Soft Skills Are Hard

It was Plato who taught us that thinking is remembering. When I first read that (I took a course on Plato and Aristotle in the fall semester of my sophomore year when I was 18 and had no prior background in Philosophy) I had no clue what Plato was talking about. Now it makes more sense. There is that dreaded phrase – been there, done that – which unfortunately is used way to much and says something about the closed mindedness of the speaker, since it conveys that having a like prior experience blocks the possibility of any learning from the current episode. But, more to the point, there is the notion that any new idea or experience must confront a person’s world view and via some process of internal negotiation that still is a mystery to me, the new idea or experience is integrated in, sometimes without any change in the world view but once in a while with a dramatic change in stance. The world view itself is based on past experience and prior acts of incorporation and thus in any current thinking we bring bits and pieces of our past to bear. Plato had it right.

In a Chronicle Update from last week there was a piece about MBA students and the companies who hire them in discord about the importance of teaching soft skills, with the companies thinking this is crucial and the students feeling it is unimportant. This piece struck a chord with me, partly because I work in a Business School and partly because whenever I see expectations that are out of wack and where the market doesn’t seem to provide self-correction, I wonder if I can provide an explanation for the persistent dissonance. This post is my attempt at doing just that.

I don’t have an MBA, never took an MBA course, and on the details am quite ignorant about how MBA instruction happens. But I think my own soft skills are reasonably well honed, that at least in a University setting I know how to interact and negotiate with a wide variety of people – students, faculty, administrators, and staff – and that indeed at this point I’m pretty comfortable with just about any audience I might be with on campus. (The only real discomfort I’ve had in meetings in the last 3 or 4 years were (1) in a meeting about classroom construction with the construction people themselves where I felt like an outsider and (2) a couple of meetings with the Provost present where I felt like a school child.) Egotistical to the last, I believe my own experience can help in understanding the soft skills issue, in spite of my lack of knowledge of MBA instruction.

When I was a very junior faculty member I was known to be extremely mathematical in my orientation and while a nice guy perhaps difficult to understand on economic issues, especially by more senior faculty members who didn’t have as strong a theoretical orientation. Also, I hung around economists in my social life, other assistant professors in the department, and with them felt quite at ease. This replicated my graduate school experience where I hung out mostly with grad students in econ. The effect was to create a sense that I could be comfortable in this cloistered setting but that it was risky to communicate outside the immediate cohort; I might feel uncomfortable and not well understood.

Having kids began to change that a bit and especially being on the Board of Directors of the daycare my kids attended because then there was a different commonality that drew the parents on the Board together, our children and the care they were getting, and the interaction was with a different set of people. Then things changed more substantially as I began to do ALN and things really amplified when I became an administrator in SCALE.

That started in Summer 1996, when I was 41. The previous year, as a SCALE faculty member, I had engaged with several others in an ongoing discussion in FirstClass, about how to teach with the technology. In that online conference there were both faculty members from a variety of disciplines and support folks, also variously situated, and we were able to interact well, each representing his own point of view in the argument. In one sense, participating actively in that discussion was a good foundation for what came next.

Along with Cheryl Bullock, who was part of the SCALE evaluation team, I set out to interview as many SCALE faculty as I could. My motivation was to build connections with them. John Ory, who led the SCALE evaluation, and I had agreed that Cheryl and I would tag team because Cheryl was not having much luck interviewing faculty members on her own.

I was terribly frightened about this at first. I guessed, incorrectly, that I needed to show disciplinary knowledge in the faculty member’s subject matter, and just how would I do that? I didn’t realize that much of my thinking about teaching with technology did generalize and that I could hold up my end of the conversation quite well. But subject matter expertise was only part of it. In addition, I didn’t realize that my personal interaction style could work well with quite a variety of audiences. The problem I had communicating with other economists in my department happened because I tried to talk to them in the language of formal economics. Had I been informal, however, I’d have been more successful. Talking about teaching and learning, informal was the only option for me; I didn’t have any prior training. That proved to be an advantage.

There’s still more to it. There is knowing how to argue and be collegial at the same time. There is understanding the need to give the other person enough space so she feels free to express herself. There is communicating in a way where repeatedly there are tests whether the message is being understood, the asking of a question for clarification while pushing the discussion along a little, the trying to tie what she is saying to my personal experience. And there is the making it all fun by recognizing in the other that they have thought about the issues but haven’t been able to give them voice and doing so is a reward in itself.

I knew how to do all of this, though before the interviews started I wasn’t explicitly aware that I had this capability. I learned these things not by taking any classes but rather from my living situation at Cornell when I was junior and senior, at 509 Wyckoff Road. But during college I thought about it a little bit differently. At that time (I think this is still true but I’m ready to be educated otherwise) most kids of college age put on an act, certainly with their parents, quite possibly with any other authority source like an employer or a professor, and then often even with their peers. Being yourself – letting your guard down so to speak – makes you more vulnerable. The act is partly, perhaps mostly, a defense mechanism; it’s not merely trying to be what you think others want you to be; it is surviving in the social environment in which you find yourself.

At Wyckoff Road we didn’t put on an act and we had great conversations. We accommodated the sense of vulnerability by being somewhat careful about who was part of our group and acting within that fairly cloistered setting. My junior year I lived on the second floor and did things with many other people who lived in house, though oddly not much with my roommate whom I had known in High School; he hung out with a different group. The next year I got a single on the third floor and the bunch of us who lived up there became a tighter group, though we did interact a fair amount with some others in the house.

Two others who also had singles on the third floor were grad students, one in Physics, the other in Human Ecology. Both had lived at Wyckoff the year before and while neither was a “ringleader” for the group, they got the ethos without trouble and fit right in. The other room, off the kitchen which was our hangout place, was a double. It had two undergrads who chose to live there largely because they were members of the sorority right across the street and for many of their meals and social activities they’d be at the sorority rather than at 509. One of these studied human nutrition, the other was a hotel-ee.

These two both really enjoyed the be yourself approach we all took, but it took them some time to get used to it and unlike the rest of us our existence at 509 probably served as a refuge from the rest of their lives, where indeed they did put on an act. I did my part to make this work, part of which was simply going with the flow rather than dictating terms. I can’t recall the details of how this came about but my junior year we went out to listen to music a fair amount and often went to the Stables Inn, where I drank Black Russians. (One thing that does change from being an undergrad to being middle aged is our taste for drink.) As a senior, I don’t think we did that as much if at all but I recall going to Hojo’s quite frequently on Friday night for all you can eat pancakes.

This world of open conversation operated almost completely outside our classes and the subject matter there almost never came up in the discussion, except peripherally, so we were quite democratic in choice of topic and how to contribute to it. To me this matters a great deal and is really important when considering how focused college education can get nowadays. The diversity of background was a huge plus for us. It encouraged participation without requiring expertise ahead of time.

So in that sense I was much more open during my college years than I was as an assistant professor. The conversations as an assistant professor tended to be mostly on the same things – departmental politics – and really narrowed things compared to my undergraduate days. Being open to subjects is the essence of soft skills. And delighting in conversation on a wide variety of topics is also critical. The important ability is to bring in something form one’s personal experience that creates a tie, some stake in what is being discussed, but not forcing that and not narrowing the conversation. Courses tend to do the opposite, especially as they get steeped in a particular discipline.

At some point in the trajectory, whether in the major as an undergrad or in graduate studies, school deliberately tries to narrow, to encourage depth in the subject matter being investigated. Soft skills want us to be generalists. That is frightening because the student is not sure what he has to bring to the table and it is more frightening if the person hasn’t been around the block at least a couple of times. The typical MBA got his undergrad degree say at age 22, then enters the work for about 5 years, gets the MBA and now is supposed to re-emerge with their company in a more mature role. But he is still shy of his 30^th birthday – a veritable babe in the woods. What experiences while in the MBA program could possibly overcome that sense of being the novice afterwards? Wouldn’t this student cling to the technical training so there would be some veil to be wrapped in, both for self-protection and to demonstrate some expertise so as to establish some personal credibility?

Academic professional programs might try to inject soft skills by attempting to produce the type of diversity that I experienced at 509 Wyckoff Road. One might envision students from Engineering, Law, Human Resource Education, and Business put in teams to simulate the type of communication issues that will come up when these folks return to the world of work. This would give the students some way to gauge whether they successfully could bridge gaps in knowledge and have valuable conversations, discussions that led to interesting action plans. But setting up something like that would be quite hard to do and mostly it would have to occur outside the course context, so might elicit little interest from the faculty. Absent such a program, how could the student possibly develop the confidence to communicate in general terms with a varied audience?

Now let me focus on a different part of my experience and discuss a different dimension of the soft skill capability. Since I didn’t take an English or a Writing course in college, I learned a bit about what was taught there when I took a Writing Across the Curriculum Seminar in summer 1996. My recollection is that there was a hierarchy of writing skill with summary at or near the bottom and analysis or synthesis near the top. Further, it seemed I had been demanding from my own students only those higher level skills and expecting those to be delivered in a mature manner.

Here I want to focus on summary, because now I think it is critical while in 1996 I thought it unimportant. And in discussing summary I want to distinguish it from “taking minutes,” which in the way it’s been practiced here recently takes on the form of those letters about the family that some people send out at Christmas time – Cassandra went on an outing with her French club, Michael found a job working as a park ranger in the summer – more an annotated list than a coherent story. That’s not what I mean by summary.

I never understood why we’d have students summarize other rather comparatively short pieces of writing, for example a newspaper article. This invites plagiarism and begs the question of what value the student is providing in working through the exercise. But providing a summary of a discussion that wasn’t otherwise recorded is an entirely different matter. When one does that there is a demonstration of understanding the underlying issues and there is a potentially productive use, bringing that conversation to others who weren’t there. The summary is also a useful way to follow up with the participants, get their buy in or their further contributions.

Writing such a summary, something I find myself increasingly occupied with as an ordinary part of my job, requires being able to get to the gist of the matter, to first distill to the essence and then providing supporting information. In turn, this requires providing a framework within which to consider the conversation. Analysis of the framework proves the way for organizing the summary.

Now in my 50s, coming up with such a framework is something I do intuitively with little effort, and I suspect that is likewise true for most senior executives in the business world. The skill is not unlike coming up with a formal mathematical model to analyze an economic problem. It shares with the math modeling the need for abstraction. But it differs in the demand for simplicity and the need to produce something quickly – one, two, three brush strokes and we’re done. Beyond that it is self-defeating as the detail cuts against the grain.

Not all students have a taste for abstraction and one of the reasons that we get those Christmas letter type of reports is that the person doesn’t know how to bring the argument to a higher plane. Teaching a sense of abstraction is hard. Where we do it, we normally provide the tools for the abstraction already and then the skill to be acquired is to match the scenario to the particular model. Students struggle with this and it in itself doesn’t teach students to come up with their own models. Further, those who don’t like math may look for a different avenue to develop this type of thinking, but I’m not sure what to recommend. And for those who do like the math and the abstraction there is still the issue that the representation has to be sufficiently simple that it can be readily communicated. Some people making an abstract argument get wrapped up in detail – I find myself doing that from time to time and almost certainly it is a mistake.

Can we teach MBAs to make simple ad hoc models that do focus on the forest, not the trees? This issue is tied to the other one. Students welcome the comfort of their own cohort because they don’t have to adjust their language to the least common denominator. They aim for sophistication, not simplicity, and they may very well confuse being straightforward in communication with being simple-minded. They may also not understand how much thinking and effort goes into producing a summary that is understandable and easy to read.

Personally, I learned these things from failure. I made many mistakes. My current approach, bring it down to bring it up, took a very long time to cultivate. Part of the implicit question behind teaching MBAs soft skills is whether we can accelerate the learning, make the failures more planned and part of the curriculum, or avoid them altogether so the students can go to the next steps.

I don’t know the answer to that, but I’ve tried to show what is at issue. The student’s ego and the student’s courage are at stake. Soft skills test both of those when they are practiced, especially at the beginning. Students want to be prepared. Unfortunately, that can be self-defeating.

C# Minor

Ingmar Bergman is dead. Will anyone mourn?

A couple of nights ago the family went out for dinner, a bit unusual for us; we normally do takeout. We’re not great at having family conversations. Eating at home allows for an efficient ingestion of nourishment and treats; perhaps some matter of fact discussion about tasks that need to get done, then back the computer or to video games or Harry Potter. Going out is more leisurely with time to burn and now the boys are too old to play “I Spy” – riddlely riddlely ree, I see something you can’t see. So after placing our orders we started to talk.

Soon thereafter my younger son asked – “who was the President who came after Lincoln, in 1860?” Ben usually has a point when he asks a question, but this time I wasn’t getting it at all. I said Andrew Johnson followed Lincoln but that wasn’t till later. Then Ben offered a non-rebuttal rebuttal about Jefferson Davis and followed that with some observation that Lincoln was a Republican but what about the Democrats? Somehow this morphed to me quizzing the family about the presidents since JFK, and then before JFK too. The boys didn’t know LBJ and guessed that Nixon was next after Kennedy. They did know Nixon; interesting what one must do when in high office to be remembered, at least by the Arvan clan. The boys knew Jimmy Carter, but only after a prompt. They struggled with Reagan and Bush père and couldn’t identify their Democratic opponents. (I confess that when my wife brought it up I couldn’t recall whether Geraldine Ferraro ran with Mondale or Dukakis.) They didn’t know Harry Truman. They didn’t know that Adlai Stevenson ran against Eisenhower. We’re from Illinois and they didn’t know Adlai Stevenson, yet their teachers keep saying how well the boys are doing at school. What gives?

I don’t doubt that my kids are bright and can learn quickly and deeply. I’ve seen that in other things they’ve done. But it is clear that history, at least the type of history associated with knowing the Presidents, doesn’t touch them in their own world, even if there are parallels between Viet Nam and Iraq, even if the cocoon in which they reside will burst forth as they enter adulthood. The kids say the Pledge of Allegiance at school, but I’m afraid it is an empty ritual with no meaning for them behind the words, no way to touch them inside with the message. That goes likewise for the singing of the Star Spangled Banner. My older kid is in the High School Marching Band and this week he is in band camp. During the rest of the year they do parades, competitions with bands from other schools, and of course they perform at half time of the football games. In their repertoire apart from the Star Spangled Banner, obviously there is Sousa, and then some Rock Classics set to marching band format.

Not having gone through this sort of thing myself as a kid, I played in the concert band for a while but my school didn’t have a marching band, I wonder what the activity instills in the kids who go through the rather intensive effort to prepare as well as what it instills in the broader audience, the fans and the parents. Certainly there is much pageantry in the performance and, since that is by design, one might guess that it is done for a purpose beyond pure entertainment. Perhaps it is meant to instill patriotism, although it seems more likely to generate school spirit than loyalty to country, since most of the pageantry is wrapped around an athletic contest.

* * * * *

These are not topics on which I normally dwell and I wouldn’t have given them any attention whatsoever save for some other happenings.

Last week espn.com ran an in depth series on the Pat Tillman incident. There was greater coverage on the ESPN site than on the NY Times site. I was puzzled about why ESPN provided this content; it didn’t seem sports related though I supposed that in an expanded view any news about former pro athletes is sports related, but that didn’t seem enough to warrant making it a feature. A different idea is that currently sports is wrapped up with the debunking of institutions: Barry Bonds home run chase and the Tour de France with steroids, an NBA ref betting on basketball games and possibly fixing those games, and the dog fighting case that feature Michael Vick make for a prominent but incomplete list. Perhaps the Tillman case fits as more of the same.

There is sports punditry just as there is news punditry, but the analysis these sportswriters provide is less driven by ideological fervor. Partly for that reason and partly because, face it, sports is supposed to be entertainment, not life and death, the sports punditry is less heavily scrutinized by other members of the established media, by the fans sure but less so elsewhere. And in the case of ESPN, though part of ABC probably run as a unit independent of ABC News, there is likely less scrutiny than at other sports news groups, which do have ties to the larger new organization. Maybe ESPN featuring the Tillman case is an example of their News unit pushing its boundaries, something they can do --- recall the George Bernard Shaw maxim.

It seems that ESPN is encouraging at least consideration of the idea that Tillman wasn’t killed by friendly fire, but rather he was assassinated by his own troops, witness the headline on this piece, caused by resentment against an overbearing sports star. And if that’s true, the closest tie is with Columbine, where the shootings were similarly motivated. The pageantry we associate with sports has a dark underside, especially in how the “heroes” treat the rest of us. Perhaps that is “the story” of all of sports and so maybe the Tillman case belongs on the ESPN pages after all.

* * * * *

Here is a different thought on the relationship between music and patriotism, coming not from the need to glorify the nation through pageantry but rather from another place entirely, to endure suffering and to do so by having something close that touches the soul, something to cling to and value in spite of all else, something of beauty. Here is Roman Polanski talking about Chopin in reference to the soundtrack in Polanski’s movie, The Pianist.

Fryderyk Chopin's music was an essential part of Wladyslaw Szpilman's repertoire. For us Poles, Chopin symbolizes revolution. It is not surprising that his monument in Warsaw was pulled down during World War II, nor that the wartime struggles led to his music being banned in Poland. His music is our music - it's like mother's milk. It is what gave Szpilman strength and courage. I am proud to be able to reunite them for this soundtrack. I needed a great pianist from Poland to play authentically and honor both men's memories, and Janusz Olejniczak does that.

I’ve written about The Pianist before, so I don’t want to linger on it here (although this piece in the NY Times is intriguing about the particular selection of music in the film). Instead, I’d like to focus on a different film that I watched last week. It is partly about the life of Chopin and in that about some of the ordeal he went through in writing his music. The movie is called Impromptu, in an obvious reference to one type of Chopin’s piano music. But Chopin is only indirectly the main character of the piece. More overtly, the main character is George Sand, the French novelist.

Sand had many of the affectations of a man, in part because doing so gave her greater freedom to pursue her own ends. In the movie, Sand is portrayed by Judy Davis, a performer whom I haven’t seen in many films but who makes a strong impression in those that I’ve seen (A Passage to India is a good example. There she plays the odd and perhaps demented but certainly determined character, Adela Quested.) What Davis does most convincingly is to visually demonstrate earnest and complete pursuit of her own interests, to be totally driven by that rather than to behave in accord with social convention or to perform in a certain way in order to attend to the feelings of others.

In the film Sand’s life was spent in pursuit of scientific truth, as rendered by the artists, musicians, and writers who resided in the sphere in which she operated. Chopin’s music was the embodiment of this truth. Her love for him followed from her love for the music. On multiple occasions in the film Sand is seen lying under the piano while Chopin is playing it, an unlikely place for the rest of us yet the best way to be caught up in the rapture and the beauty of the music. And indeed the music is wonderful.

After watching the movie I did a Google search (chopin piano .mp3) and found this truly delightful repository at pianosociety.com. There are free recordings (and sheet music too) that are available for download and organized either by composer or by performer. The composer pages provide a biography and sort the music by type. Chopin’s page is interesting to read in its own right and helps in understanding the underlying events in the movie.

Chopin, played by Hugh Grant in the movie in a role that doesn’t fit Grant’s current typecast, is depicted as sickly, timid, and very much concerned with doing things in a proper way. In all of that he is the opposite of Sand. In fact, Chopin had Tuberculosis and died when he was only 39. (My dad had TB; got it before I was born. The consequence was a partially collapsed lung that limited his wind while swimming or playing tennis and that did create the impression that he was not as robust as the rest of us, well after the TB itself was gone.) So the sickly part seems accurate.

The timidity is at first hard to reconcile with the enormous passion that is embodied in the music. Chopin was a magnificent performer, but apparently he preferred to play the piano in the company of a small group of friends over giving public performances. He clearly was not timid in the pursuit of his own ideas but he very well may have been quite shy with others he didn’t know.

The dialect Grant adopts does seem misplaced, but how does one do a native Polish speaker talking in French but performed in English? An interesting part of Chopin’s story is that he was loyal to Poland till the last, but he lived in France and never returned to his home country once the war with Russia began. Much of his music, certainly the Mazurkas and the Polonaise, were written to bring the folk life of the Polish people into the world of piano music. He did this wonderfully.

The biography of Chopin also points out how much of a traditionalist Chopin was and how much his innovations, for example in the Nocturnes, were firmly based on earlier baroque music. Listen to some of those and then listen to some music by Bach, perhaps one of his Toccatas. The rhythm in the left hand is essentially the same. As daring as Chopin was with his haunting melodies, he made them conform to the strict rhythm of the left hand. There is a lesson in that for all of us would be creators, a need to adhere to a discipline even as we try to break the mold.

In the process of my Web surfing about Chopin (I didn’t alight on the pianosociety.com sight at first) I learned that Chopin’s Nocturne in C# Minor was the “theme song” to The Pianist. And in my further surfing to the Wikipedia page on the musical form Nocturne, I learned that some think the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is a Nocturne. Guess what key that is written in.

* * * * *

The Poles have Chopin and Chopin’s music. The music is wondrous. It is so easy to describe the music with the adjective beautiful. At first thought of this I was jealous of the Poles. They have Chopin. We have Francis Scott Key and Sousa. They have love of Chopin’s music and that deepens their love of country. We have our pageantry and that make us endure the music.

But then I had a different thought. We all have Chopin. We all can love beauty and can make its pursuit our truth.

The pursuit of beauty is not talked about much these days as an ideal in higher education; it doesn't find its way into many campus strategic plans. Nor is the pursuit of beauty an ideal talked about much in the arena of national politics. Yet we all have Chopin. Hmmm.

Facsimiles

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

Don Marquis
US humorist (1878 - 1937)

I’m part of a dying breed – faculty in a former life who have since moved on to become learning technology administrators. As dodo-heads go, my lot is not so bad; there are certain groups within the broader population who treat me and my brethren with much respect, sometimes even reverence. I was with such a group last week at the Educause Learning Technology Leadership Institute. This post is about the experience there and how it fits into the bigger picture of things that are happening at the moment.

We are in the midst of the post competence era. As I’m sure you’ll agree, the Bush White House can rightly claim naming rights for this new epoch that we find ourselves in. And thanks to the likes of Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, for making it clear that the Bushies make the same mistakes over and over again, due to a combination of extreme hubris and an abiding cronyism.

Given the religiosity of the President and the right wing neocons with whom he is aligned, one might conjecture that we are witnessing the just desserts for the essentially Philistine crew working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But let’s put that conjecture on the back burner because, sad to say, it seems something else is amiss, and that something else is happening outside the world of national politics. Consider, for example, the auto industry. This story about the debacle at Ford for having acquired a variety of high end auto companies: Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo to name a few, only to find them hard to maintain and with sales that have not come close to the rosy forecasts that Bill Ford anticipated when he bought the companies in the first place, shares none of the pious rhetoric we associate with announcements from the White House on Iraq, Al Qaeda, Catrina, you name it. Yet there are some striking similarities between the two. Both emblemize the taking of dramatic action when a more cautious alternative was available, with the decision justified by an overly optimistic view of the future. Both were driven by a 60,000 foot view of reality, only much later when the initial optimism provided to be incorrect to be forced to reckon with more low-to-the-ground concerns. And both have led their respective constituencies to a precipice.

“What has really evolved here is that the scenario has changed so dramatically,” said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. “Because of that change, you’re looking at things in a far more pragmatic way, with the thought that if you screw up in labor negotiations, or you screw up in product development, the company may go down.”

When I was a kid I watched the movie version of Li’l Abner with the famous line “What’s good for General Bullmoose…” and, of course, that was a mild satire of “What’s good for General Motors…” Satire doesn’t get written unless the object is worth poking fun at. GM is not what is used to be. And many of our other institutions seem to be in the same boat, some of them closer to home. The Times Magazine is running an essay contest for College students. “Fine,” you’re likely to say. But check out the theme for this thing – “College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.” And read the essay by Rick Perlstein to “introduce” students to the topic. It’s all very depressing. That’s precisely because it seems so accurate.

I’ve got this feeling that we’re reliving the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s all compressed into one (note that Nixon was a significant part of all three decades; how’s that for paranoia?) and whereas 30 years ago after much anguish and torment we experienced a rebirth of sorts, that road has already been traveled down and it sure seems as if it can’t be crossed again. We’re trying, but we’re barely treading water.

Here’s another dimension of the problem. Bush gets blame for callous indifference in the lack of management of relocating citizens of New Orleans after the Catrina debacle --- no arguments from this quarter on that score. But the reality is that Bush inherited the levee system that was in place, which if it had worked might have meant that citizens wouldn’t have had to be relocated at all. It was the Army Corps of Engineers at fault for the levee system, not the White House, because the system they had designed simply could not hold up to a storm as severe as Catrina, and then there were errors in how deep into the ground the levees were built to boot. With that thought in mind, now ask about our infrastructure on our respective campuses, IT and otherwise, and ask further if an analogous disaster could happen at your place. I get sick thinking about it.

The problems seem to be mounting and the talent of the people addressing those problems, able as they might otherwise seem, doesn’t appear up to the challenge. Within IT specifically, budget-wise many of us manage by what I call the secret $20 bill theory – do the IT project first and find the funding for it afterwards (in that part of the wallet where the secret funds are stashed); in other words assume (or pray) that the funding will be forthcoming. In case it’s not obvious, the secret $20 bill approach does not scale well. Further, that project which seemed so exciting at the outset eventually begins to lose luster. But it doesn’t go away; it has developed a constituency of its own. And then the cycle repeats, again and again.

This particular dodo-head can analyze the problem out the wazoo. That is something of a talent. After all, sometimes analysis can lead to a solution. But analysis of the problem is in itself not enough. Indeed, nowadays analysis mostly seems to lead to paralysis. So this dodo-head starts to think of a different bird, a very large bird, one that is known for keeping its head in the sand. That’s the opposite of what they teach at LTLI about “chin up” leadership, true. But the dodo-head knows that the ostrich is not going extinct.

* * * * *

Though the original designers of the institute may have had something else in mind, the LTLI turned out be a bunch of latter day Morpheus’ (I was one of those) getting an even larger group of Neo’s (the 50 or so attendees of the institute) to take the red pill and go down the rabbit hole. These folks in attendance are good people and you could see they had an emotional need to make the journey. As it turns out, learning about IT leadership is very much like seeing the “real world” for the first time.

But that initial journey is harsh and especially during the first evening some of the people in their table teams were uncomfortable with each other. They didn’t know how to work through a group process to decide things. They didn’t know how to disagree with each other and get to a resolution of the issues. And they seemed to feel on stage.

In that they were right. We were watching. We were looking for stars. We’re always looking for yet unrecognized talent who might take the next step up. But mainly we were looking for trouble. We spent a lot of time beforehand talking about trouble and what we’d do if we found it. Prior institutes had some non-functional “Making the Case” teams. History repeats – sometimes. Turns out it doesn’t repeat if you’re watching too carefully. Our teams had a momentary impasse that first evening, but they got through it. They bonded. Then they were fine. I don’t know if our worrying mattered or not. I do know that near the end some attendees reported a strong emotional experience from the institute. I felt that too.

Four years earlier I had attended the Frye Leadership Institute and in many respects was in the same boat then as the attendees at LTLI were last week. But, dear Obiwan, it is now I who am the master. I’ve made this rapid transition by embracing the dark side of the force, oh the lure of the dark side, the fascination with self when so many others require attention.

There were seven of us faculty at LTLI. Among this august group, I was tasked to represent the professoriate and true to my calling, profess I did, whether it met the circumstance or not.

And now a little aside. My first semester at Illinois, fall 1980, I did a horrible job teaching intermediate microeconomics to undergraduates and, perhaps unsurprisingly but still painful for a young instructor, some of my teaching evaluations said I had to be the worst professor on campus and I should be fired. (I’ve since learned that there are many candidates for worst professor on campus, with new ones each year.) The next semester I got to teach graduate math econ in the style I learned from Stan Reiter at Northwestern while taking essentially the same course from him. (Stan indirectly got the approach from Plato.) I liked playing Socrates with the economic theory and I was comfortable in that role. The course went well. The grad students liked it in part because they hadn’t experienced that sort of thing in their other classes. It turned out I wasn’t the worst instructor on campus after all.

I was half my current age then. I’ve had a chance to mature since. I don’t have as much opportunity to play Socrates nowadays, at least not with a large group like at LTLI. But from my experience as a faculty member at LTLI last week it is clear that I still like doing it, especially when  I’ve given some forethought to the issues to get at without feeling the need to lead the dialogue from a pre-written script. That’s what I did in my first plenary session with Larry Ragan, which was on “Building Relationships.” That session was supposed to provide insight on relationships between the learning technology leader and many different types of players on campus. When it came time to do my spiel, I got to spend an extended period on building relationships with faculty members, in particular with emphasis on just what it is that drive faculty in their actions. I did that through Socratic dialogue.

We mingled at the breaks and sat interspersed with the attendees at the meals. I professed there too, whether I knew what I was talking about or not; I was comfortable in holding forth, if not with the specifics of the issues we discussed. As I said at the outset, sometimes dodo-heads like me are accorded respect. I took advantage of that.

A centerpiece of LTLI is “Making the Case.” Near the end of the first plenary session on Sunday the attendees were grouped into teams that would persist throughout the remainder of the institute. The teams were tasked with coming up with a plan to resolve a serious campus issue and then on the final day of the institute they were to make a public presentation to the institute faculty who at the time of the presentation would be role playing as campus administration. The other attendees would be in the audience during these presentations. Immediately following each presentation the faculty, no longer role playing, would critique what they heard. The critique was intended for all in attendance.

Each afternoon the attendees had time to work in their Making the Case Teams. They also did a working dinner and several of the evenings continued in that work group mode into the evening. The team work on this project was interspersed with attendance at plenary session on various aspects of leadership. The sessions had relevance to doing the projects and in that way the institute design made sense holistically.

Each of us faculty were assigned to observe the first afternoon meeting of one of the Making the Case teams. We were there to see if they were functioning and making progress, to answer their questions if they should arise, and otherwise to keep our mouths shut. We were not to be the guides on the sides. We were supposed to be quieter than that, like good children, seen but not heard, speaking only if first spoken to. The other faculty stuck to this script. I knew it would be difficult for me to do so. With my group I kept butting in from time to time.

I don’t feel I’m much of a leader. Leaders have a certain pace for doing things and get things done in tempo. Mostly, I don’t get things done; instead I supervise gridlock. The gap between aspiration and accomplishment for me is huge, the sense of inertia strong. Supervising gridlock is one, unfortunate approach to management all too common nowadays --- post competence era, remember? But supervising gridlock is not leadership.

Getting things done, however, may not be leadership either. King George III, one of the object lessons in Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, accomplished a lot. He succeeded in getting the American colonies to achieve their independence. Of course, he didn’t set out to do that. American independence was an unanticipated consequence. I would not call King George a leader.

Underneath my façade I was asking myself before the institute what it was really that I had to contribute. The implicit idea of LTLI and indeed of the other Educause Leadership Institutes is that a more experienced generation of proven leaders pass along their wisdom to the next generation, the up and comers who are soaking in knowledge so they can climb the chain of command. What wisdom would I pass along?

Leadership and thinking are not identical, but they are related. The only President whom I have a living memory of and whom I think of when the word leadership is mentioned is Kennedy. Kennedy had a remarkable brain trust, the power behind the thrown so to speak. I couldn’t help the Making the Case Team directly with their leadership, but I could help them a bit with their thinking. There were lessons to learn on that score.

The team I observed was very eager to make progress to solve the problem they were assigned. They did not have the patience at first to ask whether the problem itself was well defined --- it wasn’t. As it turns out there was a need for them to make important assumptions to give the problem a real definition. Lesson 1 – before solving the problem, do note that most IT people are pretty good problem solvers given a pre-specified problem, ask what problem it is that should be solved. That is harder. The solution may be far from obvious. One doesn’t get to that in a linear fashion. One negotiates to that end through a sequence of iterations by developing an increasingly subtle understanding of the complexities at hand.

Because I didn’t feel constrained to help the group directly with leadership, but I had recently written this post Writing as Problem Solving, I had a strong predisposition as to what they needed to learn on the thinking front. They needed to learn to guess and discover what a good guess looks like. And they needed to develop a process of confirmation as to whether their guesses held up. For my part, after listening to them for a while, I’d play Socrates. “I’ve got a question. If you’re assuming such and such, why doesn’t that mean this? And if it does mean this, doesn’t that create a train wreck for what you’re proposing?” They didn’t like the questions because they impeded their “progress.” I left them that first afternoon after about an hour feeling a bit unsettled, but I had a sense I accomplished something in affecting how the group should proceed with their work. I wonder if the group members reflecting on that experience would feel the same way.

The institute had a strong sense of theater and I believe that the dramatic themes, a subtext rather than a fully fleshed out idea in our planning prior to the institute, contributed strongly to the emotional feeling that many of the attendees experienced. One way the theater manifest was during the presentations of the Making the Case. Several of the teams brought in nuggets they had garnered from institute faculty, delivered in the same way as the faculty had originally presented them, but integrated into their overall presentation. The effect was to show they had been listening, to create a good chuckle, and to give the faculty a sense of looking in the mirror. Imitation may not just be the sincerest form of flattery; it may also be an effective way of persuading others.

I believe the institute’s main impact was cathartic rather than intellectual. It was intense while it lasted. For the institute to have a lasting impact the attendees must now spread their wings and fly from the nest and not have big birds on the brain, extinct or otherwise.

Reruns

Within the family we’ve reached a more mature point about giving and getting presents. For Father’s day I let my wife know about some DVDs and CDs I wanted. Lo and behold, that’s what I received from her and the boys (plus a gift card to espresso royale – my tastes are very predictable these days). One of these was a boxed DVD collection of old Dick Cavett Shows, this set with “Hollywood Greats.” (For the nitpickers in the crowd, the date that amazon.com has for this is wrong. It says 1969 on the site, but the shows seem to be from 1970 and 1971.)

Nowadays Cavett is now one of the regular bloggers at the New York Times and I came to wanting that collection from reading one of his posts. It’s a bit odd to write a post promoting something commercial where the writer stands to benefit from the sale, especially given the imprimatur of the Times. But blogging about one’s personal experience from work or private life is de rigeur and in Cavett’s case he spent a significant amount of his work time very publicly as ABC’s alternative to Johnny Carson, with less mass appeal for sure but a bit more depth in the conversation, and since there are clear lessons from that experience it seems right to me that Cavett should bring it up and that the rest of us can take part in his past by buying these videos.

There are three shows per DVD, I’m in the middle of the second disc, in a show with Groucho (irrepressible as ever, but getting a little senile) and Debbie Reynolds, with Dan Rowan too but I’ve not yet reached the point where he makes his appearance. The entire previous show was an interview with Bette Davis. While I haven’t quite put the stopwatch to it, all the Dick Cavett shows originally aired as 90 minutes but now with the commercials taken out they are about an hour to view. I wouldn’t know this but for the way I watch them. I dread exercise so much that I need some sugar coating to get me to take that pill. We’ve got an old TV hooked to a DVD player where our stationary bike is set up. I pedal and watch then get off the bike and do some other light exercise and watch all the while and back and forth in that manner till some of my guilt feelings are erased, or the show has ended, or I’m too pooped to continue.

In the old days when I used to jog regularly (people who’ve met me in the last 5 or 6 years wouldn’t believe this, but I used to do 4 or 5 miles a session though not very fast, about 10 minute miles, and do that either every day or every other day) after about 20 minutes or not quite halfway in, I’d find a sense of rhythm. The breathing would have reached a plateau and my heart would be beating pretty well with an elevated pulse rate, the melody of the song I’d been listening to would have somehow been brought into accord with my stride, and altogether it created a feeling of exhilaration, especially when the air was crisp and the sky a sharp blue. In my head I’d feel a kind of reverie, away from work thoughts, not expecting this time to be anything but R&R.

Riding the stationary bike doesn’t quite do that for me. My urge to quit during the session is pretty strong (are we there yet?), which is why I need the DVD to watch. And I’m doing some of the same type of reflecting that I do when I watch TV sitting on the couch, trying to tie what I’m seeing and hearing on the screen to specific issues I’m dealing with at work or to those other more broad issues that are confronting us in the learning technology profession. It’s both a blessing and a curse to be in reflective mode most of my waking hours.

The first disc has two sessions just with Katherine Hepburn – well worth watching, quite compelling actually. And then the third session is with Fred Astaire. As a talk show guest, Astaire is kind of stiff. But Cavett got him to agree to perform, singing Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter, and to do a bit of dancing as well. It was quite amazing how good he was in the singing – all timing and style, not a great voice like Sinatra, but do know that the composers wrote their songs specifically for him; timing and style count for a lot.

The Hepburn interviews were unusual. Apparently Hepburn didn’t do TV interviews. This was a first for her. She made a preliminary visit to the studio to check it out. She’s there in slacks and Cavett is wearing tennis shoes. As it turns out, part of her reticence in going on television was abject fear about appearing in that medium – too spontaneous and not enough control for here. The walk through visit was done mostly so she could try to overcome the fear. Once in the studio and with her emotions in check, Hepburn decided to do the actual interview then and there.

Cavett, fully cognizant of how difficult it was to get Hepburn to be a guest on the show, accommodated in full. Actually he was more devious than that, making me guess he was onto her discomfort right from the start; they were filming from the outset of the walk through. And the entire show ends up being one continuous segment with no real separation between the walk through and the interview. There was no audience at the start, only the crew for the show. Somehow word got out about the interview and an audience trickled in while the interview was going on, unbelievable actually except for it clearly being how it was done.

I’ve seen Hepburn in a variety of films – The African Queen, Pat and Mike, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond are some I can recall off the top of my head. There are many adjectives that come to mind about her from seeing these performances – smart, gutsy, spirited, quick witted, tender, and insightful are a few of those. Fearful is not on the list. It’s very hard to think of Hepburn as cowering and afraid. That doesn’t match the mental model. Yet at least insofar as appearing on television, she certainly was. During the interview she talked both about why there was no good reason for her not to appear – one might have thought she’d argue that TV was drivel and not worthy of her attention, but she didn’t press that point at all. Quite to contrary, she seemed to feel that TV was a worthy medium for artistic communication. (Remember again this was Cavett’s show, not the Tonight Show.) It was herself that was the problem, not the medium.

On edge already because of this phobia, she talked about being in constant fear while acting in movies. (Bettie Davis made the same point in her interview but she didn’t seem as ill at ease during the actual interview with Cavett. Hepburn took the entire first show and some of the second show before she settled down. Both of those were filmed the same day.) It was never quite clear from what she said exactly what it was that she was afraid of, but being in a similar boat on numerous occasions myself, it almost certainly was fear that her current performance wouldn’t stand up to the standard set by her previous work. She came back to the predominance of fear in her screen acting on multiple occasions during the interview. Yet clearly she overcame the fear and is one of the icons of Hollywood filmmaking. She was not explicit on how she did that but certainly other motivations were at play as well – ambition, a need for self-expression that seemed especially strong during the interview, and the kindness of her co-actors were a few that did come out in the conversation.

Cavett asked her why she wasn’t wrecked like so many other leading women in Hollywood. (I think it was in the Bette Davis interview where he asked essentially the same question that he specifically mentioned Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe.) Apparently booze and debauchery were ok for Bogie, John Huston, and Spencer Tracy, but not for Hepburn. She reported she had a strong sense of discipline and staying physically fit and being able to perform at a high standard with boundless energy during that performance was an imperative for her; so booze and pills were out. She attributed the sense of discipline in full to her New England upbringing. Her parents encouraged her to speak her mind, but they also required her as a youngster and on into young adulthood that she be attentive and listen to the wisdom of her elders as expressed through their conversations, not just her parents but the many house guests they had. And her parents had a genuine curiosity in how her day went, what she had accomplished. They were quite supportive in that sense, though apparently her dad was not very happy at first with her going into acting.

So here are two key themes for us to think about. Even the best and the brightest of us, perhaps especially in them and then even more so in those for whom acting or more broadly performance is a critical part of the work, have to deal with stage fright on an on going basis. It is a constant demon with which to do battle. Stage fright does not vanish even for those with great experience and great talent. In that sense there is no cure. But there is a tonic, much of which is a sense of rootedness and rightness that comes from proper upbringing. The tonic is not simply the need for self-expression. That need evokes passion. The sense of discipline does not emerge from that. The discipline comes from elsewhere, from family and the lessons learned there. At least that was true for Hepburn.

I think that is worth pondering now, as we try to teach leadership and ethics to our students (while plagiarism and disengagement seem to be on the rise). What is the foundation for the students on which we can build? Is it rock solid like Hepburn’s seemed to be? What can we do if it isn’t?

I want to turn to a different part of her interview where she talked about acting. There are lessons from that as well. Hepburn was quite modest about her own acting and during the interview you could see why. She had a certain quickness to her talk and would flit from one point to another in reaction to Cavett’s prodding, mildly annoyed that he had interceded but seemingly incapable of resisting the temptation to react to what he said. She reserved the highest praise as an actor for Tracy. This is not surprising, of course, given their relationship. But it is what she praised him for that was interesting and to me a bit unexpected. She said that Spencer’s great power was his concentration. He could stay in character and continue to focus in spite of the distractions and with that concentration could go deeper into getting at the essence of the role.

Concentration is not a word we talk about much these days, certainly not as a mode of behavior we should aspire to. Yet for Hepburn, concentration was the absolute key to acting. According to her Tracy had it, in spades, and all his fellow actors knew it and they wanted to work with him just for that reason. He could elevate their concentration as well and in turn that would produce marvelous performances. It certainly seems that way from the pictures he made. I watched Inherit the Wind not too long ago, a case in point, truly a wonderful picture and an apt commentary on the religiosity of today in America.

I suppose it is on this point (about the importance of concentration) where I am most removed from the bulk of the profession. I find support in my view from this comparatively recent interview on NPR, though I get more solace from listening to Hepburn and hearing her voice her seemingly timeless Yankee values on the subject than I get from learning that neuroscience seems to tell us that we don’t function at a high level when we multi-process. Others in the profession seem to allow for concentration only as a byproduct of the environment and thus we must seek immersive environments for it is those that produce concentration. And in general the profession seems to attribute great power to the environment and looks there for a first cause.

In contrast, Hepburn clearly thought that concentration was an individual power, some have it more than others, and Tracy was her ideal. She really didn’t say in the interviews whether it could be learned or not through she thought her own powers of concentration not as strong as Tracy’s. People of Hepburn’s ilk will look inward to improve their concentration. They will not look to technology for that.

There is benefit in watching these old Cavett shows, if not for the lessons I’ve drawn from them then simply to get a glimpse of the stars as they were when not in a film. And, too, the shows can remind us of where our views have changed over time and where they’ve remained the same. I was in high school when these show first aired. On some of the key themes, I don’t believe my views have changed very much.

Can one learn skepticism from a video game?

It seems that I get irked more easily these days. Something others might find innocent or bland I take as pernicious. I now subscribe to Inside Higher Ed’s Daily Update and one of today’s items is mentioned as follows:

When ‘Digital Natives’ Go to the Library

Colleges urged to teach information literacy by embracing the learning styles of video games. more

This line so annoyed me. I found it inane. I’ll explain why in a bit. But let me first point out other recent remarks I’ve found equally ridiculous. In arguing against the Senate’s recent measure to toughen CAFE Standards, Rich Lowery on the News Hour said that even if the standards improved fuel efficiency they’d have negligible impact because people will drive more. Oh my! (Presumably, smart consumers compute a cost per mile by dividing the price of gas by the car’s fuel efficiency and when the cost per mile goes up, for example as has happened recently with pump prices, we drive less and when that goes down, we get the opposite effect. But it is more complex than that, for example because driving can be a substitute for flying, the demand for which is also affected by the price of gas, and further, we really don’t know what the demand elasticity is, nor do we know what will happen to future prices at the pump.)

And then there is Vice President Cheney’s argument that his office is not part of the Executive Branch because the Vice President is also President of the Senate, proving once again that the real sin of power is hubris and that the exercise of hubris leads to outcomes that can’t pass a reasonable man test. (This is not an academic debate. At issue is whether the Vice President’s office must comply with and Executive Order requiring all “entities” in the Executive Branch to, on an annual basis, turn over classified information to the Information Security Oversight Office, a unit of the National Archives. The Vice President has wanted to keep these documents secret. And let’s recall that Scooter Libby worked for Cheney, so he seems well past the point of deserving the benefit of doubt on this one.) This incident makes you feel that instead of teaching Checks and Balances in grade school they should have the kids go straight to reading The Prince.

Second, if you do follow the “more” link at the end of the Inside Higher Ed blurb to get to the actual article by Scott Jaschik, you will find that the expression “information literacy” is not mentioned even once. Whoever cooked up that blurb must have surmised that all instruction Libraries provide for students falls under the mantle of “teaching information literacy.” Perhaps that’s true, but perhaps not.

The message of the article itself is mostly benign --- the Library as Temple is an outdated concept, student inquiry should drive Library Instruction, and Library tools should be easy to use so a novice can find things. These points closely parallel the current message we’re hearing about classroom instruction – we should move from a teacher-centric to a student-centric approach. So there is not too much to get worked up about there. But then in multiple places in the piece there is explicit exhortation to embrace games. (This included a bit about LAN parties, which aren’t parties that I host (or attend) nor are they parties about local area networks, but rather are parties held after hours, from which I gather that LAN in this context is short for late at night.)

The irony to me is that none of this seems like promoting information literacy and much of it seems like escapism. I’m quite ok with escapism and do my fair share of indulging. But what about information literacy? Is that still on the radar for Libraries? Does any of what is being advocated by James Paul Gee, George M. Needham, and others have anything to do with teaching information literacy?

I want to move from ALA’s orientation to information literacy, to my own and in doing so I want to return to the title of this post. In my way of thinking about information literacy we enter situations with a prior world view based on what we’ve experienced, what we’ve been taught, what we’ve argued with others, and what we’ve reflected on by ourselves. When we confront a new piece of information we do so with that prior world view operating in the background. We test the new piece of information. Does it fit? Does it contradict what we believe to be true? Is it redundant or does it add something new? Then, if it seems new and especially if it seems to contradict something else we believe, we perform other tests. Does the author of the content stand to gain from having you believe one thing or another? Are there others saying the same thing? Where do those others fit in the political spectrum? Has the author or any of these others said different things that you’ve come to believe are true? What else would I have to believe to make this true?

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of questions but rather was intended simply to open up the process that we go through when we speak of information literacy. Much of the time that process is implicit. We don’t actually make such a list of questions but we do zero in on whether the information is to be trusted as well as how we can incorporate it into our world view.

Information literacy is the critical issue of our times and, in truth, we’re failing at it. But it’s not just our students. Think of WMD and Iraq and consider the dismal failure of the Fourth Estate to challenge the grounds for invasion in a meaningful way that would have prevented the war. Read Frank Rich’s latest column about the Bush Administration’s current effort to downplay the failure of the surge.

But don’t just consider information literacy from the perspective of national politics. Think about it in your job. Ask whether non-learning technology types (other IT professionals, Deans and Provosts, faculty) are sympathetic to learning technology or not. Consider the furor over the Gorman posts about blogging.

Then think about information literacy in other aspects of your life. Think about the Lincoln quote on fooling some of the people, and ask whether the insidious effort to get Intelligent Design taught in the K-12 science curriculum as an alternative to Darwin is really about fooling some of the people. Then ask yourself whether you too can be fooled, especially if you don’t have the opportunity to bring to bear your usual process for incorporating new information into your world view. Think about the Stockholm Syndrome and what that means for information literacy.

We’ve become a society where debate is absent; marketing prevails instead, the promotion of Madison Avenue, the White House, Fox News; the source matters not. It is the style of presentation that matters. How are we to evaluate that content? We’ve matured to the point where humor and lampooning seemingly have more credibility than straight news.

Then return to students in the classroom and ask about the “Will this be on the test?” mindset and the “I don’t know what you want” type of frustration that students express when they are receiving instruction from a faculty member. Ask whether students surrender their own world view in this classroom setting because survival in school qua grades seemingly demands it.

And with that brief tour of information literacy you’re now ready to consider where video games fit in. To me, they don’t. That’s why I got my dander up.

Like Father…

The house we lived in where I grew up in Bayside had a fair amount of wear before we moved in, I believe that was summer of 1959 when I was 4. So by the time I was a teenager there were a variety of minor things in the house that needed repair and my dad spent a good deal of his weekend time doing little fixit jobs. His instruments were many and varied but I recall a lot of use of popcicle sticks or wooden toothpicks, string, and scotch tape. He got a certain delight from his handiwork though the rest of us had to wonder whether it really would do the job. Mostly it did, at least for a while. But it definitely didn’t look like it was professionally done. That was part of the charm.

I don’t have any of my dad’s desire to do home repair, but I do have a yen to create online objects and most recently I’ve been making video clips, either little screen movies with voice over or talking head videos. It occurred to me that those should be combined – introduce the screen movie with the talking head – to give the viewer an idea of who that man is behind the curtain. This is an early attempt at trying that. It is definitely not slick. I wonder if it gets the job done.

Here we are trying to get the College of Business to standardize on Illinois Compass (WebCT Vista 4.x) to use as a courses portal, to take advantage of the fact that the calendar tool allows a pooled view across courses, and to see if we can deliver something that satisfies students and faculty alike and yet is hosted by the Campus rather than by the College (take advantage of economies of scale and lower incremental cost for the College). We’ve been doing some training sessions for instructors and for administrators responsible for some of our professional programs, notably the MBA and MSF programs.

Those sessions are reasonably effective and I believe are a good gateway toward an ongoing relationship between my staff and those receiving the training. But not everyone in the College will want to avail themselves of the training and if as I prefer you make the training a dialog partly driven by the inquiry of those receiving training, then some things may not be covered at all and other things may not be done in sufficient depth. Short videos available online might fill those gaps nicely.

Also, there is something different between these little movies and a Web document with screen shots, parallel to but perhaps not identical to the difference between lecture and presentation from a textbook. My sense is that the Web documents tend to be quite functional in their orientation. They are therefore quite good as reference, especially for someone who is looking to do a particular task. But as a first pass they may leave the reader missing the forest for the trees. In the movie you can be more conceptual and not try to be exhaustive in what is covered. That might be better as an entry.

Now let me talk about a variety of factors that contributed to how the video turned out. I’ve got my dad in mind thinking about them. First, I don’t want these to be a life’s work. So I didn’t story board at the outset and I didn’t do enough takes so that every part went perfectly smoothly. I did put some effort into getting the microphone volume setting appropriate, but you will notice that in going from the talking head to the screen capture there is a jump in the volume, the consequence of recording in two different applications, and I did nothing to smooth that out. I also put in some effort into determining the size of the window to capture so it would display reasonably in a browser. If I’ve got my Bookmarks toolbar hidden, then the entire movie displays within the browser window comfortably. With the Bookmarks toolbar enabled, the stop and start controls at the bottom show up, but not fully. That effect is just like my dad’s handiwork, ok for use but definitely not perfect.

There is one other parallel with my dad. I like to do things with inexpensive equipment. The webcam and headset that I use are really cheap, about $70 in total. (Camtasia at the educational discount is under $200, but I wouldn’t call that cheap.) For things I do on my own, I much prefer cheap. I don’t know if the reason is genetic or upbringing, but I really do prefer that and the question what can you do reasonably well for very little money appeals to me as the right type of ed tech question. I can rationalize my instinct by saying that for all forms of content creation it makes sense pedagogically only if the students themselves can do it. Cheap means the students can do it where they live and need not go to a lab. That’s something to consider. But my own comfort with the approach doesn’t derive from that rationalization. It comes from something else, a more basic feeling.

I believe my dad did some of his handiwork as therapy, a form of self-expression and a way to do other than his job. My dad rarely talked about his work at home, but I believe he wasn’t very good at it, he was in a Law partnership with his brother who was the more senior member of the firm, and I believe there were a variety of frustrations about the work for him. Self-expression and therapy are definitely two core needs for me. Kind of makes you think about blogging.

Will Socialism Make a Rebound?

When I was a first year grad student at Northwestern, 1976-77, each day during the school week I would drive up from my apartment in Rogers Park and spend most of the day on campus. Northwestern was on the quarter system and I believe most of my classmates took 3 courses per quarter. I took 4, initially because I didn’t understand the difference between the quarter system and the semester system and 4 courses didn’t seem like such a heavy load, and later so I could try out some things other than the prescribed curriculum and take some classes with students who were past their first year. Aside from attending classes, I put in a lot of time in the reserve room doing the required reading and working through the economic models – you read economic papers with a pencil and a pad of paper and you show yourself you understand by deriving the equations/model.

I had hardly taken any economics as an undergrad and I didn’t know whether I’d be any good at it nor, and more important for me at the time, whether I’d like it. I told myself to suspend judgment on that, give it my best shot for a quarter or so, and then see where I was. During the first quarter I was quite certain I had never worked that hard before, especially over an extended period of time. It’s funny. After a while just from putting in the effort the subject matter co-opts you, your speech becomes laden with the jargon of the discipline, and then almost subliminally you ask how is it possible that you’re putting in all that time if you don’t like it?

Even with all the classes and the time in the Library I still had some free time on hand and I needed some release from the regular studies simply to keep my wits about me. Frequently at the end of the day a particular classmate and I (and sometimes his girlfriend) would go out for desert. There was a pie place in Skokie, as I recall on Dempster, that we went to often and as an alternative we’d go to a deli that had a wide variety of cheesecakes located on Sheridan Road across from Loyola. But it didn’t make sense to go off campus during the day and since I didn’t have office space (I may have had a carrel in the Library but that was even more spartan than the Reserve Room; starting in my second year I got a desk in the Math Center) I’d hang out in public spaces on campus. The two main ones that I’d frequent were the Cafeteria at the Norris Center (which is still there today) and the Library Lounge (which I believe has since been repurposed for other Library use).

Many of the other grad students on campus, particularly those in their first year, were more or less in the same boat as I was. So there was a tendency to see the same faces in these spots. That classmate with whom I frequently had desert with had been a bit of a Marxist as an undergrad (he went to the U of Colorado in Boulder, came from a well to do family in Philadelphia, and had some sort of authority thing for his old man). This classmate introduced me to some sociology students, one of whom also was a Marxist. We had interesting discussions, if a little bit on the b.s. side of the spectrum as compared to what I was getting in my classes, and I believe I read the Communist Manifesto just to feel comfortable in those conversations. Since I took a Linear Programming class in my first quarter there, I was able to appreciate the Labor Theory of Value on a technical level, though I don’t believe it came up much in my courses (we did spend a lot of time on National Income Accounting in the first quarter of Macro and I recall that the underlying model was a general Leontief System) so could give back in these conversations on the technical side of things. These conversations plus one course as an undergrad on economic models of politics where we read Schumpeter was essentially my entire education about Socialism. The bulk of my formal training was on neoclassical economics.

This little lead in is my mea culpa in talking about Socialism when really, I’m not expert in this at all and so maybe I’m saying things in an awkward way or perhaps even incorrectly. But it seems to me that in a lot of what I’m reading these days or watching in film there is lurking behind the scenes the question of whether some version of Socialism is where we are (should be?) headed. Let me give some examples so you can see what I mean.

Last week I saw Freedom Writers on Pay Per View. The first half hour or so was horrible, a lot of senseless violence and utter despair, and I was getting pretty disgusted with the picture and ready to turn off the TV when the tone of the film changed. I understood that they were trying to set up the situation, give the viewer a sense of the accomplishment of the teacher and the students by noting the brutality of what had come before. What I didn’t understand till after the film was over that you the viewer actually need to have the feeling of being assaulted in order to make an emotional connection with what the teacher does in getting through to her students. And the only way to create that sensation was to have the first part of the film seem to drag on forever. That created a sense of the abyss, with no way out.

The teacher goes through a period of disconnect and distrust with her students. You the viewer have a sense of hopelessness but the teacher remains optimistic and determined. Eventually she figures out a way for them to open up with each other by acknowledging the common horrors they’ve experienced – friends and relatives being shot to death – and she does this in a clever pedagogic way where the students not only indicate their own circumstance but see the circumstance of their classmates at the same time. This was the bond they needed to accept her as a teacher and to cross racial lines and accept their classmates as human beings. Once the bond was formed the teacher was able to get remarkable communication and depth of expression from the students because it was the first time in their lives where they could talk on an emotional level about the realities of their own existence. They had a need to get this out. The teacher filled that need and taught them how to right at the same time.

The teacher goes through a remarkable amount of self-sacrifice to achieve a quality learning environment for her students. The supplies at school are inadequate – the department head wouldn’t let this class use the books that were in the school warehouse for fear that the students would ruin them and because she had a pejorative view of the students’ ability to read – so the teacher worked additional jobs after school in order to earn enough money to pay for books and other supplies out of her own pocket. This was another demonstration to her students that she cared and that demonstration extracted a strong response in kind from the students. But the teacher paid a high price for her own dedication. Her husband felt neglected and they end up separating before the end of the film. It also seemed that she was more of an achiever than her husband and he couldn’t deal with her drive and ambition for her class. She couldn’t reconcile her work life and her family life. So the message seems to be that wonderful things happen at school, even at a tough school like this one, but there is indeed a big price to pay to get those wonderful things. The teacher pays the price willingly, as if to say her kids are human beings and they deserve the attention, don’t they?

Ultimately, the picture turns into a tear jerker in part because this outcome is so exceptional, though the student needs for personal dignity and to tell someone what they are going through seem so basic and so ordinary. And precisely for that reason I started asking myself whether something like this could be done on a large scale --- in other words, socialism.

Let me turn next to Health Care Plans that the candidates are advancing and how those are entering into the Presidential Campaign. Atul Gwande had an interesting piece on the Obama plan, noting that the particulars of the announced plan may mean less than the ability to shepherd a modified and renegotiated plan through an inevitably difficult and painful process with Congress to come to something that can both get the necessary votes and yet solves the mess we’re in now with so many uninsured and premiums skyrocketing.

I started to ask myself how Obama and indeed how any of the other candidates might work their way through such a negotiation – what will inform them on those subsidiary issues where they can be flexible and those principles where they need to make their own personal line in the sand. And in thinking through that question I thought to myself that the candidates need some personal ideology to serve as a guide for hashing all this out. For the Republican candidates, perhaps it’s enough to think of health care primarily as an issue about the cost of doing business, and containing such costs so we can maintain our competitiveness. But Democratic candidates, of necessity, have to consider health care from the perspective of the well being of those unemployed (and uninsured) as well as those who have jobs and insurance but are fearful of losing both. What other principle is there to advocate for a system where all get insurance regardless of employment status unless it is Socialism, though some may prefer other euphemisms (Social Safety Net?).

Health care, though clearly an important issue (health care costs have been rising faster than the rate of inflation and in the U.S. we have the highest health care expenditure as a fraction of GDP, see this table) is still just one issue. Perhaps a more fundamental concern is income inequality. This afternoon I found a current version of USA Today at the coffee place and while I normally don’t read that paper for some reason I went to their Op-Ed page and found this piece. Income inequality is front and center there, something for us as a nation to be ashamed about. That column is about the pious nature of our public religious face; if we really believed in the Golden Rule how could we possibly endure so much poverty in a land with so much plenty? But many of us, brought up with a strong notion of the benefit from the separation of Church and State may look for a non-religious argument for reducing income inequality. How about this essay by Albert Einstein? It’s called, “Why Socialism?”

USA Today certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on the income inequality issue. The New York Times Magazine devoted the entirety of its most recent issue to the income inequality question. It looks at this question through many lenses: the candidacy of John Edwards is the feature, but there is also a stimulating if a bit disconcerting piece on the preaching of Ruby Payne and getting insight into attitudinal and behavior differences attributable to class differences and in particular why middle class teachers have such a hard time teaching the children of the poor, a discussion of how to manage promoting growth of the economy on the one hand where a superstar approach gives the right incentives to create new ideas and new product with providing a decent quality of life for those who are less fortunate on the other hand.

But the piece that got me most thinking about this, even if it was a bit of fluff, was the article about Larry Summers, where apparently Summers is reconsidering the views he had during the Clinton-Rubin years where he was pretty much a free trader and government’s role was to make trade as unfettered from regulation as possible, to considering a latter day “Industrial Policy” so that workers would not suffer so much from the inevitable dislocations that have resulted from Globalization. Summers, for all the hoopla surrounding his leaving the Presidency of Harvard, is a serious thinker and someone who probably would prefer to couch his own arguments within a broader framework. And if his big issue is how to tame the beast of competition in global markets, will he go so far as to embrace Socialism? He’s not there yet, clearly, but has reached his final resting place on this? My guess is that he is still in intellectual transition.

So far in this piece, I’ve considered Socialism as a kind of income insurance. That is certainly an aspect but it’s far from the whole picture. There is a different type of question to ask, one that is not yet getting as much press, but a question I think that may be more fundamental. Consider the Robin Hood type of income distribution but coming not through banditry but rather through volunteerism. Think of the Peace Corps, of Teach For America, even of the United Way. These programs matter. They matter to the recipients of the services and they matter to the providers. But ask yourself whether these programs are enough, taken altogether. Do they matter in a macroeconomic sense? Or are they a drop in the bucket?

Consider volunteerism as a coordination problem – it’s a lot easier to get people to do the volunteer work if friends and peers are also doing the volunteer work. This means if you want the volunteerism to matter in a macroeconomic sense you need government to play some role to encourage participation. That role is not social insurance. It’s more like instilling social responsibility and encouraging the resulting behavior (something Einstein argued in the essay linked above). The government does play this type of role with military service. Why is that the only way that young people can show responsibility for their country? Given the issues we face, does that make sense?

It’s my sense that we need to advocate for a kind of social responsibility on our campuses and make that real to our students, giving them opportunities to do the equivalent of volunteer work while they are pursuing their studies and making that part of the fabric of their education. How else can we combat the cheating, the nihilism, the disengagement? And how else can we give meaning to their education in the here and now, education for itself, not only a deferred gratification, as a gateway to good jobs.

Yet socialism is a dirty word. We think of Red Scares, of the Iron Curtain, of cumbersome state sponsored bureaucracy. We’ve embraced the rhetoric of Milton Friedman. Friedman’s key word was freedom, individual freedom. His TV show with his wife Rose was called Free to Choose. Socialism, even Social Democracy of the type practiced in Sweden and not just the Scientific Socialism we associate with Marx and Lenin, clearly has elements that restrict freedom. As long as it stays a dirty word, the ideas can’t make a comeback, though if one looks at the issues we’re focusing on now, the ideas should be front and center. So I don’t know how this will play out. But I know what my heart tells me.

Mini-Lectures via Camtasia

Today I've been doing some recording in Camtasia in part to provide demos for faculty in my college and in part to think through the pedagogic implications. This is my latest effort, a mini-lecture on "Block Pricing," a particular type of price discrimination. I'll discuss briefly on technology/implementation issues and then another brief discussion on pedagogy.

First consider sizing of what you are seeing. The movie should display in the browser without the need to scroll, either horizontally or vertically. I've captured about as big a region as is possible to do that (when viewing on a laptop) and yet preserve a reasonable aspect ratio. Excel is helpful for this sizing effort because it counts rows and columns. I've got 22 rows displayed (and note that there is one tool bar open that appears below the Menu bar) and the columns displayed are A through M. If you size an Excel window that way you can then use it is a guide for any other application that you may wish to record; just size the window of that application to match the Excel window.

In the settings in Camtasia I did a screen recording with voice narration. I maxed out on their settings for video and audio quality - bigger file size, but who cares. Then I saved the file in the native format and made ready for Web delivery. When Camtasia does this, it uses Flash and produces the video as an .swf file. As an alternative I tried a custom setting in Camtasia to make a Windows Media file, but the video quality is not as good - there is discoloration. So I'm sticking with their recommendation for Web delivery. Camtasia produces an entire folder of stuff, with .xml, .css, and other files to accompany the video file. One of these is an .html file. When Camtasia is done I drag that entire folder onto my Web space on the College of Business server and then click on that .html file. That launches the presentation at the url where the presentation appears. Voila!

I'm doing this at the office where I have a very good connection to the server and the presentation appears almost immediately. I need to try at home to get a more realistic sense for how long it takes to load. I'd appreciate learning your experience with that.

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The movie is of an "Excelet" that I had written (to accompany a textbook by Baron and Besanko). The Excelets were originally written as ancillary material to accompany the book, but I think these type of mini-lectures can be used as gateways into the content. Note the duration. This one is under 4 minutes in length. If you were doing a chalk board lecture on this topic it would probably be 20 minutes to a half hour, and that is because all the content would be derived from scratch --- the way we were taught to do it. I think the derived from scratch approach is fine for a student who will go on to grad school, but other students don't have the patience and need a quicker way to penetrate the ideas.

So here much of the construction has already been done. The Excelets have the virtue of literally being able to visualize the comparative statics from that construction and thereby get some insight into the construction itself. Note that the presentation in the video is mostly to explain how to use the Excelet and read what is going on. While there is some theory presented, most of that is in passing. They pick the theory up in the play with the Excelet and the video is aimed at encouraging the play.

For presenting theory of this type, I think this is the right type of design. No doubt building the Excelets is time consuming. But the Excelets are durable and can be re-used from semester to semester.

In my opinion, this type of content lends itself to online delivery. In teaching Economics, one can parse the course into two parts, one a math/theory part and the other a story telling part. We need to teach both and students really understand the economics only if they are comfortable with both. The story telling part is much better done face to face and in small group work during the live class time having students hash through a sensible story to match the economic situation seems like a valuable activity. The analytics, on the other hand, at least getting the basics, can be done online and via self-study. This type of online mini-lecture would seem a boon for that.