Throwing Stones In A Glass House

Fortunately for me the Draft due to the Viet Nam War ended just as I turned 18 in January 1973 (and I lucked out with getting a very high lottery number as well). So, thankfully, I did not have to serve in the military. And as I reported earlier, I missed out on the Peace Corps and VISTA, opting instead to go directly to grad school at Northwestern after finishing up at Cornell. So while I’m going to talk the talk in this post, I haven’t walked the walk, and I know it. I’ve been an academic and spent most of my life on campus at the U of I. It’s been comfortable. It makes for an ideal environment to do serious reflection and in that sense it has been well suited for me. But it has not forced me to confront reality, particularly the issues of living in a large urban environment, since I lived in Chicago while attending grad school.

This above is my mea culpa. Now I’ll make the case as if that doesn’t matter.

In going through the track back on an earlier post, I came across Barack Obama’s Web site and in particular this speech on 21st century schools. Unlike me, Obama does have the personal history of activism and community service. His speech is moving and sensible on several levels. It shares several ideas with the Louis Gerstner led Teaching Commission report that I’ve referred to earlier. Yet Obama’s speech departs from the motivation of the Gerstner, et.al., document by leading off with mention of Jonathan Kozol and his new book Shame of a Nation, rather than by focusing on potential future decline in GDP growth (because we will be out competed by India and China and others) that is at the heart of the Teaching Commission report. I have not yet read Kozol’s latest, but some years back I did read Savage Inequalities and based on recollection of that Kozol has no need to appeal to macroeconomic issues to make his points. For his arguments, he need only appeal to basic notions of fairness and justice and a sense of human decency. I think it is wise of Obama to cast the education issues in these terms.

But to me either Obama doesn’t have the argument quite right or he is playing his cards too close to the vest now and is still holding back on some critical aspects. He mentions efforts like Teach for America and the New Teacher Project and several others as well, though he does not try to pick winners from this list and while he tells us these efforts will have to scale up eventually he doesn’t tell us how that will happen.

To the extent that the argument depends critically on young people just out of college taking up the call to teach, basic economic reality is likely to get in the way of this vision. Many of these young adults will be carrying a debt burden with them and will need to find work to service that dept, if not to pay it off immediately. Those who are financially unencumbered might choose the path that Obama implicitly suggests for them, but for those carrying a lot of dept, isn’t this asking more than can be expected? And with the rising cost of a college education, one should expect this problem to become more acute.

So, behind the Obama argument there is another that has not yet been articulated --- taxes need to be raised to fund debt relief for those college grads who opt to spend some years teaching in the schools, before pursuing some other career. This is what will be needed to make the approach scale. Recognizing that, the question is whether one can make a compelling appeal to increase taxes for this purpose.

Here Obama’s rhetoric casting the issue in moral terms may serve him well – but the case still has to be made. Now, if a young adult serves in the military, a totally voluntary act, the individual receives funding for college in return. (And similarly, if one enrolls in ROTC the college education is funded by the promise of future military service.) So with respect to the military, the case has already been made that service justifies a subsidy for enlisted people to get their higher education and that quid pro quo is part of the deal and readily funded by taxpayers.

Hence it seems to me that Obama must make the case the teaching in the schools after college is an expression of patriotism worthy of general taxpayer support, the moral equivalent of serving in the military, with rhetoric to match the argument, such as better to fight the inward battle to what Kozol calls “Third World America” to support values we all believe in than to fight the outward battle in Iraq, to support we’re not sure what. But one doesn’t see ratcheting up of the rhetoric this way in Obama’s speech. Perhaps he feels we’re not ready to scale up these efforts. To me, however, it seems an appropriate time to push these points.

Let me leave that and turn to a related point. Economic incentives can only go so far in bringing new graduates to the call of teaching. Other motivations must also be in play and one has to wonder whether the college experience itself should be neutral on this point or if instead it should prepare the students for a period of service after they graduate. In other words, the ethical tone while in college might have as much or more to do with addressing the labor supply issue for new teachers than any debt relief program that might be instituted.

In some posts from last August (from 8/9 to 8/21) on “Inward Looking Service Learning” I argued that the needed reform at public research institutions such as mine, which attract relatively strong students but that seem to be breaking from the dual pressures of promoting student engagement and containing costs, is to have those students themselves provide service to the institution by teaching and mentoring other students and with the advice and counsel of the faculty develop online environments that aid in instruction. One of the key parts of the argument is to make this the regular business of the university, put it front and center, and make it a point of pride that students are part of the productive environment at the university, rather than an object of scorn and derision that instruction must be of low quality because much of it is done by undergraduates. In other words, this was meant as a self-help approach to addressing the needs that like institutions have and putting all the members of the community: faculty, staff, students, and administration into an ethical environment where self-help and support of the community become a habitual response to serious issues.

Whether this can work is, of course, an open question. But if it were implemented and did work, it would then stand to reason that it would impact the labor supply of teachers from newly minted graduate students who now saw service to the community as a part of their essence. Right now, we do see courses that bring undergraduate students in contact with K-12 students in the community, perhaps a step in the right direction, but this too is not done at scale and though there is some rhetoric to the contrary, there is no real impetus to have this occur at scale in the current environment. I don’t think that will change until the service-based approach is perceived as addressing our own internal issues rather than simply as filling some good citizen requirement for the University’s image.

But I think it is possible, by making this potential tie explicit, that leaders such as Obama might look to Higher Education and encourage reform there so as to make it more likely that the improvement in the schools has a real chance. Why start by making an appeal to young graduates to turn to public service when a fuller and more sustained recruitment can happen by having the students engage in serious service during their college years? It’s the logic behind this question that encourages me to be somewhat optimistic about the possibility.

This is a long haul issue. There is no quick fix. But that is not a reason to delay in getting started.

Dual careering and getting K-12 students to do schoolwork during the evening

Its not often that I find the commentary of Stanley Fish striking a chord with me, but his point that some of the best instruction occurs outside of regular courses seems dead on. And while he is particularly concerned here with adult education via TV and radio talk shows, I believe the lesson applies as well or all the more so to youngsters, who get much of their education through play and their interactions with peers outside the classroom. So it is worth a moment or two of pause to scratch one’s head and ask whether we really help students out by piling on the homework or forcing them into “educational” extra curricular activities when that isn’t of their own selection. I make the point up front because I’m going to argue that in many cases we should be doing that and certainly when the home or neighborhood is not itself nurturing, then there is an added obvious reason to encourage the school to make up for that.

Let me make a big aside first. I’m confronted with the my kids school in two ways. First, since I drive them in, I’m occasionally involved with getting the backpacks ready and loaded into the car. These backpacks are behemoths. Both kids have two loose leaf binders (I have no clue why), a textbook or two, some folder for transmitting papers to be turned in that don’t have key holes punched and miscellaneous other materials. Then during the evening when I arrive home, much of the backpack contents are littered on our counter where we have our informal meals. (The younger kid likes to do his work on that counter.) The unmistakable message that I take from these observations is that the kids middle school is a world of paper – the computer and the Internet intrude at the outer reaches of this world but have made nary a dent in terms of the core processes involving student homework.

One other point, this one may be specific to my kid, but I believe it is more pervasive than that, is that the amount of homework seems minimal, at least for the sixth grader. The eighth grader does seem to have a fair amount of work, but the younger one often reports – I did it already at school, or – I don’t have homework tonight. My younger kid tends to zip through things, often without sufficient care, especially when he doesn’t see the derivative benefit from the activity, so the “did it all at school” line might reflect that rather than that adequate homework has been assigned, but my sense is that this is not the full explanation and that another part of this explanation is in this paper world in which this school exists homework provides a big burden on the teacher, not just in the reading and evaluating of the student work, but in the record keeping as well. This acts as a deterrent to assigning more homework.

So perhaps it makes sense for the schools to utilize learning management systems and have online homework, which in addition to addressing some of the issues I mention in the previous paragraph have the benefit that the homework can begin to become a teaching device in addition to an assessment mechanism where students can have multiple tries at a problem and get feedback on earlier attempts that help them understand the source of the mistake they are making.

There is only one sensible reason that I can see for not doing this, which is that there is not a good way to provide universal access to the technology and absent that, differences in class, income, and race that already tend to cleave the schools will be accentuated via digital divide issues. This is, of course, a serious concern and the public schools certainly have to embrace universal access. But I believe the trend is toward universal access at home (I’ve read some stuff on that front recently bud didn’t bookmark it and can’t find the reference now) and when some threshold that I’m not sure how to specify is crossed, I believe that with providing access at schools after hours and at libraries and other public places that we’ll get close enough to the universal ideal that we can assume using a learning management system for homework (or other online tools) will take a serious hold.

As that threshold is neared we can then start to think through the question I asked in my post on Second Careers and K-12. How does one bring bright and talented people who otherwise wouldn’t become teachers into instruction? An alternative to the answer I gave there (and I still favor that solution as a primary focus but do recognize that many approaches need to be tried) is to imitate the University of Phoenix and hire adjunct instructors who interact with the students online. These adjunct instructors would need to have other jobs, hence the expression “dual careering” in the title of my post, and that is what would make them affordable as employees in the K-12 environment. Unlike how the University of Phoenix works, however, these adjuncts need not be the sole teacher of a course teaching a prescribed curriculum, but rather might be partners for the on ground teachers who need assistance and they might bring in their real world experiences from their other jobs as they interact with the students.

I certainly don’t have a fully worked through model of this, but it seems clear to me that one could encourage more writing by the students in discussion boards, blogs, surveys, or what have you and get interesting critique of the work if there were additional adults to the in class teacher looking at this work. On the flip side, these adjunct instructors might enjoy very much interacting with the students online and expressing something of themselves in these interactions so that it would get away from the dreary type of grading and be more compelling as a form of human interaction from the point of view of these online instructors.

In other words, once the school has gone the route of online homework, this then becomes a potential mechanism for bringing in other instructional staff with minimal other logistics to manage. In contrast, to bring in dual career instructors without the technology the only way I can see that working is to start having classes at night so that either the students would have to return to school a few days a week for an evening session or the students would stay in school continuously from the daytime through the evening, so these adjunct instructors could teach them face to face. This might work at the senior high school level in some cases, but the transportation, safety, and other logistics issues make that seem a less likely solution, absent the idea that students will spend more hours in school overall across the school year, with some of those hours in the evening. While I would embrace that idea myself, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. The online approach, in contrast, could happen much more readily --- if an online homework system were already in place.

Dual careerists can’t pay as much attention to the second career and if they do that work primarily for love and not for money they will periodically be conflicted because the primary work will make demands on them that they can’t ignore. So there are limits to what can be expected from this sort of innovation. Nevertheless, it seems to me worth a try in those school districts that have already committed to online and solved the access issues.

Google Calendar and the CMS

This will be a quickie. I will get back to my personnel in K-12 posts soon.

Yesterday I was futzing with Google calendar, which requires a Gmail account to access, and I thought it was a nice app with potential broad use. On my campus we don't offer a calendaring tool to the students, so this would be useful for them and we relaly don't have a way for instructors to share their course calendars with class outsiders. It would be helpful in that vein as well.

So I started to ask myself how might the CMS accommodate groups of students to use a service like google calendar. We've had discussions internally about having a registry for student's "other email" address, but my sense is that this is a bit of a loser unless that other email is primary, because students maintain multiple personas online and change those with fluidity. We want the persona they'd like to use now, for this purpose, and that might not coincide with what is in the registry.

So I think we want a decentralized way to do mini-registries that are relevant only for the near term. The obvious tool in the CMS for this is the survey tool. It's fine for data collection of the sort needed for the group to share their calendars. But, as far as I know, the instructor would manually have to intervene to distribute the survey results to the students. That is a loser. We need for the instructor to decentralize the data collection and sharing, otherwise it won't happen.

One other point, this regarding the evolution of CMS functionality. We need the CMS, as I've argued earlier, but the rapid development of tools such as Google Calendar that operate outside the University enironment entirely and are seemingly more functional that tools within the CMS, suggests a need to carefully consider comparative advantage and where the focus should be in CMS development. I do think it is correct for CMS developers to cede functionality to the broader marketplace rather than to try to do replicate that functionality within. Then it needs to figure out how to make the two environments couple and I believe the guilding principle on that is to encourage this via decentralization, such as in the example above --- give the students the ability to use the CMS environment to build their own bridges.

Second Careers and K-12

Because I tend to think of issues in a theoretical way, I occasionally stumble into interconnections of ideas, each interesting in its own right, that speak to one another in a way to make a novel synthesis. I’m hopeful that I achieve such a synthesis in this post. However, I’m the first one to admit that in the process of abstraction critical institutional detail is omitted and so there may be numerous reasons for the ideas to fail that I don’t envision here, were one to seriously attempt to implement them. While this risk is there every time I generate something, when I stray to the K-12 arena where my knowledge is limited and stems mostly from my role as parent and chauffeur of my kids to school and the assorted memory fragments of my own experience in K-12, hardly a way to come up with a full picture of the situation. For the record, I’m a product of the New York City Public schools, first P.S. 203, then I.H.S 74, and finally Benjamin Cardozo H.S., all in Queens. Sometimes, reading about K-12 issues, such as the reforms in the NYC schools under Joel Klein, I hearken back to those experiences.

The general issue I want to consider is how to attract talented people, who otherwise would do something else, into serving as teachers in K-12. In today’s post I will focus on the “second career” solution – these talented people are in their mid 50’s or older and have retired from their first career job, they have a pension from that and quite possibly good health benefits as well, and while their intellectual and physical capacities may be on the decline (relative to how these people performed when they were in their mid 30’s) they nonetheless are able and productive and want to do something socially useful with their lives, rather than idle away their retirement playing golf and bridge and what not in an enjoyable but essentially purposeless existence. In subsequent posts, I’ll consider alternative paths in attracting bright people into becoming K-12 teachers.

I came to think of this by wondering whether I could teach in K-12 (probably closer to the 12 than to the K). I’m 51 now and by the time I’m 60 I’ll have 35 years of experience at Illinois, if I don’t leave the University before then. I started at a fairly young age right out of grad school and was studying economic theory when I could have been doing Peace Corps or Vista or teaching grade school. But anyone who knew me at the time would say that grad school was the right path for me – I had all the academic tendencies, I really didn’t know how to do much else than be a full time student, and if one is to engage in serious study like pursuing a doctorate in economics at a high profile program such as the one at Northwestern, there are big advantages in doing it straight away after getting the bachelors degree.

But none of those reasons will apply in a few years when I’m eligible to retire from Illinois. Might I teach in K-12 then? Would I have the wherewithal to make the job switch? What inducements would I need to make that change rather than continue on here? (I have tenure, so I’m thinking about all of this as a voluntary move, not a coerced one.) And would I be any good at it? I think I have something to offer, but I’m not sure I could deal with the institutional rigidity. I’ve had many years to do it, “my way.”

Let me leave the personal issues for now, I don’t really need to address them at present, and turn to some other sources of thinking on this subject. One is this really interesting post by Gary Becker on the Japanese Retirement system from the Becker-Posner blog. It’s this post that got me thinking about second careers more generally. I highly recommend this read (and indeed, the entire archive for June is filled with posts and comments by both Becker and Posner on retirement) and in general I agree with the view put forward that the problem with retirement in America and most West European nations is that retirement happens too early in life. (Both Becker and Posner are well over 65 and still are faculty members at the University of Chicago.) The irony here is that while the “official” retirement age is 65 (there is no mandatory retirement, so instead of using the word “official” it is more appropriate to say “according to conventional thinking”) many people take early retirement and the average age at retirement is somewhere between 59 and 60, the situation is reversed in Japan. There the official retirement age is 60 but most continue on in the labor market after that via the second career mechanism, with full retirement happening closer to 70.

So I want to talk about modifying the Japanese approach to the situation here and making K-12 teaching the locus of second career employment. There are many plusses that can be assigned to this solution and I’ll get to those. But now let me consider a different source. Thomas L. Friedman had a column in the Times a couple of weeks ago, which focused on the quality of the schools and the relationship between school quality and our national wealth. The argument, one that makes sense to me, is that our prosperity will start to decline if our school system remains second rate. I do want to qualify that a bit, because there is such economic inequality in this country and there is inequality, as well, in wealth generation. So I believe one has to be careful making conclusions of this sort and there is some trouble reasoning too much by looking only at statistical means in school performance data. But that said, there does seem to be general deterioration in the schools that both blocks the human capital development of the children of the highly productive folks in our society and, perhaps more importantly, impedes the upward mobility of the over achieving segment of low-income people, whether immigrants or native born.

Friedman’s article cited a report from The Teaching Commission, which is a bunch of luminaries gathered to make recommendations on how to reform the schools, aiming at an audience of state and federal government. The Commission was led by Louis Gerstner, former Chairman of the Board at IBM and the report is entitled, Teaching at Risk: Progress and Potholes. I’ve read only the Intro and the section, “Revitalizing the Profession.” If I can dig out from under, I’ll read the rest of the report in the near future. I believe that I’ve read enough for what I’ve got to say here.

The report is based on the premise that to improve the schools the single most important factor is to improve the quality of the teachers. I agree with that one, though if there is another variable to consider it is class size, but my recollection of that literature (which I looked at maybe eight or nine years ago) is that the effects are pronounced but tap out when a class reaches twenty students or so and, realistically speaking, the capital infrastructure supports that size and larger, so I think focusing on teacher quality is sensible. Further, the report provides some evidence that teacher quality matters in terms of student achievement (though as above, I’m a bit suspicious of how much the statistical evidence reveals and how teacher quality is defined and the direction of the causality).

Then the report goes into a litany of problems with teacher quality – the majority of college grads who go into K-12 nowadays were poor students in college, ranking in the lowest decile of their graduating class, there is huge turnover in the system and many teachers don’t last five years, the system is heavily biased towards seniority and obtaining continuing ed credentials that, unfortunately, are orthogonal to ensuring that the teachers are up to date and engaged in their own teaching. Moreover, there is a substantial confidence problem in that the public doesn’t trust the teachers and so the report recommends a vigorous testing program for teachers in their field of expertise so they can periodically verify their competence.

The report is likely correct in this diagnosis, but I believe the cures that they are suggesting likely won’t work or won’t be sufficient even if they work part way. Consider the issue of poorly performing college students going into teaching. On my campus the best students (measured by ACT scores) go into Engineering, Bio Technology, and on down the line. Are we talking about diverting some of the Engineering students into teaching? The irony here, of course, is that Friedman in The World is Flat argues that we need more engineers. I think we can agree is that there is shortage of very good students, but we really don’t want to divert them from other growth areas of the economy, even as we want to bolster K-12.

Then, too, there is the (perhaps controversial) issue of the MRS degree. (In economics MRS refers to marginal rate of substitution, the ratio of the marginal utilities, so I innocently enough learned about the MRS degree from my students as I was cutting teeth learning to teach intermediate microeconomics.) As I mentioned in a post from January, Linda Hirshman argues that many women who have attended elite academic institution and who did remarkably well as students there, nonetheless end up as stay home moms or part time employees to accommodate their family life, whether by choice or implicit coercion. Taking that as truth, doesn’t it make sense that women who are less good students in college and not all that career oriented major in a field where it is easy to exit, to accommodate those family responsibilities once they kick in. For better or worse, K-12 teaching fits that bill. If it is to get out of that bind, either some other field will take its place or the MRS degree will have to disappears entirely. I don’t see another field stepping to the fore and while in principle I’m fine with the MRS degree going the way of the dinosaur, if I were betting that is not where I’d put my money. And given that, certainly it is a contributing factor to why the schools attract comparatively weak college students. It is too bad that the commission report doesn’t touch this issue.

Then consider pay. The report argues that teacher salaries must keep up with the market generally, if the field is to attract talented people. That is correct. But the report focuses on public education and there, of course, the teacher salaries are financed via taxes, not tuition. The report gives some high marks to governors of a few states who have started to spend more on K-12 and bully for them. But more spent on K-12 means either less spent on other government services (higher ed is obviously one of those) or it means more tax revenue collected. And both of these set up an intergenerational politics that simply doesn’t favor the continued increase of teacher salaries. I’ve got no problem voting for a governor who wants to raise taxes to fund the schools now, when my own kids are in K-12, but when I’m retired and my kids have kids, they quite likely will live in a different state from me, at which point even though I’m sure I’ll love my grandkids, voting my pocketbook means I won’t want to put money into the schools. Because society will continue to age, the intergenerational politics is going to make it extremely difficult to sustain funding teacher salaries this way, especially with the bulk of K-12 funded at the state level. As with the MRS degree issue, the report doesn’t consider the intergenerational politics of funding teacher salaries.

Now let’s return to my proposal. The fact that people are living longer and that more people who are early into their retirement are in good physical and mental health suggests that following the Japanese, a move to a second career approach for the entire economy is a sensible thing to be doing. But, clearly, we are not yet there. So there is an opportunity to use the need to attract talented people to teach K-12 as a way to cherry pick from the population who want a second career outside the industry in which they currently work. (Note that The Commission embraces the idea of streamlining red tape so that talented people from all backgrounds can find their way more readily into the teaching profession, see page 19 of the PDF in the paragraph starting “Three.” But they don’t provide further arguments for why these other background people would go into teaching.)

The potential for cherry picking means that quality-wise these people might be much better than the schools otherwise should be able to expect. Further, the income requirements of these second career people are likely to be modest. And to the extent that second-careerism becomes fashionable among some seniors, the inter-generational politics would be entirely different. Then, too, larger companies might use this as a vehicle to enhance and round out their own retirement programs and thus they might have a reason to invest in the schools as a public service, complementing the second-careerism. These are the plusses.

There remains the dual issues of first, whether it is possible to teach old dogs new tricks and second, of whether second-career teachers have enough energy to keep up with the students. My sense of this is that to make this work the role of these second-career folks needs to be thought through carefully. Perhaps in some cases they would be there to substitute for regular teachers who’ve come through the more traditional way, but mostly I’d imagine they’d complement these teachers, by mentoring smaller groups of students and by mentoring the teachers themselves about how learning and communication occurs in the industry from which they from. They would be treated differently from how student-teachers are treated now, but there would need to be an analogous systematic adjustment to this potential labor pool.

So there are certainly risks to implementing this suggestion, but the upside seems sufficiently high to me that it is worth exploring.

Faculty Development in the Style of Open Source 3: Instructors as Hackers

Two of my core assumptions in working through the approach are: (1) if you drill down enough everyone is a hacker and (2) instructors have an intrinsic need to talk about their teaching. I want to talk about the implications of these assumptions, but first I want to offer some justification for making them and also to clear up what I mean.

I will do this via example. On our campus we have a highly dedicated and super knowledgeable (about the technology) leader on Web accessibility. His name is Jon Gunderson and he has a good and dedicated staff working under him. Over the years, Jon has taught me a lot about accessible design, though I still have much to learn. (For example, I don’t know how to use CSS and position elements on a Web page without using a table.) Occasionally in the past, I’ve taught Jon a thing or two about how instructors “think” about design. We’ve made some progress on bringing those two distinct ideas into alignment. But convergence is not yet on the horizon. While that is clearly the goal, there is some benefit in not yet achieving that goal from the point of view of understanding how content creators actually use the tools that are provided to them.

I’ve now seen Jon make the point a few times so it resonates with me that almost nobody learns how to use the Microsoft Office tools (think of Word, primarily, and also PowerPoint and for now ignore anything more exotic) via formal training and hence rather than learn “the correct” way to do things, many people “hack” solutions to formatting issues that work visually for them and so seemingly solve the problem they are trying to address when they design the document. (And I might add that some secretaries are as bad as the faculty in this regard and don’t have a clue about the appropriate use of Tabs, Indents, Tables, etc. as distinct formatting elements.) As a reader of such documents one is typically oblivious to this type of hacking, but if one is editing a document done this way, God help you. One small change seemingly destabilizes the entire piece.

I believe we all do analogous things in our teaching, because there are a lot of issues that come up which have not been anticipated beforehand so of necessity have to be addressed on the fly. This might include when it is appropriate to grant exceptions to stated course policy about deadlines for assignments, how to adjust the course schedule if a topic takes longer than anticipated, or what to do if the server acts up right before an assignment is due. My guess is that this list is the tip of the iceberg. In this sense all instructors are hackers.

Eric Raymond in the Cathedral and the Bazaar means quite something else by use of the term “hacker.” To him hackers are very good programmer who work on trouble shooting some code. Indeed, the general “problem solving” use of the word hacker is either out of vogue or hasn’t made it to such august sources of reference a dictionary.com (being a bad golfer is one definition they provide) and wikipedia.org, which has the Eric Raymond meaning and the evil alternative – folks who break into other computer systems for illicit reasons. I’m going to keep my alternative for a while in this post because part of what I’d like to discuss is how to modify the approach to be more like what Raymond means.

Let me turn to the other assumption, that instructors want to talk about their teaching. There is an important caveat. Many instructors have been scarred by teaching. The experience was unpleasant if not outright painful. And the students may very well have been hostile to the instructor’s efforts. Under that circumstance there may be very good reasons for the instructor to clam up, even if the instructor is desperately looking for ways to improve the teaching approach. So the conditions must be set to get past that initial shyness.

The second assumption really follows from the first and thus it follows from the more general idea that if one is engaged in problem solving, one typically wants feedback from others who might have a different perspective. And in reciprocation, the instructor who gets such feedback might very well be willing to provide such feedback for others, as long as on the receiving end the feedback is useful and timely.

So what I envision has faculty at various stages in their development as teachers initially interacting one-on-one with Linus Torvalds styled leader and discussions of both the teaching and possible technologies to advance the approach. This one-on-one interaction is in the style of a co-author relationship, because that most suits the cultural environment in which the faculty member operates.

In this milieu the leader offers tips and suggestions of possible things to try. At some point in the trajectory, the leader moves to suggestions that come from the problem solving/issues of other instructors. The leader needs to give a focus on common issues and then when solutions emerge try hard to transfer those among the group of instructors.

In this context, open content generated by the instructors (sharable learning objects) might be very useful as the embodiment of solutions and therefore as templates for transferring such practice. Consequently, any such approach to faculty development must include as part of the effort a repository for sharing these type of learning objects. Ultimately, instructors might go to the repository to learn about teach approaches in an unmediated way, but initially it will be the leader who recommends that the instructor look at specific learning object that might serve as a template. And conversely the leader serves in the role of encourager and provocateur in moving instructors in the community to create such objects. The leader also marshals the support resources so that the instructor doesn’t feel overwhelmed from this type of participation.

The leader also makes the ideas and findings of the members public, first in a very informal way such as via a blog, but then in a way that is more systematic and meant to be generalizable. This is what I referred to as the primer, in an earlier post. By making these things overt to the community, the leader is both encouraging the same type of social/intellectual interaction that Raymond identifies with open source software development and also aims squarely at improving the quality of instruction practice, as it is rooted firmly in the community development activity.

The key issue and what seemingly will make or break the approach is if “majority” faculty members (as distinct from early adopter faculty members) are made to feel first comfortable and then interested in seeing their questions and problem solving solutions being discussed openly by the leader. If they can be made to both approve and participate in the process then they should increasingly look like early adopter faculty, who likely will readily contribute their solutions from the start. And if that happens, these faculty members who are hackers in the original sense that I described will in the process of moving down their own learning curves transform into the type of hackers in the sense of Raymond, whose contributions have social value beyond what they use for their own purpose.

So what I’m proposing is that faculty development change from a process where pre-established knowledge from the outside is brought into the development process and where the faculty are viewed as the recipients of the development activity, to the alternative where the faculty members make new, situated knowledge in the process of their own teaching, and the assessment and diffusion of that knowledge becomes the basis of the development activity.

I wonder if this can work. I’d like to give it a try.

Intermission

I will get back to the Faculty development pieces, but I wanted to comment on all the recent discussion on No Child Left Behind.

Yesterday the Times ran this article about how schools that are performing poorly on the standardized tests are narrowing the curriculum. While there is some concern about this potentially damaging these kids because of a less rounded education, how can one be worried about not learning history if the kids can't read? So I was less bothered by that. I did wonder with all the emphasis on reading in the schools, whether the kids were doing any reading outside school. When I was in elementary school, in the mid 1960s, we did two things for reading. One was SRA which was color coded modules that forced certain type of reading for comprehension and combined with a testing/assessment mechanism. The student proceeded through the colors at their own pace, and progressed to the next level when proficiency was attained. I'm guessing that SRA is something like the current focus with testing for reading.

The other things we did was called Individualized reading. We read outside of class and kept a list in a notebook of what we read and then perhaps a sentence on the book. During the reading time in class the teacher would have one on one consults with the students about their individualized reading. I'm not seeing anything like that discussed in the papers. Everything is about the testing. But are the kids reading outside of class?

I did a quick Google search and found a piece from NPR on the issue.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5149640
The commentary by David Dunn, who is a spokesman for the Department of Education, confirmed my fears. Lots of emphasis on looking at scores, no discussion about whether the kids are reading on their own.

From that I found this other piece about a new Delaware Middle School run by the clergy that is having success with high risk students
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5280100
But the regime they have in place is draconian. In essence, school becomes the total life for these kids, because their home lives are so debilitating. With such intensity of commitment the kids do learn --- and they read, real books according to the piece.

So the question seems to be whether absent a middle class home life that gives the kid the support to develop the reading habit on their own, if this type of commitment at the Delaware school become a necessary condition for real learning. It seems to me the answer is it likely is.
Hmmm.

Faculty Development in the Style of Open Source 2: Building the Primer and Keeping Book

One of the unanticipated benefits of blogging for me is the looking to others for their views and perspective to see if it coincides with mine and also to see if I’ve thought about what they have to say. This may seem like a dumb remark – of course blogging is about community and certainly learning from one’s peers is what happens in a community. This is true enough. But, truthfully, over the years I’ve developed a certain arrogance or insularity of process in how I learn – there has to be some experience on which to reflect and then there has to be a substantial time and effort in reflection. At this point in my life what appears to me as instinctive behavior is to search inward for answers or ways to frame an issue. I’m trusting of that inward looking process and skeptical of outside generated alternatives. This is the way I was trained to think, probably starting as early as eighth grade on the math team, and certainly reinforced by more math and formal economics training thereafter as well as a whole lot more informal educaiton. Finding answers by looking inward or through my own self-explorations seems natural. Learning from outsiders whom I know only via their online persona seems anathema.

I mention this because I want to argue that blogging in itself is insufficient in some sense and that blogging is other than open source development, though it is certainly open and done in communities. Indeed, I’ve come to think about faculty development in the way the post title suggests in large part because my blog, which has gotten significant attention from learning technologists and others with a professional interest in learning technology (librarians, software developers, etc.) has nevertheless been a total failure as a mechanism for faculty development in the sense that it has not enabled conversations with individual instructors who want to engage in the subject of how they are using the technology in their own teaching. I had hopes that the blog would do otherwise and I maintain the belief that many instructors want to have such conversations, but my blog has not proven to be such a gateway. My best guess as to why is quite simple – these instructors have never read my blog or, if they’ve looked at a post or two, they did not have that resonate with their own situation and thus didn’t see the point of making the connection. I believe that in being skeptical of the opinion of unknown outsiders, I typify the faculty view, and so I have no trouble understanding this. The mystery is why I thought when I first started the blog that it would be otherwise – live and learn.

Thus, by my title, Faculty Development in the Style of Open Source, I definitely do not mean a global based effort of interested faculty who come together via online discussion. That can’t work here and certainly I’m interested in an approach that can be implemented on my own campus. I’m also skeptical that it can work elsewhere. Rather, I mean a centrally coordinated effort where the faculty development happens primarily in situ, while the instructor is teaching and where via indirect but explicit means one instructor addresses the teaching problems posed by another instructor via an approach that they implement in their own course. This contrasts both with the complete decentralization practiced by the edu blog community, where there is no central coordination at all, and with self-directed approaches to understand learning and teaching method as characterized by work on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL). With SOTL, the researcher typically both poses the research question and then does a study based on that question. There is then no obvious role to be played by the support provider in that study. SOTL certainly has a national following but it may very well place too high a bar on instructors in terms of doing inquiry about their own teaching and hence may only engage a sliver of the faculty in this type of research.

Traditionally, faculty development activities happen at interludes where the instructor is taken outside the teaching environment. This may happen in a two-hour workshop or a week long seminar aimed at giving the faculty member the appropriate training and hands on experience with new teaching tools and approaches. It is then the faculty member’s job, thereafter, to incorporate what was learned in the workshop into the actual teaching. While this is the common practice at an intellectual level it is rather odd as an approach, especially for those who believe in learning by doing, because it means the true learning will happen when the faculty member is off on her own. At best, then, this type of seminar or workshop can be viewed as preparation for the real learning that will happen during the process of implementation, perhaps providing a framework for that or getting the faculty member into the right mindset.

It is during the implementation phase where instructors need to discuss what they are trying, bounce ideas off of somebody else, and get mentored through the inevitable pitfalls and failures until something that seemingly fits together is produced. So, some have proposed a formal mentoring program around instruction where senior faculty members from other departments mentor junior faculty about their teaching. The approach is strong on giving the junior faculty member an informed ear from an experienced colleague. But it is weak on both the incentives of the senior member in participating fully in the partnership, particularly at R1 institutions such as mine where there is the constant question of how valued is teaching really and shouldn’t the junior member merely learn to satisfice in that domain so as to spend the bulk of her time in building her research portfolio, and in transferring the lessons from that mentoring to others. A premium is placed on providing a little hermetic environment so as to encourage the partners to open up and discuss candidly what is going on in the teaching, but of course that closedness also provides a the senior member with a convenient cloak under which to shirk from the mentoring responsibilities and to encourage, in effect, very little to transpire.

Consider, as an alternative, a Linus Torvalds styled leader, whose full time job it is to promote faculty development and to make overt the lessons learned from the implementation process, when faculty who are new to a teaching approach put into practice what has been preached to them in those workshops and seminars. Suppose the leader does this by adopting an ethnographic approach and making regular entries, perhaps daily, in a publicly available Web space about what is going on in the implementation, both from the instructor’s end and from the students’ reaction to it. For this to happen the leader would have to engaged with the parties in conversation or via direct observation of what they are doing so as to have interesting and relevant things to record. But for the participants to be willing to participate in this conversation the dialog must be two-way. They leader must provide some mentoring on the implementation and must contribute to a sense that if things are broken then they will fixed and that there is process for resolving such issues. It is in this sense that faculty development process imitates open source development.

But in some other ways it will differ, of necessity. Open source development, of course, is driven to produce software code. That is its raison d’etre and that in itself provides a center of gravity for the participation by hackers. In contrast, I don’t believe faculty will actively participate in such a program unless there is some prior commissioning process. That, in turn, would most likely happen if some academic unit, a department or college, wanted to take a new direction, for example in embrace of blended learning for residential students, or to start a new online degree program for students at a distance, or to encourage some cross curriculum goals such as information literacy promoted via a new coordinated approach to instruction. This type of strategic reform would provide impetus for the faculty to participate and in turn the entire faculty development effort would be viewed in common as a means for achieving the goals of that reform. At least on my campus, I would think such an external motivator is a requirement for this type of faculty development process to work.

Nonetheless, I believe it helpful to consider that the faculty development activity produces a product, just as open source software development produces a product, and in the title of this post I called that the primer, short for Primer of Transferable Teaching Practice. While individual faculty members may be motivated to explore implementing new approaches in their own teaching for the benefit of the classes they teach, the leader will be motivated differently, to take novel and interesting approaches and commend those to others who might try them, so that not all wheels have to be recreated from scratch and so to get others who might be less willing to try the completely novel to nonetheless modify their approach where improvement seems likely.

So the leader will have a broader view of what is at stake and therefore will be in a position not just to mentor an instructor about things that might work in their own teaching, but also to encourage the instructor to try things that might be of interest to other instructors, who would imitate the practice. This, I believe, changes the social dynamic in SOTL, because there the individual faculty member drives the agenda. Of course that is still possible under my proposed alternative, but to the extent that the dialog with the leader is perceived as a welcome benefit by the instructor, there is now a negotiation between the two as to what things to try in the next round of implementation and which of the instructors self-generated ideas should be modified so they might be more palatable to others who would imitate.

The leader needs to establish credibility in this regard and the primer is a mechanism for that. So periodically the leader will attempt to distill from the daily ethnographic writing common themes, observations, and apparent lessons. Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which I mentioned in the previous post, provides a nice example of the sort of distillation I'm suggesting, which will itself be written up and published openly. These essays will be chapters and the essence of the primer. But where for his purpose Raymond focused on himself as the leader in the Cathedral and Bazaar, the primer must be written in such a way that there is prominent recognition of the efforts and accomplishments of the implementing instructors.

The leader has yet another job. There will be many instructors who prefer to try approaches tested previously by others rather than to implement something novel on their own. Thogh these instructors will be reluctant to experiment on their own they nonetheless will have questions and concerns about their teaching and based on their prior experience they will have a host of issues when it comes to instruction. These too must be recorded. And they must become part of the wisdom and the culture of the faculty development so that the approach taken is seen as addressing these. Where possible, they should be written about in the regular postings and where because of delicacy and respect for the faculty members sense of discomfort in making overt apparent weaknesses in the teaching, the leader must nonetheless keep a book of these issues so that they come up in discussion with the experimenting instructors in the group.

Faculty Development in the Style of Open Source

In December 2004 I attended the Sakai conference in New Orleans. There was a lot of energy at it and enthusiasm for the possible. This was still fairly early in the Sakai development and I remember thinking after sitting through a developer session that these guys were talking at a too high level (this was a discussion about the Sakai Content Management System) and they needed to make some concrete decisions just so they had something real to hang things on. I came to the conference partly as a good citizen because my campus had just joined SPP and I wanted to show the flag, along with Ken Spelke, Associate Dean for Information Technology in our Graduate School of Library and Information Science, who is the PI from our campus, and because I was and continue to be a bit of a Doubting Thomas vis-à-vis Sakai. So I wanted to find out for myself what was going on – to the extent I could understand that – while I know some developers and consider them to be friends, spending a couple of days listening to them talk about their work is not my definition of fun, especially since I’m not really able to follow a conversation “in geek.” Apparently I was not alone in that view and the organizers understood they would have some illiterates at the conference. So they had an Executive Session meant for the paper pushers in the crowd, led by Joseph Hardin of Michigan and Brad Wheeler of Indiana, two of the primary leaders of the Sakai Project. That session was more intelligible for me.

The single biggest take away for me from that conference was a reference to a book that Hardin and others raved about called The Success of Open Source, by Steven Weber. Sakai was riding high on the popularity and the mystery of open source software development. Weber’s book unlocks that mystery. It is a serious read and well worthwhile. I thought about assigning it as one of the readings for my Honors Econ 101 class this semester. Topic-wise it is perfect, because it provides a thorough analysis of an alternative to a market mechanism that seemingly overcomes the Free Rider Problem in production of a Public Good. But I decided it was too hard and perhaps impenetrable by my students, bright as they are, maybe next time.

None of this would have occurred to me had it not been for the fact that a week or so ago I got a phone call from a reporter for our Faculty-Staff news weekly, Inside Illinois. She was writing a story about the new Web technologies and how they were being utilized around campus. She had found my blog and asked me a few questions about it, notably when I got started with it and why. Normally when I get interviewed by a reporter from the student newspaper, the Daily Illini, I have some clue beforehand because my secretary alerts me to the fact that they called and what they are interested in. So I can do a modest amount of preparation mentally, just to frame the issues for myself. This time there was no preparation and I felt that my responses, though truthful, were a bit inadequate and that I could have given something other than my stock response had I been more reflective. Perhaps the Sakai conference and reading Weber’s book created a spirit in me for being more open and the blogging was my attempt at satisfying that spirit. I don’t know. I believe I had a complex set of motives and this could very well have been a part.

This is all connected to something else that has been fermenting in me for the last month or two. A very long time ago, when I was leading the SCALE project, I had an interview with Chip Bruce who was then a faculty member in our College of Education; I believe this was at his request. (Chip has since moved to the College of Library and Information Science.) He had just come back from China and in the haze of my memory fragments of the time, we were meeting about online learning as it related to that trip. Somewhere during the discussion we started to talk about evaluation of online learning and Chip said something that has stuck with me since. (I should note here that I had an intimate acquaintance with the SCALE evaluation but I got involved a little late on that and so mostly was concerned with the faculty interviews and the presentation of the results, but never really had a chance to engage in the framing of how the evaluation was done until we started the SCALE Efficiency Projects.) Chip said that we’re too concerned with summative evaluation, thumbs up or thumbs down, and asking whether the technology is beneficial for learning. He said that instead we should be asking what might seem to be simpler questions – what is the behavior as a consequence of the technology implementation? What do people do, both students and instructors? Don’t ask whether what they do is good or bad, just record what they do, if you can observe it, or if you can’t but can learn from the participants through their reflections of what they do, then record that.

I’ve treated Chip’s advice as truth all these years but not really had a chance to incorporate much of it into my own job. Then recently, doing my regular patrol of Edu blog posts, I ran across Glenda Morgan’s post on Ethnography of Academic Technology, and it triggered a connection in me. Because I was already thinking along these lines I was delighted to see that particular post. It was encouragement that the time is ripe to consider the type of approach I want sketch out in my next few posts – that we do ethnography not as outsiders but as participants in faculty development, which in turn is schemed along the lines of an open source software project. In the remainder of this post, I want to mention a few other sources of connection that are important in tying the ideas together.

At the time of reading Weber’s book, I became aware of The Cathedral and The Bazaar, by Eric Raymond. As I knew it is an ethnographic treatment of open source, my first instinct after reading Glenda’s post was to read this, though by now it is perhaps eight or nine years old, with the latest copyright dating to 2000. Though there is technical gobbledygook in it, there is much that is really worth reading and it is a fairly short Web essay, so unlike Weber’s book, it is accessible to everyone. I am going to rely on it in much of what I have to say. It seems to me it has a lot of excellent points and a good part of what I’d like to know is whether those ideas can translate to other environments that are in some ways similar in that they too are about solving novel problems but are dissimilar in that they are not about software development. Raymond seems to be a smart guy and he makes a very good argument and so much of what he says seems like it would transfer.

But on one key issue he seems totally blind and I’m not getting why, so I want to make that explicit here in case I’m missing something. The Bazaar is Raymond’s metaphor for open source and the essay is about why it is a superior way to develop complex software. (Linux is the quintessential example. Raymond’s essay proves that the methodology behind Linux is replicable because he employs essentially the same approach in leading his own software development for something called Fetchmail. Indeed, his ethnography is based on his own experiences with the Fetchmail development.) The Cathedral, on the other hand, represents proprietary software development as done inside a large corporation such as Sun, IBM, and Microsoft. (Note that these companies have to some extent embraced the open source approach and invested in it.) One of Raymond’s key points is that by assembling hackers who choose to work on some particular code at their own volition, and have them interact with a community of other hackers via bug detection and code fixes, as mediated by a central manager of the sources code (Linus Torvalds in the case of Linux, Raymond himself in the case of Fetchmail), where there are rapid releases of new versions of the code so the hackers have a dynamic environment in which to play and apply their skills, makes for the right type of environment motivation-wise and can nonetheless scale in a decentralized way so also makes for the right type of environment coordination-wise. This seems correct and is the genius of open source.

But hackers need to make some money to live on. Most hackers do their open source coding on the side. They have another job. Some companies, such as IBM, hire programmers to devote toward open source development and obviously that is an important part of sustaining software such as Linux. But there is still much of the coding being done by hackers who have other work. In this sense, the other work subsidizes the hacking, because those folks have to eat and have a roof over their head, and computers to work on, etc. For Raymond’s argument to carry through, the day job of the hacker has to be orthogonal to the hacking work. It pays the rent but is otherwise unrelated to the open source coding. Because if it were related, then the employer at the day job would likely be building a Cathedral and then the awkward conclusion that Raymond would have to make is that the Bazaar is built with the Cathedral (or many Cathedrals) as the base. For whatever reason, Raymond seems to ignore this point. When I translate the argument to faculty development and want to consider faculty members in an analogous role to hackers, I will be very cognizant of their day jobs as researchers and teachers.

Here is one other distinct reference worth mentioning. In David Brooks’ most recent column in the New York Times, All Politics is Thymotic, (you must subscribe to Times Select for the link to work) he identifies the core source of motivation for political behavior and it happens to be the identical source of motivation for Raymond’s hackers. We crave recognition. Finding a mechanism to allow us to express this craving and to thereby earn recognition is perhaps a way of getting human behavior to act in service of the public good. Both Raymond and Brooks make this point. Brooks adds, however, that the thirst for recognition can very well act in selfish manner against the public good, and can be the source for all sorts of hubris, as evidenced by the Bush administration. I think we in the blogosphere understand this lesson well. So in making our translation of open source to faculty development, and in trying to tie Thymotic motivation into faculty exploration of teaching approaches, we should be aware of the risks in that. It might backfire.

One day before the Ides of March

Q: What is 11.00101?
A: It is the binary expansion of Pi to 5 places.

Which is my way of introducing that today is Pi Day (3.14). And with that it is a way to note that there are certainly many ways to view an idea (in this case there are many ways to represent the number Pi) but often particular representations (in this case the decimal expansion of Pi) take root in the collective consciousness as a way to identify an idea and perhaps as the way to view it.

With that, I want to take a fresh look at the 3 R’s and in particular at their interplay. There is a common notion that these are learned separately or if there is a tie between them, then it is between Reading and Writing. Surely those are related, but I want to focus on how knowing the third R (Arithmetic) can benefit the execution of the second R (Writing). And, of course, I don’t really mean Arithmetic; I mean Math, more broadly considered. I’ve long held that knowing math well can help make one a good writer and indeed that it is a good gateway area of knowledge into becoming a good writer. At the least, that has been the case for me. So here I’d like to explain what I mean.

When I was in eleventh grade I was fortunate enough to take a class on Number Theory. We used this book, but I think a lot of what we did we just derived in class. I learned about Perfect Numbers, Factorials, Euclid’s Prime Postulate, and a bunch of other stuff that was fun, if useless. Indeed, the really great part of the class was in the lesson that ideas in themselves are something to delight in. Ideas can provide much amusement and questions about those ideas can lead to interesting paths of investigation. Sometimes the University is critiqued as having too much “theory for theory’s sake” and not enough relevance for what is going on in the real world. And I’m sympathetic with that critique. But on the other side of the coin, ideas are important for themselves, not simply as representations of reality. Learning Math is a great way to reach that understanding. And to me, it was the fundamental way to get that lesson. Everything else had an air of contingency to it, of being situated in the specifics. Only math had that purity of idea where that preceded the application.

Studying math is also an excellent way to learn about making good argument. A significant part of that comes from learning how to do proofs. What needs to shown? What steps along the way are sufficient for that? This is not a mechanical thing and I believe some people might get turned off from math too early because they think it is mechanical (and boring). Part of learning to do proofs is learning how to make your own “Aha moments” by finding the interconnection between one part of the argument and the other. And it creates a strong sense of where to look when search for the source of an idea. This is a critical skill in maturing as a thinker.

Math also is a great way of communicating a sense of taste. Arguments can be made in an elegant way. Or they can be done sloppily. Why is elegance to be preferred? That is not an arbitrary thing. Elegance in the argument creates joy in the one who hears the argument and that in turn creates joy in the other one who creates the argument.
Learning taste is a key, if overlooked, aspect of an education, any education. And in this sense by learning it in Math, the lesson can transfer to other areas.

Now let me change directions. I didn’t stumble onto this topic. My honor students are working on their projects that are due this week. In the process of coaching them I’ve gotten a good sense of their writing. While a couple of them have a mature style, which shows up even in their initial drafts, too many of them write in a fuzzy, imprecise way that conveys a sense of being unsure about the topic. Of course they are unsure; they are beginners on the economics. But when one sentence contradicts its predecessor, or there is excessive repetition of an idea, or the sentences appear disjoint it shows they are unsure about how to present argument itself.

I’ve made the claim (following many others) that students don’t write enough and certainly to the extent that practice makes perfect, that is one explanation of what I’m seeing right there. But I also wonder whether these kids got as good a math education while in high school as I did 30 years earlier. Remember that these are kids in the Campus Honors program, meaning they are among the best and the brightest here, and the vast majority are engineering students. So they more than likely had a “rigorous” program in math. But I fear they didn’t learn math as a form of argument and so didn’t develop a taste for argument. And I believe I'm seeing that in the writing. Their first instinct is to find "what I as the teacher am looking for" rather than to make a coherent argument based on their own current understanding of the topic. And, indeed, I believe that learning math would positively dispose the students to making arguments on their own.

In critiquing their work I use an approach based on my own personal modifications of what I learned in a Writing Across the Curriculum Seminar I attended many years ago. To me argument and dialog go hand in hand and so my critique as much as possible is written as response to what they say so that I'm pushing them to make argument even if they haven't viewed that as the initial purpose of the assignment. Of course, I critique the economics too and if they make an implausible conjecture I will try to point out why that is not right and how to consider something that is more appropriate. This is hard work for me but it is the part of the course where I feel the most that I'm teaching and where it is clear to me that they are receptive to the critique because they have a stake in the paper they are writing and because they have a chance to modify the document as a consequence of what I have suggested. All of this is part of the ABC's of the WAC approach and I must say that I've found WAC to be a good basis for considering how to teach the entire course, even the piece with no writing intensive component.

What does Internet technology do in this vein? The obvious key thing is to lessen the lags between submission, response, and revision. This promotes engagement and that is clearly good. It also makes teaching feel like running a sprint - it wears you out quickly. But I wonder if having a few quick bursts like this during the semester is better for the students than having a sustained but more reserved critique of the writing throughout.

March Madness

We’re about halfway through the spring term here, one week away from spring break. In my class, which is project oriented, the first project is due next week and the kids have begun writing in earnest (at least most of them have). But for a one or two this push before the holiday might be sending them off the deep end. I wonder what to do about it.

It’s a blessing being a bright and talented kid. There’s such an upside. So many things seem possible and these kids have openings in terms of whom to talk with – peers, faculty, firms who might offer an internship, administrators at the university, and others. And there is such a diversity of possible activity in which to engage – courses, naturally, but also sports, student organizations, stage performance, greek houses, etc. I’ve got kids in my class involved in each of these.

But it’s also a curse being a bright and talented kid. One develops a reputation for being a high achiever, but one can become defensive about it especially when is unprepared for things that are difficult or feel unnatural. And it’s easy to feel ashamed of not being good in these areas so it’s natural to clam up and no let on about the difficulties rather than to be open about it and seek help. Further, the shyness causes other difficulties, especially with teammates who are working on the project, because it will seem to them that this is just shirking. After all, everyone makes mistakes. What is the big deal?

What is an instructor to do in this case, when it becomes clear there are a handful of bright students who are struggling in this way? Be firm or be gentle? Grade the student according to his performance (and punish teammates in the process because there is a team component to the grading) or accommodate the performance with additional opportunities for improvement.

The irony is, this happened the last time I taught the class as well, but I didn’t make that big a deal of it. In that offering there was a student who hardly spoke up in class and for the team projects seemed to lean pretty heavily on her teammates. But in that case one of her teammates was the most gregarious kid in the class so it was more like different personalities creating a reasonable mix. This time around, more of the class as a whole in on the quiet side. So it’s harder because it is more noticeable.

Because we have so much time together in class for ensemble discussion (and there are only 12 students) I haven’t tried to have online discussion as an alternative. Perhaps I should have. It sure would be helpful for there to be a place where students can open up that is a sufficiently friendly and low-stakes environment and that the kids don’t feel put upon there. Really, I had thought the face-to-face discussion would do that. And I think it has for most of the rest of the class. But it hasn’t for a couple of my kids, so now I’m second guessing the approach.

Somehow we need to transition from such a solemn way of looking at things to something that is lighter and more fun. Making it fun seems to be the key. But I don’t think you can have fun if you’re worried about stinking up the joint.

I hope I’m making more out of this than is really there. I fear, however, that I’m accurate with my call.

Burnout

It is interesting to me to take note of what moves me emotionally. This past weekend my wife was chaperoning our older son who was participating in Science Olympiad. She talked about how he and his friends didn’t make adequate preparation for some of the events (so what else is new) by rehearsing beforehand and figuring out a strategy for approaching the tasks. One of those was to cut off a stick of some sort to attach to balloon filled with helium. The idea was to have the stick of the right size so the balloon would stay in the air the longest, but not have it tough the ceiling of the room. These kids cut off too big a piece – the balloon never got off the ground. So far whatever aptitude he is showing for science is as a theorist not as an empiricist. Sounds like dad.

They bombed out in some other event too but took a first in genetics, which was apparently done by administering some test. They were coached by a biology student from the U of I, rather than having to prepare for the event themselves. These kids are eighth graders. It is certainly not surprising that the coaching mattered. My son was quite proud of the prize he and his friends won. I could care less about that. But my wife said she talked with this U of I biology students for some time and the student said my son was one of the brightest kids she ever met. For some reason, that mattered to me a lot. I’m getting a little teary here, writing about it now. It’s kind of strange for someone like me who spends so much time thinking about how to encourage good practice to promote deep learning to nonetheless view innate smarts this way. But it clearly matters to me, a lot. Somehow, it is a reflection and vindication on what I’ve been talking about in the blog. And in that vein I’m happy to report that my son does have the reading habit.

Sticking to the thought that we might surprise ourselves by what we react emotionally to, I have to say I was deeply saddened to learn that Stephen Downes has stopped writing his blog, at least for now. I don’t know Stephen well and can’t speak at all to what drove this choice, but certainly he has been a strong and thoughtful voice for open communication, and something of a hero figure for what he has done. I prefer my heroes to be unblemished. I get sad when I learn they are all too human.

I do know there is a certain malaise in the profession now and I’m going to take Stephen’s exit as an opportunity to reflect on that. Part of the problem is simply that those who burn the candle brightest are likely not leading full rounded lives but instead getting so absorbed in the moment and the possibilities that may exist that they are inadvertently putting themselves on an emotional roller coaster with little reserve left over for dealing with the tough but pragmatic issues that emerge from “day job” part of their lives. Periodically, I’m in that boat.

A second very big issue, is that after all the campuses have made these sizeable investments in Learning Management Systems to ask whether that was a sensible step and whether it has assisted on advancing learning on campus. This one has been doubly big and the cause of much strain, first because its not all that long ago where we felt we had a choice to make going down this path and so we feel responsible for that choice and second because it clearly is the most visible service we offer on campus. The criticism about LMS mostly come from faculty or learning technologists who have played with Web 2.0 apps and like them and want to teach with them in an open environment. These innovators have always been our champions and our friends. But now sometimes we are saying no to them. That is hard.

The third big issue is whether learning technology is really part of the rest of Academic IT, as it is on most of our campuses. At a meeting of the CIC Learning Technology group where mostly in attendance were my counterparts at these peer institutions, I asked whether any of them felt they were on a track to become a CIO. None said they were. I found this strange but not surprising. Personally, I don’t feel remotely qualified or interested in being a CIO. But before I posed this question I didn’t sense this feeling was ubiquitous. So we are outsiders and insiders at the same time, perhaps a healthy tension but also a source of strain.

Isn’t there some joy and satisfaction in the work? Certainly there is some. But there are also a variety of strains and tensions. If I can use a metaphor to the various strains and tensions that engineers worry about when they build things, these things do break on occasion, sometimes spectacularly so, but then we learn from that on how to build the things better.

So here is to Stephen Downes. I hope the hiatus is a source of such learning for him.

Hidden in Plain View

Following on with the theme of the last post, I’m going to continue to discuss ideas on which crucial points are a mystery to me.

In today’s NY Times there is a column by Paul Krugman and another column by Bob Herbert both of which mentions nukes, indeed the Herbert piece centers on them. But for whatever reason, to me they both seem to be missing the main point (and I think that is because they both have their own prior agenda to pursue). Krugman’s piece is about Bush being so clueless as to the well being of the average American that he can’t get it right even when he does get it right, as with promoting trade with India. Herbert’s piece is about nuclear proliferation, in other words using Nukes as weapons, and how the U.S.- India deal violates all sorts of treaties and sets a terrible precedent.

All this is true, but it seems to me that the deal with India is first and foremost about energy supply, not about weaponry, and in effect the deal says that for the emerging economies of the 21st century, India now and surely China to follow in the not too distant future, nukes are the answer, or at least a big part of the answer, and especially with the rising price of crude oil this seems like a no-brainer as far as describing what is happening. But the surprise to me, given the moratorium on construction of nuke plants in the U.S., and presumably the inability to provide reasonable assurance that Chernobyl or Three Mile Island won’t recur, as well as the inability to provide safe and effective ways of disposing of the spent fuel, is why nobody seems to be up in arms about this solution. We can’t create nuke plants at home, because the lobbying against is too great, but there’s nothing stopping us to give nuke plant technology to the emerging Asian giants, so there we go for it unabashed and certainly undeterred. Perhaps Bush’s plan all along was to make the American people so contemptuous of his management ability that they wouldn’t question him when he really is making policy, critically important policy, and naturally without any debate, in Congress, the press, or anywhere else.

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Apart from a few friendly tips offered up by Burks Oakley and Ray Schroeder when I was getting started with this blog, I’ve received no instruction from anyone else about how to write my posts. I’ve no doubt that I’m better at doing this than a year ago, I’ve found a certain rhythm and so have some sense of what I’m trying to achieve with the writing although content-wise I leave the writing itself as an exploration activity. In other words, there is no detailed plan in advance as to how the themes will be covered. That comes out in the doing. There is only a loose idea of what to touch upon. This may seem like a cookie cutter approach, but it is not, and I feel I’m still learning how to do it and do it better. One small piece of evidence on that score is that in the past month or so some of my sentences have gotten longer. I’ve been trying that out, tying together a chain of thought that is interconnected into a sentence structure that a year ago I would have made simpler, but now I’ve got the confidence to do otherwise. So there is change and learning.

The key thing from my point of view is keeping at it, finding a time to write and doing it regularly. My sense is that full time undergraduate students in the main don’t learn that because the requirements imposed on them make it difficult. Regular writing doesn’t match up with the course work in any obvious way so the classes don’t push the student into this sort of behavior. How might we get them there is a question we all should be asking, but nobody seems to be. Why not? (Sometimes short sentences work best.)

There is then the related issue of how important instructor critique is to making the writing better. On the whole, I’m guessing its mostly a constipator – students can’t get their (formative and perhaps ill conceived) ideas out because of fear of that critique and hence the instructor gets in the way even if the instructor is trying to be friendly and encouraging. Of course, there is the Ken Bain point I mentioned a few weeks ago that the students may very well be comfortable in their uneducated views and freely flowing writing may nonetheless be bad because it expresses ignorance and no interest in self-expansion by bringing in new ideas and challenging their own prior assumption. So a students demand for security and comfort cuts against their ability to learn, especially through their own writing. This means there has to be some joy in intellectual risk taking for writing on a regular basis to be a source of deep learning. Again, how we get there is a question we should be asking.

I’ve talked about needing a regular pattern of writing, but a common mistake is that the pattern is only the time spent at the keyboard. There needs to be the prior time for incubation of ideas and groping as to what to try out, with a possible mental rehearsal of the argument and how that plays. This is certainly necessary. I watch my younger kid – he’ll be 12 at the end of the month – acting out scenes from Age of Empires or a Simpsons episode – and I know he has inborn in him this need to for story telling. It’s in the essence of his make up. And he seemingly does it in his play time now, but I’m guessing this will ready him for doing it in his serious school time when he is in college. But do other kids learn this? Do they try out ideas and rehearse them on their own? Should the school be responsible for teaching this sort of thing? And can it be taught independent of some writing activity or delivery of a performance? Hmmm.

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Glenda Morgan, in her Accidental Pedagogy blog made an interesting observation about gender bias in edu blogging. Her guess is that we’re about 50 – 50 on gender lines among learning technology professionals. That seems a reasonable guess to me, in the absence of harder data to give us a more precise picture. But she observes that the bloggers within this group are overwhelmingly male. So why the discrepancy?

I don’t know but I can suggest some hypotheses based on the following observation – most learning technology blogs are on the periphery of work, not the center of it. The boss may be fine that we’re doing it, but hasn’t sanctioned it. So it is part work related but also partly a way for us to devoted some of our “leisure time” to work related activities. (If that seems like a strain in interpretation please not that I am an economist and I’m trying to apply standard economic methodology to consider this issue.)

If blogging is partly leisure then the way leisure (here this should be interpreted as all time that is not market compensated work, so doing the dishes is leisure if you’re not a professional dishwasher) is perceived may vary systematically across gender, with women probably viewing the time constraint as tighter than men (quite likely because of child care responsibilities). If blogging is mostly work presumably it offsets time spent on other work projects and hence there may the issue of how much time is devoted to pursuits that given individual recognition versus pursuits that give organizational recognition and that split differs along gender lines.

I wonder if publications in Educause Review or Educause Quarterly also map this way and if not why? Something for us to be thinking about.

Things I Don’t Understand

In today’s Chronicle there is a rather depressing piece about an ACT study on student preparedness for college, measured by student literacy. Only 51% of the students are ready for college by this metric. This constitutes a 12-year low in this performance standard as stated in the Executive Summary of the ACT report. (The full report is available for download at the ACT Web site http://www.act.org/path/policy/reports/reading.html.) I don’t doubt the findings. I do doubt the prescribed remedies and I’ll say why in a bit. But this post is about what I don’t understand and on this matter it is whether I should care. I can see the argument on both sides and I just don’t know how to reconcile the two.

First, however, let me clarify what I mean about caring since, to state it in a callous and overplaying-the-hand way, if I were a bleeding heart liberal, then of course I would care. Society is doing poorly by some of its citizenry. These kids can’t read and literacy is a prized skill. There is no doubt about it. But that’s not what I mean about caring. I care about my own children. And I care about the students I teach at Illinois and those students likely to attend Illinois in the future. Does this result matter for my own kids or the kids I teach? That’s a better way to put it. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to answer the question. So, generalizing to others like me who do care about both Higher Ed and hence indirectly about K-12, I can’t tell whether this is a call to action type of item or just more of the same old same-old.

I do know how to frame the possible answers and here it is very helpful to look at a couple of columns from the New York Times Op-Ed pages the last couple of weeks, because both sides of the arguments are represented in these columns. The first is this piece by Paul Krugman, Graduates versus Oligarchs, from a few days ago. (You need to subscribe to Times Select for the link to work.) Krugman, based on a study by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon (somewhat ironically, I had Gordon as a prof for grad macroeconomics in Jan 1977, when he was again wondering about the productivity slowdown in that case because of the “stagflation” during the Carter years) argues that the economy is becoming more of an Oligarchy as wealth is getting increasingly concentrated among the very rich. He argues further that this is bad for the rest of us, since the oligarchy encourages cronyism and corruption, while the lack of income growth for the rest of us suggests market forces are becoming less important in terms of allocating the pie. Whether you buy the argument or not, it is clear to see the analog in educational case. Those lower 49% who are not reading well are going to suck resources and instructor initiative away from those higher 51%. Indeed, I’ve heard many discussions that the primary effect of No Child Left Behind is the dumbing down of the curriculum, eliminating enrichment for the higher achieving students in favor of more preparation for standardized tests that perhaps serve as reasonable meters of student learning (???) but otherwise doesn’t prepare our students for the future.

The other argument has been made recently by David Brooks, both in his slot with Mark Shields on the News Hour (I still call it Macneil-Lehrer), and in this compelling column, where he argues that political forces are quite limited in achieving social ends (he obviously is focusing on Iraq, but if the point is true there…) and that the real power to move people toward action comes from religious and cultural means. So the kids with the families that have the requisite cultural patterns will develop the reading habit, increasing their maturity as thinkers in their own way and in their own time frame, driven by their own curiosity and perhaps by the reading selections offered by others, and thereby thrive intellectually if not materially or socially. My kids, who live in a town dominated by the University and where both parents have at one time been faculty members, have that cultural advantage. So why worry about the schools and the possible pernicious influence of the No Child Left Behind or the lower 49%. But of course the town itself is infused with this culture and so the schools themselves reflect that. What about living elsewhere in the state in medium sized towns that are not dominated by a major research university? Should one worry then? I don’t know.

I do know I can’t endorse the ACT view that the schools can impose critical thinking through the reading of serious texts that are a part of the required curriculum when the reading habit is not otherwise present. (And they do seem to acknowledge that frequently it is not present at all.) I would much rather see a campaign for the earlier years of student development where TV and Video Games are limited and possibly even sports so that the pleasure of reading is encouraged for its own right and try to see whether it is possible to make a dent into how kids today spend their own leisure time and whether reading can become a part of it, especially where those cultural forces wouldn’t otherwise predict this would happen. To do what the ACT suggests in the absence of such a campaign is to make reading serious content a repeated experience in confronting ones own personal failures. How can that work?

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Because of my own emotional difficulties when I was a teen in spite or perhaps because of some obvious success in the classroom, I’ve really worried less about my kids’ successes with literacy and more about whether they can establish their own identities and learn to live within them and not have to feel that they must do things just to please the parents, who after all are prone to get some vicarious thrills from their achievements and to (unfortunately) compete with colleagues who have similarly aged children and who likewise live somewhat vicariously through their offspring. After all, this is a college town and such are the foibles from growing up in this type of community.

Truthfully, I’ve played only a background role in their education to date – a source to consult when the math problems are harder than usual or when some unusual complexity arises elsewhere that doesn’t suggest an immediate resolution. And I’m quite content to play that role on purely academic matters. But I wonder if on an emotional level I can be of more use to my kids and help them short circuit some of the developmental problems that I experienced and that are at root a matter of nerve, not intellect.

We Arvan’s have many talents but not on the list are poise and stage presence. Everyone gets nervous, I know we are not unique in that regard, but I don’t believe everyone punishes themselves afterward for underperformance when they feel they can do better and fixates on that punishment rather than simply moving on to the next thing. In my own case, finding a way out of this so that every new social experience didn’t seem like an out of control rollercoaster required giving myself a break, getting joy out of my weaknesses as much or more than out of my strengths so I could get pleasure from things like singing off key, telling bad jokes, and more generally not having to perform up to some standard that unfortunately paralyzes the performance rather than encourages it. In my teens I bounced from being a high performer with even higher expectations and living in that universe to being a completely miserable and neurotic Nervous Nellie. I only started to find some personal balance on this front when in my twenties and I sure hope that my kids don’t have to go through such a long period before they find their own peace of mind. But can I actively affect that or do they have to learn this on their own and the best I can do is be there for them when they want to talk about it?

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Returning to the literacy theme, but this time thinking about it at the College level and from the point of view of writing and creating, a friend at Purdue told me that at his school, which is seemingly not bound by general education requirements determined by the campus, but rather has all requirements dictated by the department or the major, the Engineering departments have become dissatisfied what the English/Writing department is producing in the required writing course; they want their students to be able to write tolerable to read engineering reports, and explorations with Blogs or Wikis, or other new approaches that are not instrumental in improving the writing of engineering reports is viewed as wasteful and pernicious. My friend said the Engineering departments are thinking about creating their own offering in writing. I joked, “How would they be able to find graduate students to teach it?” But really, this is no joking matter. Looking narrowly at Purdue, do the English/Writing faculty understand how the Engineering faculty perceive this course? And looking at this more emblematically across universities, do those who teach writing, surely armed with the belief that they have the student’s best interests at heart, concern themselves with what others on campus want to see in student writing and let themselves be influenced by that in the teaching? Or do they deliberately put blinders on in that dimension, with the justification that those others are outcome driven only and haven’t thought through at all what processes might successfully generate those outcomes? Hmmm.

On my own campus, the situation is somewhat different. We have a new course called Writing With Video that is rightly getting a lot of attention because it is has demonstrated that the student can communicate with power and insight through video and that they very well may show more aptitude in this dimension than communicating via written text. If we left it there, it would be fine and no source confusion on my part. The confounding factor is that we are now considering an “informatics” minor and the Writing With Video is being offered up as an exemplar course in such a minor. Further, the off the cuff justification for the minor is that students who as undergrads major in the humanities don’t have much of a job market upon graduation. But students who had the informatics minor would have technical skills so would be employable, I suppose by companies that also hire engineering students. Does this make sense?

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This is already a long one so this section will be brief. It’s on iTunes University. At a CIC meeting I attended on Monday, everyone who spoke up on the issue said that Apple was into iTunes University to sell more iPods and more content distributed through their iTunes Store. Frankly, in the grand scheme, I don’t see it. We’re going to have academic content drive purchase of entertainment hardware? And that is going to happen after the students are on campus, after they’ve purchased their computer and received their financial aid and figured out how they are going to afford the college experience? Well then, I am Mr. Rourke. Welcome to Fantasy Island. I wonder what my colleagues have been smoking. But I could see it, sort of, if Apple is talking about iTunes High School and iTunes U represents a step toward that. Has anyone else been asking about that?