intelligent questions, they are profound and deep ones.

My big question is where does this beautiful curiosity about the world, its creatures and environment disappear to as children grow up?  How did this enthusiatic questioning and wondering get replaced by rote memorisation and passive acceptance of facts for far too many of our young folks?

 

Risky life not so risky

My latest reading is Dan Gardner’s Risk.  It’s in the “popular science” category, meaning that everything is not specifically referenced and many serious social scientists are likely to dismiss it without turning the first page. Nonetheless, I found it engaging.

The essence of Risk is that we’ve never had it so good yet we’re so scared. Fear is a significant part of our day-to-day lives and yet there’s no rational reason for much of this. What exactly are we afraid of?  Who or what is making us so fearful? Are we right to be scared? What are we basing our fear on exactly?

Dan quotes from numerous studies to illustrate his points. The main output seems to be that our gut or instinctive reaction can get things wrong or distorted. This flies against the oft quoted “go with your gut”, or “what is your instinct telling you”. But based on lack of concrete information, the rational “head” part of our brain might not get much of a look in and so we accept instinct. It could be faulty, but knowing nothing else we accept it as truth.

Take for example nuclear energy. If asked for their first reaction when they hear those two words, most will probably shudder and mention Chernobyl or Sellafield. Their reaction is negative. Nuclear power is a bad thing in their books. Ask them exactly what’s bad about it, how likely is another fallout, what exactly was the extent of existing fallouts relative to other catastrophes, what’s good about it, etc, and it’s likely that they cannot give a well-informed answer. This begs the question; where does instinct get its information from to form the negative reaction given?

The answer: half stories, news reports half read, sensationalisednews reports that make us sit up and listen, films that aren’t real, creative marketing activities, etc, etc.

The problem is that most of us are experts in only a few domains or even in no domain at all. When we hear a story that’s not in our area of expertise, we typically do not hear enough to put it in a realistic perspective. Our news sources feed us what the author termed the “relative” risk as opposed to the absolute risk.

Here’s an example: In 2006 the US FDA issued a warning about a particular brand of birth control pill.  The newspapers (even respectable ones) presented this warning along the lines of women using this pill are twice as likely to have blood clots as those using another brand. Gut reaction is to freak out. Cue worried customers demanding a refund and a health check. But what does the risk actually mean? What is being doubled? How big a risk is it?  Most newspaper reports omitted the absolute risk. Apparently it’s approximately 6 out of 10,000 women developing a clot. That’s 0.0006 chance, a tiny tiny fraction of 1%. Doubling, even trebling that is still a very negligible risk. But many reports didn’t explain this. A little information is truly a dangerous thing. This shows that we need to question what our media gives us. We cannot accept things at face value.

There are now so many media outlets competing for our attention that they have to do whatever is required to grab that attention. Even well respected media outlets will tweak a headline if it means the reader / viewer will take note. Here’s one from the BBC: “Kenyan renews Chelsea goat offer – A Kenyan man has told the BBC how happy he is that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has agreed to renew his marriage offer to her daughter”. The initial reaction is “Eh!”. Reading down the article, Hilary Clinton’s exact words were “My daughter is her own person. I will convey this very kind offer”. It’s not quite the same as the headline yet it’s not an obvious lie either. It’s more a bending of the truth to garner the reader’s attention.

The media also have the problem of needing to present us with jargon-free information that a non-expert in a particular domain can understand. The problem then is one of lost-in-translation. Getting the point across without seemingly extraneous or complex details in an eye-catching way can cause distortions. Nothing bugs scientists more than reading the “abbreviated” “popularised” version of their research, the version that omits the ifs / buts / maybes / known limitations that they have published in more official sources. Next time you see a headline that says something like “GN foods are good / bad / indifferent for our health”, don’t take it at face value, ask yourself where the research might have come from, who sponsored it, do they have a financial stake in the results, how big was the study, what type of data analysis was carried out on it. If answer cannot be found, then an open mind needs to be kept.

As another example take the newspaper headline concerning paedophiles quoted in the book – “Pervs running riot in our schools”. The aim is to freak out parents. They see the headline, gut reacts dramatically to a threat to the well-being of an offspring, they feel the need to buy the newspaper to read all about it, newspaper sales go up. Yet the number of hard core violent paedophiles out there is minuscule. There are many other threats out there to worry about (e.g. falling down the stairs) that are far more likely to occur.

Marketing will happily fudge the truth.  It’s not in their interests to do otherwise. Step one is creating the climate, step 2 is filling the gap with the product / service in question. Step one could be nourishing the fear, the loss, the gap, whatever might be missing that this product / service might sort out. For the marketing to work, it needs to be presented in a way that appeals to people, raising and magnifying the fear or loss or whatever it might be. If this step fails, then the marketing fails. Plenty of examples are given in the book – a poster in a doctor’s waiting room emphasising the problem of high cholesterol as a dramatic health problem. A closer look in the ‘fine print’ reveals that the poster is sponsored by an organisation creating anti-cholesterol pills. George Bush’s Presidential campaign emphasised the threat of terrorism, magnifying it out of realistic proportions. Then came the message; vote for us and you’ll be safe from this terrorism. Are these “products” that should be marketed using traditional marketing techniques? I’m not so sure.

The ultimate message is to get out there and live your life. Yes, there are risks but keep them in proportion – how likely are they to happen, what’s the worst thing that could result if they did actually happen? Being realistic, my biggest risk factor is getting whacked on the head by a Dublin Bus wing mirror, and it probably wouldn’t even kill me. Actually, it’s highly unlikely to ever happen!

 

Rising grades back in the news again

UK politicians wonder how / why the number of 1:1 degrees awarded in the UK has almost doubled in a decade. Read about it here and here. Yesterday’s Observer also carried the story, garnering 250+ comments.  There seems to be suggestion that different institutions require different levels of effort from students to achieve their degree classification. The conclusion seems to be that the watchdog overseeing standards isn’t doing its job right.

I wonder how they could possibly consider that standards are and / or should be the same across the entire gamut of universities. It’s absurd to think that that there can be equality. It would be like comparing the proverbial apples and oranges. Yes, they are both fruit but so vastly different.

The only way equality and direct comparisons across institutions could be made is if marking were centralised ala the leaving certificate in this country, and all students sit the same unseen papers.  That’s not going to happen. The administration nightmare for a start puts a limit on it. Even if that obstacle was overcome, such an approach would merely strait-jacket third-level education, preventing any flexibility and innovation, let alone eating into much-valued (from everyone’s point of view) academic freedom. Third level would become a continuation of the second-level spoon feeding exercise, and that’s not even useful at second-level.

The politicians argue that employers have a right to know whether they should employ person A with a degree from university A or person B with the “same” degree from university B.  I don’t think it is as straight-forward as that.  An employee brings a lot more than their degree parchment to a job. Indeed, that degree parchment is just one indicator of their abilities for the particulars of a given job. I have heard of employers not taking 1:1 students believing that they tend to be one-dimensional and not as rounded personalities as those with lower honours. Consider as another example the most successful graduate of my undergraduate degree. This person is now one of the country’s foremost business people but didn’t come top of the class or achieve a first class honours qualification.  Yet, he achieved the grounding required to proceed to his very impressive achievements.

In Ireland we have a much smaller number of universities and colleges than in the UK. As such it should be easier to ascertain what is a “good” college and what is not. The definition of “good”, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It differs for everyone.  If a potential student is interested in studying a precise area of engineering then their definition of good is limited down to the few institutions offering this course. If they have a strong location preference then it is likely that their choice is very much reduced, particularly if they live outside of Dublin.  Students need to work out what is important to them, rank and weight those criteria, attending as many open days for different institutions as they can. In this way, they can choose the institution that best fits their definition of “good”.

A problem is that far too many students don’t do this. Their decisions can be made on flimsy criteria such as: “my boy/girlfriend is going to _______ so I’m going there too”, or “my daddy wants me to study ______ at ________ so that’s what I’m doing”, or “that college give too many / few first class honours degrees”, and for older students “I don’t know how I will juggle in studying with the job and family life but I feel obliged to obtain a masters”.  A student’s goal on entering college is likely to effect the award classification they get on leaving. If entry goals are so varied and in some cases, shallow, what can we really expect?

This looks like a debate that will run and run.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Update: Jobless graduate sues her college

I couldnt even begin to comment.

 

A little glow in the doom

In these days of doom and gloom, rising unemployment, pay and recruitment freezes, nama debates, terrorism in tourist destinations, delayed economic recovery, etc, nice heart-warming incidents and situations are happening.

Here’s one from Herald AM this morning.

Casper the cat, resident of Plymouth Devon, has become a firm favourite with  local bus drivers. The little feline imp has taken to hitching a ride on the number 3 bus service . He has his regular hop-on and hop-off stops which the bus drivers have got to know. Locals seem to be accepting of their feline traveling companion and are happy to accommodate him. He apparently enjoys curling up on a seat for his journey.

It’s simply nice to know that the doom and gloom hasn’t made us so morose that we are immune to the endearing foibles of our four-legged friends.  Long may it last, the endearment that is, not the recession.

 

Useless research not so useless?

Questions are increasingly asked about what exactly some research is for. Why do universities and various other institutions allocate so much time and effort (not to mention money) on research that doesn’t seem useful or worthwhile?

Much of the problem seems to arise from the fact that many research units are highly specialised and speak a metaphorically different language from each other. As such mutual understanding can be limited.  For example, those in the law domain have very different usage of English than do creative writers. Those in the sciences have several sets of terminology that only they can understand.

Arguably, however, the language differences are just a screen. Researchers from different units do not always appreciate the domain essence of what their colleagues in other departments value. A typical law professor may not see the beauty in a Jane Austin turn of phrase. A climate control researcher may not appreciate the finer points of buzz marketing. As the risk of generalising, a hard-core environmentalist might have considerable difficulty appreciating the nuances of a marketing campaign for a seemingly trivial item like a cuddly toy.

The interpretation of trivial is in the eye of the beholder. A piece of seemingly useless research that I read about today concerns hair length in Florida theme parks. At first glance one wonders why the researchers decided that it was important to know the hair length of 24,300 adults attending a theme park. The expression “who cares” comes to mind. What difference can it make if your hair is cropped short or several feet long or somewhere in-between.

It’s not up there with research into cancer research but I’m informed it’s important. There are implications for the very lucrative fashion world. Milliners, in particular, keep a beady eye on hair lengths. The extent of tresses is a top priority for cosmetics manufacturers too. For most of us a bottle of shampoo is merely a bottle of shampoo. But ask shampoo manufacturers and the commentary is very different indeed.

The essence is that research into hair length is seemngly irrelevant to me but is of grave importance to others.

So called “useless” research that requires the investment of resources may not be all the useless when considered through a different set of eyes. The problem is that it can be difficult to view a particular research domain from the perspectives of others whose domain of expertise is far removed from one’s own.

Hair and lots of it....

... or none at all

A call for open-mindedness is required.

 

Summer Holidays

Hands up and be counted all of you who think that lecturers (like myself) who work in colleges / universities have extended long holidays over the summer. Go on, hands up!

I thought I had plenty to do until I compared myself to some others. Taliessinthroughlogres will / is having a busy summer. Thankfully, mine won’t be as busy as this and I’m actually planning on 2 weeks holidays. Here’s how mine compares -

• Development of new courses and subjects (no, not this year for me)
• Research (yes, the only time of the year I get an extended period to focus on research)
• Recruitment which can be meeting and interviewing potential students and production of promotional materials (no to the second, as for the first…)
• Liaising with Industry and government bodies (not over the summer)
• Writing research papers (depending on research progress)
• Dealing with student appeals and cases of unfair practice (yes)
• Supervising postgraduate students (yes)
• Applying for research funding (no)
• Helping organise conferences (no)
• Reviewing journal papers and drafts of student dissertations (yes to the second, no to the first)
• Helping students revise for repeat exams (yes)
• Teaching in partner institutes (no)
• Development of teaching and assessment materials for next year (yes)

Life doesn’t stop just because classes stop and (some) students take an academic break.

Do you still wish you worked in my area?

Alas, no rest for the wicked over the summer for some.  But what about our charges…..

Pic from olesverden blog

 

Talking to a machine

Having had enough of the tedious process of typing notes for my research work, I finally gave in and purchased some voice recognition software.  Perhaps talking to the computer would be a less tedious process?  It’s a long way from Star Trek (computer do this, computer do that!) but it’s a start.

In a way it’s almost like talking to a person who is learning English and so is not so familiar with some words and sounds. The software has to learn new things as it comes across them.

The really quirky part involves the words and sounds it throws little wobblers on.  Some examples:

• It has significant difficulty with words that have a “Tuh” sound and they end up being abbreviated to something else altogether. The word “tools” is non-existent in its vocab. It took some extended training to teach the tool the word “tool”. The word “through” poses similar problems.  You could end up with a phrase of “The tu tu the system caused tu many tu to be tu”. What does that mean? Answers on a postcard please.
• It has a peculiar liking for the word “dissipating”. Every 3 or 4 syllable word ending on “ing” that it doesn’t understand ends up dissipating.
• It has a number of placenames, person names, odd slang, etc that it likes to show off on occasion.  I’m not quite sure what it understood when it returned “British Tom porno” to something I said.

Correcting the mistakes is where the real fun starts.

Really, it is fun – honestly – particularly when I ask it to select the misspelled / misunderstood word and it stubbornly keeps blinking at me and doesn’t move to a pixel towards selecting said word. That’s when I have to administer the tough love. Would…. you…. pu lea ase … select … the … bleeping … word. Then, in all its intelligence, it assumes that I want it to type those words and has great fun wondering what “bleeping” is.

Once the mistake has been corrected, I often forget to tell the software to move back down to the bottom of the document to continue dictation. As a result I have sentences smack-bang in the middle of other sentences. One could weave a really interesting story there. How about: “significant shifts have occurred in flux and often distributed across geographic conceptualisation of classrooms”. Is that profound or just a lot of nonsense?

Nonetheless, I’m getting there in building a relationship with my voice software. It’s getting to know me and my “tu” pronunciations and I’m getting to know it and its dissipations. It’s the start of a wonderful friendship.

 

Gender evolution

My cousin’s little fellow (arguably the most gorgeous little imp around) tells me that he’s off to do a cookery course as part of school summer holiday activities. He’s as excited about this as if he were off to play football with the greats of the game. It’s something fun and interesting to do with his holidays. More importantly, the idea of cooking being a ‘woman’s work in the kitchen’ is totally irrelevant.

How things have changed!

I almost want to cry when I think back to my own primary school days. I was lucky enough to attend a small rural school and for the most part it was a positive experience. It had 3 teachers when I started and somewhere along the way that 3 became 2. There was one classroom for the infants and lower classes (ages 4 to 7 or thereabouts) and one classroom for the older children.

Here’s what typically happened on a Friday afternoon: the younger classroom become the home economics room (i.e. sewing, knitting, cookery etc) for the girls and the older classroom became quiz / games room for the boys. Guess where yours truly got sent …. to involuntary prick herself with sewing needles, involuntary ruin perfectly fine yarn and involuntary burn any cooking utensil  that lent itself to buring?  The part that really hurt was hearing the cheers and whoops and hollers of the boys in the next room as they got to enjoy learning through (what at the time were unorthodox) methods of sheer fun. It hurt!

Another example – the school had a small library and pupils were allowed borrow books from it. Being wonderfully democratic the pupils were allowed to run the library, the male pupils that is!  Oh how I remember gritting my teeth with envy as the boys in the 6th class (11 or 12 year olds) took turns to run the library. I remember how important it all seemed, sitting behind their disks, checking and stamping library cards and books.

A non-academic example involved a mouse!  It was a rural school and so the odd rural 4-legged creature ventured indoors every now and again. I vividly remember one such occasion. The little mouse had dared to enter the older classroom and was duly spotted. The reaction – all the girls were sent off to the juniors classroom to be safely out of the way of the fun while the boys had a whale of time chasing the mouse around the room. I still remember the whoops and hollers from the boys. I’m still convinced they eked out the chase just to annoy us girls before the invader was safely dispatched to a nearby field.

Back to the 21st century and things have certainly changed. Now all pupils, male and female, partake in home economics. The library (as far as I know) is run on a computer and book-checking is electronic and self-service. 4-legged pests are kept at bay with electronic beeping devices.

It’s wonderfully egalitarian and civilised. I hope all the pupils, male and female, have plenty of opportunities to whoop and holler with excitement now and again.

 

End of year review – was it a waste of time?

In the ideal college environment, all the students pass with flying colours, learning and achieving copious amounts of knowledge and skills as well as the ability to apply and use these skills.  Lecturers proceed with ease through the year and end it with a sense of much satisfaction concerning the achievements of their charge.

But the world is not ideal.

There is plenty of research to indicate that teaching and learning needs to change. The annual Horizon report reminds us that learners want to be active in their own learning and offer a range of tools to assist in this. Put more bluntly, is college a waste of time?  The arguments put forward by Mixerergy are as follows, with my commentary in italics:

• It creates corporate drones

Students lose their independence and become pawns of whatever company pays them enough to help make payments on their debt.  In the light of increased debate about university fees in Ireland, this is a controversial one. Nonetheless, sweeping statement like don’t help anyone, least of all the graduates who want to and are able to contribute in a constructive and effective way to their new employers.

• What it teaches is out of date by the time students graduate

This is very much dependent on the subject domain. Some domains (e.g. accountancy, perhaps?) change very little year on year. Others (internet marketing, perhaps?) change a lot. Taking another perspective, isn’t it important that students obtain an appropriate grounding so that they can then go with the flow and thereby are capable of adapting to change as change happens in their domain. In my opinion, this is arguably more important than knowing every little (or even large) fact in that domain.

• It doesn’t teach the way people learn

People learn by doing, not by sitting in a class and being lectured to.  This implies that college is all passive learning and students have no opportunity to practice what they learn. I’m not a fan of the large group lecture (I’ve blogged about this previously) but fortunately I also have opportunities to facilitate and scaffold student construction and development of their own ideas through project work and small-group tutorial classes.

• Four years of information is too much to retain

Students end up cramming as much information about a class as they need for to do well on a test and they forget almost all of it after they finish a semester. Unfortunately, the grades-based education system as it is now encourages such learn-it-all off-and-write-it-all-down-in-the-exam modes of study. Nonetheless, such study techniques won’t get a student high grades. Yet, it continues to happen. We need to ask why students persist in such study modes when they know they are satisfying only one goal (getting that passing grade) but not another (true learning). Perhaps, the students’ preferred goal is not the lectuers’ preferred goal?

• The truth is that college is one big party

The under-graduate college years are pivotal for a student. It’s their transition from parent dependency to personal independency. Personal development, growth of self awareness, experimentation with social structures and events that might have been out of bounds previously are critical here. We need to encourage students to strike a balance between the study part and the social part of their college life.  An excess of partying means a student is unlikely to get beyond first year. A college year spent in the library results in an unfortunately one-dimensional students.

So, what’s the answer

Mixenergy suggests letting students work on real projects, and give them experienced mentors that they can turn to for answers and advice.

In reality, what organisation might let amateurs with little experience and even fewer skills loose on any project of theirs?  Employers may be willing to take a chance on this on a small scale but that’s likely to be it. Any more and they risk spending far too long and too much training up the students in the skills and know-how required for the job.

How many mentors might there be per student? Ideally this should be small. But such a structure has resource and cost implications. One of the reasons large size classes are still with us is simply because because they are cost-effective.

Mixenergy raises some interesting issues. Students are different now then in a pre-net generation. They grow up in a technological world that provides different mental models, ways of processing information, shorter attention spans (for more traditional media types) and personal interests that are far removed from those of their pre-decessors. As a result, engaging students with traditional ways of teaching and learning is limited.

The problem is that such ways and methods are so embedded in our institutions that they are very difficult to break out of. We have a wealth of technologies with potential to reach and engage students (see the Horizon report again). Unfortunately, lecturers with an interest in deploying these tools are faced with many obstacles such as the over-emphasis on grades and traditional exams, not to mention institutional policies and procedures that dominate most educational institutions today that (sometimes, inadvertently) work against novel and innovative ways of active student engagement.

Yet, we persevere!  Giving up is simply not an option.