“students hate complexity”

I don’t think so. That quote popped up on my Twitter stream from George Siemens who is tweeting a conference in Valencia this morning.  His reaction is ‘Well tough’ but mine is no, actually they don’t hate complexity, they just hate poorly presented complexity

Students do hate complexity when a large a complex problem is thrown at them, and they are expected to make sense of it without any guidance. We don’t expect people to master complex tasks without guidance – pilots learn to fly in simple planes and work up. Surgeons start out as interns. Real life is like that.

University should be like that too. My own experience is that when you throw a UN resolution up on the projector for the first time, students do baulk at the pages and pages of apparently pointless verbiage. If you throw something like that at them and say “Here, analyse this,,” then of course most of them will get lost in the third paragraph and give up.  But if you take them through one resolution, and show them where the operative paragraph is, and why all that preparatory BS is there, then they can read the documents and, over the duration of the course, come to understand how documents like that flow from negotiation. As they get more engaged with the problems, they can deal with the complexity, and some even come to enjoy playing the game of negotiating, drafting and working on complex texts.

So it is not the case the students don’t like complexity – properly presented, they enjoy mastering complex challenges, and if you think “students hate complexity” then the problem may not be with the students, but with how you present the complex issues to them.

If you want to read a UN Resolution, look at this – the verb you are looking for is ‘Decides…’. The conference the twitter came from is hosted by the European Distance and E-Learning Network, and I really should be there and not here surrounded by exam scripts, but all the sessions are streamed.