Change and Stasis

Last week I was in Austin, Texas for the ELI Annual Conference and the CIC Learning Technology Group meeting that followed. As is my wont, below is a set of after thoughts from that trip. But first, here is a quick follow up on my health as reported in my Birthday Rhyme.

At a check up yesterday AM my blood pressure was entirely normal. Either the meds have been working (hurray for the miracles of modern medicine) or a week away from the office, especially when it is the first week of the spring semester, is the right tonic, or it's all measurement error. The automated machine couldn't give a reading so they had to take the blood pressure the old fashioned way. I'm guessing I'll have the measurement taken several time over the next few months. Let's see if back to normal is the consistent outcome.

* * * * *

I didn't attend ELI in 2009. Sloan-C had been at the same hotel (the Caribe Royale in Orlando) and we were just beginning to be in economy mode regarding work-related travel. But I did attend the prior three conferences, in San Diego in 2006, Atlanta in 2007, and San Antonio in 2008.

Having started to blog about a year before the San Diego conference, it is not surprising, I suppose, to have blogged about it. However, the underlying circumstances were more than a bit strange. At the time I was chair of the CIC LT Group and several of the members who were also in attendance at ELI thought the conference could have been done better, so I was tasked to communicate the issues (a bit too much whiz bang and not enough on research about effective use, Mark Prensky's plenary talk especially seemed in that category, the live blogging in the large room didn't work because of bandwidth problems with assorted similar prolems, and the conference as a whole seemed biased against the big schools such as those that populate the CIC) with Diana Oblinger, who was then running ELI. She and I had about an hour phone call soon after I contacted her and then we arranged for a conference call with the entire group. To Diana's credit, she was a very good listener, heard all the issues I brought up, and I believe that effort helped to make for a better outcome for the 2007 conference.

I attended that one in part to follow up on the interventions I had participated in the year before. Indeed there was improvement and I wrote about about that. But since I'm also a teacher who uses technology in the teaching and I like to stretch myself when I do teach, I noticed that the ideas that seem to interest me in my experimentation were hardly being reflected in the conference. So while the conference was an improvement over the prior year, viewing the conference as a signpost of where the profession was heading, I was not satisfied. At the end of the post I took some shots at the profession, then had some regrets about that afterward, so wrote another post trying to give a vision of what I'd like to see. It's hard for me to believe that was three years ago. It feels like yesterday. It did occur to me last week that ELI should have some sessions on visioning, one like mine as well as competing alternatives. How can we evaluate what we are doing in the absence of such a vision?

I suspect that many learning technologists would disagree with what I proposed (which I still embrace, though I will elaborate on it a bit more below). In a nutshell, I believe that technology well employed is invisible. It critically supports learning but is transparent in the way it does that. So technology itself can't be the driver of what we want to achieve. Our ambitions must stem from elsewhere. In that post from three years ago I made up an expression called Humanism Across The Curriculum (HAC), a way to teach in every single course we offer, that would deliver on the promise of Liberal Education. HAC (and learning to use data for real world decision making) is the elsewhere and in that earlier post I tried to give a broad strokes definition of the elements that would comprise Humanism Across The Curriculum, without trying much to explain how technology would promote it.

Many others in the profession would like to see technology play a more overt role. Gaming is one prominent example. I can't see how to use it in my own teaching and I'd say I don't get it. I can see how absorbed my teenage children are with games at home and still I don't get it. So maybe that is me. But I don't get it with other technology too. For example, I don't get it with Twitter and back channels. In conferences, maybe. In ongoing classes, really I don't get it. In particular, I've seen Peter Doolittle of Virginia Tech talk about the impossibility of multiprocessing when the tasks are difficult. Back channels seem to promote the ADHD behavior that the always on technology encourages. I can imagine students mistaking that for deep learning, but it isn't. So an argument for back channels via Twitter or some other technology would have to be along the lines that instructors otherwise don't give students sufficient voice via alternative means, such as in small group work, if back channels were to make sense to me. And here's the thing, this is potentially an empirical proposition to be tested. So a debate based on competing visions might be a very good thing. It might point to work we should be doing. It might also help to identify where we do agree.

I did see a few sessions at this conference that spoke to the HAC notion, if only to indicate just how far we have to go to get there. In the last session on Tuesday I attended a presentation from folks at the University of Oregon about students "making history" in order to understand the historical artifacts that they were studying. They took what I would term a dual channel approach to instruction, which I've come to conclude via my own teaching is a necessary aspect of HAC. The Oregon course was an introductory History class taught in lecture-discussion format. That first channel is the traditional one involving the typical presentation and assessment that we all know (but do not love).

The Oregon project entailed a specific section of students who were in a living and learning community that included an undergraduate TA who had taken the course previously. He served as a role model, performing similar online writing tasks as the other students in advance for them to review and he commented online about the work the other students produced. (This TA was one of the presenters at the session. I continue to be amazed by the poise and presence of such students who appear at ELI.) The TA, in turn, was mentored by a faculty member, though not the lecturer for the course. They got very good results in this class with student participation and engagement, pointing to a possible path for a scaled up approach in the future. I too have gotten good results with a similar approach, with me doing the same sort of work that the undergrad TA was doing. More about that below.

There were some parts of what this project did that I didn't get. The project involved the University Archivist and others from the Library, so it was very resource intensive, in a way that I didn't see that it could scale. Further, from the Archivist's point of view, her involvement would make sense if what the students were creating really was worthy of preservation or, from a different point of view, if all student work is worthy of preservation and this was just a demo project for her to understand what would be involved with a broader effort. However, at the session I got the impression that her involvement was being justified because this project was important - these students really were making history. I didn't understand how that could be known now. And if it can't and further if the approach can't scale, then it seemed like a factor that would make the current project successful because it conveyed to the participating students that the University was behind the effort and that would encourage the students to take their own contributions seriously, but it would mean the results would be harder to replicate in the future and thus less interesting to the rest of us.

The opening plenary session by William G. Thomas III also was about teaching history, in this case from the perspective of the lecturer in a large introductory course which relied on digital archives, something that the presenter has expertise in as a researcher - The Valley of the Shadow project is how I became aware of him, and a home grown wiki software developed at the University of Nebraska where the students made their contributions. The session was interesting but not very inspirational, certainly not as good as some of the sessions I had seen at the previous ELI I had attended in San Antonio, because it lacked theater (Michael Wesch, a featured presenter at the San Antonio conference is a dynamic speaker, one whose impact on the audience is hard to clone) and because while I nodded my head in agreement a few times at things Thomas said I didn't have much to take away to try in my own teaching. The session title was about how we teach writing now. On that I was as far along as the presenter. And those in the audience who haven't been involved teaching writing may have been even less engaged with the talk than I was.

The other thought going through my head listening to these sessions is that in some sense a HAC approach in a History course is too easy for a case study. Indeed my own course was also "softy" in that the subject matter, with no math modeling, neither working with numeric data nor experimental data, nor studying difficult to understand theory, readily lent itself to a narrative approach. If HAC is to succeed it needs to work in science and engineering courses and elsewhere in the curriculum where problem sets may have been an integral part of the traditional way of teaching the course while producing a narrative would have been seen as something alien. Such a course would provide a better test case for my HAC approach. But maybe when looking at current reform in those disciplines what is happening doesn't quite match my preconception of HAC.

Here at Illinois, for example, there is an effort in Engineering called iFoundry, which is an attempt to move away from the traditional approach to Engineering and make it more engaging to the students. They have a pilot program that they are expanding called iEFX, which appears to be recasting the Freshman Experience in the mold of Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind. Since my son is attending starting in the fall, as a parent I don't really want to look under the hood at what they are doing and simply wish him the best. But as an eLearning administrator I've got a whole bunch of questions starting with how much this approach is in line with my HAC conception, followed by how faculty who themselves were weaned in the more traditional approach can become proficient in the new paradigm, and then concluding with how Campus and Unit level eLearning folks can play more of a partnering role with initiatives of this sort.

It is also worth noting that much educational reform these days is being driven by survival instincts in the tough budget climate we find ourselves in, perhaps more so than by the needs to innovate for the betterment of learning of our students. On that score I found this piece an Inside Higher Ed report on a session at the MLA meetings last month extremely intriguing, particularly the presentation by Dawn Bratsch-Prince, on bringing language offerings into alignment with University priorities, in this case by wrapping language and culture skill attainment within the mantle of globalization. So at future ELI I could see having a session on visioning driven by folks from the disciplines, not from the likes of us, where they first discuss programmatic goals and need at the disciplinary level and then present a wish-list for IT to help satisfy the need.

I too have been thinking about how the budget climate and how it would impact my own prescriptions for Higher Ed. I learned first hand last fall that the dual channel approach to instruction is more intensive than the traditional approach. It is certainly more intensive for the students enrolled in the course. Absent the undergraduate TA as in the Oregon example, and maybe even with such a TA present, it is also more intensive from the point of view of the instructor. The tough budget environment will demand that instructors put in more time in teaching (and less in either research or service). With more of the overall funding coming out of tuition dollars, this seems a logical outcome. My view is that that extra time should be spent on more intensive teaching, not on teaching more students in the usual way.

Institutionally to signify support of this view, for example, a heretofore 3-credit course would be awarded another credit. If this sort of thing happened across the board, students would earn the necessary credits for graduation by taking fewer courses, with each course offering a more in depth experience. Some breadth would be sacrificed, obviously, but the overall experience would be richer. This sort of change requires the approval of faculty senates, accreditation bodies, and a change of culture within academe that this reallocation of faculty effort is fitting and appropriate. So it won't happen overnight, for sure. But if that is the picture to be painted, at least we can see where we hope we're heading, and we can understand why that future alternative would be less expensive and better positioned than what we are currently doing.

Unfortunately, it seems that the notion of doing something with less expense is a concept that economists understand implicitly, but others on campus do not. Among my conversations at ELI, only when I talked with my friend Byron Brown from Michigan State, a fellow economist, did I hear anything on this score that made sense to me. We have to talk about things we are no longer doing or plan to stop doing soon. That is where the savings are to be found. There was a session on the last day at ELI about Doing More With Less, a panel where one of the presenters was my friend and colleague from the CIC, Cole Camplese of Penn State. He has been an innovator and his campus provides an excellent model for how to do learning technology well at a very large institution level. Cole did say in that session that they aren't going to let the cuts stop them from innovating - fine. But then he proceeded to talk about a bunch of new initiatives, which sounded much more to me like business as usual than it appeared to be sober talk about managing cuts. The austerity issue isn't going away any time soon, certainly not on my campus nor, I believe, nationally. We need an upbeat but realistic approach. Truthfully I'd prefer desperate and realistic for a while so at a minimum we can affirm reality. That would be a better way to make headway. At present, we still seem to be in denial.

But on that score there is a substantial problem which came out more at the CIC meeting than at ELI. The technologies that we have been supporting for the last decade or so, principally the LMS, as well as emerging technologies such as lecture capture, strongly affirm a very traditional approach to instruction. Further we are very locked into the LMS and thus protective of our users and our staff who support them. From this perspective budget cuts look like pain, not letting us do what we feel we need to do, and innovation beyond that feels almost frivolous, a diversion from the core mission. We compete with each other on emerging technologies like lecture capture playing a game of one upmanship without attention to a strategic goal formed internally without regard for what peers are doing. Such non-price competition, we know, is cost increasing. So the technology is quite capable of creating the opposite to what we want to achieve. And it is unclear to me whether we know how to separate the chaff from the wheat.

I attended two sessions on the general theme of Copyright and Fair Use, one by Patricia Aufderheide of American University, the other by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School. These were my favorite sessions because in the past I've been infuriated and felt penned in by Copyright, most recently in having my students make multimedia projects for my course last fall. These presentations seemed to offer a way out and argued for the importance of us asserting our Fair Use rights. That was refreshing.

I've felt similarly constrained in my teaching by FERPA and I've come to conclude that in the choice of software we support we are promoting values that are antithetical to the real goals of our institutions. In the class I taught in the fall we spent substantial time discussing intrinsic motivation and becoming acquainted with the research that asserts that extrinsic motivation can taint the intrinsic form. My students in the class, coming in, were high achievers all and extremely grade conscious. They didn't see a problem with that. But over time with their blogging as the feedback they got from me was commentary only (the grade would come at the end of the semester only after they had done a critique and a portfolio selection of their own writing) they started to become hooked on the alternative. Indeed my view is that the HAC approach is very much about promoting student motivation and having an ongoing dialog with them that is centered on the issues the students raise is a big part of doing that. That dialog really doesn't need grading to sustain it. If the institution demands it, grades can punctuate the dialog. But elevating the grades can actually be destructive of the learning.

In what I did, most of the commenting occurred on the student blogs. I did make discussion boards in the LMS, private spaces where when I needed to communicate about grade information I could do that along with critique of the work. It was clunky setting that up. There was one board per student and a board for each student group. Though I recognize this is a somewhat unusual practice on my campus, I'm arrogant enough to believe it is more satisfying and appropriate than the practice that is more typical.

So when I hear now that students value the technology mostly for the "convenience benefit" (a phrase I'm growing to detest) and that the most used area in the LMS is the MyGrades area, I have to scratch my head and wonder whether we know that we are encouraging pathology rather than promoting learning. Partly for that reason, after seeing the session by Jon Mott on the Genius of AND, I wrote my prior post on the need for the analog of fair use in FERPA, instructors need to be able to communicate about grades as a natural extension of the dialog they do have with students, not in some cordoned off way.

Alas I wear at least two hats and can't always maintain the idealism of the teacher. As an administrator there are practical issues to confront and here at Illinois electronic grade books have something of a rich tradition, dating back at least to Plato. And when I was the Campus person in charge of us moving to an enterprise LMS, at the time WebCT Vista, I also had the sheer (non) pleasure of presiding over the decommissioning of our Campus Gradebook service, itself an offshoot of Plato, and received many (un) appreciative inquiries from faculty who used Campus Gradebook, wondering why we were getting rid of a perfectly good offering to replace it with the inferior product that was part of the WebCT tool suite. So to amuse myself, though unfortunately not to really address the problem, I built some spreadsheets to show that much of the sophisticated function could be done with Excel, such as this one which builds a smart histogram of exam score results, letting the ranges in the bin be determined by the data, or this one on summing a bunch of homework scores while deleting the lowest n scores, where n is greater than 1, a grading schema that many instructors on my campus like to employ in their teaching. I also engaged in many discussions entailing submission of final course grades out of the LMS into our Banner student system, something Campus never delivered on because we never achieved tight data integration between the SIS and LMS and the batch way of moving the data was simply going to have more problems than it was worth, yet a separate system developed in our Physics department had that capability, which caused undo consternation by large class instructors in other departments.

When dealing with these sort of administrative issues intrinsic motivation becomes a luxury that fades into the background and FERPA wins the day. Wearing multiple hats contributes to having a more multifaceted view of the issues, though it is not necessarily so much fun.

Let me get back to ELI and then close. I don't know if the conference requires critique, but the profession certainly does. The essence of such a critique would be in repeatedly asking questions such as: What does learning look like? Does that particular implementation promote learning? Can the implementation be replicated? How do we know? I do think the pace of change we are seeing as evidenced by ELI is just too slow, though I have no real suggestions on how to speed things up. While bandwidth has obviously improved and there are some technologies that didn't exist then, we don't seem to know that much more about things than when I ran the SCALE project way back when. Based on where we were then, I'd have hoped most things would have been figured out by now. Yet it still feels like we're still just getting started.

Perhaps my peers in the CIC feel otherwise and are much more satisfied about where we are. I do think there is some gender linkage in determining how critical/satisfied we are about events like the annual conference. (In case it's not obvious, the being critical attribute is carried on the male gene. I need an emoticon here.) But I've taken a lesson from my teaching this past semester where I more openly expressed dissatisfaction with the class than I've ever done in the past. That can be a basis for improvement, if we're open about it and admit our own shortcomings. Mine are all too obvious, not the least of which is outstaying my welcome when writing. So I bid you adieu. I hope there has been some benefit in what I've produced above.A

An analog to Fair Use for FERPA

I'm in Austin Texas. This is wind up day for the ELI conference. The best presentations I've seen have been about the good guys fighting back on copyright by asserting their Fair Use rights.

It occurred to me at some other sessions that student privacy, which I've always taken to be about records, particularly for prior course work, perhaps inadvertently has been casting a dark cloud over teaching and learning, particularly with respect to within course grades (on quizzes, papers, projects, exams, etc.) I think a not in appropriate metaphor is to consider teaching and learning as conversation and grading as occasional punctuation within that conversation. We've been building systems and continue to build systems that focus on the punctuation. We seem to ignore the indirect effect that in the process our institutions deliver the implicit message - learning is about the punctuation.

We need to a way to be more directly assertive about learning. Our institutions need to be for learning as conversation. That happens in the open in communities. When the learning comes into conflict student privacy, that needs to be managed with discretion, not by fiat. I suspect in our over legalistic and regulated society that we need Federal Law to proclaim that. I've got no clue how to get there, but it seems to me we should be talking about this because right now we are being cowed by the forces of gloom t operate the other way.

Chiming in on the Lecture Capture issue

I've been reading John Cassidy's How Markets Fail, a critique of modern academic economics, particularly the "Chicago School," in light of the Financial Crisis and the ensuing "Great Recession." I'm not quite halfway through it. I really like what I've read so far. It inspired this interactive spreadsheet to illustrate the basic concepts underlying his discussion of "General Equilibrium" and the video below. Cassidy writes an intellectual history of economics, describing many of the key players and their contributions, explaining why their ideas are important. In a certain sense it is a setup for a very long shaggy dog story. Too many economists fell in love with math and the models they made with the math. They lost their sense of reality in the process and that has come back to burn them.

Nevertheless, one can't completely ignore the old models and go to something superior. There is learning working through the underlying models and students need to understand their strengths before seeing a critique. So I started to envision that Cassidy's book might be used in lieu of a textbook in an intermediate micro course, to motivate students to think through these models.

Many people are now discussing lecture capture in the live classroom and lecture videos made at the instructor's desktop as an alternative. Recently I read this very interesting post by Gardner Campbell on the subject, where I became aware of the Khan Academy. (There is an awesome number of videos at that site.) There is testimony from some of the audience about why those videos are appealing. Lecture Capture is also an agenda item for the next meeting of the CIC Learning Technology Group. So let me make two points about this, one a very obvious one, the other perhaps also obvious though maybe it requires some penetration of the issues to reckon with it. I want to put those both together.

The first point is that captures, once created, have an essential public good aspect to them, at least when they are not password protected. Following Cassidy, I will assert that markets don't provide public goods very well. But communities can effectively provide public good. So the question is: why haven't we moved to a community approach for capture? And how might we go about doing that. The other point is that particularly for analytic content, but also for much other content that students find difficult at first, they don't have the wherewithal to familiarize themselves with the subject matter. The not so hypothetical quote of the student talking to the instructor to exemplify the problem is, "I understand it very well when you explain it. But I can't do it on my own." Students need help with the familiarizing process and coming up with activities for internalizing the content. This is why simulations are so important. They are much more important than lecture.

Simulations are time consuming to make and most faculty haven't ventured down the road. But if they did, they might lecture --- very briefly ---- about the simulation itself and let the students discover the rest on their own by playing with the simulation. That's the approach taken with the video below. I'd like to see us produce videos of that sort (with the captions too) as a collective effort. Can we get there from here?

Birthday Rhyme

The below was too long for Facebook, so I'm posting here.

* * * * *

Here is a little rhyme just to say,
How I feel on my 55th b-day.

So many well wishers makes me very happy,
Although it's a workday so no afternoon nappy.

Starting out pensive and rather quizzical,
The first thing on my calendar I had a physical.

The doctor's exam gave me a real charge.
Especially the report that my prostate is medium, not large.

On the other hand, my blood pressure is too high,
Whether from work, teenage kids, or a not laid back enough guy.

For this once a day I've been taking a pill.
Modest improvement, but the problem persists still.

So the doc is now upping the dose.
Aiming in the normal range to get me close.

If that doesn't succeed other remedies will be tried.
Perhaps eliminating my favorite foods, some of which are fried.

All is not a question of health.
There is also the matter of personal wealth.

This is more than financial, it means having a good idea,
Not given to me by mama but generated by mia.

Alas I must say here is the real thing,
It is the bad rhymes and puns that so cling,

To my mind that is filled with noise and clatter.
It's what keeps me from turning into a mad hatter.

Which gets me recalling now about Alice.
Wonderland after all was hardly a palace.

It was the invention of one Lewis Carroll,
A role model for me without any parallel.

For it's fantasy and silliness that are such a delight
Making some joy is more fun than writing essays that bite.

Though I'm prone to do some of that too.
Waking in the middle of the night puts you in a kind of stew.

Now I know it's normal aging and not some other fate,
Which is why on this day of days I really fell great.

Thanks everyone.

Teaching Quiet Students

I need to return to writing my book, a draft of which I'm committed to finishing in the next couple of months. So this will be the last longish blog post for a while. I will continue to write shorter things about technology or about news items that pique my interest. But otherwise, this space will be quiet.

* * * * *

When I was teaching the large intermediate microeconomics course (about 180 students) in the late 1990s, I'd spend some time in class asking students questions, waiting for some brave soul to volunteer an answer. Sometimes nobody would. One semester I had a female student whom I remember because she ultimately became an online TA for me and her voice was very distinctive, very much like Amy Irving in The Competition, though for the life of me I can't remember her name. This student invariably would raise her hand after I'd pose such a question and she would give a thoughtful response. It got to the point that I wouldn't call on her immediately, hoping some other student might give it a go. She was so good she may have intimidated the others from trying. She was gutsy and had the smarts.

On at least a couple of occasions she came to my office to talk one-on-one. Self-assured and on the ball in a setting most students would find unnerving, she was quite nervous in these one-on-one sessions, which I know because she was shaking visibly. Shakespeare surely had it right that All the world's a stage, but I suppose each of us gets to "choose" where it is that we have our stage fright. I believe at the time I felt, "What is she worrying about? I'm not very intimidating." Indeed, I'm not. But with hindsight I can see that it was more a matter of circumstance than anything else. Those one-on-one sessions were of consequence for her and perhaps a little more unpredictable in format than the in class sessions. The performance anxiety probably would have happened even if I was a total pussycat. In fact because she was good and talented with the economics she wanted to be judged seriously, or so I inferred. She wanted to sail over her own high bar. She was the source of her own performance anxiety.

Of course, she was not unique in that. When I started to write this blog I did so without anyone else knowing about it for a couple of weeks and cranked out quite a few posts. Eventually I let some people know and got positive reaction from them. Then some others whom I didn't know "found" my posts and a few said good things about them. All of a sudden, I had writer's block. I had to live up to a standard that I didn't even try to create. Nevertheless, it was paralyzing for a while. The good thing with writing is that you do it alone and so can put the readers out of mind, most of the time. With face-to-face encounters, obviously you can't pretend your audience isn't there.

Thinking about performance brings to mind Ethel Merman in There's No Business Like Show Business - "nowhere could you get that happy feeling, as when you're stealing that extra bow." For people where performance is reward, the stage fright beforehand plays the role of necessary evil that gets them keyed up and ready to deliver. They grin and bear it. Others put on an act as a form of self-protection. They adopt an outer persona that differs from their inner being. They aim to please the audience without putting their inner being at risk. When I was a college student I thought most other students were this way, as I've written about previously. As a teacher there is a question of whether part of the job is to get these students to shed their outer skin, at least for the purpose of the course. I'll say a bit more about this below.

These I used to think were the main varieties. Of course, there were also more extreme forms. Some folks don't experience stage fright in a context where most others do. It may be ho hum for them, been there-done that, and without the novelty it's just an ordinary interaction where none of us would feel it's a performance. Or they may have emboldened themselves by desensitizing to certain forms of criticism. My mom had a lot of that in her and I remember my wife referring to my mom as a tough old bird. Such folks can seem heroic, performing in instances where the rest of us can't or won't. But they may also lack sensitivity to certain situations where the rest of us will be more aware.

The other extreme is the person who really suffers through performance, perhaps because he is not prepared, perhaps because he is not skilled enough, but also even if skilled and prepared because performance itself is painful and unrewarding or perhaps because if skilled and prepared then performance might seem superfluous. As a student, particularly when at Cornell and especially in the political thought and philosophy classes I took where I was outside my own realm of proficiency, I was awed by the notion of the quiet genius, invariably a woman, who would write brilliantly but not say a word in class. There were a few students like that, though I only became aware of them when the professor would hand back our papers and make some off the cuff remark about the really excellent ones (not mine).

I believe most of us rotate through many if not all of these scenarios or at least we've tried out the various roles on occasion. But then one seems to prevail either out of conscious choice or, more likely, because we fall into it. In classes where I was proficient in the field I was not shy. In grad school I was one of the few students who raised his hand a lot, at least in microeconomics, which became my area of expertise. I was comfortable there so I asked questions congruent to my own thinking. I had no intent in doing that to intimidate my classmates, but I believe sometimes that was the consequence. If you have mental agility you show it, or so was my implicit belief.

* * * * *

When you are teaching your target often is yourself as a learner or, if you try hard to be broader than just yourself, your target is your conception of students. Actually, in most cases what you try to do is focus on the subject. You teach the subject first and foremost. Thinking about the audience is only a secondary consideration. Perhaps, when thinking about teaching from the conception of Bruner's Spiral Curriculum, the role of considering the audience is to place the particular instruction along the spiral. Specifically with microeconomics, we teach courses in Principles, Intermediate, and Graduate Theory, though there can be substantial differences in difficulty and coverage within any one of these categories, depending on the economist teaching the course.

It was teaching the Intermediate course that initially fueled my interest in learning technology. The typical section I taught in the early 1990s had about 60 students. The course worked spectacularly well for about 5 of them, who would tell me it was one of the best courses they had taken on campus. For the vast majority, maybe as many as 50 students, the course was a struggle for them and, based on the exams they wrote, it was also largely unenlightening. For the rest, these students got by with the minimum possible effort or they didn't get by at all. The kids in the first category were, with a few exceptions, either kids who wanted to go to grad school in economics or engineering students (meaning the math was no problem for them) who had an interest in social science. The course was (and still is) required of all students in Business. In that the aim is to provide a solid economics foundation for the various business disciplines, a sensible goal, at least in theory. But the students found the subject abstruse and didn't see the relevance. This made the teaching almost combative. These were the bulk of the students in the middle category.

I came to appreciate later that this was the situation in many required courses for students outside the major, with perhaps the quintessential example being organic chemistry for pre-med students. However, I learned that the problem was much broader than this. The first summer when I became an administrator in the SCALE project and interviewed SCALE-affiliated faculty, many of them reported their students were too passive in class and that it was difficult to get discussion going. They were trying teaching online because of the promise that students would open up more in that setting, which in turn would encourage better discussion face to face, or so they hoped.

I was not very happy with the situation in my own class. I wanted the results to be excellence across the board, where what we had in fact was a broad base of mediocrity. The question I asked myself that served as my motivation was whether the outcome was driven by me - there as a better way to teach that middle group and I needed to change my approach to find that better way - or them - my teaching was fine but the students were approaching the course all wrong. I didn't know the answer then. And I still don't. By the time my thinking about teaching had evolved sufficiently to really be able to test the proposition, I was no longer teaching the intermediate course. However, within a year or two of embracing learning technology I had a pretty strong view of what I should be doing. This was based on an incentive approach (after all, I am an economist), where the goal was to move students who were not in that elite category up a notch or two. With this mindset, the student issue is either a lack of effort or the effort is misdirected or the student simply doesn't have the smarts to figure this stuff out. Incentives don't help for the lack of smarts, but they can help with the other two. However, I never really verified this on a student by student basis. The class was too large to do so. I only had aggregate data to support the conclusion. There would be a need to have an extended conversation with each student individually to really verify this.

Indeed, I did not see teaching as having such extended conversations with each student till this past semester, though I had taught small undergraduate courses previously (a Discovery class, freshmen only and no more than 20 students, and two Campus Honors Program classes with 15 students, all of these classes in Principles). I probably wouldn't have figured out to have such conversations this time around either except that the course wasn't covering a standard topic. (While we ended up not covering all of these, some sense of the course trajectory can be had from looking at the assigned readings.) Without feeling obligated to achieve specific coverage there was more freedom to stray and react to student writing where the student was rather than force their ideas through some gateway I specified. Here I'm talking about my reactions to what they wrote. I had freedom in responding. Doing so helped me to reconsider my preconceptions.

The class (17 students in total) had more quiet students than I had expected. There were also several very glib students, who could easily have had a back and forth conversation for an entire class session had I let them, which may have encouraged some students who might have been vocal in other settings to remain on the sidelines and simply follow the discussion.

Though they were quiet in ensemble settings they did participate in the online writing. And here is an interesting thing. As writers, some of them became risk takers. They strayed more from the path than the other students in the class and produced some very interesting pieces, probably the most enjoyable for me to read among all that was produced. In contrast some of the glib students struggled with the writing, more than I would have anticipated. Based on this, here are some tentative conclusions.

The decision to handle stage fright by putting on an act has some unsettling consequences, at least on some individuals. These students intuit this downside from an ethical or a behavioral perspective and conclude they want no part of it. They thus opt to be quiet rather than put on an act. When they are sufficiently comfortable, they will open up. That might take quite a while (months, not weeks). Trying to rush that can be counterproductive. Writing is very helpful for these students. They are apt to open up there much sooner than they open up face to face.

In contrast, students who are quite glib face to face may struggle with writing because they have to confront which persona to show, an issue that they don't deal with face to face. Indeed, when there is a persona switch that can be quite emotional, a powerful experience but also a difficult one.

There is the further observation that some people would rather be reflective and react only after they've chewed things over. They literally prefer to be listeners. In some of our readings - the stuff by Peter Drucker and Peter Senge especially - we learned to prize listening. I'm not especially good at it myself in face to face larger group settings and especially early in the semester I found it quite a strain to manage the flow of the discussion in the class and listen intently to what individual students said at the same time. So I would aim to get the gist of what they were saying and let some of the detail fall through my fingers. I was much better able "to listen" to the individual students when reading their blog posts and I believe my written comments in response indicated that. The upshot is that if listening is such a value we should encourage it.

So I would say the teaching goal from 1990s to get all students in class to participate in the class discussion needs to be modified. The students are their own best arbiters of the participation decision. Having a private channel for reflection in addition to a public channel for class discussion seems to me to be much superior to having only one channel. The next time I teach I will surely do that, even if the content of the course is more prescribed and I do have obligations to cover certain content.

Finally, I'd like to combine these observations with some things Atul Gawande has been preaching in the medical field but that I believe apply in a straightforward way to the situation I've described here. (Gawande was on Charlie Rose a couple of nights ago, mostly talking about checklists in promoting his new book. But he did reiterate that where medicine is practiced well and at low cost doctors communicate with each other about their patient's care.) The two channel approach doesn't scale well at all.... if done on a course by course basis. It might scale reasonably well and engage many more students if they were in cohorts across courses and then it is done on a cohort basis. With all the reform that people seem to want with learning, that seems to me the most promising change, yet it is getting scant attention. We need to talk about it much more.

Forecasts and False Prophets

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Martin Luther King Jr.
US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 - 1968)

Tis the season for making predictions for the upcoming year(s). Mine is below, a personalized interpretation of King's quote. He must have had in mind Ghandi or Thoreau. I've made it my New Year's resolution to read Walden, which I started yesterday. Taking the bits from it I've already garnered, I will stake out a position that I've not really seen articulated by the "punditry" and I've been reading a fair amount by them over the holiday, the usual NY Times Op-Ed pieces, and the "assigned readings" from David Brooks' Sidney Award (see the first line here for the links). The essence of the prediction is simple enough to articulate. All the punditry talk about problems from without or problems that we as a society must face. They treat those problems like a problem from applied physics that is amenable to design, so one can speak of optimal solutions. Punditry is about generating such solutions for problems in the social context. I do a fair amount of that sort of thing myself. Mostly the populace as a whole sees outcomes that emerge fall short of the optimum, because the situations are invariably more complex than the analysis is willing to consider and what emerges then is apt to disappoint, witness this News Hour interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin and John Cassidy, a looking back at the financial crisis. The two-fold conclusion, certainly disheartening, is that behavior among Wall Street types seems to have returned to business as usual in spite of what appears obvious - substantial reform is needed - and perhaps more troubling is the finding that normal prudent and sensible behavior - stay out of high risk assets that have a substantial likelihood of default - was trumped by a need to produce higher yields, since the prudent behavior appears to under perform the market, at least till that world starts to implode.

My prediction is that the big changes we'll see in the coming year are about problems from within, individual issues that each of us must face on our own. That is where we'll see the bigger shift in opinion and behavior. It is a necessary first step before any solutions from without that have some bite can be implemented.

I'm certainly no ace prognosticator. Indeed my profession prides itself on its lack of ability to predict, the emblem being the Efficient Market Hypothesis - all the current information is incorporated already into stock prices. Future stock prices are then driven by further news, information that can't be known now. So the path of future stock prices can't readily be forecasted. To this there are two critiques I am aware of. One is by the Behavioralists, who say in fact that we're not quite the rational decision makers that economists like to model, so our "humanness" introduces some degree of predictability of the future. The other is The Black Swan - on the predictability front things are even worse than you think because there can be sudden regime change after which things look entirely different. Both of the critiques make sense to me yet for the purposes of prediction I tend to discount the behavioralists so in the main I adhere to the view that we can't predict. Smart as we think we are, we're really quite ignorant about many important things.

Nonetheless, I've had my moments, via what I'd call low-to-the-ground predictions. I can see the need based on my own experience and make a prediction that something will come along to fill it. My first recollection of doing this was in the early 1970s when I was in High School. At the time there were still greasy spoons around that were not part of national chains, but McDonalds was emerging as the premier brand. I was a fan. My prediction, no great shakes (pardon the pun, though it was intended) yet in this case on the mark, was that McDonalds needed a quarter pounder; the regular hamburger was rather wimpy. Lo and behold....

Fast forward two decades. The 1990s were a good decade for me in many respects, prediction-wise included. It started off with a bang. I got married in June 1990. My bachelor party, pretty tame by most standards, featured a poker game. I hadn't played poker since I was a college freshman at MIT. During the orientation week, where you choose your courses, meet your adviser, make a housing selection, plus a zillion other getting familiar with the place sort of things, my real education came during the evening playing seven card stud high-low poker with some other freshmen and upperclassmen. I recall winning a big hand when my four eights (I had a pair showing and two more in the hole) beat somebody else's boat. After that they threw me into the shower, a tradition I hadn't previously encountered, one that cooled me on playing poker thereafter. So I was somewhat reluctant to play during my bachelors party and had to be talked into it. As it turned out, I won pretty big that night and wondered if they fixed the cards to achieve the outcome. (They claimed they didn't.) For my part, I took it as a sign that boys night out once a month or so should be part of the deal - my wife was ok with that. We had a fairly regular poker game with fellow economists and graduate students. In the main, I won in those sessions. I understood the ground rules and the psychology.

There was some carry over with that later in the decade, investing the kids' college fund. Pretty early on after I switched my career to learning technology, I put about two thirds of the portfolio into tech stocks - Apple and Adobe. That was a no-brainer. The market was going crazy then. My insight, or luck, or whatever you want to call it, was to get out pretty close to the peak. I felt the chill and got cold feet. You've got to know when to fold them.

The decade that immediately followed, the one that just concluded, was a different matter. The group I used to play poker with broke up for a variety of reasons, people moved on to do other things. So eventually I found a different game - first with information technology professionals whom I knew on campus, then with their friends, and eventually with friends of friends. The rules were different and the stakes lower. I could never figure out where the other players were coming from mentally. And it seemed mostly that I got crummy cards. In the 1990s, my cards were better. When you win its skill; when you lose its the cards. Eventually, I lost interest entirely and stopped playing. The same thing was true for investing in the stock market. Once Bush became President I had no feel for what was happening - so I just put the kids' college money into mutual funds. Although there was another run up of the market, fueled by the housing market bubble, we hardly benefited from it; then we lost our shirts like everyone else when the market tumbled. There has been a modest recovery since. But I really don't track that stuff like I should. It's not that interesting to me any more.

This brings us back to Thoreau. He asks - what is really important for us? Do we spend our time doing that? Or do we get wrapped up in nonsense that ends up of little consequence and is not fulfilling in the process? If the latter, why are we trapped in a life so below our potential? And what can we do to remedy things, to become more one with ourselves? I'm not talking about living like a hermit out in the woods. I don't literally want to imitate Thoreau's experience. But I do want to embrace his fundamental questions, about bringing simplicity and importance into our lives.

I'm living both sides of this. I'm best suited at this point in my life to do informal but thoughtful analysis, a working through of a variety of ideas, investigating before the fact and then communicating what I've come up with more or less by the same methods - chatting over coffee or writing as in a blog post like this one. When I'm doing those sort of things, I'm being true to my nature and letting the best of me come forward. This is most easily done when the ideas themselves are of consequence to me, but the implementation of those ideas is not. As an administrator, however, that is no always the case. The implementation sometimes blows up in your face. Other times it is simply less exciting or less well done than was previously conceptualized. More than once I've been talked into making an idea mine that I didn't generate and found that I've had to bear responsibility for the outcome, not a good one you can be sure, without having the fire in the belly to push hard to see it through. I'm sure everyone who has been in IT administration has had that happen from time to time. So we look for alternatives, either for diversion or for comfort. Healthful activities themselves promote our own well being - exercise, reading a good book, getting the kids to develop their (off beat) sense of humor, having friends over for a meal, anything that creates joie de vivre. If only it were that simple.

Alas, I have the genetic disposition to overindulge, with food and drink. As a kid my mother would call me and my sister fressers, from the Yiddish or German verb fressen. It takes one to know one. If eating is good, then eating more is better. We know where that logic leads. I had trouble with my weight as a teen. My mother said it was also because my dad was a diabetic and children of diabetics are prone to be large. I have no clue whether that is science or an old wives tale. In any event, I developed several bad eating habits, some of which are still with me. I went through a regime change between college and graduate school - the one time in my life where I can say via the force of my own will I persisted at something that was very hard for me, dropping about 60 pounds over the summer through a one-meal-a-day regime. For the next 20 years or so I mostly was in check. Jogging was my salvation. But then my knees got shot and I didn't figure out a good alternative form of low impact exercise soon enough. So I exercised less, indulged more, and the weight drifted upward. It was kind of a like a thread unraveling on one of your socks. At first you just tear off the lose end and keep wearing the pair. It's no big deal. But the thread keeps unraveling and eventually there's not enough sock left to wear. When its your body rather than your sock, the unraveling can create desperation.

I thought I had that in check and figured out a way to keep my weight in stasis, albeit at a level way too high to be healthy, via doing the stationary bike every morning for about 45 minutes, lifting some very light weights at the same time. Then, about six weeks ago, I started to feel excruciating pain in my right leg. It started in the hip area and then migrated to the thigh. I thought it was sciatica. I've since learned that the probable cause is arthritis - in both hips and the lower back too. Pain killers help. Ironically, sometimes pain helps too. I learned a rather important lesson during the first couple of weeks of this episode. I could think and focus on my work, but it was harder and the joy from doing it didn't last as long. I am no hero. I can't be the good part of me if I'm in chronic pain. Perhaps episodically I can overcome the pain. Realistically, however, if the pain persists I'll cave and then look to numb myself with mindless distractions. The sensible solution is to minimize the pain. Any Web site on the subject of arthritis of the hip will mention weight loss as one of the more conservative treatments. It is evident to me that I must make a personal regime change that aims not at weight stasis but at weight loss, either less indulgence or more exercise or a mixture of both. Before my vices were a release from the stress of ordinary life. Now they seem an imprisonment to keep me from doing what I'm meant to do, ergo the unraveling metaphor I chose. This is why reading Thoreau seems so crucial. Breaking bad habits will be hard. Doing so demands an examination of what's really important.

It's now time to invoke the Charles Barkley line; I am not a role model. But I was right in my prediction about the McDonalds quarter pounder and feel confident that when something "makes sense" to me I've identified a real need. For that reason I believe in the low to the ground sort of predictions. And in this case I believe my situation is far from unique, especially once the unraveling metaphor has been extended beyond obesity, obviously a substantial problem in America today but more a symptom than the underlying cause. Virtually everyone I know appears to me under so much stress, work related or otherwise, with the feeling that there is no end to the tunnel in sight and that there is a huge weight on the shoulders producing a need for incessant labor while yielding litle to no satisfaction from the efforts.

The economy is driving much of this, but it is not simply a larger than usual recession that is the root cause. It is the bubble like nature of the institutions we work in. The Health Care industry is a bubble sector, witness all the concern about containing costs, and likewise for Higher Education. The bubble seems to be bursting here but nobody knows what to do about it really. The higher ups in the administration will react to bring spending in line with available funding, but there is no vision of what that will look like.

Fearful that they might lose their jobs the natural reaction is to avoid the problem and continue on as best they can. Yet ongoing undue stress can lessen personal well being. How far down the path does somebody have to go before they wake up to the fact that the life they are living is causing themselves harm? I don't know. I do know that when they do wake up, they'll find Thoreau offers a compelling vision.

He cautions that consumption beyond the basic necessities of life is a more than a distraction; it's the road to perdition. So recognizing the need for simplicity in our lives and being true to ourselves, we abandon this unnecessary consumption. Imagine telling your employer - "Look, I'm wearing out in the work. There is too much of it. A big part of it is a drudge. And I have essentially no say in what the work is about. I need a change. So I propose the following. I'll take a voluntary pay cut beyond the furloughs you are already planning. In exchange for that I get to shape a good part of the work on my own and say no to folks who want my services when I deem their requests to be out of bounds. I can't continue as I'm going now. My way I'll endure and because I am a talented employee you'll be better off that way too."

All the pundits - left, right, or center - talk about the need for economic growth. It is the magic elixir to one and all. Or is it? We as individuals need simplicity and to be true to our own natures. In creating an environment that produces that we grow as individuals. But measured by normal economic means, the result will be shrinkage. Better a work environment that is rational and real than a bubble environment that promises growth.

I wonder if we can get past our fear of falling behind the rising Asian countries and come to this realization. Judging by my reading over the holiday there will have to be a lot of change in the thinking of the punditry to get to this point. This is why change from within needs to be the driver.

A little reality check

A debate over credit hours and out of class work versus in class work is welcome, but looking at the driver for this particular debate, the issue appears to be chutzpah more than anything else. A typical full time student here takes 15 - 18 credit hours (and I think the mean is closer to 15). The semester is 15 weeks long with another week for finals. Here they want to offer a 5 week course and give 9 credit hours for it. That really is pushing it.

News Analysis: Thinking Beyond the Credit Hour - Government - The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout

Tidbits

Some follow up to a previous post and readings from David Brooks Sidney Awards, Part 1 and Part 2.

* * * * *

We had a white day-after Christmas. The family partook in Nathan's present and went to see Avatar in 3D. My take on the technology is first, it has definitely improved. The glasses now look more like normal sunglasses. I could imagine wanting to see other movies done this way, though my wife did complain of a headache afterward. Second, the technology has its biggest impact up front. The mind hasn't adjusted to it yet so it is most noticeable. Some way into the movie, the story takes over and the technology doesn't seem to matter nearly as much thereafter. Third, there was one part of the movie where the technology really helped in telling the story. This is when the protagonist, Jake Sully, first tries on his avatar of the Na'vi. He is awkward and uncoordinated and the 3D helps to convey that sense. There are flying scenes later in the film where it is more spectacular because of the 3D. But it didn't seem consistently important throughout.

My take on my previous post about pantheism, etc., is that Douthat gave us something of a misdirection. The film is overtly anti-imperialist, particularly of the American kind (send in the Marines) which are depicted as instrumental about their own needs and unthinking about everything else, particularly the well being of the natives. So the military solution becomes the first best option rather than the last resort. Patience as a virtue apparently isn't. Given the historical moment in which this film appears and America's extended presence in Middle Asia, one might not be too happy with this not very subtle bashing. So rather than take that one on straight away, with most of the the Times readers (me included) still feeling that WMD and Saddam shows the idiocy of this approach, a more conservative view needs to undermine the message of the film but in a more subtle way, one that might make the audience reflect. I did and wrote my earlier post as a consequence, but I hadn't seen Avatar when I wrote it. Douthat's piece probably wouldn't have resonated with me as much, had I seen the movie earlier.

* * * * *

I liked How American Health Care Killed My Father. It's a thoughtful analysis. I especially liked Goldhill's desire to separate out health insurance for catastropohic incidents from the rest of health care. I've long thought that should be the case and that there are huge distortions in the system from bundling the two of these. Thereafter, he argues for the rest of health care to be financed by the individual, so that "ordinary" health care is procured as a consumable. This, his argument goes, would be the best first step toward containing health care costs and making the system responsive to the patients. It is an interesting argument.

I like to take arguments like these and attack them on their merits. Goldhill, himself a businessman and obviously quite literate financially, may not see the weakness in his own position. In this case the main weakness is that most consumers are not so literate about their finances (one big explanation for the Housing Bubble we experienced). In Goldhill's terms, health care would then have a substantial asset management component and one would wonder whether on their own consumers would get it right. Comparatively healthy people might then under consume health care in the form of precaution/prevention. Comparatively sickly people might over consume treatment. As an investment decision, who will help the consumer with these choices? Would that be the family doctor? If so, does his solution look so different from what is being proposed?

As a result of reading this piece I did some quick Google searches to find out about physician income. Most doctors whom a patient sees only when they have a condition that warrants the visit, face a certain sort of moral hazard that Goldhill describes in the piece. But physicians who have a long term relationship with the patient may still have a moral hazard, akin to the one that financial advisers have with their clients. Goldhill's analysis needs to work that consideration through. It isn't there in this piece.

More generally I got to think who among the entire industry of health care provision might lose if recommendations like Goldhill's were to be taken seriously. It would be good to see the analysis from the point of view of the drug companies. Based on some work by Larry Kotlikoff from a while back, my sense is that if you do a cost-benefit analysis on most new treatments, the conclusion would be that the treatments were inefficient. You get the reverse only by making the an ethical argument about extending life or improving quality of life via the treatment. Goldhill is silent on this issue too, though I believe if his solution were implemented it would move things closer to the efficient outcome without the ethical argument. Hmmm.

* * * * *

I did not like The Rubber Room, a designation for a place where tenured New York City teachers who have been deemed unfit to teach must go in order to receive the remuneration to which they are contractually entitled. Steven Brill, the author, does not appear to be a neutral observer in the piece, but rather a witness for the prosecution. A piece like this can get written because now so much thinking about schools rests on the research finding that good teachers matter, a lot. So it must be that bad teachers matter too, in a way that is not good for the children. The view from management, then, is to attract and retain the good teachers and weed out the bad ones. I'm afraid this is the state of the art with current management thinking in K-12 education. It makes little or no allowance for a feedback effect where "the system" influences the goodness or badness of the teaching. And it makes the relationship between principals and teachers seem necessarily adversarial.

This is a simple categorization of how a tenured teacher might be found to be bad:
(1) The teacher was bad all along, even before tenure was granted, but the system made an error and judged otherwise when tenure was granted.
(2) The teacher was never bad, but was judged bad after tenure was granted via some sort of Type 1 error.
(3) The teacher was good at the time tenure was given but deteriorated thereafter for reasons due to the system.
(4) The teacher was good at the time tenure was given but subsequently had some problem essentially unrelated to work that made the teacher bad.

Let me dispense with these in inverse order. We can all agree that (4) is possible. Getting rid of tenure is not necessary to address (4). The efficient solution would be some form of buyout where the teacher then seeks other work or chooses to retire. This, in essence, is the same issue with faculty tenure at universities without mandatory retirement. Tenure gives bargaining power to faculty. It doesn't ensure attachment in perpetuity. It means the terms of separation have to be mutually agreeable.

Brill's piece is essentially unconcerned with (3), but I think it is the heart of the matter. Does the system wear teachers down? What can be done to refresh teachers in the form of professional development, new assignments, and reorganization of the schools? Will the young teachers of today, the ones the system is trying to attract, be the burnouts of tomorrow?

Brill does discuss (2) in the piece - a teacher at Brooklyn Tech was (falsely?) accused of making sexual advances with a student. What Brill doesn't discuss, but what does require elaboration, is if students in general recognize they have power via this route the tone it can set in the classroom.

As for (1) Brill suggests that there was a regime change when the Bloomberg-Klein leadership took over - acceptable teacher performance under Giuliani, Dinkins, or Koch, might no longer be acceptable. Fine. But the feeling one has reading the piece is that Brill embraces a hostile takeover mentality and decisions teachers made to become teachers in the prior regimes hold sway now as to the current allocation. So we begrudge the current payment or the possibility of buyout, though the analysis should be like (4).

In the current labor market, being a teacher may be an attractive option - any job may be an attractive option. Long term, however, getting good people to want to be teachers as a career, not just as an interlude before the real career starts, is a serious problem. Designing a system that does this and also does a reasonable job with the bad apples is what is needed. Brill's piece, by ignoring the long term incentive issues, can go for the jugular and place the blame squarely on the teachers. Does that really make sense?

Can Bridge Make a Comeback?

As an Assistant Prof, I played a fair amount of bridge, mostly at lunchtime, a diversion from work. But it was learning too because while I knew the basic rules before and a few of the conventions, I didn't know a full bidding system nor did I know how to count - which means in this context what to keep track of. Also, I didn't understand the play of the cards as a method of communication with partner, and that good defense can be as fun or more fun than playing the hand. I know my own kids don't know bridge. I wonder what it would take to create an interest among college students. It is not the sort of thing that would help on the resume, but it would definitely help with their general thinking skills as adults. The piece below is from several years ago. But it is a worth a look.

Bring Bridge Back to the Table - New York Times via kwout

Theism - "Pan", "Mono", and "A"

I still have an original Kindle. It has a word look up function that I use only occasionally, partly because I don't remember to use it, partly because it is slow and clunky, and partly because I read my Kindle while away from my computer and when in "reading mode" I don't feel like being in "keyboard mode," which is also why though I can read the NY Times on my Blackberry, doing so is not quite a satisfying experience. The best look up function I've found is with the Web version of the NY Times, where if you highlight an individual word a question mark appears. Click on that and you get the definition of the word (along with some ads triggered by the word,which I presume is what pays for the service). This is pretty functional. So I'm asking myself why Dictionary. com or Onelook.com or some other online lexicon doesn't offer something similar for the entire World Wide Web, where if you have their plugin (I'm making it up that it would be a plugin to the browser, but that makes sense to me) then any time you highlight a single word on a Web page it triggers a search in their dictionary, preferably rendered in a new browser window. This can't be that hard to do programming-wise, given the functionality that already exists. Having it would really be great.

These thoughts were triggered this morning by a Ross Douthat column, Heaven and Nature, which I found thoughtful, though I believe it was errant in is conclusion. The piece begins with a critique of the new film Avatar, in large part because its not so subliminal message is a pantheism found in other juggernaut films like Dances with Wolves and Star Wars. Douthat's piece is interesting in large part because of its main thesis, that in spite of our professed religions (or lack thereof) pantheism has an appeal, particularly to Americans, where it appears to be a way to views about nature, religion, and democracy. May the Force be with you.

Apart from films with "Passion of the..." in the title or Dan Brown novels brought to the big screen, I normally don't think about religion when watching movies or commenting on them. Douthat's piece was something of an eye opener for me. It suggests that as much as we might want to cordon off religion from public life, with the First Amendment serving as our guide in that pursuit, the two are inextricably tied and can't really be decoupled. What then should we make of it?

After 29 years of teaching, this past semester I had my first taste of religion in the classroom (really mostly in the online writing that students did and only a tiny bit in my office hours or our ensemble class discussion). My instinct was to ignore it, though I couldn't completely do that. I wanted students to use experience from their own living situations to reflect on class themes. Little did I know that many resided in faith-based living environments. That was a surprise for me. Until writing this post I hadn't considered why such a living arrangement might have appeal. One reason might simply be for comfort. Our campus is very large and it is quite easy to feel lost in the crowd. Another reason, however, is that faith may be a large way that these students define themselves and what I was seeing was a Beyond the Melting Pot argument applied to the U of I, with faith replacing national identity as the main group identifier.

That in itself was fine but two issues did crop up that I really didn't know how to deal with and I managed poorly as a result. For both of these, think of sports stars who after having big success in some contest and being interviewed on TV thank the Lord for their success. On why the athletes do this, I can envision at least two distinct reasons. One is as ritual or habit, developed in large part to block out pernicious influences in the players' lives - gambling, drugs, violence. In this way it has become almost a non-thinking act, akin to putting on a warm coat when going outside in cold weather. The habit provides warmth and comfort.

In my class however, I wanted the students to struggle with some concepts related to the writing so the students could take these ideas for their own. I particularly wanted them to come to grips with whom they were trying to please in the pieces they created. Many of the students, high academic achievers all, had completely bought into the idea that they were to please the teacher. I wanted them to develop their own sense of taste. First and foremost, they had to please themselves. This was difficult for them. Many took a very long time to get there. I didn't want them to have an easy answer - God is my audience would be a cop out in this case. A bit of the students writing was in this category. I didn't know how to respond to it.

Then there is the other point, closer in line with the article I linked to, whether the public utterances about points specific to a particular religion impinges on the space of students who are of other faiths. The related question, more to the point in my class, is whether the student of faith is sensitive to the point that he might so impinge through his own action. If he is evidently sensitive but has chosen to make his faith-based point, he must feel he hasn't crossed the line. Others might disagree. Who then becomes the arbiter? What rules need to be in place in the class beforehand to make such questions lead to a good conclusion. My own "mental model," jargon from Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, is that all discussion of religious matter should be cordoned off. There's nothing like the teacher painting himself into a corner.

Of course there was the other possibility, that the student might not be aware at all that such comments could impinge on other students' space or impinge on mine. We had Islamic students in the class and I, somewhere in the agnostic-doubter-finding God through the memory of my father, was brought up Jewish though it was a very Reform form of Judaism. Here my mental model going into the course is that nobody could be unaware in that way. But it turned out that in other dimensions, really having nothing to do with religion but which did have to do with the sort of experience people had, the students didn't seem as clued in as I had expected them to be. Why should the faith-based students be sensitive to the space needs of their classmates if nobody had ever educated them on the point? I didn't see it as my role to show them the light. I wanted them to figure it out on their own.

This brings me back to Douthat and a confession that I need to make. There are probably many more movies I have watched that have religion, at least as a subtext, than I care to admit. Among my favorites is Inherit the Wind. In the last scene of the movie, Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) is quoting Scripture to the chagrin of Gene Kelly as E.K. Hornbeck (H.L. Mencken). Drummond does this as eulogy to his old friend, Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) played by Frederick March. Drummond says there was much greatness in Brady. His failing was that he looked for God too high. I have taken that line for my own. Can we find God in the elements of our own humble existence?

Douthat writes:

Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death?

My personal answer to this is to view the good and evil struggle as internal. Both are inside each of us and this is where to look. Sometimes good wins, other times good loses, and there is always a next game to be played where the outcome is in doubt. Douthat, however, looks for evil to be external. If we are for good then evil is to be fought, a battle between peoples, not a battle within. Pantheism is a threat to Douthat because it challenges the commitment to the struggle, even such a benign pantheism as expressed in the movies.

This may be the basic point on which liberals and conservatives disagree. It may also be the reason I can watch movies like The Matrix or TV series like 24 , enjoy them for the fantasy that they are and not let them affect my moral compass, except with the guilt feelings that maybe I should have read a book instead.

Deadlines: The student as writer, the instructor as editor

Ask yourself a simple question. Suppose an instructor desperately wants to communicate with her students that she cares more about the quality of their writing than about the volume they produce. How does she communicate that preference to the students in a meaningful way?

Let's add a complicating but pretty obvious factor. If an instructor gives a deadline for the project that is say a month away, human nature suggests that most students will do little to nothing on the assignment till the deadline appears in the offing. This is human nature. Students also may not realize that to get a good quality product, they have to go through multiple drafts. One and done often doesn't cut it.

Once students do kick into high gear and get cranking writing their piece they can then form a sense of their own about how high quality a product they are producing. Students (at least the ones I know) don't maintain that intensity for the entire semester, and when they are in less intense mode, they are much less sensitive to suggestions about how to improve their work. So most efficient for their own learning is some rapid iteration between student and instructor during the interval of intensity. This is why I don't believe having deadlines for drafts that precede the ultimate delivery is the right way to go.

I think it is actually better for learning to set up faux deadlines that are communicated to the student as hard limits. They are still intense at or soon after that deadline. As instructor, you now have their complete attention, so you can push for making their work better with suggestions and further iterations past the deadline.

Then there is something else as instructor you can do to enhance quality of the final product - give the ultimate decision power to the student regarding any recommendations you make as editor, author's prerogative if you will. If you have a little email thread with the student about the suggested changes and explain the why behind making them, then the student is in a position to think through the suggestions and give a why back on not accepting them or make the changes accordingly. The students will then have some ownership of the work and if capable should produce good stuff in this setting.

It is time intensive for the instructor to be reading and commenting this way, but it certainly is a good way to have dialog with students on a one-on-one basis, conversations that the students probably wouldn't initiate otherwise. And the deliverable can then be something all are proud of.

Merging Multiple PowerPoint Presentations.....

.....created by several authors.

The CIC LT Group is having a virtual conference, Clouds on the Horizon. I'm facilitating one of the working groups, LMS/Sade. We are doing a session later today called Apres la LMS. The session is to be held in Adobe Connect. Risk averse about these particular things, I insisted that team members make PowerPoint presentations that are pre-uploaded into Connect rather than do any screen sharing. I thought we might have latency issues with the latter.

So the last day or two the PowerPoints have been coming in. I have to say that working with a bunch of folks I really didn't know before but who have something of a common purpose and who have adopted a cooperative tone is quite a bit of fun. The collaboration itself has been a very good thing. I believe the CIC should encourage this sort of thing more frequently. There are benefits from it.

Merging PowerPoints, however, was more challenging than I had anticipated. I did a Google search on this and found this page, which unfortunately applies to Office 2003. The approach doesn't seem to have been retained in PowerPoint 2007. I tried the help but didn't find anything useful, so I flailed around for a while. Ultimately, I had a brainstorm. If I were designing PowerPoint and I wanted this work, how would I build the functionality in? From there I got to the solution in a few steps.

On the View menu, there is an Arrange All button. If you have two PowerPoint presentations open, those appear side by side. Put each presentation in slide sorter view. Then select a slide in one presentation and drag it over to the other, inserting it where you want in the presentation. For whatever reason, on my computer that usually took two tries. But it did work.

Once in a while what copied didn't quite appear the same in the destination as it looked in the original. Some of the formatting gets messed up if there is too much of it on a slide. Perhaps because my original was .ppt and some people sent .pptx. But otherwise, it worked.

Not bad. I wonder whether this will add to the pile of useless knowledge that I've accumulated or if I'll use this approach again in the future.

Mr. Holland's Opus and Harper Lee's

Too much schmaltz is not good for you. Sometimes dispassion is necessary and then austerity in one's entertainments is preferred. Or, if passion is to be sought, perhaps it needs to be of the transcendent type, where in spite of witnessing misplaced fervor we are nonetheless elevated from the watching, as we ourselves are not so possessed and greatly admire those who are. But other times, maybe when we're down or feel befuddled or see what appears to be our last opportunity to accomplish something of substance wash through our fingers like the ebb tide as we're kneeling at the beach, then schmaltz might be just the ticket, comforting for the most part, with perhaps a tad of an educational idea, but nothing too challenging.

Last night, Mr. Holland's Opus was on one of the movie channels. I'd been struggling with the most recent posts of my students - they blog weekly on a prompt I suggest for them or on a topic of their own choosing that is in some way related to course. The course is called Designing for Effective Change. Approaching the last lap of the semester, we're now supposed to be working on a class project, which is aimed at making some effective change on Campus. But reading the students posts, I was struck by how many of them are defenders of the status quo. After all, these students have done very well by the system, so why wouldn't they defend it. Yet somehow I expected them to see through their own experience, even to sacrifice some of that, if doing so would benefit their fellow student who has not fared quite as well as they have. Then, too, I've become aware that as writing exercises in other classes some students do design projects for change, but as an artificial form only, the goal being to deliver the paper for the writing requirement, not to implement the recommendations from the paper. I had wanted something real to come out of this class project. I still want that. But a real outcome is receding from probability to possibility and may fade out entirely from view. Instead we'll get another academic exercise that doesn't amount to much; the course as a whole may have touched a few students, but the class project probably not.

So there is Mr. Holland, the teacher who got it right, though he didn't know it while he was doing it, the teacher who devoted so much of his individual time to helping his students outside the regular classroom that he had no time left to write his own music or spend with his family, the underpaid music teacher who had to teach driver's ed in the summer to make ends meet, the teacher who fully committed to excellent performance by his students and so willingly persisted alongside them till they could deliver on this goal, the teacher who constantly worked at understanding student motivation and continued to try new approaches to tap into that. Mr. Holland, who makes the Quixote tilting that is teaching seem like a noble cause, who matters in the lives of his former students, enough so that they gather at his surprise retirement party to perform his yet unperformed "An American Symphony." Schmaltzy movies always have a happy ending. And in schmaltzy movies, the good guys matter; they matter a lot. Viewing this one got me ready for another day of school, even though the class project is going into the crapper.

The course is more than the class project. The students as bloggers are individual writers, some taking great pains to produce work with originality and creativity. It is my first time having students do this sort of thing and what I'm learning is that my job is as much about soothing ego as it is about coaching the writing craft. I've had an intimate relationship with angst since when I was a teen and through much of my adult life, so I thought I'd be able to understand the inner workings of these kids and be able to relate to them accordingly. But angst comes in different flavors. Mine does not feature the strong perfectionism that seems to inhabit many of the students. So I feel ill prepared to help them, though I do embrace most of the strategies for effective teachers at the listed at the linked page. (I don't talk openly about perfectionism, though some of the students do.)

Worse, on occasion I seem to be feeding the beast. Praise for work that I truly believe is well done turns into a short-lived benefit for the student and a long term cost, by creating an expectational floor for the upcoming work not yet submitted. The successful writer develops writer's block by dint of the past success. Surely this is pathology. Or is it?

I thought of To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the great first novels of the twentieth century. For Harper Lee it was also her last published novel. It is unclear why this is the case since she was in her early thirties when To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and is alive still today. Was the fame which accompanied the success of the book so unwelcome that she didn't dare produce another masterpiece? Was it that having hit the nail perfectly square on the head with the hammer she no longer had use for other nails and no reason to wield another hammer? Or was she sent to purgatory by her own perfectionism, her one act play so good that it was simply too tough for her to produce a second act.

Knowing of Harper Lee, how does one coach a talented yet perfectionist student nowadays about the student as a writer. Everything seems so much more accentuated now than when I was a college student. I saw anorexia then but only in isolated individuals. Now the mindset, if not the physical manifestation, seems much more prevalent, especially in this group of high achievers. What then, should be done about it?

These kids very well might not see writing as their vocation for other reasons. Most are pursuing a career in some profession - engineering, business, or medicine. But in our first full book that we read for the class, Better, the author Atul Gawande concludes with a set of suggestions to become a positive deviant, including "write something." So the students have it on better authority than I can offer that writing should be something they do, in addition to their profession if not in lieu of it. Ahead of teaching this class I'd have given Gawande's recommendation my full throated endorsement.

Now I am less sure. For the perfectionist students in my class, will any produce an opus of writing? If so, when will it occur in their own career trajectories? Will it happen as with Mr. Holland, to mark a good and productive life, one with meaning for others? If it doesn't happen at all, will it be because as faux Harper Lee's they flame out before reaching their prime?

For me as a teacher, what am I to make of this, viewing writing at the path to deep thinking and learning yet sworn to "do no harm"? I can't see how to make progress with the students without putting them at risk. I fear that some may be too fragile for the journey.

Are students ready for Web 2.0 in their classes?

This afternoon, Norma introduced me to the presentation, Meet Charlotte. The gist of the presentation is that in our personal lives we have all this open and highly networked communication, which is very easy to learn to use. However, at work we have walled off technologies that appear clunky and difficult to use. So, the presentation asks, why not make the IT environment at work more like it is at home.

I've been teaching this way for the past two months or so. If the students are taking to it like ducks taking to water, they sure have an odd way of showing it. Now it is true that I'm having the students write longer posts, not tweets and maybe that explains it. But many of them have gone out of their way to talk about being self-conscious in writing out in the open. They haven't gone out of their way to say it is an out and out bad thing to do. But they also haven't said this is the intellectual equivalent of a return to nature. If given the option of what they are doing now or the alternative of writing in a walled off environment, I think many of them would choose the latter. It's not the ease of use I'm talking about. It's the safety. They seem to feel at risk on the open Internet.

In my own head I'm not sure whether to accommodate them or cajole them out of their comfort zone. I should note that most of these kids are studying science or engineering, with a few others mixed in, but no humanists in the crowd. What we are doing in my class is outside their experience of their other courses.

Ironically as I'm asking this, some have produced quite interesting writing. So judged by that, the approach seems to be working. But should students be in a more or less ongoing state of discomfort? I would answer yes if the matter was purely intellectual and what was at root was students challenging their own prior held beliefs. That's not what is happening here. Instead, the students seem to be afraid that their own performance is not up to snuff or that they inadvertently say something that will get them into trouble later.

This isn't the end of the story. They have been mostly writing for me. I'm trying to get them to write for each other. Maybe they will come around if that happens. But getting the writing for each other to happen well and getting them to come around is by no means a slam dunk.

I wonder if other instructors are seeing something like this and if they believe Web 2.0 is the right approach in spite of student shyness.

a wise quack

http://itwatercooler.illinois.edu/s/mallards-retirement-set-june-30-2010

Teaching and Learning: The Extensive and Intensive Margins

While my university may be slower than many others in determining the magnitude of budget cut it will have to manage, there is much anticipation that cuts are pending. One set of obvious adjustments that will be made on the instructional side - average teaching loads will go up, there will be fewer non-tenure track instructors and among those who are tenured already there will be greater variation in teaching load, depending on what other contributions the faculty member is making. High-powered researchers will teach less. Those with a more modest research portfolio will teach more. This necessary adjustment will begin to codify what has been implicit until now. Teaching and research are substitutes from the faculty member's perspective, especially when viewed from the vantage of how to allocate faculty time. The promotional videos that campuses like mine have put out for years for viewing at the half-time of basketball and football games create the image of a strong connection between research and teaching. That there is some connection I would agree. If that connection were strong, however, we'd witness teaching loads increasing across the board as the way to manage the budget cuts, unlike what I ventured above. We'll see. In one way I look forward to this change. It will, I hope, make the conversation about teaching and learning more realistic. That would be welcome.

The sort of changes I mention above will be imposed from the top, because that is where the budget issues will be managed. Lower to the ground, I don't believe it has sunk in that substantive change on campus needs to occur. Rather it seems to be business as usual. Yesterday I was talking with a colleague who mentioned his department might be adding an additional course to the major. He didn't elaborate on the reasons, but it is easy enough to conjecture that in most fields, this particular one included, knowledge is expanding at a pretty rapid clip. So students need to be exposed to more of what the field has to offer in order to claim competency in "the major." There is a logic to this sort of argument. But the consequence in the aggregate is to see an ever expanding set of courses on the books. I believe we've witnessed exactly that. And my guess is that it is the same elsewhere. Majors have become more demanding. Students either take more credit hours overall before they graduate, or they take fewer electives. But the offerings of those electives persists.

A couple of years ago following the ELI conference I wrote a couple of posts, one that critiqued what I had heard at the conference, the other offering a vision of an alternative. Part of that I called "Humanism Across the Curriculum." I am becoming increasingly convinced that it is a correct direction for us, though it is far from what we are doing now. Indeed, we are trapped in what we are doing now so that we can't get there from here unless we undo a substantial part of our current activity. I'll circle back to that point in a bit.

I'm teaching an Honors Seminar at present. Some of the students are taking it for Advanced Composition credit, which embraces the Writing Across the Curriculum approach that I critiqued in that earlier post. The critique was based on the resource demands of WAC, not the pedagogy. My class now has 17 students. (It was capped at 18; one student dropped.) Even the non-WAC students in my class are doing a fair amount of writing via weekly reflections that they blog. Midway into the semester the class is beginning to gel, as the students are commenting on the posts of their peers and in so doing they are showing support and awareness of the contributions of their classmates. In other words, we're producing the requisite sense of community and feeling of intensity that is conducive to deep learning.

I do want to note here that motivation is much less of an issue in this class than it might be elsewhere, because of who the students are. They want to find meaning from the class as much as I do. If all students were like these Honors students, then what I say next might be much easier to achieve.

I am wondering if the intensity and sense of community in the class could be maintained, if the enrollment had been capped at 30 or even 35, or if that increase in size would so put a damper on what we are doing that all would be lost. My belief is that it could be done. Let me elaborate.

I've put quite a bit of effort into this class, but much of that is because on both the subject matter and on the approach this is new to me. Some of this effort, however, I believe needs to be retained were there to be repeat offerings of the course. I've written a fair amount myself for the course, partly to model for the students, partly to provide commentary on how the class is going, and also to demonstrate my personal commitment. That, I believe, must be retained. The first several weeks I not only read all the student posts, but I also commented on them. These comments are individualistic, not some canned response. To generate them the post must be read and there must be some analysis of it in order to respond. This is time consuming, but I believe necessary. Thereafter I said I'd comment on about a third of the posts, but I've done more than that. There would have to more discipline on which posts to comment on, with a shorter duration at the beginning where all students would comment. And there would have to be greater urging for the students to comment and indeed to post about what other students have written. This part is do-able too.

The live class session, currently conducted mostly as an ensemble discussion, would probably require breaking the students up into small groups for a good part of the session, so they can voice their own views. That requires more orchestration ahead of time. That would be some work. We'd also need a mechanism for those groups to report out and discuss their conclusions. Developing that would also be work. But it seems possible.

We took an experimental approach to the course sessions and after the first week started to evaluate those via a survey in Google Docs. I posted about that in early September. I think the experimental approach is also critical, though the particular method of evaluation perhaps can be improved. In any event, students who see that their opinions matter in how the course is conducted are much more inclined to participate vigorously. The post processing of those surveys is not hard. (A summary of the multiple choice questions is produced. That is converted to PDF and posted. The responses from the paragraph questions have to be re-ordered to anonymity can be maintained. Then those can be posted too.) This needs to be done until the class function seems satisfactory for both students and instructor. Once that results appears close, students will stop participating in the surveys, because they won't see the value. Indeed, a fall off in participation is a good indicator that expectations have stabilized.

So I do think it possible to expand enrollments in the way outlined above, in which case one could teach this sort of course more frequently and get a much larger number of students involved. There is a different matter of whether instructors around Campus could find their way to teach their current undergraduate courses in a Humanism Across the Curriculum manner. That's an issue for a different post. Here let's just assume they can do this.

Now we can turn to the sort of back of the envelope calculations that are great to do on a slow Sunday morning. We have about 2000 tenured or tenure-track faculty members. If each taught one of these intensive, Humanism Across the Curriculum courses, and each of these courses had a cap of 35 students, which for the sake of argument was binding in every case, than that would produced 70,000 enrollments in such classes. But we have on order of 30,000 undergraduate students (actually more) and if they take 4 or 5 courses a semester then that demand requires somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 enrollments.

While there might be a substantial enrollment taught in the HAC way, there is a sizable enrollment gap that somehow must be managed. Further, in the above calculation we've already allocated to the faculty their undergraduate teaching obligation. So if the gap is made up via supply, that must be done with adjuncts and/or graduate students teaching, some of which clearly will happen via large class instruction.

How much of the student experience should be via large class instruction?. Can we credibly affirm the benefit of large class instruction when we are making such a big deal about HAC? Why not reduce demand instead? This is the conclusion that seems irresistible to me. Students should be taking fewer courses over their experience in college. The courses that remain should be more intensive. Other courses need to be removed from the experience.

It is on this point where we we must undo. We are headed in the wrong direction on the number of courses front. We are moving toward expansion when we should be moving toward reduction. How can we get there?

If the number of credit hours necessary for graduation remains unaltered, then a bunch of current courses that have x credit hours need to be converted to have x + 1 or x + 2 credit hours, so the students can acquire the same number of credit hours with fewer courses, or students need to be able to earn course credit from practicum and other experiences that they do in lieu of courses they are now taking. We probably need some of both of this type of approach.

I don't see this sort of reform on anyone's radar right now. I wonder what it will take to get other faculty and administrators to think this way. My sense is that instead, we'll do less on the intensive margin, because that sort of activity will be viewed as too expensive. That will be a mistake, but it sure seems likely based on where we are currently headed.

Expensive Speech

I take the report of the increased lobbying on health care reform to be true. The analysis of why the lobbying, however, seems flawed to me. Rather than focus on the Republicans, who are not large enough by themselves to block anything, the piece should focus on divisions among Democrats. If the press could accurately analyze and report on the lobbying activity that potentially could mitigate its impact. As it is, however, it seems like we're witnessing bribery right in front of our noses, and to ill effect socially.

Millions spent to sway health care opinions - CNN.com via kwout

Situated Logic and Standardized Pests

Here's the canonical problem. You need to explain a general principle to someone else, someone who isn't all that great at abstract reasoning or who generally prefers to hear a story rather than a syllogism. So you explain the principle via a realistic example that is worked through. That let's you tell the story and illustrate the principle at the same time. Your task then is to figure out what details of the example to include in your presentation. Some of those details are there to illustrate the principle. Others are there to embellish the story. The question then is what to include in the example and why. Have you told a good story? Is the principle clearly articulated within the story? Those are the two main questions to use to test the solution.

If this canonical problem is taken as the basis for a certain type of writing, then the next question is whether the writer has enough of a sense of taste to give reasonable answers to those test questions. Likewise, the canonical problem can be taken as the basis for a certain type of live presentation to an audience. Again, the follow up question is whether the presenter has enough of a sense of taste to give reasonable answers to the test questions.

The canonical problem, as it is constructed here, is the obverse of the type of reading comprehension problems one sees on the SAT. The College Board calls these Passage Based Reading. Understanding how to do these sort of questions conveys a type of reasoning ability. As I've written elsewhere, mostly recently in this chapter of my book, I've had suspicion for quite a long while that many students don't have good skills in doing this based on my experience with getting them to discuss articles about economics from the New York Times. (I'm not referring to recent experience but rather from courses I've taught over the past 13 or 14 years.)

Do note that I was careful with the choice of the word "obverse." The canonical problem is not the inverse of the reading comprehension problem. There is some art involved in choosing what detail to include or not from the example. Being an engaging story teller requires more than understanding of logic. Nevertheless, there is also a type of reasoning involved. Getting the gist of the general principle into the story requires identification of what that gist is. This creates an imperative for the writer or the presenter.

One might speculate that being good at the reading comprehension questions would dispose one to be good at solving the canonical problem. That had been my prior expectation. But now I'm beginning to wonder.

In the class I'm currently teaching, which has students from our Campus Honors Program who typically have very high standardized test scores, the students are struggling with solving the canonical problem. At first, I was quite surprised by this. Now, as I'm trying to make sense of what I'm observing, there seem to be two possible conclusions to draw.

One may be that the students have reading comprehension of a teach-to-the-test variety. In the testing situation the students are clued to read the passage and ask - what is the test maker looking for? Armed with that clue the students can make good meaning of the passage. But for other reading, more expansive and free ranging, they don't read in the same way or don't know how to distill the essence of what they are reading. The ability to understand a narrowly focused passage is surely necessary, but it is in no way sufficient.

Unfortunately, this ability to make sense of a larger body of reading material defies the standardized tests, because measuring it would take too long in the administration of the exam. So, I'm afraid, we really know quite little about how students read for meaning when confronting a longer work. We should fess up to that fact.

The other possible conclusion is that even with good reading comprehension the student will still struggle on the canonical problem, because they are separate skills. In this case the obvious conclusion is that students need training on how to work the canonical problem. My sense of it, based on my class. is that students are not getting this training much if at all.

Neither possible conclusion makes me happy. But talking it out this way, I feel more that the students are the victims than the perpetrators. I've got to keep that in mind as I teach. Yet I also have to wonder how we can so neglect their intellectual development, including the best and the brightest of them.