Mindset of an martial artist in academic teaching

Students teaching each other

Learning is not just a skill, but also an attitude. 

The mindset of a teacher in an evolving martial art is that of a relationship where both student and instructor are venturing in a common effort to excel. The training place, the dojo, is a safe place to make mistakes and the instructor-student relationship is based on creating independence by learning how to learn. The Asian-influenced philosophy that is nourishing mindfullness in learning, with the aim to improve skills, can seem somewhat reversed compared to Western thinking that dominates in academia.

A typical class room or dojo

In academia, a lot of time is spent on adsorbing a lot of information with a presumption that students know how to process this raw information. This stands in contrast to the thinking in martial arts, where possessing a text with an important technique would be considered useless or misleading without a moral understanding. The written information of a technique in martial arts cannot be grasped unless one is able, with assistance of a teacher, to contextualize and animate it and appreciate its synergy with one’s present moral and intellectual understanding. With age and experience, the understanding continues to grow. Though the Asian-inspired thinking in teaching is hundreds of yeas old it is only now beginning to gain popularity in Western academia. Alvin Toffler and Roy Leighton are among a few who strongly speak in favour of replacing the overall understanding of education in a modern society from an obsolete form based on memorization, were information is available to anyone anywhere, with the ability of applying the knowledge available.

Wonderful teacher-student interaction when teaching in Japan

As an university teacher with a background in martial arts, the academic education seems incomplete by allowing students to pass a higher education by displaying a mere ability to answer written or oral tests as expected, without simultaneously educating the person how to apply the knowledge for something good.

To become a good instructor in martial arts, the teacher needs to be a leader among equals: respecting the students while destroying his or hers own ego. Developing skills in academia to a higher level (as it is the goal in martial arts) is possible if the teacher embodies the passion for the subject and insists on communication with students. This contact is based on a mutual respect and striving for excellence by example. 

A thought example. Imagine attending a martial art class where you for 45 minutes listened to a power point presentation of a teacher explaining how you should move and behave. Would you come back for the next lesson? Now imagine a university lecturer who takes the students somewhere relevant and interesting for the subject, shows and explains about the subject as examples appear or in response to questions, insist student explore and use their senses. Would you come back for that next lesson? Perhaps even go home and read about questions that appeared in the discussion?

Today's class is under water

Promoting passion and healthy self-criticism above long-term purely academic aims, such as degrees, might also result in overall better-doing students. In addition, constant self-reflecting empowers students to adapt to inevitable changes in life and constantly reflect on their roles in collaborations. One aim of higher education should be that the students would find they have an excess of passion and begin teaching back on their own initiative - thus showing they have developed a heart for learning. 

Students teaching and learning, and smiling!

Link: Bujinkan Estonia Tartu Dojo

Industry Interest in Science or Science Interest in Industry?

Birute Miskiniene from the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and Research spoke to me and a group of university heads and education coordinators of the Baltic States yesterday (BOVA University). We were there to comment on the future strategy of collaboration of higher education between the Baltic States.
Miskiniene spoke about the future and the policy of education in Lithuania. She highlighted in bold and repeated over and over again was that universities and scientists had to be find a connection to the industry in every way (teaching, research, Ph.D.-students...)! The retorics was no longer a polite encouragement, but for once a specific political finger on the sore spot.

We see that everywhere now - it is being forced down on the education. But when listening to this (there was no oppotunity of asking questions) the feeling of dispair turned to optimism when I turned things on their head. I will explain.

The case in a nutshell:
Politicians and industry point of view.
They want bangs for their bucks! They thus think the best strategy is to combine academic work with industry in a total makeover of the academic world. The responsebility is put on the academic world as an obligation to feed the industry with useful products and tailored students for positions in the industry. I would say the logic makes sense practically a long way, if the academic world only produced engineers (and engineers are very useful people I think).

Academics point of view
Academics want to do science! Science is not product engineering! It is discovery! It is partly intuitive and spring from the freedom of pursuing ideas and understanding in depth! Bold risky ideas - test - fail/succeed. At best, science is a discipline guided by moral and ethics - and this often does not harmonize with dancing to the pipe of industry. The forced model makes it more difficult to pursue basic understanding of say the intestinal system of an animal, because they can only get money for drug design and testing by collaboration with the industry. The intellectual property rights is another tragedy of this shotgun marriage that further paralyze important information from benefiting people on a wider scale.   

But why is it scientists and the university has to chase industrial collaborators and funds? Why not the other way around?

The more I thought about this the crazier this seemed. I will here boldly claim that:

It is the industry and politicians lack of imagination and will to seek opportunities that stops them from taking advantage of basic research already being done - and there for the taking!

What am I talking about? Example:
Let us say I make a basic study of the most basic form of epidemiology: estimating how common a virus is in a population. Let us say I find it in 20% of the population where it cause illness in a modest 0.2% of the population. Especially children and immunocompromised people would be in danger. What could industry and politicians do with that knowledge if the really wished to make use of it?

• Diagnostic Laboratories - development of accurate methods to detect the disease and sell the diagnostics
• Doctors - Possibility to detect disease, avoid some deaths and reduce the days people have to be sick
• Population - More people diagnosed, treated, surviving, and prevented from infections = more working people.
• Politics - Showing awareness to health of the population. Meeting future international demands before they arrive (lowering costs for fast implementation).
• Food industry - If the food is transmitted by food, and they connect to voluntary control programs, or see the need to begin them (with government perhaps) to be able to safely export products that can transmit the disease. 
• Medical industry - higher sale of products for treatment of disease. New markets.
• Tourism - Documentation of a disease decline or raise is important to what people will eat or trust in the country. Avoiding getting a bad reputation for being a disease hub on the map by being proactive and giving accurate advice.
• Journalism - Misinterpretation of scientific information and misguiding the public (sorry, I really think these people do a lot of harm) - or perhaps in the future it may be possible: to educate the public soberly about relevant preventive measures.
• Insurance companies - Who are in the risk group? Does it influence work performance, death, personal risks?
• Schools and nurseries - how to prevent spread and detect symptoms before an outbreak.  
• Lawyers - well they are basically everywhere from rights, safety regulations, politics regulations, contracts etc.
• and so on...

Any of these examples of groups that could and would benefit from just looking into what universities are actually doing already in the name of science only requires a phone call from the group to the scientist saying: "Hey, we can use what you wrote in your article what would it cost to explore/present/write on aspect X?"
 
In my head, industry is there to know how ideas are sell-able and have to be pro-active. Scientists should (continue) to test ideas and concentrate on expanding their insight in depth in areas that would otherwise remain uncharted. Not the other way around.

Open Scource Teaching Platforms - The Post-Gutenberg Era

Since my university joined the "University of Life"-wave it has kind of been in the cards that the language of teaching should be English and open to a wider group of international students. Higher education has since been continuously forced to find new sources of income to replace budget cuts. This it is difficult without compromising the integrity. Or as the engineer joke goes: "You can get the job done fast, cheap, and well done - but you can only choose two of the options!" This principle however evades quite a few management systems - and I suspect there could be a moral loophole to sort of get all 3 (such as thinning down the integrity).

One quite obvious movement towards meeting these budget cuts is that universities and even students put their heads and resources together across the borders to create the tools that are too heavy to design alone. The especially true for small universities like my own. Creating free teaching materials seems to be an powerful way of meeting both lecturers, students, and the universities limited resources.

Before I continue I wish to share a small anecdote from reality related to what I wrote previously: "Change must come through the barrel of a gun!" - when push comes to shove, the creative mind kicks in.
A female acquaintance working in the military as a programmer was invited to play a war game with the officers some years ago. She was put in charge of a country and set to handle the simulated conflicts. The officers were unaware that she was a very experienced role-player and played to win - with a twist. Before she won the war game she was presented with the dilemma: "Your motorized transports have stopped their progress due to unforeseen technical complications caused by weather conditions in the enemy territory." To this she answered her adviser: "My Brother, shoot one of the engineers and tell the rest they got one hour to solve the problem, or the next one will be shot. Continue to do so until the problem is solved! Live Magnolia, home of peace and harmony!"   
The will to survive is a hard point to argue with, regardless if it is your desire to breathe or your accumulated academic efforts.

So, what have people come up with to solve the designing of teaching materials in collaboration and openly accessible to students?

One well known platform is the Wikibooks, which I briefly mentioned previously. One critiqued element of this platform is that anyone can edit it. This can be considered a problem if you wish to ensure a specific integrity of the material - or there are specific points where the scientific community is polarized about ("creation" just to take an obvious one). Another problem is the static book-form of the material. The linear setup of a normal book is replicated in the Wikibooks. This can be a problem if you want to pick-and-choose elements for your specific course.

Recently I found the Connexions website through a presentation by Richard Baraniuk. This platform seems a bit more advanced for university teachings. It is also open-source and the material is creative commons. Students can read online or order books that are published on demand (thus 1/5 of the normal price of an education book). Writers can add material as modules which allow flexibility when teachers are putting together text material particularly for your course. And best of all, you can create a so called "lens" that fits your institution for quality control. The lens is a predefined peer-review process of people and institutions that checks the content of the material.

A final observation is that if we are to meet students where they learn today, not even reading is sufficient alone. Visualisation is imperative especially to children and especially now when we have a generation accustomed to have high density information taken visually.
Visual Learning Systems (AKA Kahn Academy) has taken this full step. Making the module based step by step learning from the lowest grades to high school/college. This is unfortunately a commercial platform so only the financially privileged can use it. Other sporadic initiatives are springing up globally, but still fairly unorganized. In Estonia, Chemicum is already working similar concepts in chemistry on its own (thanks Tõiv), but we need a way to build it in a modular form on an open platform. Frankly this is where the universities should be already -  an open source visual learning platform!

I think creating and using online education material, for free, is a necessary step for higher education. Also to attract students to the university. Educated mentors will still be needed. They need to free their hands from paper shuffling and do what they should do with the students - learn!
I love holding and reading books as the next geek, but in reality the era of books being the only source is already past. As written before this is also needed if we really wish to lift education in developing countries. This is the fastest and cheapest way to get the knowledge there!

Now I just hope our university will choose one, and just one, platform. Have spine to force it into action, educate its staff to use it and stick with it!   


Richard Baraniuk on open-source learning:

Where is the passion (in science and education)?

I recently had the pleasure to speak with one of my old course mates from university. He took the path of a high profiled career, working in several countries and continents under top-researchers in cutting edge micro-biology. I took a path of a different country too, but settled with a very modest income, work on my own a lot of the time, but with huge freedom to persue interesting subjects with relevance.


It was thus surprising to hear from him that he felt that his work was, indeed cutting edge and just what politicians and industry are singing about, but dull and unsatisfactory on the personal level due to the hollow feeling of: yes, this was interesting, but probably no living thing improved their life from those millions invested. I have been left with that question in my head too when reading high profiled articles: "OK, scientific approach, but so what?" But hearing the same coming from the horses mouth is interesting. Often I felt a bit off the track myself because my research often feels very low tech when I try to solve a practical problem or fill a large gap in the basic knowledge. I feel like I am slowing myself down since the top dogs scream for so called "cutting edge" research. As if complexity or more expensive studies per default makes better results.

I can not myself understand why I need to build a skyscraper with a hovercraft when the foundation is obviously missing and requires a shovel.

My friend and I began a discussion of how come it is that so few of us (molecular biologists) actually become researchers (only 5 to my knowledge of our group of our year.) What was it that made us want to become researchers?
It was not a specific course we could conclude. It was not because there was particular interested supervisors for our 2 year research project in the M.Sc. program. It was not the prospects of finding a dictated Ph.d.-project or an interesting job (those were bleak.) But it was our sense of "we can make a difference" and passionate teachers - THAT made a difference! Or in short just "passion!"

It seems so obvious but I was a bit surprised anyhow.

It is about individuals caring about what they do, and do it. 

It is because it is not what is in the universities or what is valued among research most places. No wonder the industry or society as a whole do not get problem solving academics if they are demotivated and basically looking for something else to do when they are finally through the university.

So, perhaps it is not very useful to measure in (number of) articles published, pages read, the skill to take written exams, and number of passed students per year. Perhaps students finding and trying to solve projects they care about within the frame of their education with motivated and flexible teachers would get different results.

Just an idea.  


I am at the point where I teach a bit.  Perhaps I can help breaking the cycle a bit by being an interested supervisor inspiring the next generation feeling they can make a difference. Gotta try!

One major funding agency that seems to have understood the above is Welcome Trust (UK) who states:

We believe passionately that breakthroughs emerge when the most talented researchers are given the resources and freedom they need to pursue their goals.

 In addition to funding people rather than projects they fully and openly support Open Access and data sharing of research as a policy! 

Bravo.

(I leave you with Black Eyed Peas similar question of do you practice what you teach: "Where is the Love?")

Disease control... bridge under construction, please wait

The conclusion of my PhD-work was that despite 20 years of published knowledge about the parasites I work with and the damage caused by them, almost nothing has happened to prevent it! The cattle farmers are unaware of its presence, though every single farm got it, or ignores the symptoms. The disease symptoms have become a tree in the forest - the status quo. But why?

This massive "?" was a puzzle I have to solve. Not because it is my duty, but what is the point of ANY research if those who benefit from it will never hear about it or rejects it on default? Doing my background research for the Baltic states and onwards to Scandinavia, the pattern was similar - the flow of information that would benefit farmer and/or animals just stop dead somewhere for whatever reason. When asking for opinions from veterinarians of why this is so, many have opinions about farmer mentality: they do not know, they do not want to know, they know better than veterinarians/scientists, they give up and return to old routines, they do not care etc. But nobody really knows. Research on the area is amazingly sparse, but do exist (1, 2, 3)
It seems like two different worlds: University and Agriculture.

Is it the scientists fault? Should they be better at informing? Is the medical staff too poorly educated, insecure, powerless? Is it the farmers tradition, routine, focus, staff? What?

It is therefore easy to estimate that the majority of those research billions put into improving anything in agriculture is just oil for the machinery (accumulating know-how). Or in other words: not very well invested money.

We see the same problem in specialist research fields. The high tech awe-inspiring new genetic tool that can do anything... except apply itself to any valid interpretation that leads to a practical use. I begun as a ultra-specialist in biochemistry (one molecule). But gradually I felt I had to keep scaling up and up to get any sense out of my results. A "what is the point?"-search has lead me into immunology, to epidemiology, and now into the hands of social science.

Standing next to the agricultural monster and analyzing, it is scary to see how unorganized it is, in some cases narrow minded, but most importantly in self-awe. It sounds so much like politics/economics rhetoric's - growth, growth, growth - at any cost! From our epidemiological studies in cattle, it looks like not-doing many things would solve many problems in the industrial farms, in-stead of adding new things to do to prevent things happening (the patching-technique). And if I may come with a bold hypothesis: allowing the cattle to live as cattle naturally would have - is very likely to limit most diseases, leg disorders, reproductive problems, and mortality's dramatically!

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” – Isaac Asimov

Image: Bo Secher

University budget - copy+paste+pray... or WAKE UP!

University budget cuts while the obligatory short sightedness continues - I had enough and had to put my head on the chopping block! We are experiencing severe budget cuts to an extent where there literally is no money for research after (some of) the payrolls have been secured. I am submitting the article below to the university newspaper where I work (Estonian University of Life Sciences, aka EMÜ) in Estonian.

I know I do not have The Truth and the Glorious Facts which others might have, but at least I am making honest attempts of finding a way out. I thought the article fit the topic of the blog and added the English version here.

Crisis?

It is easy to cut down on budgets. It is perhaps easier to make savings into continuous profit. I would like to suggest EMÜ directors several strategies that can do that.

I work with parasites at EMÜ. To me it is obvious to see the same general survival strategies are used by cooperate firms as seen in the biological world. We have to live with them because we are too weak and starved to expel them. Just like getting rid of a parasite infection will give you surpluses in health and economy, so will independences from licences and resources.

Here are 4 ideas EMÜ can apply to save vast amounts of money.

1. Replace expensive licences with open source.
2. Make internet telephony standard
3. Become an green independent university.
4. Make savings self-perpetuate in the budget.

The software licenses are expensive and almost without exception, unnecessary. Open source programs such as Open Office can replace most tools used on the computer, for free. Though it is mainly myth that licensed programs can do more and are safer than open source, individual exceptions can be made to satisfy sceptics or specialists – opposite of the current strategy.

Skype is already standard many major firms because it is free and ridiculous cheap use compared to standard telephony. A headset and web cam cost less than most of us pay for a phone bill each month. A hand held phone that can use Skype through the WiFi network cost less than 2200 EEK. It does not take much imagination to manage a credit system for those calling non-Skype networks, and for monthly unlimited world wide use of landlines cost less than a meal in the university cafeteria for 3 persons. Why pay for both internet and telephone when you only need to pay for one?

Being "green" looks good. Being "independent" works! EMÜ has all the facilities to implement technology that provide free heat and electricity. Already working radiator systems, water tanks, and flat roofs (even south facing tilted roofs) are begging for solar heaters and sun cells. The university has several hectares of land for pipes that could provide buildings with heat through ground pipes and heat pumps. These technologies can easily be rejected as options when buying them from firms who sell and install each of the items for around 100.000-150.000 EEK at household size. However, most items can, and is, easily made by untrained hands at a quarter of the price or less. I would love to share my knowledge and be part of such a project at EMÜ – because it is fun and it makes a lot of sense.

Most of us do not make use of the above methods regardless of their obvious and proven benefits. It can be difficult convince oneself to find that extra financing to invest in a method that will save you money. So, if you succeed making the first baby step and save something on your budget after the initial investment is paid back, immediately invest it again! The second step is much easier when there is nothing to loose any more - your overall expenses are the same with the savings reinvested. The self-perpetuating strategy can makes the progress possible. Normal strategy would be to put the savings into the bag of money, look at the minus on the bottom line, and say "sorry, there is no finances for it this week/month/year". In stead of staff taking extra holidays, perhaps they should build sun panels?

We got the tools, let us grow the will!

Further reading