How do students play at their schoolwork?

I was reading Barbara Ganley’s latest post this morning, and since I’m mentioned I feel compelled to respond in some way. Before I do, however, let me make some more mundane observations. Barbara says Middlebury has 12-week semesters. Jeez! Here it’s 15 weeks and another week afterwards for finals. They’ve got higher prices and smaller portions. How can we publics compete?

On a different and perhaps more interesting point demonstrating yet again how small the world is and how even if we start from very different places there is a good chance our paths will cross, Barbara cited Will Richardson who cited Donald Murray, and as I’m reading that on Barbara’s blog, before reading the post on Will’s blog, I’m saying to myself, “Donald Murray, that name sounds familiar. Where do I know that from?” And while I had not read Expecting the Unexpected I had read part of a different book by Donald Murray that I came to because I was attracted by the title. And perhaps still more to the point, I came to that before I was even vaguely aware of other Edu bloggers who were writing on similar issues.

That earlier post of mine also shows my Econ training coming through and why I’m probably unlike other Edu bloggers in some respects – at the core I believe in tradeoffs, not perfection – and by poking holes in arguments as best as I can I hope to elucidate some of the tradeoffs being made that otherwise seem to go unnoticed.

Barbara wrote a lot, as is her want, and below I’m going to focus only on one paragraph, but there is much meat in it, perhaps the heart of the matter, at least it is in my view.

Sometimes a great talk can stir debate and inquiry, and foster learning. Yes, I agree. But the problem is that too many teachers rely on this method as the primary method. We also focus on the impossible timeframes for our courses and measured amounts of material to be covered rather than thinking about ways we can assist our students to learn about how to learn within our field. We err on the side of the accumulation of what we call the basic materials of our disciplines--often through reading and lecture instead of providing ample time for messy learning curves or the relationship between hands-on authentic learning activities and deep learning. We do not have enough time for our students to go find examples of processes we study in the classroom out there in the world and to play around, to be imaginative, to see what would happen if they mixed A with B. We ask them to gather information and soak in knowledge rather than play around with it. And our students are stressed out. We are stressed out. As we know, with the Web, information and knowledge are easily accessible. But how do students learn how to play around with that information if we don't give them opportunities to do so-- collaboratively--discussing, conversing, arguing, doing, inventing, failing. This is the beauty of a school, it seems to me--that we have the potential to grow rich, diverse learning communities that reach out beyond their own scope to the complex world beyond.

Until I became a full time administrator and hence when teaching did so as an overload and as a gift to the Econ department so I could choose the course I would teach, I did a lot of teaching in a large section of intermediate microeconomics, with up to 180 students, and a substantial amount of lecturing of the type that Barbara questions in the above paragraph. So I have a good deal of hands on experience at that sort of thing and agree that as a rule it is not particularly satisfying, for students or instructor. But there are several qualifiers to that and it is the qualifiers which I want to emphasize.

When I was in high school, either 11th or 12th grade and now I can’t recall which, I along with two other guys in my graduating class would travel to NYU on Saturday mornings (one of the parents would take us to the subway stop in Jamaica and then we rode that into the City) to attend a lecture. In the fall it was on Relativity and Geometry. There was no taking attendance and no grades. This was just getting bright high school kids exposed to an interesting approach to college level thinking.

One of the things I recall from this experience was a critique of the standardized tests in Math asking questions of the form, which is the next in the sequence. Here is a specific example.

Q: 4, 14, 23, 34, 42, 50. What comes next?

A: Lexington Avenue. Those are stops on the F-Train.

The point, meant to be a serious one, is that one can rationalize a finite sequence of numbers with an infinite family of different polynomials. Then what comes next in the sequence depends on which particular polynomial was used to generate the first few terms. The professor did teach us the “method of successive differences,” which if applied correctly guarantees (according to him) the “right answer” on any of the standardized tests. This I recall some 35 years later. Unfortunately, I don’t recall any of the relativity. C’est la vie.

This type of going to lecture was not an isolated event for me. I graduated from Cornell in January 1976 and then hung around Ithaca for another semester. I did some Library research for a prof in political science on Congressional voting on Educational measures (my recollection is that even then the argument was that so called Great Society spending programs actually redistributed wealth toward the richer school districts rather than to the poorer ones as is generally perceived) and I washed pots in a Sorority in exchange for my meals. But that left a lot of free time on my hands and part of what I did with that was to attend an introductory Political Science lecture with a girl I was pretty crazy about at the time. She was a grad student. So both of us went for the benefit of the lecture itself and that only. I’d call it the entertainment value or the intellectual stimulation value. There is something to that and I believe lecture should be considered in that light quite independent of the “power relations” that Barbara stresses in her post and that is also a big deal in the paper by Ron Burnett that she cites.

A different sort of qualifier stems from this observation. The bulk of the students whom I taught in intermediate microeconomics were Business majors or Business major wannabes, and for the most part they really detested the course. They didn’t understand why they were required to take it and they were frustrated that my course entailed more work than courses in their major. There would always be a smattering of engineering students and occasionally a few Econ majors with enough of a Math background to have a realistic shot of getting into a decent Econ grad school program. Those kids really liked the course and appreciated the way I taught.

To get a better feel why, consider the following problem.

A father and his young son are at a beach that abuts the ocean. They are staring out at the water and see several large vessels, some near to shore, others further out. After a fashion the son asks the dad, “Looking straight out there on the horizon in any direction, how far is it to the point where the ocean touches the sky?” The father responds, “You know, I’m taller than you, just about twice your height. So I see a different point on the horizon than you do where the ocean and sky touch, even if we follow the exact same line. In fact I probably see out twice as far as you.”

Is the father right? And in either case just how far is it to that particular point on the horizon?

I’m not going to answer that one. Instead, let me say there are those type of people (I’m one of them) who find the challenge of this sort of problem fun, as is using the appropriate math to solve the problem. And there are other people who would find spending time on something like this more painful than going to the dentist. Among the engineering students, there are many of the first type of person. Among the business students, there are mostly the second type. The problem itself has absolutely nothing to do with economics, but identifying types this way would go very far in predicting whether the individual valued and felt they learned anything from my intermediate microeconomics course.

My conjecture is that if one sorted types this way then lecture on a “math oriented” course such as intermediate microeconomics would be a fine way to teach, presuming there are only the engineering types in the class. This is pretty much for the reasons Barbara identified. They are self-directed in the learning. They do play with the material and make it for their own in that fashion. And the lecture for them serves as new stimuli, a source of yet other problems that they haven’t yet considered but are eager to solve.

I will conjecture further, that if one could identify a different type of play that the students should be doing in other disciplinary settings, for example in taking a history course where the above type of problem solving affinity is likely useless, then one could be effective with lecture that promoted that appropriate type of play, again viewing the lecture as a source of stimulus and the students largely self-directed.

And still one more conjecture. In the setting where the lecture and the play are interconnected in this way, the power relationships that Barbara laments become less important. The tests will be perceived as “fair” and the students will regard them as giving appropriate feedback on their own sense of understanding. Instructors will generally enjoy teaching in this setting and will feel less of a need to exert ego to establish authority. And students will enjoy the class too, in spite of the fact that lecture is the predominant mode of instruction.

These conjectures notwithstanding, the scenarios being depicted above don’t coincide with my realm of experience in teaching intermediate micro. Many of the students who exert effort in the intermediate micro course don’t engage in play at all. Instead, they memorize and seemingly act on the belief that the one is a substitute for the other. They memorize in spite of my exhortations to the contrary, a conditioned response qua school survival skills that has literally been drilled into them since the early grades in primary school. Many of the students I’ve seen have extraordinary capacity for memorization and in some respect that is awe inspiring. But, of course, unless the memorization is accompanied by some other activity that incorporates interesting use of what has been memorized, there is no deep learning.

Indeed, I’d be inclined to say there is no learning whatsoever. And that’s what seemingly happens in much of college “education” today. For example, see my little thread with Gary Brown. I don’t believe there is much if any disagreement between us (or between Barbara and me) on what is happening in many, many classrooms and it is something to be alarmed about.

The disagreement is with how the problem is best addressed. Right now I believe, though I may be stereotyping a bit in which case give me a virtual slap in the head, every teacher who has moved away from the lecture approach that I know teaches critical thinking anew, as if that course is the first time students have a chance to reflect in this mature manner, their entire prior formal education being done in the pour into the student’s head manner.

Suppose instead, that students do have some successful teaching earlier on what critical thinking is like – they learn to play with ideas, issues, and materials on their own, to turn things inside out and try them on just for the heck of it, and make their own sense of meaning from that process. And they learn to discuss and share their experiences with like minded peers and benefit from that. What would you do in the subsequent course?

I would lecture.

The Need To Keep Learning

Yesterday, I must confess, I was pretty much a bum. After taking our older kid to 4-H Camp, a 90 minute round trip diversion to Allerton Park to deposit him and get him registered, I spent most of the rest of the day either napping or watching the U.S. Open golf tournament. My excuse was that it was Father’s day and I hadn’t slept well the night before, either too much job stress or too much partying with friends or most likely a bit of both. I didn’t even have enough energy to write a blog post, something I normally look forward to and something for which I try to make the time.

Actually, I watched some of the golf on Saturday too including a post-round interview that Phil Mickelson had with Bob Costas, which was surprising in itself since the tournament was still to be played on Sunday and also revealed that Mickelson expected to only get a couple of hours sleep Saturday night, implicitly planning to perform on Sunday via the adrenalin that surely would be pumping through his system and with the seemingly new found maturity (had he won this would have been the third major championship in a row for Mickelson) from having gone through the experience before.

Hemingway taught us that courage is grace under pressure and I’m sure others who watch the golf major championships do so in part to witness courage, presumably ever present in our sports stars even if it is seemingly lacking in ourselves and our colleagues. But Hemingway did not have the last word on the subject. Lombardi modified the view with his famous line, fatigue makes cowards of us all. In other words, we might possibly see courage when watching a sprint, but we’re less likely to see it in a marathon.

Golf is interesting for that reason; a four-day tournament on a tough course is a grind; but also because in medal play golf necessitates watching the leader board in that the player’s correct decision to make matters not just on the player’s own circumstance but on the circumstance of competitors as well. If leading with a few holes to go the rational decision maker qua golfer will be more conservative, to avoid mistakes and thereby preserve the lead. Conversely, if the player is a couple of shots behind, then the player will “go for it” to make up the lost ground. I wrote up some formal math notes on this idea about a year ago, when I made a post about using Tablet PCs for doing math and science. But then I was really asking about the decision making of a basketball coach and letting their team should three-pointers instead of two-pointers.

Golf, as an individual sport, has the decision making and the execution of the golf swing done by the same individual and so what is most interesting about it from a learning perspective is whether the individual can simultaneously make those two roles compatible. (There is a caddie who servers as a partner in the decision making, but the ultimately choices are up to the player.) Certainly, performing well in both roles is not an easy thing to do. There have been two popular movies about golf recently, and especially in the one about Bobby Jones there was an emphasis in portraying the character as being prone to go into a fit when the performance was not just so. Of course if the performance does not vary and one can eliminate risk in the decision making, then one can be more aggressive overall, even when leading the tournament. Some of that may explain the meltdowns we’ve seen, yesterday on the 18th hole by Mickelson, and more spectacularly on the 18th hole at the British open a few years back by the heretofore unknown Frenchman, Jean Van De Velde.

But the situation with Mickelson I think is harder because when he was playing the 17th hole he was tied for the lead (with Colin Montgomery who along with Mickelson double bogeyed the 18th) and the mindset of someone who is tied for the lead with one hole to go should be quite different from the mindset of a player who is ahead by a stroke.

Add to this mix that the course with the extremely thick rough and severely sloped greens was very difficult to play and that Mickelson overall was not having one of his better rounds, already over par before the 18th hole. And there is one more variable that I read about on the ESPN Web site this morning. Mickelson doesn’t carry a 3-wood in his bag and is unlike most other players in this respect. (Players are entitled to carry I believe 14 clubs. Mickelson has had two drivers in his bag, one for the hook the other for slice, and he may carry an extra wedge too.) While 3-wood might have been the right play, his options on the 18th were driver or 4-wood. He chose the driver.

So while we can’t possibly know what was going on in his head the last few holes, here is my suspicion. He got a little ahead of himself and started to thinking about winning the tournament. (The admonition is to play one hole at a time. In other words, he was human. I’d certainly have done the same if in his shoes.) He had the lead for a good part of the back nine and when Montgomery tied him (in part because he lost a stroke to par) he felt like he was in a dogfight. And that thought, in conjunction with the fatigue, set the stage for the 18th hole, although the circumstance had changed and he had the outright lead.

Mickelson made several mental mistakes on that last hole, first at the tee box, and then afterward not taking his medicine for an errant drive. One clear lesson from the experience is that there is a need to play till the end, which means think through each shot, including club selection, and don’t as they say “dial it in” at least not until the outcome is fully decided. So the player must constantly re-evaluate his circumstance and can’t afford to take a mental break until the tournament is over.

But I think a larger and perhaps more general lesson is that there is a tie between humility and good decision making over time, particularly in stressful situations. Mickelson knew he was putting himself through the ringer emotionally in this tournament, but he didn’t cut back on his public “obligations” and ultimately the bad choices he made on the 18th hole probably can be tied to other choices he made during the tournament that might not seem so overtly tied to his performance. Prior success is a wonderful thing to have but we need to attend to our physical and emotional well being just as the golfer needs to think through the golf shot and we must continually assess the circumstance for itself and not simply trust that things will be fine because that’s the way they’ve always been.

If our students were a bit more humble about their academic performance, perhaps they’d engage in the schoolwork earlier on and avoid some of he cramming and all nighters. Just a thought.

The Curse Of The Engaged Student

Somehow, my last post tweaked the funny bone of George Siemens and as a result he was kind enough to direct some traffic my way from his blog, http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/. Thank you, George. In the process of finding the reference, I also saw his post on Digital Maoism, a critique of how everyone is reacting to Wikipedia (as distinct from a critique of Wikipedia itself) by Jaron Lanier published in Edge. I thought this was quite a good read, certainly thought provoking.

What do you do when you’ve read something that you feel was well done and made an interesting point, but to make the question slightly harder to answer, isn’t a blog post? I know it would add little value, at least in this one instance only, to simply reprise George Siemens’s post in my blog, because folks who regularly look at edu blogs are apt to find this info on George’s site. So I was thinking about sharing with an audience who wouldn’t find the information on their own, because they don’t read edu blogs, but who would have big benefit from reading the Lanier piece.

Regular readers of my blog will note that in early May during the last day of class I gave books away to my students (really just loaned the books) for summer reading and to get them to think about economics beyond my course, even if they wouldn’t take any more courses in economics, which they won’t. (In the main they’re engineering students who have finished their social science distribution requirements.) So it occurred to me to let them know about this this article and yesterday I sent them an email to that effect.

I don’t know how this has worked overall, but I had one student, for this post I’ll call her M., who seems to lap up everything I give her in the extra curricular area and (implicitly) keeps asking for more. The book she chose from my pile is Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. I wouldn’t have chosen that for her. While it really is interesting on investment backing circa the early 1980’s, its’s also a bit raunchy and clearly written for a male audience. She loved it. She sent me email to that effect and said she debated the book with her dad at the dinner table and ultimately got him to read it.

Now it’s one day later from when I sent the class the reference about the Digital Maoism piece, and I should point out that while it wasn’t emphasized in the course we did talk about about the Iowa Electronic Markets and the idea that markets efficiently aggregate information, so the Lanier piece provided a good counterpoint to that, and lo and behold here is an email response from M. with the verbatim:

Wow....maybe I don't think about the things I encounter on adaily basis as
carefully as I should. This was an extremelyinteresting article. I
never considered the importance of alisted author, or really thought about the
validity of someof the sites I check for information. Thanks for
passingthis along! Hope you're having a great summer also! (By theway, my
little sister is reading Liar's Poker now, too.)

M.

I kind of knew she would respond to my email, but not so quickly and so appreciatively. I know she is an outlier as a student, but her enthusiasm has shifted the conversation for me. The issue is not the technology and how to teach with it. Instead, it’s what to read and what will keep the interest up. I hope some of you will help, because I’m tapped out.

Killing The Puppy

I first found out that I was a really good student after the initial marking period in 7th grade. Weird memories of that time creep back into my head. We had to wear ties to school. This was public school, JHS 74, on Oceania Street one block south of the Long Island Expressway. I think we had “assembly,” once a week. At this one, the principal called out my name and I had to walk to the front of the room and shake his hand. I had a 93.2 average and it turned out that was the highest of any student in the grade for that marking period. There were probably a few hundred people in room. I don’t believe I anticipated this “honor” in advance and I think I was embarrassed.

There were other reminders, some painful. Near the end of the school year we were all going around with our yearbooks, the ones that your classmates and teachers and family write in. My sister’s was the best. Written in an inward bending spiral, she wrote, “Undertake your undertakings before the undertaker takes you under.” One girl in my class, not someone I knew particularly well, wrote that I made her uncomfortable in class because I raised my hand and gave answers to the teachers’ questions. It’s funny, those are the only two that I remember at all and that yearbook is long gone now. Here are a couple more of those. For a brief period of time I had a girlfriend and a couple of days in science class I changed my seat to sit next to her. Some other girl in the class, I believe she had put me up on some intellectual pedestal because the next year she nominated me to be president of Arista, though I clearly wasn’t popular enough to get elected, was emboldened to tell me that I shouldn’t have this particular girl friend because she wasn’t good enough for me. It’s strange, but I suppose typical, that people put you into a box, even when they have good intentions for you.

Let’s fast forward a few years. I’m now in tenth grade and the wheels are beginning to fall off emotionally. It’s the first time that my grades are starting to slip. My self-esteem is definitely taking a beating. And I can’t help but notice that I had been propped up emotionally by the GPA, like a junkie on a drug high. Now that my grades are declining, am I worth less as a human being? And is my real source of motivation the ego stroking I receive when I get a score of 100 on a test? All of that started to seem quite artificial. But I didn’t have something else more real to put into its place; at least it wasn’t obvious to me what that something else should be, so I floundered for a while. It was to be still two years before I read Kafka, but I was probably more ready emotionally for it in tenth grade than I would be as a senior.

Ultimately I came to some peace with myself on these issues, but that wouldn’t happen till graduate school or later. The real value was in the doing, or the reflecting, or simply living inside my own head and then, perhaps more importantly, interacting with people, any sort of interaction on just about any topic as long as that was open and with a real back and forth. Everything else didn’t matter as much. If there were head pats along the way, fine, no problem. But when it all boils down to looking for the next curtain call, it’s really a huge distraction, and not a healthy one.

Blogging can create this problem. The author gets encouraging comments from a post and then looks to recreate the conditions that generated those comments, because the comments aren’t just communication from the readers, they are also virtual pats on the head that “validate” the writing of the initial post. All the possible paths for being connected, from Google, to Technorati, to Del.icio.us, to Sitemeter create a large set of possible pats on the head to indulge the ego. Again, it's not the pats per se where the issue lies. It's with the reaction to try to recreate that circumstance, the looking backward, the focus on being stroked.

Consider this metpahorical, but actual example. You are playing ping pong. As you get into it with your opponent, some kibbitzer asks, “What do you do with the hand that doesn’t hold the paddle while you play the point?” If you actually pay attention to that question, you’re done. You’ll lose the game and won’t be able to play ping pong again till you forget about that question, because apart from the serve nobody who plays ping pong focuses on their off hand. The focus is on the ball and the hand with the paddle. As you get interested in the other hand, and the only reason why you’re interested is because the kibbitzer posed the dumb question, you can’t concentrate on the game.

My intent with this post, however, is not to talk about blogging, nor is it to talk about my adolescence and school. With the latter, I was merely trying to establish my bona fides as someone who understands the emotional aspect of grading and GPA. What I want to talk about in this post is teaching really bright kids, especially early on in college, and getting them to make intellectual leaps in their thinking and to begin to get them to consider that is their lot in life and how they should spend their time. These are the kids for whom “general education,” which I will define perhaps in an odd way as college education where it is not overtly obvious that it is career relevant, is most critical because these kids do have the capacity to make such leaps and in the process of changing their world view they also make commitments to their own personal growth that endures well beyond whatever course served as the initial stimulus.

But these kids have the most puppy in them of all the students. The socialization they’ve had on the grade front is so powerful and so complete that they become victims of that. Being a good student can mean being too conservative at taking intellectual risks, and therefore ruling out before the fact a chance to grow. Of course this problem exists with less able students as well, but to borrow from my economic jargon, the opportunity cost of going the conservative route is lower for them, because the flowers are less likely to bloom even if they take the risks. So consider a course in the freshman year aimed at such bright students where the primary (but unarticulated) goal is to encourage the students to take intellectual risks so as to create leaps in their imagination, quite irrespective of the subject matter. This, in fact, is what our Campus Honors courses here are supposed to do.

But it isn’t so easy, for the following reason.To quote my colleague Jerry Uhl from the Math department here, “Learning is about failing, repeated failing.” It is uncomfortable being in a state either of complete ignorance or having the awkward feeling of partial knowledge, it is ego deflating when initial stabs produce less than satisfactory results, and to the extent that learning is viewed by students as a competitive sport, it also raises the fear that the others are progressing along so nicely and it is only this particular student who is not getting it, so he is falling behind.

Thus, to use another metaphor, you the instructor want the students to jump into this pit of blackness and then you want to help them climb back out where they can see again, but now with their views altered by the experience. And what I’m after, still not completely satisfied with what I’ve tried though I believe my students were grateful for the experience, is how the instructor should communicate with the students while they’re in the pit. If you communicate with them as a puppy while they’re in the pit, with pats on the head and nothing more, you are being dishonest. Their performance is not wonderful. The writing needs a lot of work. They quite possibly are missing some of the esential points in what they are working on.

Sure, there is a need to say, “I’m OK and you’re OK.” But beyond that, the talk must be about the work and where it is situated and about the direction they need to move in their thinking. They need to make mods in what they are doing and you need to be seen as being helpful in suggesting the mods to make. This approach to teaching is what I mean by my title, Killing The Puppy, and I really believe that too much exuberance at this time, for example exhortations of the form “Great job,” especially provided to the product of what the students have produced to date rather than to the process they’ve been using, can be quite damaging. The students themselves know they are not on terra firma and want useful suggestions, not platitudes. But that is not easy to provide unless the ego stroking has been suspended and students and instructor both are willing to be open about what is going on. The instructor communicates via the coaching an interest in the student learning. Undeserved applause for the performance early on actually communicates the opposite.

There is still another point if I can push the metaphor of the pit and climbing out a bit more. Semesters are an entirely artificial time interval to take sojourns designed to promote leaps in the imagination and if the course has two or three projects as part of the course requirements then at the culmination of each project there is a need to provide some type of summative evaluation, i.e., to give it a grade, because the academic culture demands it. And then there is a the real possibility at project’s end that the students are still in the process of getting their vision back into focus. They don’t yet have a mature view based on what was learned in the process of doing the project. So here, especially, the problem crops up about what should be communicated, satisfy the puppy instinct in the students or be more square and overtly less satisfied with them, because now part of what is communicated has a grade involved.

Summative assessment for an early project can be viewed as formative for what comes next. So my sense is that the tone should not change much and if the projects seem squished in that they’d benefit from another week of hard work, that needs to be articulated. For the ultimate project, and by this time all of us want the semester to end even if we’ve enjoyed the course, just because we want to do something different, it may matter less. But why start with pats on the head then? If the students are to have a lingering memory of the course, is that pat helpful?

I have no idea how much teaching happens in this style but grade inflation is a well known concern that indicates the contrary and from a Writing Across the Curriculum seminar I took a while back, I know that much in evaluating student work occurs as instructors rationalize the letter grade they assign. So I’m not sanguine about this and, if that is correct, it is a shame.

Timing

Today we’ll try an olio on a bunch of different themes.

Yesterday I posted a comment to Barbara Ganley’s blog and this morning she had responded to me (and to the others who had made comments) with warm and heart felt remarks of her own that showed she had thought about what we said, this in spite of returning from a conference in the UK. I know that if I made a transatlantic flight then I’d be crabby and disoriented afterwards and not inclined to be generous of spirit in anything I’d write. So I do want to note how unlike that Barbara seems and this must be at least part of the reason she has such a strong reputation as a teacher. I will try to read through at least part of her archive of posts to get a better sense of the range of her ideas on blogging. My comments may have given the impression that we’re far apart in thinking about issues. Maybe we are and maybe we aren’t, I don’t know, but it seems worthwhile to find out. BTW, there may be some problem with the Middlebury blog server, since it seems now that there are now comments to Barbara’s most recent post.

One of the things Barbara remarked about is whether students communicate differently with their professors depending on discipline and in particular whether students are more circumspect with Econ faculty than they are with English professors. I don’t know about that, but I’m interested in a similar comparative where the defining feature is the instructor’s age. I’ve now reached the point where getting carded means I’ve had a good day, where most of my peers compare notes on the amount of gray we have (mine is mostly in my beard), and where the senior moments are becoming sufficiently frequent that I’m not sure if I’ve really lost the trend of thought or simply wasn’t paying attention to begin with. For the class I taught this past spring, there was about a 30 year age differential between me and my students, so I’m guessing that I’m older than most of their parents. I don’t believe I’ve yet experienced teaching students where I’ve also taught the parents, but that is likely in the offing in the next few years.

I believe the instructor’s age matters. In my case, and although I’ve tried many different things in the teaching, I believe the age conveys a sense of rooted-ness and that the things I evidently value, based on the nature of the work I had the class do, comes from substantial experience and reflection. A younger instructor trying to do similar things might be perceived by the students as following the latest fad and not really knowing whether the approach is a good one. Also, and while I still have needs for ego gratification, I’ve been around the block enough to know that I don’t have to dominate the conversation in class to get those rewards, and can intercede more based on the economic points that should be raised. Then, too, relying on the crotchety aspect of the aging process, I’m more willing to please myself in thinking how to teach the course and care less about what “should” be taught.

Let’s switch gears and consider time frame for staying within one version of an enterprise learning management system. We use WebCT Vista here and started with version 3.x in our production service during the fall 2004 semester. While WebCT has released several service packs and we’ve implemented (most of) them, we’re still in the 3.x product line and likely will stay there for another academic year, with the plan to implement Vista 4.x for the fall 2007 semester and some transition/pilot/testing between now and then. Using the metaphor that my colleague Kathy Christoph from Wisconsin taught me, that managing an enterprise LMS is like steering an aircraft carrier, the turns are slow and one has to plan in advance to execute them, as well as our bias here that stability and reliability of the LMS service trumps any other consideration, the three years that represent our current plans for staying in the Vista 3.x environment probably provides a good rule of thumb for how long we’re likely to within any environment in the future. I don’t know if this maps well with how smaller universities think about these things, but without committing my colleagues as peer institutions to agree with me, I believe they are reaching similar conclusions, because of huge reliance on these systems on their campuses and like concerns about reliability of performance.

Some time ago, I posted some comments on Campus Technology’s Website, in response to an article by Chris Vento about open standards versus open source in LMS development. One of the points I raised, imperfectly to be sure but I think relevant, is on the product development cycle and when companies come out with new releases. If companies are coming out with new versions on an annual basis, we simply won’t keep up. We do seem to be able to stay approximately current with the “service pack” releases, and to the extent that those are mostly bug fixes and only a little bit of feature changes, and that our own internal testing process gives us a good sense of what is likely to happen when the service pack is implemented in production mode, that extent of innovation seems to be manageable. Major feature changes with a significantly new version are hard for us to handle especially within a narrow time window.

One more gear change. I’m part of an internal group here discussing “messaging convergence,” which is in part driven by the observation that some students have moved away from email in favor of more rapid response modes, notably IM, and that the proliferation of cell phones (as well as the offerings of network vendors) seem to be bringing voice communication and text messaging into a unified framework. Relative to the others involved in this conversation, I’ve been pretty much a stick in the mud. (For example, somebody proposed that the campus offer a Jabber service and I thought the students were doing fine with what is provided by the market.)

Part of my issue can be cast by making a too simple assumption that students can be lopped into one of two categories – engaged and disengaged. I want our IT services to enhance the experiences of the former, and then I’m really not so concerned with whether the students uses these services in a curricular, co-curricular, or purely social way, but I don’t want to offer IT services that seemingly exacerbate the disengagement in that they will only be used in a social context and not at all for academic purposes.

This nuance seems to be lost on my peers in our discussions and my sense is that they feel we should be the provider rather than the market so the students feel happy with us as an IT organization for providing the infrastructure to support their online existence. We are not very good now in answering where our comparative advantage lies, what enablers we should provide to leverage what the market does well, and how supporting the academic mission should define (limit) our scope.

Other places, including some public universities, don’t seem to be troubled by these issues, for example offering a blog service to everyone on campus whether there will be an academic benefit or not. They may be wrong but they get the advantage of learning by doing. There’s only so far one can go about essentially empirical matters based purely on self-reflection.

Maybe I’m behind the times.

Spine or Optimism

A piece in today’s Chronicle (you need to subscribe for the link to work) says that Higher Education Professionals are subject to lots of stress, more so than in other industries. This is a U.K. study and whether the results translate to the U.S. is moot, but the primary recommendation of the report is nonetheless strange to me. The report argues that managers at all level in the organization need to take great care for the welfare of their subordinates. This, of course, makes sense, but it says nothing at all of the mission or scope of the work itself which, if it feels like putting square pegs into round holes, may be the primary source of stress. What of that issue?

It’s probably a mistake to equate management with leadership, but for rhetorical purposes I’m going to do that now and ask the following question. Knowing in advance that the nature of the work is apt to be a source of stress, what tone should the leader adopt? While angst and desperation are possible responses to stress, we associate those attitudes more with artists and alienated youth than with leaders, so I’m going to rule out those alternatives in advance and focus on the two other alternatives that are in the title of my post.

Spine conjures up images of Harry Truman, “Give ‘em Hell, Harry,” while optimism brings to mind the pony story that most of us were told in childhood, a version of which is here. In the metaphor of life as a poker game, the leader with spine plays the cards that are dealt, doesn’t fold and accepts the consequences, both good and bad. The optimist, in contrast, leader or otherwise, may be somewhat self-delusional about the realities in order to find a path to transcend them. Optimism is all about transcendence and rising above the current circumstance via our imagination and different ways of framing reality, finding new solutions that have yet to emerge. So the optimist may sometimes appear to be reckless, where the leader with spine will seem cautious.

One senses in America, especially within the Bush White House, that there is very little spine. Certainly the Op-Ed columns in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, and Frank Rich paint this picture vividly. (You must subscribe to Times Select for this link to work.) Indeed, Rich makes clear there is a disconnect for U.S. military personnel in Iraq when they return home and see nothing about war preparedness back here. Prosecuting a war would seem to favor the leader with spine, but what we seem to be observing instead is misguided optimism.

An unexpected demonstration of spine as of late is from Brian Cashman, General Manager of the New York Yankees. (I’m a Yankee fan, in part to preserve a vestige of growing up in New York, though I’ve lived in the Midwest for my entire adult life.) The Yankees have had a disproportionate number of injuries this season, with some of their stars out of the lineup and others performing below par because they are not physically right. The Yankees, known as the best team money can buy with the highest payroll in Baseball, did not make their characteristic move to buy a good player as replacement from another team that is cash constrained or to do likewise in a trade where the Yankees give up minor league talent. Instead they’ve been starting role players in pivotal roles and asking their hurt but not disabled stars to grit their teeth and bare it. Certainly the Yankees are not the dominant team they were a few years ago, but the approach seems to be working reasonably well. At this writing they are a half game behind the Red Sox and playing competitive baseball.

Yesterday afternoon, when the rest of the family was out of the house, I watched Capote. (I had Tivo’d it off of Pay Per View the night before.) This is certainly not light fare, but it is a compelling story and worth watching. It is the story of how Truman Capote came to write, “In Cold Blood,” why the story of these brutal murders in a small Kansas town was so important for him to relate, and how he personally got caught up both with the towns-people and then especially with one of the murderers himself, Perry Smith.

Capote, already a famous writer and celebrity, was out to transform the nature of fiction. In that sense he was extraordinarily optimistic. He wanted to chronicle an event that was graphically real and showed immense conflict. The movie depicts Capote clipping the story of the murders out of the New York Times, as if it were made to order for what Capote was trying to accomplish. And then what ensues is truly weird for the outsider, the viewer. While others would be repulsed by the subject, Capote is fascinated and gets close intellectually with his subjects. He finds a certain identification with Perry Smith, both in the creativity of his art and his writing, and because both of them were mistreated as children by their mothers.

This closeness gives an authentic quality to the writing of In Cold Blood that captivates the reader and the film depicts several scenes where first Capote’s publisher and then the more general public are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the work. But as Capote gets closer to completing the book, a moral dilemma emerges that ends up making Capote feel like it is he who is the prisoner and this creates a serious depression and downslide in Capote’s capabilities to act and communicate with others. Capote envisioned himself as an observer and chronicler but he was finding himself in the position of the friend of the murderers and his book and his personal fame were giving him credibility to influence the main outcome, whether the murderers would themselves be executed.

Capote rightly noted that the murderers had inadequate legal counsel at the original trial, so he initiated an appeal process. But although that trial may have been stacked against the defendants, there may have been justice in doing so, given the brutality of the murders. Capote finds himself in the role of judge, a role he initially desires but ultimately doesn’t want, and then a role he can’t accept. The movie depicts Capote as a drinker, but one who is in control of the situation at the beginning. At the end he is a confirmed alcoholic and completely trapped by what he himself has wrought.

Before the closing credits, some lines of text appear on the screen indicating that Capote never finished another novel. So while many of us remember him as a celebrity, for example appearing on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, his creative flames seem to have been consumed by the experience of writing In Cold Blood. I would not have made much note of this except for having read this recent book review of A Writer’s Life, by Gay Talese, where essentially the same thing has happened, at least according to the reviewer.

Perhaps it is the case that optimists need their self-delusions to spur the creative act only to eventually suffer the risk that producing the new thing takes something out of them that they can’t replenish and hence never re-attain the vibrancy of their peak period of creativity.

We often don’t think of leaders as creative individuals. Instead we think of them as having the choices designed by others and then being hard nosed about which choice to make. There is no doubt that it was Truman’s choice to drop the A-Bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but it is Oppenheimer rather than Truman who is associated with the program to develop the bomb.

So we want spine in our leaders. And spine seems in such short supply nowadays.

Let me bring this back down to learning technology and perhaps more broadly to information technology. I know that I personally have wanted to have it both ways, and I believe many CIOs as well have felt likewise. I’m coming to the realization that it is one or the other, but not both. When I first got started I used to believe that Ed Tech administration was a place for creativity and when I expressed that to others I’d get strange looks. I’m beginning to come around to their point of view.

Rainy Day Woman

Midi Version
Lyrics

This has been a weird week for me, at times surreal. We had FSI, this time an event jointly for Four-Year College and Community College faculty, support staff, and a few administrators. FSI has always been something of a catharsis both because of the intensity of the experience for the attendees but also because hosting any conference has something of that element in it, and one with technology all the more so especially because of Murphy’s Law and the consequent need to manage more of the details. In this case both because some of the EdTech staff were handling a good part of the program and especially because Michael Lindeman of ION was putting in yeoman’s effort, it was easier for me to relax. So, why worry? Well, that’s only for starters.

Monday morning, before FSI started, the CITES Roundtable (this includes all the administrators at my level plus all of our direct reports) was greeted with the news that my boss, Pete Siegel, is headed off to new stomping grounds, UC-Davis. Bully for you, Pete. We wish you well. But what does that mean for the rest of us, both within CITES and those on campus who care a lot about IT? No matter the ability or character of the interim person named as replacement, things usually come to a standstill during that period, so they can be left for the next permanent person in the job. And it’s definitely a seller’s market now. There are a lot of CIO openings nationally and within the CIC I believe about half the positions are vacant, either due to retirements or to turnover. It’s not unrealistic to expect a long time before we fill the CIO slot with a permanent hire.

Because at this point I’m the old veteran of FSI, I got to kick off the opening session with some brief remarks. In trying to be a little humorous, and playing off all the attention at present to Biblical ideas stemming from the DaVinci Code movie release, I coined an expression “BG” meaning Before Google, and referring to the time not when Google was formed but rather when it first entered into our consciousness. I’m really not sure when that was for me, but for the sake of this presentation I was referring to summer 1999. I do think that now Google is the most profound force shaping how we use the Internet today and so it is worth marking when we became conscious of it; even if I’m a bit off in my dates.

From my own personal perspective, however, all of these things pale in comparison to what happened to me starting at 12:30 AM Tuesday morning, when I woke up feeling a pain in my lower back on the left side. Thinking I had wrenched something, I started to walk around just to try to loosen up. But that wasn’t helping. After about an hour or so of that, I decided it was a kidney stone. I had a kidney stone perhaps twenty years ago. Then it happened over a weekend. A friend took me to the emergency room. My recollection is that they fluoroscoped me and found some of my “pipes” quite swollen indicating something was blocking them. But by the time that discovery had been made I had passed the stone on my own accord. My friend took me home and though shaky, I slept it off and was fine the next day.

So I started to drink water with the hope that I could replay history. And I was pacing around our downstairs because that seemed like the best way to relieve the pain. Of course, I was asking myself what I should do about FSI (and my other work). I had no formal obligations in the morning, but did have a meeting in the afternoon and one of our featured speakers was arriving at the airport and I was supposed to pick him up and take him to dinner. Could I bluff my way through the pain? Somewhere around 5 AM I decided that after my wife took my kids to school (she is between jobs and not working this week) that she should take me to the doctor and also that I needed to have a contingency plan about my obligations in the event I didn’t pass the stone by early afternoon.

That turned out to be prudent. It’s now Thursday evening and I’ve still not passed the stone. The doctor gave me some Vicodin after a basic urine test confirmed something wrong with me and kidney stones seemed a plausible explanation. I didn’t take the pain medicine immediately, because I wanted a clear head in case I had to deal with FSI stuff. But by around 4 PM, the pain was overwhelming. So I caved in and took the stuff. They had given me Demerol twenty years ago. My recollection is that it made me nauseated and the pain persisted, so I wasn’t that optimistic this time around. To my surprise, the Vicodin surpressed the pain substantially and for a period of time it seemed the pain went away entirely. I can see why this type of drug is habit forming.

One of the lessons learned from being in intense pain like this but still having important work obligations is that it is a must to rely on others to get things done. It was literally not possible for me to do my job. In a pinch, others stepped up. I don’t know if it was a big deal for them or not, but they did it and FSI ran smoothly without me. The dependencies are almost certainly there even when there is no kidney stone, but then I’m apt not to ask for help (I’ve got the male gene) and I’m not sure people would be so responsive and willing to step up to the plate otherwise. This is something to ponder. A more cooperative less individualistic approach probably makes sense but I’m not sure my persona is fit to shape that. For now I’m just appreciative of their efforts.

Sometime Wednesday, I started to think of Dylan’s song, “Rainy Day Woman,” and especially the tag line, “Everybody must get stoned.” During the previous day or so I know I had promised myself to repent on my worst sins, if only the pain would go away. And for whatever reason, probably just play on the word “stone,” I started singing that song to myself.

That song was extremely popular with some of my high school classmates in 1972, the year I graduated. And of course then the tagline referred to smoking pot, which all the kids I knew then thought was the hip thing to do (but I only knew one kid who actually smoked pot in high school and it was only him and his mom, his dad having passed away).

I’m not sure what I thought about smoking pot when I was a senior in high school, but I know the first thing that comes to mind now is the Bill Clinton line, “I didn’t inhale.” Why did he come up with that one? Of course he came up with other gems of moral certitude, such as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” thereby paving the way for the know-nothingness of the religious right. So lesson here is that with a kidney stone and a little Vicodin you can get pissed off at Bill Clinton.

But let me turn to the other meaning of stoned in Dylan’s song. This is the same meaning as in Shirley Jackson’s story, The Lottery, which I believe was read aloud to us in English class, either in middle school or early on in high school. Stoned in that sense is a brutal assault on someone by others, both in Jackson’s story and in Dylan’s song. In my case this assault was from within, physically and painfully from the kidney stone, and emotionally from some of my other demons. If one believes that everybody must get stoned in this sense, then asking why is paramount. The answer I can come up with now, and I’m still looking at some more physical pain for me before this episode is over, is my need for absolution, a commitment to mending my ways, and in particular in placing greater trust in others as I’ve already mentioned. If I’m looking for a larger meaning in getting this kidney stone, that is the meaning I would attribute.

But this is a purest solution and Dylan’s song is anything but pure. Everybody must get stoned, in the sense my high school classmates understood the song, to drown out the pain and take on a sense of gay merriment. I achieved that with the Vicodin.

This morning, after having gotten a CT scan yesterday that confirmed a kidney stone and also that it might still be several more days of the same before it passes, I decided I could function well enough and returned to FSI to be in the audience and listen as the various “Learning Teams” gave their 5 minute reports to showcase what they had accomplished.

It was weird for me. I knew I was quite drugged up and so I was registering things with a lag and felt like I was inside an echo chamber. The Learning Teams concept was not one I had come up with. My sense is that it was Robert Baird of EdTech who championed the idea after some prodding from Michael Lindeman that he didn’t want an FSI with many plenary sessions. Some of the people at the podium giving the reports had a lot of fun with their presentations. One team literally sung their lyrics. The mood in the room was festive, not scholarly. And the attendees being in high humor is how we marked that the session was a success.

For me, in a glazed torpor due to the Vicodin, the presentations at this session seemed other worldish, and my own emotional reaction to the situation – elation for the mood of the attendees, some jealousy because I was not responsible for that success, and some disappointment because the depth of conclusion didn’t seem to be there, with all of these feelings interwoven but also muted and therefore less profound. I don’t think I’ll linger on that. It’s just how I felt then.

Perhaps everybody should get stoned when seeing something new. Then first impressions don’t mean as much. And we can linger on a worthwhile idea rather than discarding something that is promising because the book cover didn’t look quite appealing enough.

Baby Boomers and Lack of Retirement Planning

Computer Generated Voice of Post via TextAloud

Last night on Frontline, I watched the beginning of a Hedrick Smith documentary with the basic premise that many baby boomers have not prepared adequately for retirement and hence are going to come to an unpleasant reckoning when they reach the point where they want to leave the labor force and have “quality time” with family, only to find out that they can’t afford to do that. In other words, whatever pension or other retirement plan that these people have, they will often find at this reckoning point that the plan is inadequate either because of stock market vicissitudes, self-delusion, or inattention to the saving activity and managing the portfolio funds that are to finance retirement.

That data on savings in this country, particularly in the last year or so, is truly abysmal. (See this chart from the Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis.) The only way to rationalize zero or negative savings rates is to have personal wealth increase without needing to save, i.e., there are capital gains to be had on already held assets. In the mid to late 1990’s this happened, of course, due to the massive run up in the stock market, fueled by the astonishing growth in technology stocks. More recently, it appears to be the boom in housing prices that is the primary driver. Some economists, notably Robert Schiller, have warned there may very well be a bubble in housing prices. This makes the low savings rate all the more disturbing.

The documentary starts off with a focus on the United Airlines bankruptcy and restructuring under which many of the long term United employees lost a substantial fraction of their pension benefits and many of those who continue to work for the company today have had to do so with lower wages and benefits, while upper level management and the lawyers and bankers who crafted the re-org made out like bandits. Unfortunately, in my view, this later point of corporate greed triumphing at the expense of the ordinary Joe in the company, while good for creating empathy with those employees who have been disadvantaged by the process, is really a distraction from what I think is the fundamental point.

That point is the death of defined benefit pension plans in the private sector, because companies that have them and have a substantial number of senior employees can strategically profit from gaming ERISA and the bankruptcy laws, by forcing such a restructuring. Hence a modern company will not offer this type of retirement plan, opting instead for 401Ks or other defined contribution options. Under the defined benefit plan (assuming the company does not go under) the employee is “taken care of “ and doesn’t have to worry about retirement except in the event of a premature severance from the firm. (Thus these plans served as a way to bond the employee to the firm.) In contrast, under a defined contribution plan, with the contributions optional and left up to the employee, then of course the employee does have to worry about contributions and about how those contributions map into an adequately sized nest egg.

Because I love Excel and to make little models in it that illustrate issues such as these, I made up this spreadsheet to give an idea of what is going on. Let me explain a bit of that here.

First, you are setting the time path of income during the lifetime of the individual over which savings occurs. (One of the points of the documentary is that many people are not forward thinking on this issue so while in their twenties and thirties they don’t save for retirement. They only begin to think about retirement in their forties when they’ve been working for quite a while and the day they stop working begins to seem like a possibility. However, do note that if they are paying off a mortgage they are indirectly saving through that vehicle, by building up equity in their home.)

To set the time path, income is fixed at three different times along the trajectory: at the beginning, at the end, and somewhere in the middle. The duration till the endpoint is also set as well as where that middle point lies. With that information, the graph then plots a quadratic function consistent with those set points to give the entire income trajectory till employment ceases. You can change parameters to see how the graph changes. The graph moves after you let go of the relevant spinner button. One of the key variables to play with is the Years of work.

Having set the income path during the working lifetime, I next assume that savings per period is a certain percentage of income and one can set that percentage for the entire working cycle. In other words, I’ve assumed it fixed throughout the working lifetime. That is not realistic when contributions are optional, but it makes us able to vary the savings rate easily over the entire trajectory rather than adjusting it on a year by year basis. The penultimate parameter is the interest rate, which should be interpreted as the real interest rate, meaing the market rate net of the inflation rate. But it doesn’t mean that the investor is in bonds rather than stocks. If the investor has a portfolio of stocks, this should be interepreted as the average annual return on that portfolio. The interest rate determines the interest income generated by the nest egg.

Then, putting your cursor in the lower window and scrolling down, you should be able to see how th nest egg accumulates. In any period the contributions toward increasing the nest egg are the current savings out of income plus the interest return on the previous asset value of the nest. Thus the nest grows faster the higher the interest rate or the higher the savings rate. Regarding the former, it is certainly true that high interest rates can cover up other sins with respect to preparing for retirement. And, conversely, there is the temptation to overestimate the rate of return so as to offset the need to save vigorously for retirement. Regarding the latter, the fact that actual savings rates are much more modest suggests that collectively we don’t understand the issues at stake.

Finally, you can look at the the income per period during retirement, which is the bolded number in blue found in cell C10.. This is a function of the size of the nest egg at the end of the working lifetime, the interest rate, and the number of years during retirement. The per income per year during retirement is calculated in a manner similar to the calculation of the monthy payment in a fixed rate mortage. In other words, there are a pre-specified number of periods and a fixed payment per period such that over the duration the payments are set to pay off the loan and outstanding interest charges but to provide no surplus beyond that. If the interest rate were zero, then this annual payment would simply be the final nest egg number divided by the number of periods in retirement. With a positive interest rate, however, and since the nest egg that does not get paid out all at once, the asset earns interest and hence that gives more to distribute. Equivalently, we can think of dividing the nest egg among a fewer number of periods. Cell D10 gives this dividing factor. It is interesting to observe how that value changes with the interest rate.

What, if anything, does this have to do with learning technology? I’m sure some of my readers found the previous few paragraphs a bunch of econ mumbo jumbo. So let me get away from technical details and move to the main point. If there are a lot of people approaching retirement who are not adequately prepared, these people will look to enhance their income in the labor market. To the extent that these people can’t do this by staying in their old jobs, or returning to their old jobs, they may very well demand education to assist them in finding different type of work.

So the Baby Boomers’ debacle may turn into a big reward for Higher Ed, cementing a demand for online programs that heretofore seemed real but hard to identify, as these Boomer’s are looking to improve their incomes in their next careers, and additional educational credentials are viewed as the path for achieving this goal. Think of the possibility of an equivalent ot the GI Bill, targeted at encouraging these Baby Boomers back to school so they don’t have to work at McDonalds or WalMart in their second careers.

Advocating for education of this sort is the upside of the under saving problem. The downside is noting that the retirement age will have to be be pushed back because these folks won’t be able to retire otherwise. I wonder if the politicians will steer clear of the education part, because of this uncomfortable fact.

Is IT The Solution Or The Problem?

Computer Generated Voice of Post via TextAloud

Today’s quote of the day (from the Google homepage) is by George Orwell. It says

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

Sounds like a a motto worth adopting. So what are we looking at or at least trying to see? The big issue from where I sit is that we on campus don’t know how to cannabalize, by which I mean end services, departments, or even larger units that either are no longer in demand or perceived as of quality below the rest of the institution. Every activity has some constituency and is considered important by them. Schumpeter talked about creative destruction. In contrast, we have uncreative, and really unspoken about, retention.

What’s the big deal. Universities keep on keeping on. We’ve known that for some time. Anybody who adopted learning technology in the ‘90s and wanted to see that as the spur for institutional change had to wake up to the fact that universities are conservative instituions, especially because of faculty governance, but also because the interdependencies are substantial, its not very likely to excise units or activities that under a “corporate” approach would have been axed a long time ago.

The implication is that to do anything new either new revenues have to be found to fund the activity, or the activity itself must be cost saving in other areas so it is implicitly self-financing, or it just can’t be done. This wouldn’t be so terrible, but for the politics. New revenue comes with strings attached. There are earmarks. So for bottom up activities, and while I’m reasonably highly placed in the campus administrative hierarchy, I still view teaching and learning with technology as primarily a bottom up activity, new revenue becomes something of an oxymoron. This leaves cost saving or doing nothing as the viable alternatives.

But let’s not focus on teaching and learning here and instead consider IT more broadly. One might sensibly ask, “How can IT be part of the problem? It’s such a big factor in our lives. It’s an integral part of the way we work, how we communicate, what we produce. It’s the solution, not the problem, isn’t it?” And from the point of view of a home owner who has a PC in the office with a cable modem, some other rather inexpensive hardware and software, it sure seems like total cost of ownership is low, while benefits from use are extremely high. The access to information, timely stuff, interesting stuff to read, reference stuff to fill in personal gaps of knowledge, fun stuff to entertain when the mind goes blank from work, all of that is a wonder in itself. And, of course, it’s not just the getting but also the making and communicating about it. There’s email, blogs, IM and a lot more. It creates an unbelievable sense of connection. And most of the stuff is free. Surely IT paves the virtual road to the brave new world.

Consider Google. I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned, for the most part, to ignore the ads and promos, unless I’m actually in shopping mode when that is what I’m searching for. In this respect about using Google, it’s like TV commercials, press the mute button, get a tall one, and come back when the programming has resumed. Many of us learn this type of behavior and once learned it’s not that big a deal to have this type of external presence. But, of course, if everyone behaves this way than the ads don’t have impact, Google can’t generate sufficient revenue to support its exploding infrastructure, and then the walls start tumbling down. So, we who are in love with being online but also in love with being cheapskates hope the rest out there are “power shoppers” and give Google’s commercial clients a tumble. We can then leech, er, really I mean free ride, on these others who actually do provide the financial skids to the system.

So all the cool software services that are provided out there seemingly for free to us have at root a Catch-22 style foundation – it’s the ads that make it work, but we try our darnedest to ignore the ads. Is this a stable business model on which to rest the case about IT being part of the solution? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that I don’t find this a comforting thought.

Now let’s turn to big IT inside the university, where clearly there is no ad financing of university activity and, I believe, state law actually prohibits that from happening. (But if the state share of the university budget continues to wane perhaps that law changes and then maybe the university starts to emulate Google in this resepct. Perish the thought.) I believe the new hot issue is data integrity and data security. Research data, financial and personnel records, grade information, etc. All of this needs state-of-the-art storage and archiving, insurance against power outage or hardware failure, and proactive steps to ensure confidentiality and privacy. The needs in this area are growing geometrically as our business processes become digital and we increasingly rely on those.

State of the art, in this case, means having expensive “data centers” with appropriate environmentals – temperature control, no direct sunlight, redundant electric power, secure physical access, and as leakproof as possible. Big servers take up a lot of physical space. As our data preservation needs grow, the square footage of data center space that is needed also grows. We are currently estimating new data center growth on the order of 1% or 2% of the campus operating budget to handle needs for the next five to ten years.

Normally, it is a mistake to consider capital projects like building a new data center, which has a multiyear lifetime, and therefore the installation costs should be amortized over the lifetime of use, with operating budgets, which are calculated on an annual basis. This is the standard stocks versus flows distinction that we teach in economic principles.

But in this case I made a point of making “this mistake” because new data centers typically won’t carry additional external revenues with them (although one could argue that the revenue is there in the overhead from federal grants, but there is the countervailing argument that the overhead money has already been fully allocated) and hence such data centers are not self-financing. They also don’t seem to be directly cost reducing. That leaves only one other way to get them built, via a diversion of operating revenues from their current allocation. With this line of thinking, its not hard to view IT as part of the problem.

To an economist, the real problem is an abence of markets. Things like data centers are funded off the top and are therefore lumped in with unavoidables like increases in heating bills do the the rise in price of crude oil. Instead we’d argue there should be Pigouvian taxes (or their Groves-Ledyard equivalent to ensure incentive compatibility) so that we jointly determine the level of public good provision and who pays for it. But this really only makes sense if every individual faculty member and administrative officer plays the role both of tax payer and consumer.

Yet this idea is so alien from our culture that I don’t believe it will ever happen. Instead we live in a world where deans are customers, in the sense that they control budgets that are potentially subject to a campus imposed tax, and individual faculty and administrative officers are users, who want every service on campus to be provided according to the “Library Model,” where except for late charges everything is offered up for free. In this world there is a gap in expecations and demands between the customers, who tend to be more penurious about IT, and the users, who tend to be more expansive about IT. A big part of managing IT on campus is about reconciling that gap.

Is IT part of the solution or part of the problem? I say, “yes, it is.”

final final test

netfiles post

I changed the url for the file from https to http to see if feedburner makes the feed. Netfiles, I believe, is smart enough to bump that back over to https. Let's see.

last test

Another russian song and a link to the campus home page.

still one more test

a russian song

this is from someone in the math department. the one from netfiles didn't work. i wonder if the url starting with https:// matters.

testing again

this is from an online lecture

and some additional text but no additional links

Dialog with Computer Generated Voices

Audio of Script Below

The feedburner site didn't create an enlosure with my prior attachment at Netfiles. Now I'm trying again, with a different file, this time on guava, the same server that hosts the blog.

This audio file was computer generated using a program called TextAloud. The script is below. I'll make no claims for the quality of the dialog, but the voice itself is pretty good.

* * * * *

This is an attempt at dialog

I'm Paul and we're starting this presentation with me. I'm patient but masculine and sometimes show a little bravado. I need to be tempered by a softer side. {{Pause=1.0}}

I'm the softer side. My name is Kate. Though I'm a girl, I can be tough. Don't you believe me? Just watch out. {{Pause=1.0}}

Now that you know my better half, let's think of what we can do with this sort of capability. We can script a presentation as dialog. That seems pretty cool. {{Pause=1.0}}

Sure. But good dialog is hard to write. If the writing isn't well done, this will sound tedious and less interesting than if there is only one voice. How many people know how to write good dialog? {{Pause=1.0}}

Paul, don't be such a Doubting Thomas. Of course most people don't write good dialog. That's a skill not usually called for. Let them practice a little and see how they do. Don't judge them on their first try at it. {{Pause=1.0}}

Kate, you're probably right. Let's see if people can learn to write dialog and yet convey the type of useful information that they would have done, had they been writing a blog post where they focused on the content only and not the form of presentation. Let them get used to this new approach before we give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. {{Pause=1.0}}

Patience is a virtue Paul. {{Pause=1.0}}

I suppose it is Kate. See you later. {{Pause=1.0}}

Bye.

test post

Just trying to see if the mp3 file that is linked shows up at my feedburner site as an enclosure. The mp3 file is on my Netfiles site and I was having trouble getting links from there to work.

De-constructing Community

I’m just back from Chicago where there was a Sloan-C Workshop on Blended Learning. It was interesting for me and I’ll comment about some of the things I learned there below. I did skip out of the workshop early because I’ve had a hacking cough that seemed to be getting worse and making me feel kind of out of it and since I knew I was looking at a three hour drive, I thought I’d take that during the middle of the day rather than latter and be pooped out for tomorrow.

I’m prone to compare my own undergrad experience (as modified in my own memory by the 30 years or so since I graduated) with what I’m hearing now about good approaches to encouraging learning. So let me review a few quick points about my college experience. By my junior year at Cornell (I transferred there in the middle of my sophomore year) I had a very complete and engaging intellectual/social life with the people who lived at 509 Wyckoff Road. This was entirely outside the course experience. None of the people I lived with at Cornell took classes with me. This contrasted to my Freshman experience at MIT, where my roommates and I had several classes in common. The courses, in contrast, created their own contacts/friends and the work I did in them was entirely at an individual level. For some of these course – a topology course in particular but some other advanced match courses as well and some advanced political science courses – the work relied on intensive introspection and I really don’t see an alternative to that. On the other hand, I had plenty of social argument on issues and construction of ideas, with my housemates. I am thankful, in that respect, of being able to have both of these things are integral parts of my education. I view them to both be essential. That prefaces for what I have to say next.

For students who either are commuting in face to face instruction or who are taking a totally online class and who are holding down a job at the same time, there is probably no chance to fit in an intellectual social life on top of that which resides outside both the world of work and school. There just won’t be enough time for that. As a consequence, there may very well be a reasonable role to be played by school as a provider of intellectual social interaction and hence having the pedagogy done with that in mind may make good sense. For residential students of the traditional age, who are busy to be sure but without the burdens of work and family to compete for their attention, one wonders whether many of them do intellectual activities outside of class, for their own entertainment and personal growth. My sense is that it happens much less here and now than it did for me at Cornell. I’m not sure about this, but my impression is that this is far from the norm. So I can see, even at the undergraduate level, some folks arguing for a social and constructivist approach to education in the formal classes, as a way to provide this type of intellectual life.

However, there now seems to be an argument being made, implicitly if not overtly, that intensive introspection – hard thinking, working through a complex argument that solves a difficult problem, and doing that on one’s own and thereby establishing a sense of competence in being able to think this way – is not a necessary part of education and that all problem solving can be done in a social context. I believe there are many, including most of my colleagues in Economics, who think otherwise. If the two sides are to do more than simply growl at each other, it would helpful to sharpen the issue and also to ask whether there is any middle ground.

Yesterday afternoon, there was an interesting presentation by Gary Brown from Washington State University on joint work with Tamara Smith and Tom Henderson involving student evaluation in online and hybrid (some but reduced seat time) courses on something parallel to but not identical to the dimension I discussed above. Gary and his co-authors pose two possible and intended to be mutually exhaustive constructs for learning. The first is “School” and the second is “Community” and students were asked which construct most aptly reflects the learning in the particular course where the survey was administered. The principal finding in this work is that novice learners appear to be neutral to these constructs but more experienced learners speak more about community as being important and particularly that peer assessment is of value. I found this provocative but also a little unsettling.

On the drive back today I stopped in Kankakee at a Starbucks for a coffee and a sandwich and read through Gary’s PowerPoint for the presentation. Reading the slides confirmed my initial impression. I thought the cards were stacked a bit unfairly against “School” in that it was presented in an unappealing manner, not attached to personal growth of the student at all but only about getting a good grade via doing well on the tests. With this characterization of school, the results are less surprising. So I wonder whether one might get a more interesting picture (though probably not so strong results statistically) if one made a better case for School and in the process peeled the onion a bit more.

Consider these further issues. There are some courses where “students feel lost” and if the students were interviewed by somebody outside the class who was knowledgeable in the subject but who because they were not in a position of authority in assigning a grade could get the student to open up, would readily establish that the student felt a sense of incompetence in the course. There are other courses, however, whether the student though a novice feels that she is gaining mastery of the subject and making good progress and capable of functioning well with the material.

From the days when I had office hours at the same time as my undergraduate TA and could witness students walking past my office though I had nobody else there so they could meet with the TA, I’m quite convinced that many students who feel lost don’t want to talk with the Professor about it. It is painful to show intellectual weakness of this sort, especially to someone in authority. It is understandable to such students that they would want to seek out a knowledgeable peer, who might help without creating that feeling of embarrassment. But if this is the primary driver of why experienced students want peer critiques, it might be rightly criticized and resisted as the blind leading the blind.

Now consider a different type of student. This student is not just progressing nicely in the course; she is proceeding at a more rapid pace than her peers and is getting deeper into the subject matter. How does this very able student express her questions and issues since most certainly anybody with this type of aptitude will be curious about what comes next? Does she do it with her classmates? Wouldn’t that be asymmetric and unsatisfying? Or does she seek out the instructor whose authority is now not a threat but an opportunity for arguing about the issues that she is confronting. Does this type of student choose “School” on the Brown, et. al. survey?

Students who are in the middle between those two extremes and who find themselves interacting mostly with like students (neither clueless nor prodigy-like) may find that they work better in groups and getting some fresh ideas from peers while holding their own on the giving up of ideas as well and that might be satisfying.

But what happens when the subject gets really hard? Do these type of students avoid such courses? Does the social form of interaction and the group problem solving overcome the inherent difficulty in the subject? Or do we get blather of the blind leading the blind type.

While the Physics faculty here don’t practice constructivism per se, I know that they do follow a Just In Time Teaching Approach and that they reported some time ago that the approach tends to give more focus on the middle students and the very high level students feel they are being held back. Is this focus on social settings for learning and constructivism as an approach in particular really a veiled argument for taking a utilitarian rather than elitist approach toward instruction? If so, might there be a flipside argument that we should be encouraging these middle student to jump a bit higher and not be so comfortable in their mode of learning? And does it matter whether we are thinking about this with adult learning in online or blended courses or traditional college students in on ground courses?

Who else is asking these type of questions?

Getting Testy

Sometimes justice is delivered through life’s little ironies. According to this article from yesterday’s New York Times, we’re experiencing a shortage in psychometricians, those who practice that esoteric “science” a big part of which is to assign the mapping from raw scores on standardized tests into percentile rankings. This, apparently, is an indirect consequence of No Child Left Behind and its reliance on such testing for measuring learning (or non-learning as the case may be). It seems we’re testing so much that we don’t have enough of these measurement folks to validate the tests. First, there was the scandal with the SAT scoring. Now this. If I didn’t know better, I’d think God was trying to send a message to President Bush.

Here, it’s Finals Week. Many of our high enrollment courses (and some smaller classes too) use those scantron sheets for scoring final exams. Apart from individual student complaints about erasures not being treated correctly, I’ve never heard of us having scoring problems with the scantrons. But as far as what those final exam scores mean about student learning, I am more doubtful now than I’ve ever been as to what the exams actually measure and on why the entire culture is immersed in this type of high stakes testing.

There are some narrow instances where I understand what the tests do and indicate. After I had entered the doctoral program in Economics at Northwestern, I was told that the GRE in Economics was meaningless, but the basic GRE in Math was a strong predictor of success in the Economics program. That made sense to me. More recently, I learned something similar about the Chemistry sequence here. The Math part of the SAT is a very good predictor of performance there. This is not surprising: math aptitude is necessary for doing well, both in Chemistry and in Economics. The SAT and GRE provide reasonably good measures of a simple type of math problem solving skill – exactly what I mean by math aptitude. But I’m guessing this is the exception rather than the rule.

After getting killed in my course evaluations by students with comments like “test us on what we know, not on what we don’t know,” I stopped writing exams in my intermediate economics course where to get the right answer the student would have to show some cleverness in set up of the problem and its analysis. Coming from graduate school, I had thought it was that cleverness that the instructor wanted to encourage and hence that should be a big part of any exam. The students, in contrast, wanted something else. They had studied and put time into the course “learning” the material. They wanted some way to show that on the test. After about 10 years of teaching (I stopped teaching intermediate microeconomics after my second year except for an honors section and only returned to it 7 or 8 years later) I figured out that if students had seen essentially the same type of problem in a homework assignment or a practice exam, then they would feel the exam was fair because they’d be prepared for it. They had their bag of tricks and my test questions could be found in it. Even with that, my exams were perceived as hard by the students. But beforehand, they were viewed as impossible.

Impossible tests, of course, don’t measure very much, unless there are a handful who can actually do them. When that is the case, it is really not very hard to identify these individuals. But for the rest, it is not at all clear that gradations in exam performance measure much of anything. That has always been my issue with relying on tests. So in the Honors course that is just ending, I didn’t use exams at all. I had homework and projects – that’s it. I learned about what the students knew from their writing and their discussion in class. It seems to me to be far more informative, and clearly preferred if their performance doesn’t have to be sited on a bell curve and I can rely on my qualitative judgments in giving them their end of semester grade.

Then there is the issue of the stress in the students that exams can cause. We know there is good stress and bad. The good encourages elevated performance as if running a race. The keyed up individual “competes” whether the grading is on a curve or not and taking the test is a way of proving oneself worthy (though of exactly what I’m not sure). I was a good test taker when I was a student. I know the feeling. I’m guessing that most of my Honors students know the feeling as well.

But what about those students who don’t have reasonable expectations that they will perform well on the tests? How do they feel under this stress? Don’t many under prepare because they hate the feeling of coming up short and thus have a ready excuse in their lack of prior effort? And for the diligent types who do put in the hours beforehand but feel that their performance might not show the benefits from their work, where is their reward? Do they benefit from the pressure induced by the exams?

My own sense of irritation (the instructor can get testy too) is that we’re so enveloped in this method of evaluation without much if any critical thinking on why. We do it because that’s the way it’s been done. If we don’t do it, then somehow we’re cheating, getting away with it.

Maybe, just maybe, when God is speaking to Mr. Bush, he’s speaking to us too.

Durable or Ephemeral?

Today was my last class session for the semester. I’ve been having the students do “book reviews” on a team basis where each team of three students would have two hours spread over two class sessions to do an in class presentation on the book. I coached the teams ahead of time on things that they might cover during their presentation and on methods for engaging the class in discussion so that the other students also contributed. This worked partly ok, but sometimes not so great. Sometimes they posed questions that the other students could only answer if they had the book open and at the appropriate page. And sometimes they asked a good question but the rest of the class sat on their hands. Then they got flustered and moved on rather than reframing the question or asking something related to get the class started in response. Sometimes I let this happen and sometimes I intervened. I had no firm rule, other than a gut feeling that if there was important economics being omitted I should step in.

During the second hour of class I had been covering other economics or talking other issues that I thought would be of interest to the class. (These kids are in the Campus Honors Program and they find it fun and interesting to reflect on their own education, particularly their last couple of years in High School. So we would sometimes do that and I would try to tie in to issues I’m engaged with as a learning tech guy, even if it wasn’t directly about economics.) Monday, in our penultimate class, we did a brief review of how the class went for them. In the main they liked it and apparently it was quite a tonic to their engineering courses, at least for some of them. But they were a bit miffed about my deliberately being vague on how final grades were to be determined. I wrote them up a document where I argued that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are in conflict – typically one can be effective but not both – and that I really was trying to appeal to their curiosity in the course and so tried to eschew a focus on extrinsic motivation. In a regular class this approach could be seen as capricious grading but because this was a seminar with only 12 students and because what I was trying to do is exactly what the Campus Honors program wants to achieve with such courses, I felt within my rights. Some of the students were ok with my argument. A few of them wanted it both ways.

So I had to come up with something to do in the last hour of the last class – a way to end the semester. I tried something wacky but consistent with my initial goals of getting them to be interested in economics beyond the course. I decided I would do a book give away (really a book loan over the summer program) where my choice set was partially affected by what books I had on my own bookshelves at home or at the office that I thought either would be enjoyable and educational for them (a distinct subset) or some other books that I thought “would be good for them” even if reading them might be a struggle. And I included some titles of non-economics books that were either political science or humanities.

Their assignment, so far none have done this but the class ended only a few hours ago, is to email me with what books they took. I told them I wanted that just so I can have a record in case I want to track them down next fall. But, truthfully, I also want to know if they’ll actually read the books they took. Some would let me know anyhow. This way I can contact the others and perhaps exercise a miniscule prod in the process in case they haven’t.

It is certainly a peculiar mechanism. But how else can I tell whether I’ve given any of the students “the economics bug,” and if teaching the course had any impact on them beyond the semester? In that respect, it is so much easier teaching a course in the major.

For those who might be interested, here is the annotated list I sent out.