Old And In The Way

Old and in the way
That's what I heard him say
They used to heed the words he said
But that was yesterday
Coal will turn to gray
And youth will fade away
They'll never care about you
Cause you're old and in the way

Complete Song Lyrics
Album
Performance by the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience

I’m not a Green Bay Packers fan, as anyone who is a regular reader would know from my irrational exuberance over the Giants. But I’ve been taken with the Brett Favre debacle, tragic in its utter predictability, the superstar athlete who decides to step away from the game only to find a few months later that there is really nothing else to fill the void and he wants to keep playing. We’ve seen the story again and again. In Favre’s case, the Packers were favored in the NFL Championship Game, played at home under extreme frigid conditions. His own performance was less than stellar in the second half. Then, in overtime, he threw the fatal interception that lead up to the game winning field goal by the Giants. Obviously, that was a bitterly disappointing way to end the season for Favre, a sour note indeed.

Favre was said to have retired for the right reasons. He had performed at a very high level last season so physically he clearly could still play. But mentally he couldn’t handle the guff and, more importantly, he was no longer able to make the total commitment to win the Superbowl, knowing how hard it would be to achieve that outcome and how much it would take to get there. All of this sounds right and convincing, but perhaps a bit too calculating. We know that one shouldn’t make decisions of this sort when emotional. Wasn’t the hurt from the devastating loss six weeks earlier still with him? Would he make the same choice if allowed enough time for that pain to abate entirely?

Professional sport is a business, one that continues whether its star players retire or not. Favre had a professional responsibility to notify the Packers of his intensions so they could make plans to assure continuity of the team’s performance. Unfortunately, the timeframe in which to discharge this notification requirement didn’t allow Favre ample enough time to make the retirement decision in an entirely dispassionate frame of mind. In the meantime between when Favre announced his retirement and now, the Packers made the business decision to commit to Favre’s former backup as the next starting quarterback. So when Favre started to make inquiries about playing again, naturally that triggered some uncomfortable conversations, with ESPN.com really playing out this soap opera to the max. Wouldn’t it be nice if these sort of issues could be resolved quietly rather than online?

Partly because Favre’s beard is grizzled and mine is too, partly because I’ve been thinking about this issue of wanting to be useful and productive as I get older but finding it harder to do (see my previous post), and partly for reasons that I’ll get to in a bit, I started to think about the album and the song Old And In The Way, which explains my subject lines and the links at the top of this post. But in spite of those connections, on closer thought the Favre situation doesn’t really fit. Had he indicated he was willing to return this past March, he’d almost certainly be the Packers starting quarterback now. His teammates wanted him back, some said as much in the article about his retirement, even if the wishes of senior management on that score were a little murkier. For the situation to really fit, the person has to want to stay, yet feel he is being pushed out by those in authority. One example that fits is given in this interview with Joel Klein the Chancellor for the NYC Schools, where he talks about getting rid of more senior teachers if, based on the performance measures his office is establishing, they are no longer up to snuff. It was a point on which I thought Klein’s view weak in an otherwise quite interesting session.

I found another example from a surprising source, the Taiga Forum Provocative Statements. Look, in particular, at statement number 8. It is unmistakable in its meaning, although it couches its conclusion in language that suggests voluntary separation on the part of the traditional Librarians who, implicitly, will choose to either retire or find other work on their own accord. It is not my goal to defend the work that these traditional Librarians do now. But I did take offense at the idea that these people should be discarded since they are no longer useful. So I thought I’d do a little provoking of my own in return.

Note first that faculty have been getting older, meaning either that some fairly senior people enter the professoriate late in their career or, more likely, that senior faculty who’ve been around for quite some time are nevertheless not likely to retire. They have tenure and if in reasonably good health why not continue to work in their lifelong occupation? Some Librarians are faculty too. So the wishful thinking in Provocative Statement 8 aside, the average age of Librarians is likely to be increasing too, largely for the same reason as for faculty.

Next, as the world seems to be turning upside down in terms of addressing the issues tied to the dual problems of increasingly scarce petroleum and the need to retard carbon emissions to reduce Global Warming, it may seem that we can afford to put human resource issues on the back burner, a less immediate problem that we can turn to when we figure these other ones out. But that’s wrong. Life expectancy has been going up for some time. But, more importantly, conditional life expectancy once we reach 65 has also been going up. According to this table from the Center for Disease Control, if I make it to 65 years of age then, based on the results from 2005, I should expect to live more than 17 additional years and if I happen to make it to 75 then I should expect to live almost 11 years beyond that. Do we really want mature adults to stop working early in their lives because their current skills are not in high demand? Isn’t it incumbent on us to find creative ways for bright and willing people to retool so they can continue to contribute? That’s not in the Taiga Provocative Statements, quite the contrary is there in place. But I assume that’s an act of omission. If the issue were considered head on, how would the Taiga Forum folks come down on this point?

Third, and this point I made in my critique of the ACRL Report from a year ago, how can Librarians on their own define a new world of service that is user driven yet without involving the users in the definition? (It makes sense to me that the Taiga Forum Steering Committee is itself comprised entirely of of Library “Insiders” but don’t their recommendations need to be validated in some way by Library “Outsiders” and in a manner where the latter are not captured by the former.)

Then I began to ask myself what might actually be a testable proposition. Does “you can’t teach old dogs new tricks” rule in the Library world, in spite of my protestations because as statement 8 implies you need to be young and vigorous to keep up both with the technology and the changing culture? Or might we design some imaginative program for redeploying and retooling more senior Librarians in such a way that they are invigorated by and productive at their new work?

With that I began to think through what such a program would look like. I quickly came to the realization that I don’t know enough to design such a program in any detail, but I am armed with the conviction from my previous piece that much of the new Library work should be in the form of consulting and preferably in intensive and ongoing projects that develop a substantial personal aspect to them so that the Librarian becomes a core member of the project team rather than in a more anonymous reference role, with the idea that these projects won’t just be a place for the Librarians to showcase their existing skills but also a place to learn in situ and thereby become expert in areas for which there is at least a local demand for the skill set, Also the project must be done in such a way to differentiate what the Librarians bring to the table as compared to Graduate Students in the discipline, who might have more subject matter expertise, but are likely much less knowledgeable about archival, bibliographic, scholarly communication, and other Library issues which are the Librarians’ bread and butter.

How would such projects come into being? Suppose on an annual basis the Campus ran a competition where faculty and perhaps groups of students too are invited to submit proposals where a modest amount of cash might be awarded as well but the principal goal would be to allocate Librarian time (and perhaps other support provider time such as learning technologist time) to the projects. The projects could pertain to any academic function, whether teaching, research, or service. The idea would be to be broad as possible in acceptable scope so as to let the users define the need. Then the awards would be made on a competitive basis by a committee of students, faculty, and librarians, based on the merits of the proposals. Some members of this committee might be designated to perform a “whip” function to ensure the proposals are well written and to eliminate silly errors that might doom an otherwise intriguing proposal. The winners of the competition would then be obligated to pursue their proposal as best as they can and from time to time write progress reports that talk about the project itself and about the Librarian contribution to it. The award committee might also do focus groups with the project winners some time into the projects to get a sense of whether there are lessons to be learned that cut across many of the projects. And then these results would be published on the competition’s Web site, so as to inform future rounds of the competition.

Undoubtedly there is a big risk in going this route, namely that in identifying there are Librarians to be allocated for consultation through such a competition, one is implicitly identifying places where the Library budget can be cut, at least in the minds of those who see the above mentioned projects as a low value proposition. So to make something like this work there would have to be assurances obtained ahead of time that funding for these Librarian lines would not be cut, at least for several years so the hypothesis testing on whether this use might be a productive use of Librarian time, particularly as the Librarian matures.

Of course, doing this is apt to mean there are fewer lines for the type of work that the Taiga Forum envisioned when constructing their Provocative Points. But what is the alternative? If one were to develop a full life cycle model for a Librarian, what will one with 10, 15, 20 years or more past the MLS be doing? Is being a Librarian a good stepping stone toward some other type of employment? If not, and if there is built in obsolescence in the MLS by nature of the work Librarians in the future will be doing, how does it all add up career-wise?

Old yet earning pay
That's what I wished they’d say
They used to heed the words he said
And still do that today
Coal will turn to gray
And youth will fade away
Yet contributing and learning
So supporting his own way

Coming of Age

Greg Norman didn’t win the British Open this time around. He didn’t even come in second, though he did lead the tournament after three rounds. There wasn’t enough left in his tank on Sunday. History didn’t get made as some had hoped, the oldest golfer to win a major, close, but golf isn’t horseshoes. The Great White Shark still has that mane of golden hair, but now the face is wizened, the legs lack some of the old bounce, the swing still generates a lot of club head speed but appears not nearly as violent as in his heyday 10 or 20 years ago when he used to really let it rip and was one of the big hitters on the tour. What was he thinking of entering this tournament, preparation for the British Seniors Open that starts next week? Was this a way to prolong the honeymoon with his new bride, Chris Evert?

It turns out that I’ve got Greg Norman by almost a month. I’m January 11^th; he’s February 10^th. And Chris Evert has me. She was born just before Christmas; now I know where her name comes from. I remember Chris Evert from her first U.S. Open when she was sixteen, exceeding the hype to make it all the way to the semi-finals then to lose, fittingly, to Billie Jean King, a prelude to the baton pass that would happen for sure a few years later. Evert was the first of the teenage phenoms on the women’s tour and ultimately the most successful by far of the American born in that category. Yet she was also a teen idol, her implacable gaze and unruffled composure on the court, so different from anyone else I knew who was my own age. I was still a year away from being on the high school tennis team. My family, which used to play a lot of tennis because my mom was nuts about it, made an annual trek to Forest Hills to watch some of the early round matches in advance of the semis and finals, which we watched on TV. So I had more than a passing interest. This was before the Open moved to the U.S.T.A. National Tennis Center and tennis took on something of a corporate look. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s the stars seemed more approachable – a family friend had worked with Arthur Ashe outside of tennis and I got to see Rod Laver up close at a country club near Binghamton while at summer camp. But memory and fiction blur; I can’t recall whether I saw Chris Evert play live that year. It all seems so long ago.

My affinity with Greg Norman is not about distant memories. It concerns the here and now. This past weekend I spent the entire time in relax mode, recovering from the intensity of the Learning Technology Leadership Program that was held last week in Madison. I watched the playoff for the U.S. Open about a month ago. It was such high drama and compelling viewing that I felt a need to watch the British Open final round, although Tiger Woods wasn’t in the tournament. And true to my expectation it was gripping for me, but for other reasons than the players’ performance. (The wind was the overwhelming factor forcing all the scores to be over par with only four scores better than +10, though Padraig Harrington did play an exceptional final round and deserved to win the tournament.) I was feeling rather spent even though I had vegged out all of Saturday, thus having reneged on a promise to my wife to move the huge mulch pile that was in our driveway to our backyard. So before it got too hot I was loading up the wheelbarrow using the pitchfork stuck in the pile to grab the decomposing mulch that must have been much heavier than it was when delivered because of the retained moisture (we’ve had a lot of rain since), then through our fence with the gate to keep Ginger our dog in the back yard, past the patio with the barbecue and the pond to the shrubs in the back, to dump the load in a big pile, then over and over again, because there was a lot of mulch. I had to sit after a while because my back started to give out. When I resumed it occurred to me to bend my knees while scooping up the mulch and to keep upright rather than bent over while navigating with the wheelbarrow. Then I moved inside to cool off and tuned into the golf.

The first time Greg Norman was on the practice tee. He was warming up far away from the other players. I remember thinking, “I hope you have enough Advil in your bag.” The next time I came in after taking several more loads in the wheelbarrow and another break for my back he and Harrington were on the 5^th hole. The lead had evaporated. Indeed Norman was behind by a stroke. Things seemed out of whack for Norman. The commentators (Tom Watson and Paul Azinger) kept on talking about his taking out driver when instead he should have chosen an iron and him not thinking well through the final round. That’s exactly how I felt, how I still feel. That’s the affinity.

This was year two for me as a faculty member at the Learning Technology Leadership Program, with the experience last year exhilarating in its emotion, its tie to the next generation of leaders in attendance, and its bringing to the fore that I have something to contribute to their development. This time around the two sessions where I was a co-presenter, Building Successful Relationships with Shelli Fowler and Influencing Decisions: Strategies for Using Data with Malcolm Brown paralleled sessions I participated in last year and were in the same time slots in the program. (Last year the Program started on Sunday while this time it began on Monday so things were shifted by a day as a result.) The familiarity notwithstanding, I got rather keyed up before the session with Shelli. During the extended part on Faculty, where I played Socrates and through a sequence of questions tried to get the attendees to reason through the motivation and circumstance of instructors at various junctures of the career cycle, I became aware that my memory was failing me. As a teacher it has become my usual practice to not rely on notes and instead to remember in advance the starting point for the questioning and then from there to more or less work through the rest by the logic of the back and forth, this making the entire thing seem natural and the discovery, in particular, more authentic. During the journey I’d have a good sense of where we were going and the route we’d need to traverse to get there. It was familiar terrain so a simple matter to get my bearings. Unlike the year before, however, I hadn’t crossed it fully in my head the evening beforehand so at some point during the thing, already overheated and dry mouthed from performance anxiety, I felt some panic at losing this sense of location. I’m not sure whether it was noticeable by anyone else. On other occasions I’ve been told my nervousness doesn’t show. But it definitely was there.

Whether for that reason or some other cause, perhaps I made an awkward motion or took an imprudent step, somewhere in the middle of that session I became aware of a sharp and excruciating pain in my neck, near the corner formed by my shirt collar and left ear. It felt as if someone had jammed the butt end of that pitchfork into the spot. I kept waiting for it to go away, sharp pains usually do. Immediately after the session I did take 3 Advil and then another 3 right before we went to dinner. That and the wine helped to alleviate the pain. It was better the next day. But rather than go away entirely it seemed to move to the top of my head and it has persisted there since, not nearly as sharp but continually present. Along with the headache I’ve felt out of synch, with my fellow faculty at the LTL program and with the program as a whole. In the last session before the close the mike was passed from one attendee to the next so each could give a sentence or two about what the program meant to them and so they could offer up their main take aways. Their comments paralleled the comments of the group from the year before – some calling this the best professional development experience they’ve ever had. Last year I had been right with them on this emotional response. This time around I was not. That contributed to my disconnect. I was surprised they felt as they did when I didn’t.

After the sessions on the first full day the attendees spend much of the remainder of their time in their “Making The Case” teams, gearing up for their presentations which last week happened on Thursday afternoon, just before the closing banquet. Last year we were quite concerned about dysfunctional MTC teams so at their first meeting we sent each faculty member to monitor a team and make sure the group functioned well with all team members contributing. The faculty weren’t there at the start. They entered about a half hour into the team deliberations. I went beyond the charge to monitor team function, offering up a critique of the group’s ideas. I did not propose alternative solutions, but I did ask questions that poked holes with their initial ideas. This time around we did not have such an initial meeting with the teams, instead letting them go off alone while we discussed how the first day had gone as well as some issues with the composition of the MTC teams. I understood fully why the faculty leaders wanted the teams to take a more do-it-yourself approach. Nonetheless, I felt as if it were an opportunity missed – one of my skills is helping others work through an argument, critiquing the thinking with questions that hadn’t come up the first time through or hadn’t been anticipated at all. This time around I didn’t get to exercise that skill.

We had modified the presentation sessions to have the table teams (distinct from the MTC teams) work through scenarios and report out to everyone. We did this in both the session with Shelli and the one with Malcolm and in each we did this at the start of the second half of the session, right after the break, with the content presentation in the first half before the break. I felt after each of these sessions that I should have ended those first half segments earlier than I did – the ideas had been pretty well milked before we took the break at 2 PM. Then in the second half we were jammed for time so while we did get the table team responses, question by question, there was little give and take to those responses. This was another opportunity missed, where ideas could have been critiqued and pushed beyond what had been offered up. But we didn’t get to that.

We all believe in learning by doing and so it was doing that was emphasized, so far as idea generation in the group work at LTL is concerned. But I, for one, also believe in learning by schmoozing and I wish there had been more of that. In a leisurely one-on-one conversation, a chat that might not be so results oriented, there may be more of an opportunity to discuss the “why” and not just focus on the “what” and the “how.” A critique asks first whether the why is a good one, a cause we want to honor and do well by, so first there is a back and forth on that, ultimately leading to a good reason why. Then the critique moves to asking whether the what and the how are aligned with the why and whether there might be other alternatives that align better. There is back and forth on that too. This happens at each step in the plan and then again on the overall plan. Such a critique is what I’d call “testing” the plan. Being tested can be a discouraging experience and many people avoid it for that reason. It is ego deflating to have a plan defeated by such a test. In a friendly and leisurely conversation, however, it’s my experience that people enjoy this sort of conversation, perhaps because they learn something, perhaps because it helps them to vocalize their ideas to an audience who is at least partially receptive and whom they know would be fully receptive to any idea that passes the test.

I was much more ready for these conversations after the middle of Wednesday afternoon when the session with Malcolm had concluded and I no longer needed to feel on edge since I had no further presentation to make. It’s perhaps strange that I felt shyness earlier in the week, having been through this last year and as a senior administrator with a lot of experience conversing with diverse audiences. But it’s always been for me that I have to understand where the other person is coming from before I can feel comfortable or if not that then that we’ve gone through some emotional experience together that could serve as bond. The first couple of days of LTL performed the latter function. I did get a bit of the type of conversation I was seeking at the meals on Thursday and at breakfast on Friday. Perhaps the happy medium for all would have been if these conversations focused on the attendees’ careers and their actual situations at work rather than on the exercises we had cooked for them at LTL. But it’s hard for that to happen in mid week because they are so immersed in their MTC projects. As we were saying our goodbyes at the end of the closing session some of the attendees came up to me with fragments of their work experience to which I somehow connected in one of the sessions. I was grateful for those comments. But I wish there had been more and the conversations more substantial on these themes.

Thursday night after the banquet the faculty met to discuss the type of feedback we’d give to the MTC teams the next morning when as ourselves each of us reviewed the performance of a particular team. During the actual presentations we role played as Campus personalities with interest in the presentation (I played the Provost) to simulate the circumstance of an actual presentation of this sort. Most of us barked in the role play, as if gruff questioning is the norm in such a circumstance (perhaps it is). None of us on the faculty had any problem with that. But when it came to voicing criticism as ourselves we had a lot to work through about what we were trying to achieve with the feedback and with the exercise itself. What I thought would be a 15 minute meeting to go over the pro forma review that we’d deliver turned into a marathon of almost two hours. And in the process of the following question came up because it was obvious the MTC teams had experienced substantial stress in planning and then delivering their presentations. How would the groups be receptive to any of the feedback unless the tone was gentle and the evaluation mainly positive?

I was vexed by this because I had been tasked to pay attention to the business case being made by each team and on the merits the business case had big holes. This was entirely understandable because the problem the teams had to address was quite hard to solve. The setup of the problem which they were give ahead of time gave a skeletal view of the scenario and the teams had to add some flesh to that. A big issue, something quite relevant to learning technology leadership more broadly, is if in adding that flesh the focus should be only on where the learning technologists have direct control and assume the rest “would be handled” by other, more centrally situated administrators. My own view on this question is that actually the entire problem needs to be solved as a whole to ensure coherency in the solution, so taking the narrow approach and leaving the rest to be handled is something of a cop out. In particular, the setup mentioned fiscal exigency and to address that any real solution requires pain for at least some and likely most of the constituency affected by the plan, where pain here means some people working harder after the plan is implemented and for no additional pay while other people end up even worse off --- they lose their jobs, quite possibly without sufficient notice.

Perhaps the problem is too hard. Last year (and this year too) Carole Barone’s name got batted around as somebody who exemplified the view that in this sort of professional development activity the attendees should struggle mightily, thrash around a lot, and feel disconcerted because the problem they were tackling was well nigh impossible. Get used to it, the argument goes; this is the life of an IT Leader in Higher Ed. I’m sympathetic with that point of view. There is a lot of truth in it. But it leaves some questions open for which I don’t have good answers. What should a leader wannabe do when first exposed to this argument, embrace it or run for cover? And what should those of us teaching/mentoring the fledgling leaders offer up as sage advice when we see their first reactions?

It was a disconnect for me that we’d pose such a tough problem and then be so gentle with feedback on their presentations. But I was probably making a mountain out of a molehill, a personal tendency that becomes all the more likely when doing work in the evening, especially after having a few beers, which is why I don’t do that very often. (The banquet itself was a celebration of the week not a working dinner.) After all, the feedback was being given Friday morning soon before they’d all depart for home. Memories of Making the Case would likely fade quickly but a blunter memory of the entire LTL Program would probably persist for quite some time. Wouldn’t it be better for their parting thoughts to be fond ones? I understood the point but couldn’t let go of making this an issue.

Having made that first mountain, I started in on some others. The facility itself (The Fluno Center) is quite wonderful and one of the attendees in our closing session made a point in observing the she felt pampered in this place and that contributed to the importance and intensity of the experience. As nice as the facility was, however, in the room where we held our sessions the acoustics could have been a little better. Pretty much everyone in the audience can hear the presenter, at least when the presenter faces front. And, likewise, the presenter can hear questions from the audience for the most part. But members of the audience on one side of the room may not hear questions from people in the audience at the other side of the room. We had a handheld mike to bring to the tables where the attendees sat so the questions would be amplified. But it took a moment or two to walk between the tables and deliver that mike. Some of the faculty preferred to simply ask the attendees to speak up and forget about the mike – to keep up with the flow. I preferred staying with the Mike. We never quite resolved this and chose one way or another to address the problem depending on which faculty were facilitating the particular session.

On a more substantive plane, I thought we faculty were too “preachy.” Each of us gave, from time to time, examples coming out of our own work experience, solutions that we offered up to exemplify the points we were trying to make. Providing the examples was a way to show we know from which we speak. It is important to ground the LTL Program this way – the faculty need to have the right sort of experience. But it seemed to me we overdid this and often focused too much on the outcome and not enough on how we got there (so not on how the attendees might imitate the approach and produce their own outcomes of a similar sort).

* * * * *

All told, the post up to this point is kind of a cranky response to the LTL Program this time around, much of it probably the consequence of fatigue, which is the reason why Greg Norman’s performance resonated so much with me.

Just then a friend stopped by the Royal Birkdale locker room to say hello. "Hey, buddy, how are you?" the friend said.

"Um, I'm like a whipped dog, man," Norman said.

He said it with a smile, but he's right -- there was a hint of exhaustion in Norman's voice. You'd be tired, too, if you'd arm-wrestled golf history for four long days.

I don’t remember feeling so tired last year. I’m wondering why it’s this way the second time around. Surely it’s not because I arm-wrestled with history.

I began to think about my reasons for participating as a faculty member in the LTL Program, whether out of obligation to the profession to see the next generation of leaders come along, to be part of something bigger than the interactions I typically have on campus, as a type of professional development for me, or still something else. I see former LTL faculty running a refresher pre-conference seminar at this year’s annual Educause conference. The “normal” rotation for a faculty member is three years (we’ve just completed the fourth program, the first two at Penn State, the next two in Madison Wisconsin, and now they’re trying to identify a new location for next summer). All indications show the original faculty want to remain connected with the program and are very loyal to its goals.

But this recent column by Nicholas Kristof on encore careers seems to suggest that others, some of whom have been wildly successful, want to break with their pasts to take on new challenges and the folks Kristof focuses on are in my age group. (Bill Gates, who is mentioned at the outset of the column, is 10 months my junior.) The encore career represents an investment in a new set of problems. The skills acquired in the prior career are still relevant, to be sure, but the newness and the largeness in what these people are trying to accomplish now makes that a full occupation, not a hobby. A couple of years ago I wrote a post about teaching K-12 as an encore career. (I called it second careers. What do I know about marketing an idea?) This is evidence enough that something along these lines has been in the back of my head for some time. For reasons that aren’t completely apparent to me, being at the LTL Program triggers these thoughts, even though it is itself a limited time obligation (and even though I’m still firmly ensconced in in the job that provides my LTL Faculty credential).

So I’m scratching my head in a similar way to what I did when I was in college, trying to think through what to do after graduation. But I’ve also got this puzzle to work through about why last week was so different for me than for the attendees. And what does the one say about the other?

If I see any of those folks at the annual conference, we should have a chat over a coffee or a beer.

The deficient market hypothesis

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/business/11fannie.html

Ben Bernanke
Looks rather cranky
Because Freddie and Fannie
Are going into the tank-ee.

Bleedership

Progress has always been two steps forward and one step back – even when we know where we’re headed and we have a reasonably good game plan.  Typically there are little things to learn along the way, small mistakes that have to be made because nobody gets everything right the first time through and there’s apt to be some chance events that are relevant in some way and must be taken into account.  Together these necessitate retracing a step or two or three before we can resume with the forward momentum.  But lately it seems most of the steps have been backwards, the game plan not so good or, even worse, no game plan at all, where we are headed obscured by the unwillingness to articulate a full vision of what that place looks like.  And it frequently seems as if making progress is a secondary or tertiary goal.  I, for one, have recently been taken up with the idea that most of us are committed first and foremost to advancing our own personal agenda, irrespective of whether it’s socially progressive or socially detrimental, caring more about maintaining control and affirming our prior held position than about any consequence on others – good, bad, or indifferent. 

About a year ago we had an all day retreat for administrators in my College in order to discuss College Issues and to make relevant connections across administrative units, something we don’t do very often.  When we were talking about the Undergraduate Program we got onto the topic of student preparation prior to enrollment, with a few folks commenting that many of our students aren’t well prepared in spite of their very high ACT scores.  When it came to my turn to speak I said, “I blame it on Bush.”  That got a laugh, although I wasn’t trying to be funny; there has been a narrowing of the curriculum since No Child Left Behind and the kids get a school-is-about-test-taking mentality.  (Business school folks do tend to be more conservative than the Campus as a whole; perhaps that’s the reason for the chuckles, thinking the remark was a gaffe.) 

Blaming Bush has become a national pastime.  But, in truth, Bush is more symptom than cause.  The issues have existed for some time, as this recent Krugman column points out.  But only lately does it seem that we realize that we’ve mortgaged our future and if we don’t take serious steps to reverse things soon we’ll be in a big trouble as a permanent condition.  Bob Herbert rings this alarm, citing David Boren’s new book A Letter to America.   Much of the refrain is familiar.  We heard it especially from John Edwards during the debates, where he talked about fighting the special interests.  But Boren’s other point is a about excessive partisanship.  Extending the olive branch is probably a better solution to that than fighting.  The problem with fighting, as we’ve seen over and over again, is that the combatants lose their sensitivity to criticism.  They harden in their positions and thereby become impervious to reasoned argument and counterpoint.  How else does one explain Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the mismanagement of Katrina relief which still makes the news?

We witness the consequences of the partisanship.  So we spread the blame around to include Congress and those who live inside the Beltway.  And that’s been a national pastime too, a little less focused to be sure, but still in the same ballpark.  That game seems apart from the games we play.  Yet there obviously is a connection.  We get the elected officials we deserve and to understand that it’s time to look closer to home for what ails us. 

More or less on a lark (I needed another purchase from Amazon.com to qualify for free shipping on some other books) I ordered David Brooks Bobos in Paradise.  (Bobo is short for Bourgeois Bohemians, a seeming oxymoron that turns out to describe the high achievers among the Baby Boomers and younger adults, who have to reconcile their own personal value systems that tends to prize fairness and equality with the realities of the marketplace of the knowledge economy where they are the high achievers and hence likely rewarded handsomely for the fruits of their labor while the many others either find their paychecks shrinking or they have no job at all.)  I’ve only read the first chapter and the copyright for the book is from before Bush took office, so I can’t say yet whether Brooks gives a full explanation of my theme – if we coexist with such obvious internal contradictions and we feel a need for both sides to express themselves might it not happen that one sides ends up drowning out the other?  And worse, might it not be the case that we mistakenly take the distribution of economic reward as an ethical statement, that being paid exceptionally well is an indication of moral worth and hence it’s the egalitarian values that end up with the short stick; after all it’s the market making these pronouncements, we don’t do it ourselves.  I’ve got Brooks’ book on a coffee table next to my reading chair.  I may go back to find out whether my theme is all there or not. 

In the meantime, I want to get to the piece that got me into a tizzy and set me off on this theme in the first place – Is Google Making Us Stupid?  by Nicholas Carr.  I took that article very personally.   Part of me agreed with it.  I’m much more impatient in my reading nowadays, often I don’t follow through in reading a piece and instead link off to something else, which in retrospect feels like I’ve given up on the piece too soon.  So there is a sense of a mile wide but only an inch deep in much of what I’m exposed too.  But another part of me disagreed.  Look at this review of .edu blogs by Greg Ritter, just to show I’m not making this up – the characterization of my posts talks about long rambles, not quick hitter items.  I’m an idea guy, even if lacking in some of the sensibilities that Brooks describes for his Bobos.  The way I produce ideas is by constructing narratives; some of those find the light of day in my blog.  And over the last several years, Google has become a key instrument in this writing activity. 

Once an idea for a post has been selected (in this particular case, though I subscribe to the Atlantic on my Kindle, I was alerted to the Carr piece by my friend Robert Baird and dutifully read it following his suggestion) often triggered by viewing a film, reading an article or a book, or having a discussion that left some important points unresolved, I can begin to produce the story and fragments of that emerge.  The need to connect those pieces creates a related need, to document the points.  Sometimes documentation is the process of remembering – finding a reference that I already know – Google is pretty terrific for that.  But sometimes I’d like a point to be true but am not sure it really is.  I’m looking to confirm a hunch.  Google is quite good with this too, especially if the standard for evidence is not too stern, e.g., a Wikipedia entry is acceptable.  So writing has these nonlinear sojourns for documentation and learning about things I only guessed at before.  There can be modification in the story based on what I learn.  Occasionally, but not too often, I’ll abandon the theme altogether based on that. 

Throughout I’m driven by my idea and the story I want to tell.  It’s all an extraordinarily egocentric process and what engages me is the idea itself and the telling the story about it well.  As a solitary activity, that may be for the best.  But in a social setting it’s potentially pernicious and I’m aware for me it’s becoming destructive.  I find myself impatient with the stories of others, especially when they don’t tell their story quite so well.  And in a conversation (watching some of my ooVoo chats really emphasizes this to me) while my partner is polite I tend to hog the time, though I’m playing the role of the interviewer and it should be the interviewee who gets the lion’s share.  It seems the impatience that Google foists on us, as a byproduct of making information so inconvenient, has a different side effect, at least on me.  I start to view other people as information sources only and when their information quality is low they get discarded.  In this reductionist hellhole, if you think your own information quality is better you stick with that.  This is insularity in the making, a first step toward potential disaster. 

After reading Carr I told myself I had to start spending more time away from the computer – sitting at the screen can create all sorts of bad habits, even if it is also a place for learning and, for me, the place where I write.  Wondering whether getting away from the computer would suffice it also occurred to me that I had to get away from my own narratives, I had to spend more time with the narratives of others, if for no other reason that the compulsiveness I feel to produce these stories can be self-defeating, a corollary to what makes Jack a dull boy. 

So I went to the bookshelf in my study to find something to read.  I had purchased a recent John Grisham book earlier in the year, The Innocent Man, it was the slack variable when after receiving a Borders gift certificate and buying a CD I wanted there were still some dollars left over.  I’ve had admiration for Grisham’s writing since I read The Firm, back in the early ‘90s.  I read most of this on an airplane flight with an infant in my arms fast asleep and my arm asleep too, but somehow the story commanded my attention; my surroundings and personal comfort disappeared as the story unfolded.  I would love to be able to produce writing that achieves that type of effect; much of what I read does not.  So, not very confident about my ability to lose my own narrative in favor of the narrative in what I’m reading, Grisham seemed an obvious choice. 

As it turns out The Innocent Man is Grisham’s first work of non-fiction; it’s still Grisham and it is absorbing but he needs to document the circumstances and build his case, so the style is different from his novels, it’s first an identifying of the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle before he then puts them all together, and the tone is journalistic.  The funny thing is that while I was looking for escape I found my theme in reading the book – it’s all there and it shows the problem has been with us for some time.

At root The Innocent Man is about a violent crime in Oklahoma, a rape and murder, for which two people went to trial and were found guilty and then sent to Death Row, in spite of the paucity of evidence to support the verdict.  The crime was White on White,  it happened in 1982, well before Clinton let alone Bush II, and by the time the trial occurred in 1985 the country was well on its way to regaining its confidence under Reagan after enduring the stagflation of Carter and the recession that Volker’s tight money policy induced to wrest out the inflation which happened in the early years of that decade, so the attitudes of the populace were quite different than they are now and the circumstances in this case differ from what we view as the main issues nowadays.  But the crime happened anyway.  The crime itself is only a launching point for Grisham’s story and the real villains in that story are the police and the prosecutor, who “knew” the defendants were guilty in spite of the lack of evidence and that there was another suspect, seemingly more likely to have committed the crime, but whom the police ruled out. 

The book spends much of the time documenting the horrors of incarceration, which might not concern most of us given the evils that these prisoners inflicted on their victims, but the reader is drawn into the barbarism of it all with the observation and personification of others on Death Row who’ve also been wrongly accused.  They are there because the criminal justice system is stacked against the indigent  defendant, where the presumption seems to be guilty till proven innocent.  So the book makes for compelling though depressing reading. 

I don’t want to provide a complete review.  My focus is on the police and the prosecutor.  Why did they come to such a wrong conclusion?  Were they earnest in their convictions or pursuing a different agenda, duplicitous in how the case was prosecuted or, yet a different spin, comme ci comme ça?   The book considers their perspective only briefly.  The focus is on the main defendant, once a major league baseball prospect, then later when he failed at that a womanizer, heavy drinker, and sufferer from some serious mental illness.  He was self-centered, loud, and boisterous and as such an unsympathetic character, except to his parents and his sisters and then not always with them.  One obvious reason to believe he was the murderer was a kind of guilt by association that most of us engage in on occasion, putting people into categories; he had the personality makeup of somebody who’d commit this type of crime so it must be him. 

The crime scene showed evidence of a violent struggle and based on that the police concluded there were two perpetrators of the crime; one guy couldn’t pull it off.  The way this was presented in the book it seemed like a natural deduction, not an assumption forced into the evidence to drive whom the police would charge with the crime.  The main defendant had a sidekick – they did bar hopping together.  The sidekick became the other defendant, though the bulk of the evidence against him was simply that he was the sidekick.  The police had no other pair to choose from.  They did have this other suspect, who had a history of crime and was seen talking with the victim at a bar the night before the murder.  But they failed to investigate him thoroughly.  At one point in the book Grisham mentions that he may have been dealing drugs to the police, in which case perhaps the police wouldn’t want to pin the crime on him for fear that he would implicate them in drug-related criminal activity.  Ultimately this guy does get convicted of some other violent crime so it’s uncertain why they steered clear of him in this case. 

The main suspect and sidekick were tried separately. Those trials didn’t happen till three years after the crime was committed.  The police need to solve violent crimes. The community needs to feel safe.  People can’t feel safe if there is a murderer at large.  It’s the police’s job to restore law and order.  But what happens when there’s no smoking gun, nor any incriminating evidence whatsoever, though there is no doubt about violence of the crime, there’s only doubt about who committed it?  Might the police then arrest some suspects just to give the appearance that they can solve the crime?  And might the police try to pin the crime on these suspects; it’s the best they can do to restore law and order under the circumstances? 

The prosecutor’s motives seem similar but Grisham’s presentation makes it seem as if he genuinely thought the defendants were guilty.  Many years later after the original trial a retrial was sought by lawyers working on behalf of the main defendant and as a result new DNA evidence was brought bear.  The DNA evidence entirely exonerated the defendants, there was no match, and indeed proved the other suspect was guilty.  The prosecutor was stunned.  He had welcomed the DNA evidence but thought it would confirm what he already knew.  He was forced to let the defendants go free, though he was slow to prosecute the man who had committed the crime.  One doesn’t know if at various points the prosecutor was playing a charade or not.  Some people are blind to their own errors in judgment, but the blindness is genuine, not an act.

What are the tonics for this sort of blindness?  Now I’m guessing because I really don’t know.  But if there is still some self-awareness and not complete delusion then it makes sense to me to place oneself in a circumstance where self-delusion is not necessary as a survival mechanism, i.e., to consume other people’s narratives rather than to make up your own.  I need to do more of that.  But habits are hard to break.  I like to sit in front of the screen, write my posts, do my Google searches, read the posts of others on their blogs or the commentary of NY Times columnists or other online pieces that come to my attention, so I can weave these into my story.  I no longer can read at the computer and keep that information their story.  I need to read away from the screen.  But how do I get there?  Some blood will be spilled before the cure has been taken. 

Addendum to Firefox 3, MS Word, and Web 2.0 apps

I verified that I can email post to Blogger and that if I copy from Word and paste into my Outlook email that the resulting blog post will preserve the formatting and none of the xml stuff comes through. So that will be my work around.

ooVoo Chat with Shelli Fowler

In this chat Shelli and I cover first the nuts and bolts of using ooVoo and the cost of recording, then we turn to how it might work to use this for a guest speaker, and we wrap up with a discussion about students multiprocessing at their computer and whether students will view this type of content. It was really helpful for that part that Peter Doolittle from Virginia Tech had spoken here last January, because he did a demo on the multi-tasking issue, that said it just ain't so. So in doing one of these chats with a guest speaker, one might be tempted to make the conversation more complex to challenge the audience to pay attention. But that cuts against the grain of my own thinking that good instruction, and elegant presentation more broadly, should make the hard things seem simple, not vice versa.

Firefox 3, MS Word, and Web 2.0 apps

My habit has been to author my posts in Word, put in links and formatting there, use it for spell check and page length, and then when I'm reasonably happy with the document copy and paste into a Blogger post. The formatting is preserved mainly (Blockquotes are one thing that has to be put in afterwords and embedding a video is another). I've been doing that for a while and pretty happy with the process.

It no longer works with Firefox 3. For reasons that are beyond me, the copy no brings up all of Microsoft's specific xml crapola into the document and it ends up screwing up the formatting and making things icky. I wasted a lot of time yesterday trying to clean up such a document in a Wiki I was wokring on.

This seems like a step backword. I'd be interested in hearing whether other have had similar experiences. I may switch to IE as my primary browser, or even try Opera.

Online Video for Blended Courses – Balancing Competing Needs

I continue to believe that pedagogy should drive any learning technology implementation, but every once in awhile it is important to drill down on the nuts and bolts of the technology implementation. This post is about that, the various idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes one confronts in working through such an implementation and the compromises that have to be made along the way to get things to work, more or less.

We’ve recorded a seminar with a few students, are now in the process of taking those recordings and chunking into clips, more or less aligning the clips with subsections in the textbook and with the instructor’s PowerPoint presentations, and then displaying those clips along with other course content. Below I’m going to ask a series of questions that you might think of as determining requirements for the solution we’ve come up with.

Q: Where do the video clips reside, on a College server or an external host?
A: The decisive factor here was having complete control of content. We opted for having the College host. One implication is that our video is being delivered in Windows Media Format. The solution is also related to the next question.

Q: Are the videos password protected or open access?
A: We anticipate students coming from the LMS to see the videos and are designing that way. The students have already authenticated to get them into the LMS. We don’t want them to have to authenticate again, so for this coming semester the videos will be open, though we will try to make it impossible for Google searches to find them. In the future *perhaps* we can develop a trust relationship between the LMS and the Video host so we can get the higher level of protection yet with students not having to put in another password, but we won’t have that for this fall. I should note that the pay version of blip.tv has the nice feature that you can make the video private but nonetheless embed it in a another Web page, such as this blog. (You can’t do this with YouTube.) This is the functionality we want but we opted for College hosting anyway because it is a big deal to go off campus with content that we want to control.

Q: How are text descriptions and related metadata of the video rendered? What software is used for that?
A: We toyed with using a new product called Ensemble, but ultimately we opted for embedding the videos within a discussion post in the LMS. (See this screen shot for a look.) One reason for this is that Ensemble in its current version links to a player that launches separately. We wanted to allow for an embedded player, to seem similar to other video experiences students are likely to have had.

Q: If students want to make a comment or ask a question about a particular video clip, how do they do that?
A: This is another reason for using the discussion post as the Web page where the video clip is embedded. A student can simply hit reply and ask a question right there. Otherwise, we’d have to have one area for the videos and another play for Q&A and it would be harder to tie the two together.

Q: How will students find the appropriate content for them to access?
A: For a first pass through at the content we will use the learning module structure that is in Blackboard Vista to arrange the content. When students want to review, however, they’ll likely find content via search rather than by browsing for it, particularly if they want only one clip or bit of content. Some of the content for the course will reside on a publisher’s Web site. There is no search solution that we are aware of that allows one search engine to find that publisher content as well as content inside the LMS site for the course. So we knew we’d have to deal with at least two search engines. We opted to go for two and no more. This is yet another reason for using the discussion posts. The search engine in Blackboard Vista does find the text in these posts.

Q: Any other tips of adjustments you want to mention at this point?
A: We found the ShowStatusBar attribute of Windows Media player and enabled that. In the screen shot it has text in pale blue on the left saying “Paused” and on the right indication the time played so far and the total time of the clip. This is a nice functionality that we think is important, particularly letting the student know how long the full clip is. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to function well. The status bar sometimes doesn’t appear. I don’t know why.

Q: How is accessibility being managed for the video content?
A: We’re still working on this. The current thought is to produce and open caption alternative that is launched in a separate player, and produce the captions below the video rather than as an overlay. But captioning is a time intensive activity – about 8 to 10 minutes per minute of video. So we may not have the content fully captioned when we roll this out for the fall.

Q: Are there other accessibility issues to be considered?
A: The previous screenshot shows content that is rendered via a Table. Current Accessible Web Design suggests use of Cascading Style Sheets instead of tables. Here is an example using CSS as an alternative. Looks at where the Reply and Forward Buttons appear. Also, look at how the tan background is all broken up. We’ve not yet figured out how to use CSS without producing this sort of result. And if we can’t solve this, we’ll use the Table formatting and then perhaps post the caption video in a different message that just has that has a simpler layout.

Q: I see that you are doing a rate the video with an external polling tool, polldaddy.com. What is that?
A: First, YouTube has a simple rating scheme for each of its public videos, and most other video sites have imitated that. So we thought we’d do that too. We’re curious to know whether the students take the time to click that. Second, we wanted the students to rate the videos but not rate the comments of the other students. There is a built in rating scheme in the discussions within Blackboard Vista that could have been enabled, but if it is, it is active for all replies to posts.

Q: Are there any final thoughts you want to mention?
A: We’ve designed this to a screen resolution of 1024 x 768. It should work ok at higher resolutions, indeed the CSS screen shot was taken at a higher resolution – it just means everything will seem smaller and there will be more stuff on the screen. But someone who wants a lower resolution may be disappointed. Also our videos are rather large – 640x480 when they were capture, shrunk to 600x450 as they are rendered. This makes the managing screen real estate problem harder. Smaller videos would be easier that way, but we think they’d be less compelling to watch.

Further, it is clear we’ve not yet reached the point where an instructor could do all of this on his own, unless he was quite technically proficient and had a lot of time on his hands. There are a lot of small detail things that need to get decided and most instructors would give up before they’d have a satisfactory solution. Let’s hope it gets easier in the future.

ooVoo Chat with Blaire Bundy

Blaire works for Academic Technology@DoIT at University of Wisconsin and is a colleague from the CIC Learning Technology Group. Our conversation was mostly about using video interviews for generating content that learning technologists would promote, in lieu of face to face interviews for the same sort of content.

With Apologies to Ed Sullivan

It's a really big shoe!

Big Brown was a 2:5 favorite in the Belmont stakes. You could make some good money betting the entire rest of the field if you knew Big Brown wasn't going to win, place, or show.

PowerPoint as HTML in LMS

Instructors who post their PowerPoint presentations to the the LMS in advance of class do so in anticipation that students will print out the slides and bring to class, so the students can take notes and make annotations directly on those print outs. Indeed this may constitute the single biggest use of the LMS, as an electronic file distribution tool for students to view content offline.

But suppose a course is converted to a blended format where some of what used to be done in live lecture has been moved online. For example, suppose the lecture has been video recorded and the recording is distributed online, either in toto or as a series of clips interspersed with other content. And suppose that some of the online content is PowerPoint presentations. Students might still want to print those out on paper, but now they might want to view online as well. Further, they might want to find the content in a particular PowerPoint presentation via keyword search, rather than via browsing through the presentations themselves. This is more likely when the student is looking for a slide or two in trying to satisfy some query the student has. And if done this way, the student may not know she is looking for some PowerPoint slides. She might be interested in postings on the topic in the class discussion board, an assessment or assignment that deals with the topic, really anything that might be relevant.

These last desiderata suggest that if the course Web site is housed in an LMS then the search tool in the LMS should be utilized to help students perform such queries. And, once the instructor makes a conscious decision to employ the LMS search tool as a way for students to find particular course content quickly and efficiently, then it behooves the instructor to make the PowerPoint content searchable, not just the title of the presentation, but the slide titles and the bullet points as well.

On my campus the LMS is Blackboard (WebCT) Vista. The search tool there is reasonably robust – it indexes all html files that appear in the course site, as well as all content in their tools, such as the discussion or quiz tools. So to make this approach work, the PowerPoint needs to be converted to html and the html version must be inserted into the course site. Below I discuss how to do this with the tool that is built into PowerPoint. This approach may be less desirable than others, because it favors Internet Explorer over other browsers, but surely it is the simplest thing to do. There are some other converters out there that move the PowerPoint to html in a browser-neutral way, but I’ve not yet tried those.

Here is a brief example of output of this sort. This presentation aims at the instructor who teaches with a Tablet PC and might mark up blank PowerPoint slides in the session that is recorded. The idea is that afterwards slide titles can be put in to help the student navigate to the particular slide in question. One wants to put in the slide titles in a way that doesn’t muck up the hand written content.

* * * * *

And here are step by step directions for what to do after the PowerPoint has been created so it can be loaded into WebCT Vista in such a way that keywords within the PowerPoint can be found by the search tool for the course Web site.

1. After completing the PowerPoint, save as Web page (*.htm, *.html). This produces a top level .htm file and a folder full of other stuff.
2. Enable Webdav for the course site. (This should probably be done anyway, quite apart from this example.) Here are the instructions for XP. I’m not sure how to do this in MS Vista but perhaps that translation is not too hard.
a. Under the Build Tab in the course site in Compass (WebCT Vista), go to File Manager.
b. Open the Action Links for the File Manager (the little pull down menu to the right of the words File Manager).
c. Copy the url there.
d. Go to My Network Places on your computer
e. Choose Add a network place
f. In the Wizard choose: Add another network location
g. Paste in the url you copied.
h. On most campuses, it is likely that your login and password to the LMS will be the same as the login and password for WebDav. At Illinois, when you give the authentication info for WebDav, use your Active Directory password. This is not the Bluestem password for Compass.
i. Type in a name you can remember for this WebDav folder.
j. You will have to log in again to access this folder. It will show all the contents of your file manager for the course. You can drag and drop onto this folder.
3. Drag both the top level .htm file and the folder full of stuff from your PowerPoint presentation into your WebDav folder.
4. Go back to your course site in Compass (WebCT Vista). It may take a few moments for the file and the folder to appear in your file manager for the course site.
5. Once they do appear, put the top level .htm file wherever in your site that you want students to access the presentation. Verify that if they do access this way they can get to the entire presentation. Do this by accessing via the Student View.
6. So, for navigation purposes you only have to insert that top level .htm file.
7. But for search, you need to get all the files associated with the presentation that now reside in the File Manager into the course site so the search tool can index them. Therefore make some Compass (WebCT Vista) folder off the homepage (or off some folder that is off the homepage).
8. Select insert file. Navigate to that folder in the File Manager with all the stuff. Select all. Then insert.
9. Afterwards, delete the file called “Outline.” If you don’t do this step it will show up in the search as a second entry. But only delete this file in the folder in the course site. It must remain in the folder in the File Manager.

* * * * *

It seems every tool nowadays comes with its own search. So if you mix and match environments, it seems more and more likely for this to be the case, then you run into the issue of whether you use multiple search tools, in my view a loser from the student perspective though I’m guessing at that rather than knowing so by experience, or you see if you can come up with one search tool that finds all the content. If the content all were on the public Internet that one tool would be Google, and the question then would be how to make the content available in Google while avoiding a lot of false positives. But online quizzes, certainly, and online discussions quite likely will be password protected and not findable by Google. If you want that content to be searchable by those who do have a proper password, then doing something like what is suggested above makes sense. But to do that effectively, the presentation content must also reside inside the LMS. At a time when many learning technologists are preaching openness, this might seem like a move backwards.

My response is to consider the perspective of the individual instructor, the one who has been using the LMS to distribute PowerPoint presentations ahead of time for face-to-face lecture. The discussion about open educational resources is happening entirely outside this instructor’s purview. The move to a blended approach in the teaching is a big jump, one that requires this instructor to make considerable changes in perspective. The way to make a big jump is to break it up into a sequence of little steps, each itself manageable provided the earlier steps have already been taken. Making the course resources open is one of those later steps, after the instructor has thought through and realized that commercializing his own creations is not in the cards but, more importantly, also realizing that he can still make interesting content that he can be proud of showcasing.

We’re taking it one step at at time.

Widgets in LMS

Using a RSS reader widget from SpringWidgets.com, the video below shows how to bring in external feeds with relevant course info that is more convenient for the student than the alternative of using tools within the LMS for this information, because the info is "right there" rather than "only a click away." Also note that particular feeds were chosen because they display well in the Widget. Hence 30Boxes.com is used instead of, for example, Google Calendar. Likewise, Wordpress is used instead of Blogger, because the Wordpress feed shows the time of the post. I don't know why Blogger feeds don't, since the time is a feature of the actual post, but somehow that information doesn't get into the widget.

Absolution

We perpetrators of crimes from afar don’t usually see our victims. Instead we think of self and our own bumps and bruises. We commit folly and wallow in our losses, small as they may be. When the real damage reveals itself we feel shame, for our lack of imagination, for the innocents who go punished when we do not, and for our blame remaining hidden. We can only hope, late to the game as we are, that those innocents don’t suffer too severely and that our humble efforts to atone make some small difference.

Topping the news this morning is the horrific flooding in Iowa, more evidence of Mother Nature gone awry due to global warming. I was to have been in Iowa City today for the Summer Writing Festival. But the campus has suspended normal operations and the workshop was canceled as a result. I had wanted to visit with some colleagues beforehand. In our email back and forth last week they alerted me to the problems with the flooding ahead of time. The Festival itself was at first optimistic that it could go on in spite of the bad weather, but things went from bad to worse.

Last Thursday and Friday I was disappointed that this week at the Festival had been canceled. The workshop was to be a new opportunity and I was looking forward to it. But over the weekend, with the further storms here and there, my attention switched to those who’ve been victimized by the weather and what if anything can we do about it. Directly and immediately, there is probably not much we can do. Indirectly and longer term, I think there are plenty of things to try.

I’m trying to reduce my own personal carbon footprint. Last week, I ordered a Honda Civic Hybrid to replace my Pontiac Aztek. This should double the fuel efficiency when driving. The dealership was back ordered for this model. I’m to take delivery in late August or early September. But I believe it will be worth the wait.

I’ve also taken to turn off the lights and ceiling fans in our house in rooms where nobody is currently located. It’s miserly behavior, to be sure, the kind of thing my father did. But it’s not just for pinching pennies. It feels like the right thing to do.

The hardest thing for me personally, but I’m going to try, is to change my diet and, in particular, eat less meat. I wonder if others are feeling the same sense of obligation.

I don’t really understand the feedback loop by which reductions in consumption such as described above get translated back into reductions in production, particularly if those reductions are small, only at the individual level, not yet at the macroeconomic level. But surely a macroeconomic reduction in consumption is comprised of many individual reductions. Rather than free ride and get on the train only after it has left the station, why not reduce consumption now?

Hallelujah!

Hidden Conversations

Growing up I was very fortunate to have a steady best friend, David, all the way from first grade through high school. David’s house and mine faced 56^th Avenue; we lived diagonally across from each other, each a corner house, his bordering 211^th Street, mine on 212^th Street. Over those years we played a lot of ball games with a Pensie Pinkie. (I could find no image on the Web for Pensie Pinkie but if you have no idea what I’m talking about you can find some info by looking at this page for the prime competitor, the Spaldeen.)

Our favorite game was slapball. The way we played it you needed at least two players in the field, a pitcher and someone else to take the throw at first base. We could accommodate more fielders if there were more kids who wanted to play. When we first played the game David’s older brother Lesley was the permanent pitcher for both teams. As we got older we learned to “pitch” too, in this case a motion similar to throwing a dart where the ball bounces once before it’s ready to be hit. It’s amazing how much spin you could get on one of those Pensie Pinkies by flicking your finger as you tossed the ball.

We had some special ground rules owing to where we played. My family had a one-car garage attached to the house (but you still had to go outside to get into the garage) and the driveway was steeply sloped so it really wasn’t good for anything sports-wise; but we did have a stoop that was perfect for stoopball and David and I played that too when we didn’t have enough kids for slapball. David’s family had a two-car garage, luxurious for the time and the neighborhood, that was unattached to the house and with a flat driveway, which was perfect for our slapball infield.

The heading east lane on 56^th avenue (my side of the street) and the heading west lane (David’s side) were separated by a “mall,” mostly weeds and some trees surrounded by curb, about the same width as one of the lanes. This was well before the Pooper Scooper Law went into effect so the mall was a bit of a minefield and you either tried to avoid it altogether or carefully watch your step while walking in it. The mall was where our outfield started and the ground rule was that if you hit the ball there or beyond on a fly you were out. On offense the goal was to hit it sharply but on the ground and see if you could get it through the infield. If you got a big hit that way with the ball ending up on the mall or, even worse, on the lawn of the Old Lady who lived next to my house and across from David’s, then it was the fielders’ problem and they had to chase it.

Slapball was our main game when we had four or more. When we had three we played Chinese Handball, using the Garage Doors as the wall, and with two apart from stoopball we either played boxball or “errors,” the latter where you threw the ball at the garage above the doors and the other person had to catch the throw on a fly. You’d get an error on the throw if you missed the target and a different type of error if you didn’t make the catch. David killed me at that game. He was a much better ball player. But I learned to passably catch a ball with one hand that way and my hand-eye coordination definitely improved for all ball games as a result.

The simple joys of childhood sometimes mask the valuable lessons from the play. On the emotional front you learn how to compete but still keep it fun, how to keep from being a spoiled sport when you want to win too badly, how to accommodate players of different abilities and temperaments and different ages too. My brother, 20 months my junior, often tagged along. He didn’t have a friend like David who lived close by. Similarly, David’s older sister Julia also tagged along. I was really lucky that way. I never had to feel lonely or out of place. The siblings were not as fortunate.

Probably the most important outcome was to gain a strong core value for friendship. It seems throughout my life I’ve almost always had a best friend and in making choices about my circumstance I’d often be driven to favor that choice where I’d be pretty sure of striking up or resuming a good friendship. The prime cause behind those choices can be found by looking back at those times with David and the happiness in that.

With all this good fortune and David living right across the street, hard for me to miss his playing outside when walking out our front door, you might think this all came about by us finding each other and then moving along from there. But you’d be wrong. It didn’t happen that way. Indeed, we lived in that house for over a year before I met David. Somehow, unbeknownst to me, my mother found the house of another kid who also ended up being a friend, Steven. He lived around the corner and down the block on 211^th Street. My mom took me over to Steven’s house. David was already there. We played upstairs that day. I’m guessing it was Mr. Potato Head, but I was 5 or 6 at the time, so it was 1960 or 1961. Who remembers specifics with accuracy that far back? In any event, I was the one late to the party and the only reason I got there at all is because my mother dragged me.

For several years thereafter it was Steven, David, and I as a threesome at play, with various siblings on hand from time to time. This persisted even though by an odd quirk 56^th avenue became the dividing line for where to go the primary school when a new school opened up in our neighborhood starting in second grade. So Steven and I went to P.S. 203 while David stayed at P.S. 31. By junior high we were all going to the same school, but the trio didn’t survive. Somewhere around that time Steven started to find a different crowd. My friendship with David, based mainly on play outside of school, stayed strong. I don’t believe we took any classes together till perhaps junior year in high school. That didn’t matter.

Thinking about this all these years later, and knowing that I really had it in for my mother for other things she did later on where she pushed me in what I thought was the wrong direction, I’ve really got to hand it to her. I don’t know if I’d ever have gotten into that deep friendship with David without her setting it up at the beginning. For that I’m very grateful.

* * * * *

Last Thursday our four-week summer session concluded. Along with the rest of my eLearning team, I’ve been involved in a project to record video of a small seminar offering of a finance course that is taught in large lecture mode during the fall and the spring. The processed video from the seminar, along with other online content, will replace one hour of live lecture in the fall. In my college, this effort marks our first foray with a “blended learning” format in large classes. The day before the final exam for the summer course I conducted a focus group with the students, right after the regular instruction had concluded. The primary goal going into that conversation was to get the student take about having such seminars as a means to generate fodder for other blended offerings that might be done in the future: Did they like the course? Would they recommend to a friend to participate in such a seminar if given the opportunity? How did the filming (there was a large flat panel at the front of the room to show what was being recorded at any time – front camera shot, rear camera shot, or output from laptop) affect their behavior in class? Were they self-conscious or did they learn to ignore the camera? These were the questions we had going into the session. I was also prepared for the students to go off script and frame the issues as they saw fit. Indeed, they did exactly that.

Reaching this point in the writing, I hit an impasse and am only beginning again after a two-day hiatus. The news from the focus group was good but for some reason that challenged me in the writing. Partly, that’s because everything we’re doing with this summer offering is intermediate product only – input for what will be delivered in the fall, not a true end in itself. We wouldn’t offer a stand-alone small seminar class like this in the absence of recording it for re-use. It would be too expensive in that case. Also, so much of my writing style come from imitating what I read, much of which is in newspapers or magazines. The bulk of those are critiques of misplays in politics. There are fewer pieces written as affirmation of what is happening. So it’s harder for me to structure the argument now because there are fewer models of what a good structure should look like. Then too, I’m really not a dispassionate observer but rather an active participant in the project, so very much want all the news to be good. The makes it tough to use my usual reportorial style in this case. So much for this brief aside, now back to the post.

The students liked the course very much. After a day or two they got comfortable and it became clear during the focus group that they bonded with the professor and with each other. They felt empowered to ask questions because of the small numbers and because the instructor’s friendly tone encouraged that. (Note that the students were actively recruited for the seminar and hence it is far from clear how “typical” students would have reacted to this experience.) And, because they got to know each other more than they would in a typical class, they could better appreciate the contributions of their classmates.

Although the course was set up as a small seminar precisely so we could capture the student contribution and we understood that much of the contribution would come as they posed their questions, I was nevertheless surprised by the results of the focus group. My mental model for the course was a classroom version of the Charlie Rose Show. I like to watch that show on occasion, depending on the guest and the topic, and reasoned that if we could produce something akin to that the students in the fall would like to watch it too. Charlie Rose is often a bit verbose and sometimes he appears to be competing with his guest for who gets to speak. But by the end of the interview a lot has been said by both Rose and his guest. So I was hoping to to reproduce that consequence in the sessions that we recorded.

During the first week, I watched a substantial amount of what was recorded, the raw “footage” before we had processed it. There were questions from the students, to be sure, but mostly it was the instructor talking. The instructor has taught the class many times before and he’s very glib with the content. The students, in contrast, seemed rather shy to me and perhaps were too patient to step in with their questions. During the weekly lunch meetings between the instructor and me, he and I discussed the issue of how to encourage student participation. We had multiple conversations on this topic, before and during the course.

Subsequently, I’ve reached the conclusion that a TV talk show likely does not provide the right norm for us in considering a course like this, especially an intro course where the students are fairly inexperienced in the subject. “What is the right norm?” I wonder. Have we produced something that is noticeably distinct from recording straight lecture? I’m curious about how the students in the fall will react to the processed videos.

There is different lesson to be had from the world of economics. An option has value in advance, even if it is ultimately not exercised. The students felt comfortable in their ability to ask questions and that comfort might be sufficient to make them enjoy the approach – the option value was present. Yet its presence didn’t imply they were asking questions all of the time. Further, when one student would ask a question that would often encourage a follow up from another student, so the questions that are there typically occur in clumps rather than be distributed uniformly through the sessions. After the first couple of days of the course I looked at the recordings less intensively and might very have well passed by an interval of students questions without realizing it was even there, only to find it on a subsequent viewing of the content.

Contrary to this impression formed by looking at the videos, in the focus group the students emphasized the small numbers enabling intensive interaction with the instructor and with each other and they reported the experience was unique, not replicated in other classes they’ve taken. I queried them specifically on this after one student offered up the idea and the rest completely agreed. Further, and this was music to my ears, about midway through the focus group session another student offered up without any prompt from me that the class was kind of like attending office hours. This was the point of departure I mentioned earlier. We talked about office hours extensively and their experience with office hours in other courses. A couple of the students were the type to seek out the instructor on a regular basis, just to have the interaction, not as a last minute thing before an exam. But by the nature of that, it didn’t happen nearly as frequently as in the summer course.

Last Friday, after the course had concluded there was a debrief meeting with the instructor and my staff. We posed the rhetorical question of how to induce the same feeling in the fall when there will be a massive number of students as was achieved in this summer offering. We talked about having the students do group work that would be like the type of problems that were worked in class during the summer. The instructor offered up the suggestion that rather than do all that group work out of class, why not use the face to face discussion section time for some of the group work, and instead of having the TAs spend most of their time in presentation mode, why not instead have them mentor the groups. If there is a need for them to present content, they could do that by producing brief presentation for online delivery. I was delighted with this suggestion and very pleased that the instructor has taken up the spirit of what we’re trying to accomplish. How all of this will be executed in the fall is another matter that we’ll have to research then. For now we’ve passed a crucial milestone. We’re on the same page regarding the general approach we want to take, the mode of behavior we’d like to see from the students, and with similar ideas about how to instrument those outcomes.

* * * * *

I tend to extrapolate a lot from a few small successes. In reflecting on the focus group, I reframed for myself what it was that the students were doing during the summer course – they were engaged in academic play. Play is fun. They enjoyed themselves in the course because it was play. At the heart of academic play is the ability to ask questions and to have follow-up discussion emerging from those questions that have been posed. My inference from the focus group is that there are many other students on campus who would like to participate in academic play (we’ve got around 30,000 undergraduates) but few of them are actually doing it. Then, the questions are why not and what might we as an institution do to reverse matters.

Having introduced the word play into my thinking, it was no stretch at all to remember back to those good times with David and my mother creating the pre-condition for that friendship to develop. (I should write another post, perhaps even a short book, on coming to understand things as an adult by tying them to experiences from childhood.)

Large classes at institutions like mine seemingly have a kind of Gresham’s Law at work where the behavior of those students who are only going through the motions tends to trump the behavior of the more earnest students – ergo the cheating, plagiarism, and sense of nihilism. So, my rational self says it’s very hard to change that and produce something we’re proud of, where the students themselves feel they’re getting a lot out of the experience. But my hopeful self, buoyed with the good reports from the summer offering and seeing the instructor embrace the approach we’d like to pursue, believes it’s not all that hard to get a good outcome. And, doing so should be replicable in other courses.

There is a liberating aspect in producing video for online delivery that is aimed at replacing some parts of the live class session, whether that video is recording of a seminar done as we have done this summer, it’s produced at the instructors desktop such as via a Jing screen capture or a chat in ooVoo, similar such productions done by the students themselves, or yet some other approach. The liberation emerges because the need to spend class time to “cover” the material vanishes. Coverage can be handled via online delivery. Then, using discussion sections for a planned and organized form of office hours starts to make sense. If done that way most students will attend rather than only the few with initiative as happens now. And play via academic conversation appears to be achievable at large scale.

If students do play this way will they interact seriously with the online content, perhaps as a way to get ready for the discussions, alternatively as a way to satisfy their own curiosity? That’s what we need to find out.

Thanks mom.

Information or MisInformation

Polls show Obama-McCain race tight as campaign begins - CNN.com via kwout

As a reader, should I believe stuff like the above or not? Let me point out that most students are out of school now and yet many of them may be registered where they attend. So I'm guessing students are under sampled in this poll and there is sampling bias. Do the reported results correct for the bias or not? I have no clue. I can't get that from the story. If, ultimately, Obama gets a big kick in the polls when students go back to school in the fall, the polls will report that as momentum when all it may be is mis-measurement during the summer.

Veep Peep

Assuming it's not going to be Hillary, my nickel bet is on Barbara Boxer. That choice would help in a remarkable number of demographics. If you want to play the game, here is the list of current U.S. Senators and here's a page to find all the governors. Of course there are those not currently in office (e.g., Sam Nunn) or who hold other office (e.g., Mayor Bloomberg) so the potential pool is quite large. Have fun!