Feeling tugged in too many directions

Sometimes we get trapped in the metaphors we live by. For the last several days the email message from the Campus spam filter, which lists all the messages that got blocked at the central mail relays and hence didn’t get through to my account, arrived in my Junk Mail folder. Unexplained but not a mystery that I will dwell on, today’s message arrived in my Inbox. That we are subject to censorship and suppression of information not of our own choosing and that in this country of the Bill of Rights it occurs in haphazard fashion with predictability only in hindsight makes one feel ill at ease, uncomfortable in the general smugness and the lack of rhyme or reason.

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Right before the Holiday I watched Brian Williams on Charlie Rose. I must have been desperate for some type of stimulation because Brian Williams, NBC News anchor, is not the type of guy I would normally watch --- too plastic, too predictable. And much of what he said was in that category, platitudes about what a great job he has, too namby-pamby even when talking about Bush’s avoidance of reality in Iraq. But Williams said something that I hadn’t heard before and maybe it’s part of my generation’s current state of mind (Williams is 4 years my junior). He cheerily reported that the first things he looks at in the newspaper are the obituaries. It is odd to be fascinated with the accomplishments of those who have died recently, and how those people affected us, isn’t it? Perhaps not.

The various news outlets certainly have been playing to this angle as of late. For example, the handling of Robert Altman’s passing has been played as a center stage news event, even if the movies we know him for, mainly Mash but also Nashville and a few others, appeared more than 30 years ago. To be fair, Altman kept creating movies to the last. And his influence is likely greater than I indicate here. One of things I really liked about his approach, something I subscribe to as it is applied to my own domain, is keeping his actors in a relaxed and festive environment, allowing them to improvise at their own discretion, as the best way to produce a really creative result. But surely there is more than a bit of nostalgia at work in playing up his passing this way.

The effect on me, not just from Altman’s death but also the passing of Milton Friedman, R W. Apple, John Kenneth Galbraith, William Styron, and others is a sense of loss of deep intelligence; these were really smart people whose absence creates a void that will be hard to fill, a void seemingly all the larger because of the sheer idiocy of the Bush administration, a void that makes it hard to feel idealistic about the future. Idealism is a feeling of youth, one that folks my age associate with the Kennedy presidency, even if we were too young to be justified in that belief (I was only in the 4th grade when Kennedy was shot and hence have no direct adult memories of the time). Galbraith served in the Kennedy administration, as did Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who for reasons that I can’t recall provided me with the mental image of an intellectual, at least till I went to graduate school and started to read the writings of some of the great economists. Kennedy, whatever else his failings, chose to have great minds work for him.

Bill Gates on Charlie Rose, while talking about how Microsoft is waging a multi-front war – with Google over search, with Apple over iTunes, and with Sony over Playstation, not a strategy that would seem to commend itself it the appropriate analogy is military history, but an approach that does make more sense if instead the right comparison is with financial investment where the adage of every financial advisor is “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” recounted some of the naiveté early on at Microsoft where the management idea was to bring in really smart people and then give them free rein to make things happen, without concern for whether the individual’s comparative advantage was in doing the task to which he was assigned. So, surely intelligence is not sufficient, and on this my personal experience jibes with Gates’ observation. But equally surely, it is necessary, isn’t it? Armed with this realization, how can one be idealistic today?

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Barbara Ganley, in her initial post after visiting here the week of Halloween, wrote many complimentary things about colleagues here with whom she visited and about me she wrote that it was as if we’ve been having these type of conversations/arguments for a very long time, a feeling that I share and so I think it was a good way to capture the essence of that visit. But at least for me, that type of feeling is not something new. It goes back to the time when Altman was in his heyday and I was an undergrad at Cornell. At least in terms of tone and just wanting to keep talking it really is the same thing.

And yet nowadays we might think such conversations emerging as an outgrowth of blogging, a place where connections are made. In the early to mid ‘70s we would have said the same thing about smoking pot. Both the sense of openness and synch were a big part of then, at least they were for me. Nowadays I can’t imagine folks my age using pot as a way to break down barriers and create an emotional bond, but I think those who look to the genesis of blogging only from the perspective of networked computers are missing a part of our history that we should tie into. Conversations about pot smoking are probably rightly censored, especially in household like mine with young adolescent kids. They are entitled to learn about my own experiences in this regard, calling them either “finding self” or “indiscretions” as they see fit, but it should be their curiosity that drives such discovery and until they express such on their own I’m quite willing to help preserve their sense of innocence. So I for one will not be further drawing ties of this sort. Nevertheless, it seems to me an obvious connection to bring out and I encourage others whose children have already left the nest to explore it in depth.

True to her promise, Barbara gave a full explication of how she teaches the first two weeks of the semester in her second post after her visit here. There was a lot of interest here in the scaffolding of that, given how much of a point she made that the students are not ready to blog as a well functioning community at the outset of the courses. So I found her Cracking Open the Course page quite interesting and from there I read Charles’ Knowledge Tree, the one other students were to read for inspiration.

But I’m afraid from there I lost track of teaching the first two weeks and instead found myself in my own past, the first two years of graduate school at Northwestern, and where Charles’ recollections are of romance and nostalgia mine are of intense cold, austerity, and a lack of humanity. I lived four blocks from the Howard Street El stop, along Sheridan Road right before the bend around the cemetery that serves to separate Chicago from Evanston. My first winter there we had a day where it was minus 26 degrees (minus 72 with the wind chill factor). I had never experienced anything like that. The second year we had the big snow, the storm (and the lack of getting the plows out on a Sunday morning) that got Jane Byrne elected mayor. My car was buried under the snow for 6 weeks, which was just as well because there was no place else to park it. During that time I had to take the El to school. And most of my meals were canned soup and sandwiches, because I couldn’t do real grocery shopping and had to buy stuff from the convenience store on the corner.

The brutality of the weather matched what I was experiencing in the econ graduate program. Two of the students dropped out in the second quarter – many of the students weren’t prepared for the intellectual rigor of the program – and while that was evident I was miffed that the program seemingly expressed no concern for the well being of these people. That second quarter we had Macro from Bob Gordon, someone who has done interesting empirical research on productivity growth or the lack thereof, but who as a teacher offered very little when it came to people skills, he looked at the floor rather than at us when he was lecturing, and who because he was the director of financial aid at the time and could use performance in his class as a metric for who was meritorious in that regard and because aid was comparatively scarce at the time created a terrorizing effect hurt the self-esteem of many, including some who did ultimately get their doctorates from NU. Whether my classmates and I would have been more into arguing about the economics in our free time outside of class had our instruction been less like The Paper Chase, I can’t say.

I must add here that with the Math Center faculty and students I fell into by the third quarter of the first year there wasn’t this type of tone, but the rest of the students in my cohort weren’t really involved with the Math Center and so I had the same sense of isolation about my studies as I had as an undergraduate, but in the undergraduate setting it made sense. In grad school I hung around with Econ classmates socially and that social life was not intellectual about the economics.

So I lost an opportunity to learn about vigorous intellectual argument and that truth might emerge from that even if the conversation gets heated at time. This is clearly the approach of Milton Friedman. Seminars at Chicago were well known to produce smoke as well as light and if there were a flaw in the paper, the presenter might not be able to get through the session. During the late ’80s and early ‘90s we had a Chicago economist here, Pablo Spiller, who was the senior Industrial Organization guy and who ran his workshop in the Chicago style. I became one of those people who gave harsh critique to the presenter and it was a role I liked because my technical training encouraged me to find the flaw in the argument/model.


Is there a way to reconcile the Milton Friedman view that truth come out of a Darwinian struggle waged as argument with the Robert Altman position that actors have to feel festive to give their best performances? I’m struggling with this. I’d like the answer to be yes but at first and even second blush it seems otherwise. When a bond has been formed among us, can we indeed air all ideas or do we risk losing credibility by doing so and hence have to self-filter to preserve the bond? What in Barbara’s teaching approach survives when teaching economics rather than writing and at a place like Illinois rather than at Middlebury?

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In my new job I started in with the naïve belief that my main goal was to transform the culture and that blogging would be a key element to that. I’m finding the on-ground issues that folks are dealing with more urgent and it has caused me to take a step back and reflect. Until now all things technology have been done with a bottom up approach creating a diversity of solutions that from the students perspective creates bewilderment and costs them time. The expressed concern of the students regards better management of course logistics.

Most instructors lecture. And the ones I’ve talked with are either tenure track faculty who are quite concerned about putting in any time into activities outside of their direct research, while those I’ve chatted with humor me when I talk about how blogging may help them, even in their research where it might create a bigger audience for their work and it might help to expose some of the process ideas that lead to the creation of a publishable paper, they clearly have other fish to fry; or they not on the tenure track but then are teaching huge classes and have other burdens like advising and supporting co-curricula activity. The status quo fits into their approach, though there definitely are stresses, these folks are not in a position to take on risks so better to deal with the known stresses than to try something else that might prove to be a disaster when there only seems to be a vague upside to it. And, of course, for the very same reason these instructors don’t hold the students to a high account. Viewing time as money, doing so would break the bank.

The College runs a large variety of high tuition professional programs, some face to face at distance, and technology in the classroom has become a significant concern, at present as an indicator of the quality of the environs – adult learners who are paying substantial tuition have certain expectations about the facilities that may or may not tie directly into the quality of the learning experience itself. The last week or two I’ve put in a significant amount of time on learning, for example, why teaching with a pen sensitive monitor, like the Smart Sympodium is unlike teaching with a Tablet PC (PowerPoint in Slideshow mode functions differently in XP, no eraser or marker pen, than in the Tablet PC version, which has these functions) as well as the intricacies of VGA capture and in particular whether that can be done well when the instructor hand writes out presentation on his Tablet PC or alternatively does a demo in Excel that involves some manipulation of data. These are logistical matters of a different sort. We’d like to do this right, especially given the clientele, but exactly what does that mean? And do we have a way to train the faculty who teach in these programs to use the technology effectively?

I’m still in my honeymoon period in the new job and will be there at least till the break between the fall and spring semesters. The current question running through the back of my head is whether making logistics the initial emphasis of my work is correct tactically --- satisfy the current expressed needs in an effort to build goodwill or burn up that goodwill before getting to the heart of the matter.

But behind all of that is a more fundamental question. I want to create the preconditions so I can openly learn from the students, the faculty, and the administration what they really want and I’d like those conversations to happen in a setting where each of these participants has some depth of knowledge regarding the possibilities. So I’d like to do the metaphorical equivalent of Barbara’s first two weeks of the semester, building a bond so we have a common language for conversation. But I don’t have the luxury of enrolling these folks in my eLearning/CIO class and the question is how to make the bond without that or whether it is even possible.

Maybe I need to tell them what they want to hear and filter the rest.

What If?

I had a somewhat unusual day Saturday. Lazing around the house, catching up with sleep, that was the normal part. But then I saw a really offbeat movie called The Waterdance, about guys in a hospital ward, all wheelchair bound, because they had spinal injuries. I was drawn to the film (the Dish Network guide gave it three and a half stars) in part so I wouldn’t watch football and in part because of my own leg injury – there but for the grace of god… It is an interesting study, apparently based on a true story, about how the guys in the ward, filled with anger about their condition and ultimately hostile toward the ones they love the most just because they are other than themselves – they are healthy, discover each other as human beings, their paralysis below the waist a common bond. I didn’t think it was a great picture, but it was interesting to view. It made me wonder if I’m repressing anger about my accident, though I believe my condition to be temporary. I nonetheless share some aspects with the characters in the movie. Certainly I would not yet characterize my circumstance as normal.

The other thing I did was read a good chunk of the Spellings Commission Report on Higher Education. This report got some discussion at our CIC Learning Technology Conference last week, some of my peers were excited about it – perhaps our LT Group should spend some time discussing it at our next meeting and contemplating a reaction, particularly on the measurement front, where some of my colleagues have done interesting work. And the report got a mention from Tom Reeves in his keynote address, as something we should pay attention to and consider as we plan our own activities – he was talking primarily to our staff, who made up the bulk of the attendees at the conference.

I probably read this sort of document in a different way than my peers do, my economics background and general cantankerousness gets in the way. I do recognize that many of the commissioners are luminaries in Higher Education for whom I have a good deal of respect – James Duderstadt, former President of the University of Michigan and a true visionary; Charles Vest, former President of MIT and instigator of the Open Courseware Initiative, and Robert Zemsky, Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author with Bill Massy of a variety of NLII White Papers that I cut my teeth on about ten years ago prior to engaging in the SCALE Efficiency Projects, on using technology for reducing cost of instruction while enhancing quality. But there are also a variety of politicos among the commissioners and any report such as this, the product of committee decision making, may reflect compromise in such a way as to lose the sense that it represents a coherent point of view. Further, none of the commissioners appear to be economists, so their recommendations are unlikely to be disciplined by some consistency arguments that any right thinking economist would insist upon.

Let me illustrate, as I think my metaphors/analysis might be a bit alien to others who think about these issues. This is the same type of analysis I would teach in Economic Principles. Divide the potential student population into three segments: extramarginal, those not currently enrolled because “they can’t afford college;” inframarginal, those who are currently matriculating and who would continue to do so even if tuition or other factors that influence the enrollment decision were modestly tweaked; and marginal, those who are on the boundary between the other two groups. For those in the marginal category, the benefits from attending college, which are mostly in the form of higher future wages and direct consumption benefits (the latter may be hard to monetize in a simple way, but conceptually there is no problem in doing so), must equal the opportunity costs, mostly the direct tuition costs and the foregone wages from spending time in school rather than at work. It’s useful to keep this result in mind (the Commission seems to ignore it) so one can see what’s at issue with some of the recommendations. I should note that the result does have to be adjusted for risk – the current foregone wages and tuition are known items while the higher future wages are uncertain and in the present arrangement it is the student who bears that risk, something I’ll come back to in a bit.

If we applied a uniform approach to all students enrolled in college, with a common tuition and quality of instruction (this is far from the truth but it does help simplify the argument), then it might be as the Report argues that lowering tuition and thereby increasing access would be good for our economy, since some of those extramarginal potential students would now have the benefits of a college education and their contributions to society would be enhanced as a consequence. But it also might be that raising tuition and hence raising expenditure on those students who are enrolled is better for the economy, the inframarginal students will gain in productivity in such a way that more than offsets the enrollment decline that will result. A priori, it can go either way. The Commission presumes the former is the right answer, though the fact that ritzy private schools are in huge excess demand, in spite of their very high tuitions, suggests perhaps it should be the other way. I’ll return to that point as well.

Actually, the Commission wants to have it both ways and argues that by pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the hat --- technology, that little rascal that can improve quality and lower cost, if only we in Higher Ed wouldn’t block innovation in practice, innovation that would effectively leverage the technology towards these ends. And with that they cite Carol Twigg’s work with the National Center for Academic Transformation. Now I really like this work – I was directly involved with the first year of the projects when this was funded by Pew Charitable Trusts and I plan to do this sort of thing in the high enrollment courses in the College of Business here, as we move to a Blended Learning approach. But it is a far cry from achieving these type of gains in a few high enrollment courses to reducing costs across the board at the institution level for an entire university.

The latter requires addressing a host of issues that are not on the radar of the commission, for example: Should adjuncts or “clinical professors” become the primary teaching faculty to hold down the cost of instruction and should such instructors not have tenure? Should we continue the common practice where course offerings are idiosyncratic to the particular instructor, with syllabus and teaching approach determined at that level rather than from above? Should we continue to be comprehensive in our offerings or narrow down to the more popular disciplines with only a few specialties?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. My point is that to answer them one has to make tradeoffs and I explicitly presented my analysis as one of tradeoffs – lower price to increase access or raise price to spend more on those who are enrolled. But the commission has no use for tradeoffs. It gives us a free lunch in the guise of technical innovation unleashed by a widespread innovative culture. Do these folks really believe the stuff they are pushing?

And that gets me to the next point. This report ignores incentives, a big mistake in my view. For example, the report deplores the building of expensive sports recreation facilities that we are seeing on so many campuses. And it may very well be that this is a form of rent seeking, a dissipative activity that is socially wasteful, in spite of the fact that students do need physical fitness and that some aspect of college, particularly in the residential setting, is consumption benefit. But the report doesn’t ask at all why colleges engage in this type of rent seeking. The documentary Declining by Degrees does. It observes this is a necessary consequence as colleges engage in a non-price competition to recruit students, especially high ability students, and facilities clearly matter in this type of competition.

If one did focus on incentives, however, and if one was prompted with the observation that some forms of competition are inclined to produce social waste, then one might be led to ask a different type of question. Can we change the rules of the game so that the type of competition that emerges produces more of the type of results that we’d like to see? This is the type of question I wish the Commission had put on the table, because it would have been interesting to see what they come up with. Instead, they seemingly presume the answer, a Higher Education version of No Child Left Behind. (I am dismayed but not surprised that No Child Left Behind got nary a mention in the recent run up to the election. Between Iraq, Katrina, and the various scandals we have the three main points that I was taught recently are the essence of getting an effective message out when dealing with the press (particularly our student reporters at the Daily Illini) and No Child Left Behind somehow doesn’t even vault ahead of immigration reform as the fourth bullet on the list in the public consciousness, at least according to CNN. Yet the recent work by Jonathon Kozol makes it clear that No Child Left Behind has been a disaster for those it has been intended to benefit, so much for increasing access, and it has also resulted in a narrowing of the curriculum and a reduction in enrichment programs at schools with a primarily middle class student body, so much for raising the quality of instruction for those students who are already getting a “good education.” Perhaps we can procrastinate on implementing the recommendations of the Spellings Commission until the Bush Administration is out of office and its successor can try some other approach.)

What if we had a draft?

Of course, I don’t mean a military draft. I hope that our country never again imposes conscription, though I would not oppose an analogous requirement for public service. By draft, I’m thinking of the sports kind, the type the NBA holds (along with the lottery for choosing the draft order) or the type the NFL holds, where there has developed a cottage industry of experts such a Mel Kiper Jr. and Paul Zimmerman to handicap the draft itself. Indeed, keeping with the sports metaphor, and I know this analogy will bother some people but bear with me for a bit so we can work through the entire thought experiment, what if we viewed undergraduate education as the Minor Leagues for Corporate America, a place for “player development,” a place where the parent clubs had already invested in their talent and want to see good return on that investment, a place where not everyone makes it to the big club but where those with potential can get more effective attention than if they go to the Bigs straight away.

So envision a huge national draft held during the summer where students who have completed their junior years in high school could declare themselves for the draft (but they could opt out and go through the college application process and the paying of tuition in the more traditional way) and older students, those who have finished high school or those have some college credit but are as of yet undrafted could declare their eligibility as well. They would be registering for a system where if they were drafted and if they then signed with the company that drafted them, that company would pay for the student’s college education and perhaps pay a stipend during college as well in exchange for the student providing years of job market service after graduation (say 5 years) at a wage that was pre-specified by the draft (a la the NBA minimum salary for rookies.) There would also be a “free agent” market of this sort so that students who either went undrafted or who didn’t sign with the company that drafted them would have other alternatives to sign this sort of deal, but to prevent opportunism by students in high demand because they are obviously of high ability, there would be some restrictions on when such students could declare for free agency, say two years after they’ve completed their junior year in high school.

Corporate America, for their part, would participate in such a draft so they could ensure a high caliber pool of new talent down the road and so they could more actively engage early on with the education this talent is receiving and, frankly, so they are not out-recruited by their competitors. Indeed, as long as the starting salaries the drafted students would receive upon graduation are not too high, the corporations would view this entire enterprise as one of paying of the student loans in advance in exchange for getting these talented individuals to work for the company over at least a 5 year period and in so doing achieving an efficient shifting of risk, since these big companies are in a far better position to absorb the productivity risk of the students than are the students themselves.

I really don’t know if such a thing could work, but imagine if it did exist. Then regarding admission Universities would deal not only with individual students and their families, but also with corporate buyers who might be in a much better position to tie what they pay in tuition (and in other forms of grants as well) to the performance of the students upon graduation (just what the Spellings Commission would like to see). But in evaluating the job colleges do, they would be evaluating their role as coaches and as producers of mature talent, not by the performance of that talent per se. That too would have to be evaluated, but it would be a separate deal.

Further in this type of market with several big “buyers” one might envision that the buyers themselves recognize they have many common interests and so form intermediaries that advise both the Corporations and the Colleges on how best to structure higher education offerings and how to make effective deals between the Corporations and the Colleges. Such intermediaries might be much more effective than current accrediting bodies, because they’d have a dual accountability and their own viability would depend on the performance they deliver.

And consider the impact both on student seriousness and on faculty seriousness as well, particularly regarding the issues around grade inflation. Contracts between the companies and students might specify that if effort by the students is lacking then the deals become null and void, perhaps after a probationary period where all parties are on alert. That would put the universities in the position of monitoring student effort and providing convincing evidence of it to the companies. And, of course, the companies would be interested in student performance too as it might affect bringing the students up early or affecting the job to which they ultimately might be assigned. So the companies would want accurate information about performance and they, unlike the students themselves, would prefer to see an accurate grade instead of an inflated one.

There are a host of other issues that would naturally arise and should be considered before embracing such a system, quite apart from the obvious about whether anyone would play the game even if it were so designed. A short list of such questions is:

(1) What would be the role of government? (To help make a market by facilitating information flow and by assuring that abuses get unearthed and then punished.)

(2) What would the impact be further down in K-12? (I would hope to create aspirations that students would be drafted and therefore to create the analog intellectual experience to that of practicing jump shots at the backboard nailed to the garage at home.)

(3) What would be the impact on how college is taught? (I have no idea, but I do know that if such a system were in place the pressure would be much higher to deliver results and necessity is the mother of invention, so this would be a source of innovation.)

And then there is the other obvious question:

Lanny, do you really believe this sort of thing can work? (My answer to that is it depends on whether there are crucial attributes of students, identifiable early on, that make them likely to be high performance in the corporate setting. If SAT scores were such an identifier, it would be a cinch, but now we’re being told by many that SAT scores don’t even predict performance in college. (I’m guessing that outlier scores actually do predict quite well but that small changes in scores near the mean don’t have much impact.) I’m somewhat aware of the (highly criticized) work of Lewis Terman, but I’m not knowledgeable at all about whether big corporate personnel departments collect data about employee characteristics that get them onto the fast track. If there are such data and if the crucial characteristics are observable early on in people, then this market can flourish. Otherwise the solution can’t work at all as everyone would play the Billy Beane strategy of trying to pick up cheap but productive talent, by staying out of the draft entirely and dealing only with more mature free agents.)

Even if it can’t work, let’s note that I’m just one guy, not an entire commission, and I produced this blog post in a couple of days, not after months and months of study. Let’s also note that I certainly have not exhausted the possible solutions to the question – what if we changed the game in which Colleges compete to produce outcomes that are more in tune with what is socially desirable? So even if you reject my ideas out of hand, you might want to consider other institutional arrangements that you deem more likely to occur and more appropriate for obtaining good outcomes. Part of my aim here is simply to provoke thinking in that direction.

It might help you to get in the right mindset if you broke your leg first. And then get angry.

Akeelah and Adult Precocity

It’s hard for my family to find a movie we all can watch together. As I’m writing this the kids are watching Lord of the Rings II for the Nth time – my wife sat down with them at the start but she made a quick exit to make dinner. I didn’t even make a pretense. I’m satiated with that sort of thing to the point that I’d rather stick a finger down my throat.

I have watched some adventure movies with the boys that my wife didn’t care for, namely Kidnapped (the 1995 version of the Robert Louis Stevenson story) which is a boy’s delight and Last of the Mohicans, in which the Madeline Stowe character (Cora Munro) does go through a personal transformation akin to what we’d like to see instructors do when embracing technology in their teaching, but if you watch it for that you’re really stretching it, and occasionally am ok with that sort of picture on its own terms. But more often than not it’s more oil and vinegar when it comes to movies that the kids and I both like. And my wife’s taste for schmaltz (think Fried Green Tomatoes) also runs contrary to my own taste, where I’d like to be challenged more, intellectually or emotionally. So I tend to record films and then watch by myself, most recently Touch of Evil, a black and white classic with Orson Wells in the role of a police chief in a border town playing both sides of the law and Charlton Heston, tall and elegant and with dyed skin because his character is Mexican, as the more virtuous type of law enforcement officer whose jurisdiction is across the border, a reversal of our American stereotype.

So it is a delight to find a movie that appeals to each of us in the family and really captivates us and I can report that Akeelah and the Bee fit the bill nicely – a few weeks after the first viewing we watched it a second time together, very unusual and a testament to it being a film that really worked for us. It is an improbable but convincing story of a South LA African-American girl, Akeelah, enrolled in a majority Black middle school that has no reputation for academic achievement, who has a fondness and aptitude for words (and hence spelling) that enables her to compete with students from the best schools in the city, and ultimately at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The story works on many levels. It is about the need of African Americans (and, frankly, the rest of us too) for role models of achievement that can uplift us, give us pride, and bring us together. It is about how the dominant culture, in general but especially in the predominatly Black communities, anticipates mediocre performance and hence a precocious kid like Akeelah must overcome that, enduring the jeers and mockery of her schoolmates, something which at first is what holds her back. It is about how even the very talented, indeed perhaps because they are very talented, need intense coaching and commitment from dedicated and inspired teachers. And it is about overcoming racial stereotype, something which the vast majority of us want, if only we have good examples to point to so that we can show convincingly that there can be high achievement in all of us.

Watching the movie I felt challenged – could this be real? I considered several possible angles. It was my own view that spelling and memorization was not a good signpost of intellectual achievement. But the movie made a good case to the contrary. Akeelah had an old computer at home which had a scrabble game on it and that became her refuge, a way to express herself without the companionship of anyone else. I’ve experienced that sort of thing too (though not with computer scrabble) and so on that score the story was credible. And then later in the story when the Laurence Fishburne character (a Professor at UCLA, Dr. Larabee, former chair of the English Department there and currently on sabbatical) who ends up coaching Akeelah and takes over her program of development, it is much more about understanding the power of language than it is about memorizing particular words – though that definitely is a part. So on that score, I think the story did a good job of convincing us this was real and that Akeelah was not some idiot savant but rather an incredibly bright young woman with a penchant for language.

So I considered another dimension and for a while I thought I had found the lie to the story. It was my contention that serious intellectual engagement is accompanied with humor and laughter, the two go together like bread and butter, or so I thought. The movie, however, has none of that. The characters are earnest – always, but funny – never. I can’t envision learning like this happening if it is not play, and in play there is laughter. So I thought this must be it, a good try at a story but not the real McCoy.

Then, subconsciously at first and more deliberately after a while, I monitored the exchanges I was having with others while at work on campus, in a variety of different meetings. Humor wasn’t part of most of them either, but the sense of earnestness was omnipresent. I wonder why I had felt it was otherwise. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, perhaps I project too much about my own persona. In any event, based on that Akeelah passed the reality test.

There are two particular scenes in the movie I want you to consider. After Akeelah wins the spelling bee at her local school, figuratively without breaking a sweat, the Laurence Fisburne character interrupts the proceedings by giving Akeelah more challenging words to spell. She gets the first few and the rest of the audience are awed by her ability. But she eventually stumbles on a word and some of the other girls in the audience laugh derisively at her error. Akeelah runs out of the room in shame, her performance ruined by that last bit, as if nothing she had done before mattered. The Laurence Fishburne character catches up to her on the stairwell and explains to Akeelah, teary eyed, that they mock her because they are intimidated by her.

Later in the film, after Akeelah has survived the regional Bee, and gotten through the state qualifier, and she has appeared on TV news so that the entire community knows she is going to the nationals, we see the community come behind her fully with support, proud of her excellence, inspired by the performance, and willing to help her with the few last steps before she goes to Washington.

* * * * *

This past week we had a delightful visit by Barbara Ganley of Middlebury College. I met Barbara online through blogging and based on reading her blog had an intuition that she would give us a needed spark here in our efforts with a virtual component for the Learning Commons and to jump start our approach to blogging. She delivered on that and gave us much, much more.

Those who can, do. Yet precocity, particularly in adults, goes beyond the doing. Others have to witness the doing in action. And they have to feel that the doing they see transcends what they themselves are capable of, but with that they feel inspired to try it themselves – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Barbara explains her approach to teaching both in theoretical terms – the social constructivism of Pierre Levy – and in terms of the practical reality of building a trusting environment for her students while getting them to commit fully to the activities of her class. I learned many things from Barbara during this visit, some of which I describe below.

I’ve had intuitions for much of what Barbara talks about and have achieved some of these things in my own teaching, but especially on the building trust idea it’s been my experience that it happens en passant as we become familiar with each other and consequently in the past I’ve always hoped it would happen but have never previously made it an explicit goal of the teaching. Barbara takes the first two weeks of class and devotes them to this dual purpose – and during that time she does not push on the content of the course at all because the students aren’t yet ready to engage with it at a deep level. That was an entirely new idea for me.

Barbara is very much about the human interaction and not about any particular technology, but given that she really is for blogs because it enables the telling of stories and because it keeps a sense of individual identity. She is ok with other technologies – notably wikis – but doesn’t make use of them as much because they are much more about constructing knowledge than they are about telling stories and because they obscure a sense of identity. She’s also not into virtual environments (e.g., Second Life) again for those same reasons.

Barbara’s visit made it clear to me that there is a potential symbiotic relationship between small Liberal Arts colleges, where intensive teaching is the expectation, and large research universities, such as the U of I, where many people do research on innovative approaches to learning. We don’t seem to be exploiting this potential very well at all at present. We should think more about how it might be possible to do so.

And yet there is a different dimension to this type of collaboration. I and others here talked openly with Barbara about how the incentives for good teaching are weak here and that the institution struggles to find the right balance between teaching and research. Yet based on who attended her talks, there clearly are several faculty here who are seriously looking for ways to better their teaching and who are willing to put in the effort if somebody would just point them in the right direction. That somebody might very well be at a small liberal arts college, somebody like Barbara, who has done it and has a lot of experience doing it. So effective practice might transfer this way, albeit there is a class size issue that Barbara is very cognizant about. She was extremely impressed with Christian Sandvig’s work here as he has done something similar with the blogging and in very large classes.

There is still another aspect of this type of collaboration, one I’ve felt before when working with Gail Hawisher and with Peggy Lant. That is the benefit from collaboration between humanists, English profs in particular, and scientist and other technical types, with regard to the teaching approach, at least when the technical type is ripe with suggestions for improving the teaching, such as is the case with Walt Hurley. This is such a rare thing at present, but it seems such a natural. I wonder how we can make it a more regular occurrence.

In all these respects, Barbara’s visit was a sheer delight. She has the power that Akeelah showed in the movie - to awe, inspire, and bring others to action. Barbara told me she is in big demand to make visits to other universities and deliver, I assume, a similar performance. I can understand why she’s such a hot item these days, though I wish I could keep her power our little secret, so I might have a chance to lure her back to CU in the not too distant future.

From Behavior to Belief

My personal style is to scratch my head about some issue for a while and then try something based on the head scratching to see if what I was thinking holds water or not. The approach seemingly worked the last couple of times I taught, with Campus Honors students here, and the feeling of having taught them in a style I’d call my own and having that work (though they definitely didn’t like not knowing where the stood grade-wise) is a cause for believing the approach can work elsewhere and is more generalizeable . But how much so? I really struggle with that. How much that works for me in all its particular manifestation and idiosyncrasy is evidence of the general and how much is not? And how is one to tell?

I’m no longer the ed tech guy for the campus, where I can’t say the approach worked particularly well at all but where I believe there were too many constraints – does it scale – to try much of anything at all. Instead, I’ve now got that role for the College of Business where in advance I told myself I’d play it balls out rather than close to the vest, but really, balls out in support of precisely what and to please exactly whom? Before starting on the new job but thinking about how it might play out it was to please me, to justify a certain process of interaction I thought I came up with between the faculty and me, to provide substance to a personal claim that I have a reasonable grasp on human nature and how people learn.

But what I’m discovering is a bunch of circumstances that look to find quick fix solutions, that collectively don’t fit into easy categories, and that have me feeling reactive rather than reflective – looking for a solution rather than for something else to try. I’m responding at first in more or less a knee jerk manner and then when I get a response based on where I see individual excitement. And the reality is that lecture, or should I say instructor performance, because many of the good instructors in the College of Business are really good performers, is a key facet. What if in the technology implementation I propose I take away their ability to perform and ask them to do something else? Will they go for it?

I’ve been urging the use of desktop video, the type that can be embedded in a blog post, the type that can be made without too much of a fuss, either with a Webcam or screen capture software and a microphone. I’ve got one colleague who is liking the idea of doing that with the screen capture approach. He asked me about where to put the completed video and I urged him to use Google Video rather than the Web/file space the College provides for him, because I said that way he’d be doing something that the students could replicate – his behavior as a model for theirs. And for the last couple of days I started to think about instructors assigning homework/projects to the students that would be about making these type of videos in the process of completing the work.

These students have Tablet PCs (and increasingly, so do the faculty). They are either MBA or Executive MBA students and Tablets have been embraced by this group, mostly getting high marks from the users in the process, in spite of the high margin relative to laptops. But are they really taking advantage of the pen technology from a pedagogic perspective, or is all just convenience? I thought of the movie homework partly so they could draw simple pictures and diagrams – much better for conceptual ideas and of course economic theory is full of that sort of thing – and also because the voice over would illustrate the flow of their thinking, where often in this type of homework when the student gets stuck or goes down the wrong path it is hard to tell what is driving the ideas based on what is on the written page.

That seems all well and good to me but do MBA faculty want to concern themselves with the homework/simple projects that the students do or is that all delegated to a grader, with the faculty left to concentrate on their own performance? Indeed is the focus on performance so great that trying to get them to think about the work of the students is a losing battle? I don’t know. I do know some finance faculty tried an experiment to teach online some years ago and they eventually aborted --- too much work --- but in that pre-podcasting time the work was about capturing the audio from the lecture and syncing to PowerPoint slides. I think that’s where the mindset still lies.

So if I start to preach about screen capture movies that students produce – will I be given the time of the day or will people just look at me funny? But even more to the point, even if they can envision the pedagogic benefit, what if the “can be made without too much of a fuss” part is itself a con job, that the students who haven’t yet been doing this and who feel unnatural in making these sort of things feel it is a lot of work, and for what, a trivial homework problem? Is the effort really worth it? Why can’t they just do the homework on paper? It’s not that big a deal, right?

How can you know the answer to these type of questions? But really, they are less fundamental. The bigger question is what should the College support vis-à-vis communications software. I’m pushing for blogging and am encouraging us to look at Elgg for this purpose. I love to blog and what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? But I love to write too, and I know not everyone loves that. There are some alternatives to using blogging on the table, including using the Campus Course Management System as one such alternative, and relying on Microsoft Sharepoint as another.

In my gut I don’t feel that those other alternatives are right. Might they be right under certain circumstances? Sure. If we gave all the MBA students accounts on our Exchange server or if these students had Live.edu accounts (Microsoft’s education offering in this space that accompanies it soon to be released Live.com service). Then the Sharepoint might integrate in. (That is a possibility but I don’t know it to be the case.) But the University is in go slow mode about allowing contracts with third parties for email and the like. So for the time being the students will be into something else for email. And does that integration really matter so much or is it the community building and user defined access control (an Elgg strength) which is the right thing to focus on? I know what I like here, but does my leadership mean I’m falsely generalizing from my own like? Hmmm.

There is an entirely different take on blogging, one that I hadn’t considered at all until my colleague pointed out this piece on the role of email in Enterprise 2.0. This has to do with patience and wondering whether “the message is received.” I’ve got confidence that this post will be read, sooner or later, by many of the people I care about whom I’d like to have read it. But even with that, some will and others won’t. Email is more of a direct wire and from somebody I already know certainly I feel there is more of a social imperative to read the email they send than to read their blog post. If you’ve been used to that direct wire, letting go of it is…..scary.

In an already formed social network where this is one additional blogger contributing to the stew, the mental calculation goes one way. When that network is not yet formed and I’m asking earlier adopter types to try this in the hope of forming such a network --- well, they have to take a lot on faith. Those early adopter types are used to trying things out just like I am. And they’re used to coming to conclusions based on what they learn from their little experiments.

Will the blogging work in this context? The only way to know is to try.

A Heads Up

The server where Lanny on Learning Technology is currently being housed is being converted 100% to its original purpose - to support streaming media - and will no longer be used for Web publishing. So I need to find another host, which will either be on a College of Business Server or on Blogspot. A redirect will be set up, which should be fine for users who get there via a browser, but if you are subscribing to the site via an Atom or RSS feed, you'll need to resubscribe.

The earliest this will happen is December and I don't yet have the details of the new site or the timing of the switch. I just wanted to let readers know in advance with the hope this will improve the chance that the switch is seamless. I will also contact folks who either link to this blog or syndicate the blog posts.

Maybe the spammers won't find the new site for a while. :-)

Obama, can this really be the end?

I had some wacko thoughts the last couple of weeks (unrelated to my leg injury). Students need to learn to write in a limited vocabulary context – the discipline will aid with their creativity; by reducing the number of possibilities to try it is more likely that they’ll try several of them. So I thought about an assignment I’d give if I were teaching writing or speech. Get students to make a PowerPoint presentation on some pre-specified topic, where on each slide they had to have some lines from a Bob Dylan song that fit with the context of what they are trying to say on that slide. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

* * * * *

Today, Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times Op-Ed page (you need to subscribe to Times Select to access the link) is devoted to Barack Obama. Herbert is at least the third Times columnist to have done this in the past week. Preceding him are David Brooks, who urged him to run for President (why is it that the conservative columnist who doesn’t agree with Obama on a good range of the issues acts like his biggest booster?) and Maureen Dowd who tried to skewer him for not knowing whether Obama wants to be a celebrity unto himself or a pol in the spirit of Harry Truman – give ‘em hell. It’s hard to blame Obama for basking in the limelight, but given that rather naïve ethics everyone seems to trumpet these days, if he’s really going to make a run for the presidency then the other pay seems a deal with the devil and surely he can’t have it both ways, can he?

Herbert cautions that Obama should choose his own timetable for making these decisions and not be forced into something too hastily because the 2008 elections are looming. That makes sense. But I wonder if we sports fans of liberal (er, I mean middle of the road) American politics can get beyond the cult of personality here and into the core issues that we’d like to see our fearless leader bring to pass. So the rest of this post is on the issues.

* * * * *

The absolute most basic thing that needs to happen is to re-establish a sense of shared sacrifice in one and all in this country. And here, sacrifice means sacrifice, not some two bit commitment that one can blow off on a moment’s notice.

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."

(The above is the first verse from Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.) Given Iraq and the Bush tax cuts and the rest, we Americans as a people are ripe for shared sacrifice. We need it as a tonic to the hedonism and lack of real meaning in peoples’ lives. We need it because we want to solve hard problems, like our dependence on foreign oil, like the apartheid in the inner city schools that Kozol describes, like that fact that we want to shop at Walmart (and hence have the stuff at Walmart produced in low wage countries but we want high incomes for ourselves. And we know the hard problems don’t have ready answers and if not shared sacrifice, then there will just be lip service about the problems and no solution whatsoever.

But we know there is a problem with this shared sacrifice stuff – apart from some limited in time episodes in the nations past where there has been real grass roots shared sacrifice, it just hasn’t happened on it own. So we need to the government to help, to make it a fair deal, to encourage universal participation. But as of late the government knows only one way for individuals to make sacrifice – join the military.

The military is not the solution. Indeed, as the Iraq-Vietnam parallel gets more and more play, we’re going to see calls for peace from all quarters. I can imagine Down By the Riverside (obviously not written by Dylan but appropriate nonetheless) as the new (old) theme song for the movement. This particular version shows just how moving that song can be and how apt its message is for the present time.

So we need a mechanism or a set of mechanisms for shared sacrifice but that don’t involve the military. Unlike the Peace Corps and Vista, at least as they were depicted in the ‘60s, we need the burden to be more broadly distributed, both income-wise and age-wise, and not just rest on newly minted college grads. And then I would take one aspect of military service that should be embraced in this new arena and serves to cement the social compact – having done a full stint of such service, the individual would be entitled to medical benefits akin to what Veterans are entitled to. We might not get to universal health care coverage this way, but we could come awfully close, especially if non-military service to country became the norm.

To me, this seems like a pretty good basis for a domestic agenda. We could openly talk about our problems because we actually might have a way to address them. And we could increase a sense of shared purpose and responsibility in the process.

In the 60’s the stereotype was that the hard hats couldn’t get along with the hippies. I’ve no clue whether conservative Republicans (or liberal democrats for that matter) could embrace the idea of sacrificial service toward the country that is not militaristic service at all, but rather in support of the internal social fabric, especially if the other did so embrace. I can only hope.

Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashingFlashing for the warriors
whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An' for each an' ev'ry underdog soldier in the night
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

From Chimes of Freedom.

Paroled

(The title of this post refers to my previous post.)

My orthopedist said I've made enough progress so I need not wear the brace, except perhaps when it's icy outside. I'm ecstatic. This comes none too soon.

Prisoner of the Brace

Tomorrow afternoon I return to see the Orthopedist. It’s been four weeks. The surgery itself is now fully healed, at least on the outside of the leg. I’ll have a nice scar. My physical therapist said some folks get tattoos in the form of a zipper, to dress up the scar from this type of surgery. I’ll probably pass on that one; I’m not a tattoo kind of guy, but if I were to change my mind I probably should do it soon, since to the touch my leg doesn’t have a lot of feeling around the knee where the surgery was done. I was told that lack of feeing was normal and it might take quite a while – up to a year – for the feeling to return. I’ve met all my milestones in the physical therapy. I can do quadriceps squeezes and leg lifts out the wazoo. And now I can flex the leg to 60 degrees, the max that the brace will allow at this point, without too much of a warm up, and then hold that stretch for maybe 10 minutes or so before the leg starts to fatigue from being in that position. I can go up and down stairs fairly readily. And now getting into the car and driving is not such a big deal. With that I can go to work and be modestly productive. So life has achieved a certain normalcy.

But there are still some pretty humdrum things I can’t do – putting on shoes and socks by myself or taking a real shower without getting assistance, for example, and wearing long pants instead of shorts, even though it’s starting to get cold outside, for another. (I can't get the long pants on over the brace.) And because of the logic of the brace design and that for this purpose it is better to think of the leg as a cone rather than as a cylinder, narrower at the ankle than at the thigh, and hence when I’m walking the brace is apt to slide down my leg and will do so unless the straps are pulled very tight, and with that and the further fact that with just the surgical stocking alone and no brace whatsoever, the skin on my leg would chafe and get irritated, the brace rubs me the wrong way, if you'll pardon the pun.

All of these are minor in themselves and collectively are not worth writing about either except for the following observation. I’m aware of my leg and the brace most of the time. Sometimes it becomes the focus of my attention, because I can’t sit comfortably for long spells and hence I must change position, get up and walk around, or adjust the brace itself so I can be at ease. This regular reminder the brace provides creates my own little jail cell, locked into an existence of infirmity with no way out, at least for the time being.

For a very long time, certainly since I was a teenager and maybe even before that, I found refuge and joy in getting lost in thought. I recall that though I’m slothful by nature I actually looked forward to washing the dishes or mowing the lawn (some of the chores I adopted as a kid) because while doing that I could think about whatever I wanted to – I didn’t have to pay attention to something else. And I know when I was at Northwestern and would occasionally drive home to New York, sometimes by myself, I would actually look forward to the drive (between Illinois and Pennsylvania on I-80 there is not much of a view) because it would be an opportunity for being awake yet in reverie, something I thoroughly enjoyed, and I believe an important source of my own personal creativity.

To achieve that state of mind, however, I need to be free from concern about more prosaic real world matters. In that sense, the expression lost in though is misleading. I’m actually found in thought and quite alive in this way. Where I’m lost is in the real world immediacy, where I’ve entirely stopped paying attention or if not that then am doing the minimum so that I don’t get into trouble, but that requires a sufficiently low level of mental power that it doesn’t tax my thinking at all. Over time I’ve found I’m quite happy this way and more recently, since I’ve been blogging, I’ve come to learn that I need to do this from time to time to generate anything that others might find interesting in the writing. (I stumbled upon this short journal which has taken up the creativity theme and which seems sympathetic to my view, though its focus is creativity in the corporate setting.)

The brace makes all of this problematic, and frequently entirely impossible. Indeed it has lessened the intensity of my thinking and, I fear, made me duller. And, as a practical reality, it has made sleep more difficult. Optimism is harder to sustain as a result and optimism seems a critical ingredient for creativity. The lack of sleep itself may matter too.

I don’t even know where to sit. I’m most comfortable in my recliner, with leg raised. But that is for napping or reading, or doing the Soduku from the Sunday paper. When I write I do that sitting at a keyboard and need to be upright for that purpose. But sitting upright is less comfortable, not painful but not comfortable either. So what to do, go for comfort or productivity? I find I bounce back and forth. When I’m bouncing, I know I’m not really into it.

My prison sentence will be of limited duration. I’m hoping the doc will tell me tomorrow that I don’t have to wear the brace at all, but even if I do, I know its only going to be a few weeks longer. In the meantime, I may write more posts about the technology because those don’t require as much introspection, just some time playing with the software. The thing is, I don’t believe what we do with learning technology is really about the software.

Ah, penance!

Doing It Wrong

It is a commonplace to offer the advice to “learn from one’s mistakes” after experiencing a failure and almost as frequent that “one learns more from a failure than from a success.” Yet for reasons that I’m not completely certain of, these prescriptives seem to rarely if ever find there way into teaching. That is, instructors don’t knowingly, via an act of commission, take an incorrect approach to solving a problem or to present new ideas, especially in the case where they don’t advertise to the class ahead of time that they are doing exactly that.

For example, there is much talk nowadays about teaching design and getting design inculcated throughout the curriculum. Consider this simple design problem. There are two rooms in which to put flooring, one gets tile, the other gets carpet. Why not start by putting tile in the bedroom and carpet in the bathroom and have students work through the implications of that, before getting to the preferred solution where it is done vice versa?

My guess is that to protect their own egos instructors guard against making errors that they haven’t planned and are so caught up in that issue as well as the related issue that the students might find them out that they don’t venture into this other terrain where things are topsy-turvy, where the instructor’s expertise and authority are revealed only in a more subtle fashion by making sense of it all. This gives me enough of an explanation for why comparatively novice instructors don’t do this and then, since we are such creatures of habit, why more experienced instructors don’t do this as well. And its likely too that most instructors haven’t given the issue enough attention. But consider what they miss through the “telling of truth” approach that so many do adopt.

If someone takes a wrong turn but believes it to be right, there will be a period of time during which the person is happy in their conviction that they are headed on the true path. But then evidence will start to accumulate which suggests that belief is wrong. What evidence is that? How much evidence must be accumulated before changing direction? And when that evidence has been gathered, then what? Which way to head now?

Suppose that we instructors viewed one of our main jobs to be modeling for the students how they should proceed as they learn and that one key skill is to get oneself unstuck after having gone down the wrong path. How can that be taught unless we ourselves deliberately make mistakes, to put ourselves in a position where we are stuck, uncomfortable and unsatisfied, to be sure, but still with our wits about us and a strong sense that this place isn’t the final resting stop?

Knowing how students seem to prepare for class on my campus, my sense of teaching this way is that if the deliberate mistakes where part of a pattern – start with the mistakes and then move to the correct solution – students would soon learn to ignore the mistakes; they wouldn’t be on the test would they? So I think if one teaches this way one most do it by surprise, in an inconsistent way, where the students are not sure what’s coming. It may be the straight dope or it may be a deliberate error but ahead of time they are not sure which. They have to use their own wits to ascertain the situation. And beyond wit, they have to use their own sense of taste as to whether to be satisfied with what they’ve been told or to question/reject the ideas because there are issues with them. Indeed, instructors developing such a sense of taste in the students would seem to precisely the type of deeper learning skills to which instructors aspire for their students. Doesn’t it make sense to deliberately practice doing that sort of thing rather than have it mysteriously happen (or not) when the students are on their own?

But I believe an instructor is not likely to try this unless one sees the need for some “invention” in the teaching, some departure from an entirely linear presentation. Way back when, 15 + years ago, when I was teaching the graduate economic theory class or the summer math for economists class that was preliminary to the graduate students entering the doctoral program, with all those goodies about Bordered Hessians (a certain matrix of partial derivatives), the Implicit Function Theorem, and the Envelope Theorem, the core math behind the economic theory, I learned to lecture without notes. I did this not to show off, but rather because I went too fast when I paid attention to the notes – I knew the stuff so when I was paying attention to the notes I zipped through them, because I was simply regurgitating what was on the paper, there was nothing new in the process for me. Since I knew the stuff real well but this was not the type of material that one might memorize, without the notes I had to re-derive the results from scratch and much of my lectures ended up being talking through how I did that while doing a lot of writing on the blackboard. Perhpas not we romanticize about as good teaching nowadays, but the graduate students then were quite appreciative of the approach.

I tell this story in part to let regular readers of the blog know that I deliberately “made a mistake” in writing the post up till this point and wondering whether any of you noticed the error. Figured it out yet? Here’s a hint – it has nothing to do with that in my little story I talk about lecturing.

Instead, it’s about positioning the story within the Blog post. Normally, I begin with a personal anecdote. I do so for several reasons – to break the ice and draw the reader in, to illustrate by example the point I’m trying to make in the post, to show connections between my experience and my ideas, etc. I think that is the better way to write, from example to the theoretical point, from the personal to the abstract. It is more closely how we actually think, in my view, and as I’ve written elsewhere, I’ve borrowed the approach part and parcel from Stephen Jay Gould.

But I didn’t do it in this post. I started with theory and made a theoretical argument, albeit in chatty terms. Then I went to the anecdote to illustrate. If you’ve gotten this far in the reading of the post, and if you’ve read other things I’ve written you might very well have a sense of which you prefer. Further, you might make come to the meta conclusion that errors of commission are precisely the examples we need from which to generalize about our thinking; were I such a good teacher I'd do it more often.

Let me close with one last point. It may be harder to do this in “live mode” since to a certain extent you then have to “sell” the error as reasonable and that may require an acting skill that many of us don’t have, but I believe this is do-able in writing, in which case the idea is simply to take a somewhat longer journey to the resting stop, possibly by taking a detour or two in the process, those detours offering potential insights via the deliberate making of mistakes and learning from that. Instructor blogging would seem to provide a nice framework for this, as by its essence there is invention in the writing, and the instructor can be thoughtful about the type of errors he would like to make.

Web Spreadsheets – Gathering Student Generated Data – Using Google Tools for Instruction

I’m taking advantage of the fact that with my leg injury and because of transitioning to the new job, my calendar is still comparatively unscheduled and hence I have a fair amount of free time. This morning, I spent some time playing with Google Spreadsheet. It definitely has possibilities.

Let me note straight away, the one function I’d really want to see but isn’t there now. It doesn’t graph data. That is a big limitation, one that will continue to get most folks to stay with Excel. But it does have quite a bit of other functionality that seems to make it a terrific adjoint to be used in conjunction with Excel or as a stand alone for certain purposes (see below). It does have a large array of formulas, with the same names as in Excel, it will import spreadsheets without difficulty, and the really nice part is how it can be shared with others.

Now let me turn to a teaching idea that I think is for the here and now, but which I suspect doesn’t happen nearly as often as it might at present. I’ve discussed the idea before, for example here. (See the section near the end on data ingest.) The idea is design various activities to be done online where each student contributes some data and then collectively the data forms an experiment to be done in class to demonstrate a certain point relevant to the class or to test a hypothesis that has already been developed in class. This would give a much need empirical aspect to what we teach and in my experience would really engage the students.

I will leave the design of these type of experiments to another post and here simply focus on the data ingest issue. One can use the survey tool in the Course Management System for this purpose. But as those tools are currently designed:

(1) The student does not get a record of their own submission for later review.
(2) The students don’t have direct access to the submissions of other students and can only get at the data if the instructor posts it. (Typically done once by the instructor after the deadline for submissions has past, so the instructor uploads all the submission at one time._ But note this is extra work for the instructor. And, further, students might want to look at the aggregate in mid stream, at our around the time they make their own submission.

So it would nice to have a system that addresses both (1) and (2) above. I’ve made a little demo to show how Google Spreadsheet can be used to manage these issues. (To access this demo, you must have a Gmail account and use that as the login.) I’m going to talk through the demo a bit so you can get the idea. It would also help for you to try to make your own spreadsheet so you can see the functionality that you don’t see in the demo.

You have read access to the demo, but not write access. (I’m happy to give anyone write access; just send me your Gmail address and I’ll set that up for you.) When you have write access there is an additional tab called Edit, which is where the data entry occurs. You also don’t have access to the Formula Tab, which allows using the spreadsheet in an intelligent manner so it does data manipulation.

There are individual worksheets labeled with people’s names: Al, Barb, Carl, Don…. up to Lou. Those names are meant to index hypothetical students. I’ve put in the data for the student named Hank. The other students haven’t yet entered any data.

There is one other worksheet called Aggregates. This worksheet shows the data entered by all the students in one view. It gets these data from the individual student worksheets. This worksheet will update automatically as students enter their individual data. You can see Hank’s data in column I. of the Aggregates sheet. (Perhaps I should have put it in column H, but I used column A to label the content of each field.)

That’s pretty much it. Obviously this is a fairly simple minded demo, but I hope the idea comes across clearly. Because the entire thing can readily be exported (use the File menu) students can do data manipulation on the aggregates at any time, even while the data collection effort is still in progress. This is really quite nice. (The dark side is that if each student has write access to the thing, they have write access to every worksheet and hence can overwrite other student data. This is, in essence, the same problem that Wikipedia faces. That problem appears to be manageable, but students do need to save a local copy of the spreadsheet after they submit their own data.)

Now let me turn to another related issue. This revolves around the ethics and usability of requiring students to have a Gmail account to be used for instruction. Suppose in a class of 50 or 60, perhaps 3 or 4 students don’t want to have a Gmail account for this purpose, because they don’t want Google to mine their identity information. Is that a likelihood? If so, what should be done in this case?

This is the type of question that would trouble us, in the Central IT organization for the campus, but for me as an instructor, I have a fairly simple work around. I can make dummy Gmail accounts, which when created were sent to my email address, not to the students. I can then give these students the login and password and tell them to use for this purpose only. Google then has no profile info on the students at all. The risk moves onto me. I’m willing to bear the risk.

And actually, the biggest possible hassle from this is that these students forget the login and password info and then I’ve got to spend my scarce time playing the role of help desk for them. If that happened on a recurring basis, I’d probably abandon the approach. But it seems a low risk to me.

So what are we waiting for?

Making a talking head video from your desktop and displaying in Google Video

Gary had asked for a “how to” on a previous demo of talking head video, but last night Google Video didn’t accept uploads and I was a bit afraid that the YouTube acquisition had affected their upload policy. My fears were misplaced. Upload worked this morning. They must have had a temporary server glitch. So, below, is my own annotated instructions on how to do this sort of thing.

* * * * *

I’m going to talk about this for the PC. I’ve done likewise for a Mac, and if you are doing this on a Mac, you can substitute iMovie for where I talk about RealProducer Plus. However, one caveat. I’ve got an iMac with a built-in iSight Camera. For whatever reasons, iMovie doesn’t see that camera. If you use an external camera – no problem. If you do use the internal camera, then you need another program to record the video. I used iVeZeen. For recording uncompressed video, it works fine, but for compression it had problems.

On the PC, I’ve had good success with a very inexpensive Logitech Camera. One of the nice secrets is that for the quality of video I want to produce, this works quite well – for both video and audio recording. If you have a flat screen monitor in your office, clipping it on top of the monitor and then leaving it there out of harm’s way till you need it makes it quite convenient. The camera plugs into a USB port. You do have to install software that comes with the camera, so the computer recognizes the device, but that is pretty straight forward.

In what I do, I’ve used the camera as the audio recording device, rather than any built in recording device on the computer. It is easy to visually gauge distance from the camera and so it becomes easy to get a sense of a comfortable zone where the recording can be done. To do this, go to the Control Panel and select Sounds and Audio Devices. Select the Audio Tab. In the recording area, make sure the camera is selected.



One of the tricks I learned, but only after making the same mistake many times, is that the microphones for these things are pretty sensitive and the right thing to do is to set the volume for recording on your computer down. This will keep the thing from picking up too much background noise. I can live with crappy video, but crappy audio makes the presentation worthless, in my view. So this is one of the key steps in the process. Fortunately, as with the previous step, this only has to be done once. Click the Volume button in the Recording Device area. This is a screen shot of my volume settings.



Now we’re ready to start recording and for that you need some software. At Illinois, a good choice is RealProducerPlus, since we have a campus site license to the software. (UIUC community can get this software from the Webstore. Because of the licensing restrictions and the need for us to assure further distribution to non-licensed users is restrained, the software is available on CD only, not by download.) The two things it offers for this particular purpose are nice frame rate for recording (30 frames per second) so the video looks smooth not choppy and a fairly easy to learn interface. Perhaps there are freeware alternatives for the PC. The Logitech camera itself has video capture software that produces AVI files. That’s a possibility. My experience with that is mixed. Sometimes it is fine but at other times it produces choppy video.

Here is a screenshot of the RealProducerPlus interface. I’ll talk through the minimum set of steps needed to record a movie.

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/Video_Upload/RealProducerPlus.jpg

RealProducer takes as input either another type of media file or from a recording device. The default is the former and so you must actively select the recording device for both Audio and Video inputs. Note that in the screen shot I’ve selected the Logitech Camera for both of these. That is on the left, below the image of me that is shown during the capture. That the image appears shows the Video input is being received correctly.

On the right, there are some buttons, one of which says Audiences. Click it. If you are actually going to record for later streaming, you can choose multiple audiences. But for this purpose, you only need one audience and the one I’ve got is 256K DSL or Cable. Recording for dial-up makes the thing too choppy. The other control to set is the Audio Mode. I believe the default is Music (a higher quality). I choose Voice, which makes the file a little smaller. The quality is fine for this purpose.

You can put in Clip Information, and that might be a good idea if you are concerned about protecting your copyright. But it is not necessary to make a recording. The key final step for that is to identify the four icons below the Destination window, one has the Real logo, the next has an image of a server, then a pencil, and finally a trash can. Choose the button with the Real logo, select a name for your file and the location where you want the file to reside on your computer.

Now you are ready to record. I recommend making a 10 second movie or so, just to test that the recording is working ok. When you make your actual movie, you’ll simply overwrite that test movie. Recording happens a second or so after you press the Encode button. You’ll see another image in the right window pane during actual recording. You click the Stop button next to the Encode button when you are done. On my computer it takes almost no time thereafter for the video to be ready to view. There is a button for playing back the movie and that will bring up RealPlayer so you can see what the video looks like.

The completes the technical part of the recording. There is a different issue about making your own talking head video that you can tolerate. You’ll probably think the first few you make are terrible. (They might be.) One issue is looking at the camera rather than the computer screen. Another is talking smoothly and naturally without a lot of ums and ahs. We’re not actors, so that might not be easy to do. But it certainly is easier if the message is comparatively short and to the point.

At this point you now have a movie in realvideo (.rv) format. Before going further, I want to describe the value add of Google Video, because a possible alternative is uploading the movie to a streaming server or simply putting the file up somewhere for download. So here are some arguments for Google Video.

1. The process can be used for personal video creation as well as academic video creation. Indeed, my guess is that doing the one will encourage doing the other. So the same approach can be used for both.

2. Google Video has no bandwidth restrictions.

3. We’re asymmetric in supporting technology on campus, giving faculty greater access than students. (I think that is typical of most campuses.) The true power here in using this type of thing, I believe, is in student created videos. Then, it would be very good to get the faculty to use the same environment as the students.

4. Google Video has captioning tools (that I’ve not yet tried) for accessibility.

5. Google Video is easy to embed in a blog or other Web page. It has automated tools for that, making it easy to do that part.

Note, however, that Google Video does not render the realvideo file. Instead, it converts that file to Flash format. So what is shown is less good than the original .rv file, but it seems to me it is good enough.

To access Google Video, you need a Gmail account. (I’m saying this by recollection. There may be a different way to create a Google Video account.) I assume here that the Gmail account is already created. Then from the regular Google search page, simply click Google Video and sign in. That is all there is to that part.

Once in, click Upload. You get a screen like this:

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/Video_Upload/image002.jpg

This is a partially completed form. It is pretty straightforward to complete. You do have to accept the terms and conditions at the bottom. Uploading and processing does take a little while, perhaps a minute. (Obviously, that depends on the size of the file.) When completed you’ll see a page where you can view your video. That page has the info for Web publishing the video or sending email alerts about the video to friends.

Voila!!

Comments

I changed the permissions for doing comments do deter spam attacks. To comment on a post now, you have to log into blogger. I do really appreciate legit comments, but the spam is a bummer and it takes too long to delete, so this step was necessary.

Stretching It

My physical therapist has prescribed certain exercises for me to rehab my left leg. I do quadriceps squeezes – 15 in a row, hold for a count of 3 and then release for a count of 3 – and leg lifts, up, 2, 3, down, 2, 3, rest, 2, 3, and again, repeated 14 more times. There was pain with the leg lifts at the beginning. Now there is a less. Doing these exercises, I’m well within myself. I can see the leg getting stronger as a consequence.

I have one other type of exercise, one that I really don’t like, but it’s obviously necessary. The brace I’m wearing has a hinge at the knee. The hinge can be locked, more stability for me, or left open, so the leg can flex at the knee. One can set the maximum angle of flex. When I started that was 45 degrees. Now I’m up to 60 degrees. Getting there hurts and I do it in small steps. Then tendons, which were what got repaired surgically, get a real stretch, and likewise for other muscles around the knee. Unfortunately, it hurts, especially at the beginning. So I shied away from this exercise for while. But I can see the flexing of the leg is the crucial ability that I need to return to function as a normal person (drive a car, go to work, sit in a regular chair, etc.). So now I’m “stretching myself” to stretch my tendons and muscles. In this sense, I’m a highly motivated learner. Progress feeds that motivation. Today I was able to get into my Aztek and drive a bit. Eurkea!!

It occurred to me to use this idea as a metaphor for other learning. And then I thought I had come almost full circle, because when I started to teach Economics, back in the fall of 1980, I thought my role as teacher was to get the students to really stretch in their thinking. But in the main they didn’t share that perception, at least not with the economic modeling, and I was likely not sufficiently gentle with them to get them to do it willingly. My physical therapist adjusts the exercise according to whether I have a lot of pain or not. But as I said, I’m a motivated learner in this regard and he can see my progress. Being gentle in the role of teacher is harder to do if there is a perception that the students aren’t trying.

I thought that might offer the theme for this piece, but I don’t’ have a lot to say on that issue now. I’ll come back to it in a later post when I’ve got more to contribute on the question. I do think there is an important concern about whether, as we let our students drive their own learning, we are properly encouraging our students to stretch themselves. But I’ll set that aside. Here I want to talk on a more personal note, about stretching myself intellectually, and identifying the pain points in the process.

I held off writing this post for almost a week, because I didn’t know in what dimension I could focus that would get at my own issues and say something of value. In the past, I’ve written about stretching it with the writing and I didn’t want to offer up the same old thing this time around. Then this morning, after reading what I thought was an awful column by David Brooks about why the Mets won’t win the World Series (I’m a Yankee fan, enough of a reason to feel grumpy today) and then taking a walk around the park, using only one crutch instead of two and hence enabling me to go more than twice as far as I was able to the last time I took a walk, it occurred to me that I had found my theme.

And that theme is attributable to the same David Brooks, whom on the News Hour last Friday made what I thought was an insightful and telling comment about the Mark Foley case. Namely that the case has the potential to be political dynamite because what happened with Foley, if it were thought to be a commonplace or even had potential to be a commonplace, would strike terror into all parents who have teenage kids, who when not at school may very well be IM-ing with folks like Foley, apparently respectable but with an unsavory, indeed frightening hidden side. And, this feeling of wanting to protect our children from such solicitation is not, in essence, of the Religious Right but rather a natural instinct as parents. In that sense, it’s universal.

It occurred to me during my walk that these feelings as a parent are at odds with my views as an educator and advocate for online learning, where I’m on record as encouraging students to publish their work openly on the Web and equally to get instructors to make their course open by showcasing student work. and if I wanted to stretch myself, I’d have to reconcile my views. Self-contradictions hurt (for example, has my view about DOPA changed in light of Foley?) and I for one have the ability to compartmentalize my life in such a way that the self-contradictions are not so readily apparent. (I’m sure this is ordinary adult behavior, especially among baby boomers like me who as young adults lived according to a different ethic than they live today, and who at present likely need less rather than more stress in their lives.) Let’s deliberately experience the hurt now and see where it takes us.

I should note now that neither of my boys (12 and 14) does IM or email at present, and I have certainly not encouraged them in this direction, though the younger one has been lobbying me and my wife for a laptop of his own (so he doesn’t have to share the home computer) and I had to get the older one a Gmail account (any email account would have done ok) as a condition for him to participate in the Marching Band at school (but I didn’t understand why this requirement was there). Also, let me report that at our old house where we did dialup and used Earthlink (especially when the Campus dialup was busy) I set up those parental controls to block access to content for the kids, but I found that clunky and hard to work with, impeding my own account on the computer. Perhaps I need to look at that sort of thing again. Right now, however, I don’t view it as the solution.

You might ask, the solution to what? The answer, of course, is to provide a safe and comfortable environment for the family. Let the kids learn about the hard realities, but let that happen later when they have matured a bit and have better coping skills. Innocence lost can’t be regained. And when those hard realities come too early, they can create wounds; wounds that don’t heal quickly; wounds that leave big scars. The kids have their own issues to deal with; mostly about dealing with other kids. They are not leading a completely sheltered existence. What is wrong with buffering their world from some of the more egregious forms of abuse?

Of course there is a substantial age difference between my own kids and the kids I taught in my Campus Honors class last spring, a four or five year age difference, maybe more. And sure enough, the kids I taught were not mine. I worried about whether they learned economics. I didn’t worry about their social life and possible awkward experiences they may have had, though some of them wore their emotions on their sleeve more than I would have, one explaining he had a fight with his girlfriend the night before and consequently hadn’t gotten any sleep.

The boundaries between these kids and mine are there, certainly, but the boundaries are fuzzy. I would not know where to draw the line if I had to. Perhaps there is some solace in the observation that being open about their academic work is an unlikely path into their personal life. Facebook offers a more ready route for that purpose, one reason the students themselves have embraced that environment. But this seems to me like rationalization, not strong argument.

The University does protect the students from themselves, particularly with their (excessive) drinking. I couldn’t imagine otherwise. Perhaps the University has some responsibility to protect these kids from more overt threats of solicitation and predation, some of which are online. Sure the University is for the free exchange of ideas. That is the mantra, the bread and butter. But what about loco parentis? Isn’t that an obligation too?

So one side of me, driven by a concern for my own children’s welfare, sees a certain logic in DOPA, although it clearly would be better if the kids had more common sense themselves. But, often, they don’t. That’s the reality. And the question is what to do then.

I got that argument out. It’s an argument that part of me can see. But it’s not an argument I can entirely embrace. It’s an argument that is rooted fundamentally in despair, running away from one’s fears. We live that way sometimes, I admit. Given a choice, however, we should not let it be a permanent condition. We need an alternative that offers hope, personal growth and social value. Having the virtual equivalent of gated communities doesn’t do that. Openness does.

And sensing that, one might think at this point in the essay I’d entirely reject an attempt to make a hermetic environment online and instead embrace openness without reservation. But as I sit here typing this document, my left leg is flexed in a more normal pose, yet one that is still painful for me. I feel the hurt as well as see the promise of my improved mobility in the future. Stretching it means there is both.

We talk in ideological terms about these issues, a purity that belies the underlying ambiguity. I would like to advocate for an approach, yet recognize the ambiguity as well, an admission that an alternative is possible. It is my usual style to make some arguments on both sides. But with that, I normally do take a side. It’s just that in this case I take a different one as parent than I do as educator.

Ouch.

Wimp of Gimp

Another quick video produced at hom to argue for using this genre in our educational context.

Using Google Video

I wonder how many folks have played with Google Video. I'm finding it surprisingly easy to use and it seems to me to have great potential for eLearning. In the previous post is a little video I made about myself, to show how much progress I've been making with my leg injury. I was able to publish it directly to Blogger.

I actually made this video using RealProducerPlus, after having tried first with the video package that comes with my Logitech camera. The difference is the frame rate. The RealProducer does 30 frames per second. The other does much less, perhaps 12 frames per second. The higher frame rate does a better synching of the audio to the motion.

Google video converts what's uploaded into a Flash format. This the actual Web page at the Google Video site. The video itself is too big there an a bit distorted as a result, but still viewable. Look at the links at the right on that page. So the video is available to embed into a blog or other Webpage, to view off the Google Video site, or to download.

Because this is straightforward to make, students can do these and can pepper their work with video clips. And in the totally online or blended context, this would seem to be a good way to personalize the interaction. Instructors can do likewise and deliver some impromptu information to the class this way. And for those who can't resist lecturing, mini lectures can be created and embedded into quiz questions in the course management system. I tested this with WebCT Vista and it worked like a charm. So one can readily meld presentation and assessment, which would seem to be a good approach to content that students are exposed to the first time through.

It also seems to me that Google is not imposing quotas on filespace for the video and even if they do, they base this on your gmail account and you can make multiple accounts for yourself with no problem. This seems like a really great tool.

Update_About_Me

A little demonstraton of how I'm progressing since the injury

Futzing with Elgg

I start my new job tomorrow. One of the first orders of business (pardon the pun) is to find a replacement for the College’s FirstClass server. Some of the staff have been playing around with MS Sharepoint. That is a possibility. But right now Elgg looks more attractive to me, something that might capture the imagination both of the MBA students and the faculty.

I’ve been playing with it at my site at Elgg.net. The blog seems reasonably compatible with composing posts in Word, which for me is a biggie since I’m apt to write longer posts that way. I liked the general structure with community spaces, friends, a resource area for feeds, and a files area. All of that is good as is the general horizontal structure of the – users are symmetric with respect to their functionality. That is nice.

I did have some minor issues with some things I’ve tried. I was able to get my files area listed on my resources page, but I wasn’t able to get my resources to appear on my blog, though it seems this should be possible. That looks like a glitch. I thought it was a bit odd that I could invite friends to join the Elgg.net site, but I couldn’t invite friends with accounts already to join a community I created. They have to ask in. That’s a bit odd workflow-wise, but not a huge deal. Overall, I liked the functionality a lot.

My bigger immediate concern is with performance, not functionality. Page loads have been slow. Whether that represents Internet congestion rather (I believe the server is in the UK) rather than Elgg performance itself, I can’t say. I wonder what other North American users of Elgg.net feel about their experience with the site in that regard.

On Friday I had a nice chat with Sasan Salari about his Elgg integration with WebCT Vista. It is an intriguing Powerlink that Sasan has created with pass through authentication and the Elgg Window fitting inside the WebCT frame in a way that looks good. I know there are those who thing environments like Elgg will be the death of the LMS, but the grade book, assignments, and quiz functionality are heavily entrenched hear and so I see a need for both, not one or the other. It would be nice, however, if the PowerLink ran both ways, so that a user could start off in Elgg and then launch WebCT if they wanted to. This way they could go back and forth between personal space and class space and in the latter there could be a public area in Elgg as well as the intranet only space in WebCT.

I know there is likewise an integration of Elgg and Moodle. I don’t know, however, if that is one way or two ways.

There is yet another issue with this software from the provision point of view. This has to do with the expertise to support open source applications in the Linux/PHP/MySQL flavor. The College of Business has in the main been a Microsoft shop, probably a sensible approach historically given their audience. The Campus here has in the main adopted Unix oriented commercial applications. At the Campus level, in particular, where I have some understanding of the personnel issues from my involvement with the LMS, one need redundancy of staff, so that any individual can take a planned vacation or be out for an unplanned leave due to illness or a personal issue.

That redundancy requirement encourages concentration in the approach. It becomes expensive to both have the redundancy and support both Windows apps and open source. Outsourcing may offer an alternative on this score and there appears to be a fledgling hosting service for Elgg.

On our campus, however, there may be security issues that make it harder to implement an outsourced solution. While I personally have no issue with how Elgg.net handles logins and passwords, almost certainly our security people would. And then there is the issue that precisely because the software is so horizontal user-wise, definitely a pedagogic feature, it is easier to run afoul of protecting student privacy (having an open community without a closed community alternative for the students readily available) and ditto for issues about Copyright and Fair Use. But these things can be managed by educating our instructors rather than by imposing restrictions on the software. The software can accommodate these issues if the instructors act in a knowledgeable way.

If I’m right that Elgg will capture the imagination of the audience in the College of Business, then I would characterize the above discussion as a situation where the user wants are pitted against the provider needs. It seems to me that a lot of IT, at least on my campus, has elements of this type of tension. A couple of days ago I was emailing a friend from another university and said that I thought there would be a big culture change in moving from my Campus job to the College of Business job.

One significant aspect of that culture change is how risk is managed. Unquestionably an experiment that would shift the provider toward a more user centric solution entails risk. The Campus tends to be extremely conservative about risk, both for scaling reasons and because there aren’t substantial revenue sources for risk mitigation. I believe the College of Business will likely embrace more risk, if a there is a real upside to the situation, such as I believe there is with Elgg.

Let me close with one final point. On my campus, in particular, but I suspect elsewhere at big universities like mine, the risk preferences I’ve described are likely to be similar, and so it really does make sense for some of the experimentation to happen at the college level or even the departmental level rather than at the campus level and indeed that happens now to some extent. But until now, the learning from that experimentation seems to be contained within the unit that undertakes the effort. That seems horribly inefficient to me, and something where I’d hope we can improve on in the future.