Excise The Textbook

There are some old things that we need to preserve and cherish. Last night on the TCM channel they were showing To Have and Have Not. The movie is probably best remembered as Lauren Bacall's debut - "You know how to whistle." Hers is a total presence in this film, quick on the uptake, poise beyond her years, a pro as a hustler yet still a kid. The movie, however, is not just Lauren Bacall. There are other characters in the background who do wonderful things, notably Hoagy Carmichael as the piano player, Cricket. You get from him a sense of how his songs were composed and how his need as a songwriter is driven by capturing the imagination of the audience. And Walter Brennan is excellent too, the lush who is a flake but also a person of substance. Of course there's Bogie, the antihero par excellence, out for himself while serving the cause of Free France. The movie was made during World War II. It seems a blend of film noir and patriotic themes. There are definitely good guys and bad guys. But the message holds up because the characters have been around the block and are believable. It's a film I can enjoy viewing periodically for the rest of my life.

There are other old things that need to be ditched. They embrace practices that no longer fit. They block newer ideas that need to emerge. This piece is about one of those things - the textbook. At the college level, we should be getting rid of it. I'll explain why.

The best of textbooks provide "end point thinking" and that is what these books present to the students. End point thinking is the received wisdom of experts in the discipline, suitably translated for the novice mind. Students are somehow expected to "suck in" the end point thinking and internalize it. Through that process they will come to know the subject matter. However, the process of going from ignorance of the subject to mastery of the end point remains totally opaque. My surmisal of the actual situation is that in many cases the process doesn't lead to fruition. Ignorance or prior held view is retained, even for many students who do well on the tests in the course.

In the last five to seven years, clickers (automatic response units for polling students in the live classroom) have become popular. Their benefit is that they can readily show dissonance among the students to queries the instructor poses. Having demonstrated such dissonance, there is a need to resolve it. One good path to resolution is that a student and her neighbor(s) discuss their views of the situation and then argue their way to to a common understanding, after which another iteration with the clickers can show if the class now seems to better see the right way to think about the problem. The dissonance serves as a motivation for the discussions among the students. In the main, however, the content of these discussions does not find its way to a more broad airing.

An alternative is to have the students do a "preflight quiz" online in advance of the class session. In addition to answering the closed ended quiz question, the student is asked to provide her reasoning and justification for the answer they selected. The instructor can cull through these responses and select representatives or particularly interesting comments. Part of the live class session then becomes a response to those or the session launches in an entirely new direction triggered by those responses. This is the essence of Just In Time Teaching. It conveys the idea that student formative thinking should have influence on what goes on in the classroom.

However, the situation thus described pertains to only to a highly insular world where the subject matter is for the most part pre-determined. Perhaps that makes sense in introductory Physics. I'm not sure about that. It certainly doesn't make sense in undergraduate microeconomics, courses I teach. A significant chunk of such courses should be taken up with how the subject matter relates to what is going on in the "real world," say as depicted by pieces in NPR, articles in the New York Times, or elsewhere in the popular media.

Textbooks are not helpful in either of these dimensions. By emphasizing the end point thinking these books mask the student formative thinking. By offering a complete program to the instructor, they seem to provide the option to exclude real world current events as legitimate objects of study in the class. Such exclusion means the students never learn how to translate what they are being taught to apply to issues that should be of interest and concern. The courses will seem irrelevant in this case.

There is the further issue of the changing demographics in General Education instruction. When I started teaching, 30 years ago, almost all large introductory classes at Illinois were taught by regular faculty, mainly tenured professors who had a flair for the subject and for presenting to a large audience. Nowadays, many if not most of the instructors are non-tenure track. These instructors are more risk-averse in their approach and thus more inclined to offer a cookbook view of the subject matter, especially if that "satisfies" the students, as measured by the course evaluations and any other assessment instrument that might be introduced to measure effectiveness of instruction. By overt indicators, things may appear to be going swimmingly. But deep learning is unlikely to happen in this setting.

There is a need to introduce ongoing experimentation in the approach to teaching and learning in these classes and to expect instructors who do this to themselves learn about how to effectively teach the subject in a way that has a chance to open the students' eyes and change their world view. Surely this will imply a greater focus on student intrinsic motivation, about exposing student formative thinking, and a push to tie the subject matter to the real world. The textbook is a force for the old way of instruction. There needs to be a counter force for the new.

If such a counter force were present and viable, would the textbook have to be eliminated entirely or might it be retained as one piece of the instructional materials for the course? I don't know the answer to that question. There are too many other unknowns that would help determine the answer. What will replace the textbook? My hope is that it would be the creations of the students themselves. What students create in one offering of the course could be repurposed in future offerings of the class and utilized by other students. Idealistic as I am about that prospect, there is another side of me that is a realist. We're not ready to flick that switch and make the change. Other intermediate steps need to happen first.

What I'd like to see is a rather massive undertaking of having students produce multimedia content in doing their outside of the classroom work. What I have in mind is an online version of show and tell, a pedagogy that was prominent when I was in grade school. Show and tell is a pedagogy that should be preserved. Students can do show and tell via screencasts or analogous modes of online presentation. I made an argument for doing this a couple of years ago, when there was still a fair amount of production value needed to produce something decent. Nowadays, a student can use the free version of Jing and post the resulting movie in swf format as an email attachment to Posterous, where it appears embedded in a blog post. Or they can use the Pro version of Jing ($15/year) and upload to YouTube. So far I've not seen others using screencasts in this way for regular homework. If this were to happen and the student body as a whole developed the relevant sort of experience for making these, it could serve as the basis for the type of change I'm talking about.

An alternative is to use the screencasts for online presentations that are course projects and may be done in lieu of having the students make in class presentations. Because the projects are larger than a simple homework assignment, students might get more into the multimedia production. Here are some ideas on making such projects, aimed at students learning a different sort of communication style concomitant to learning the subject matter. I embraced the approach in the seminar class I taught in fall 2009 and the students who made these did some interesting work.

The profession doesn't seem to have taken up this idea of student multimedia presentation as the path to the future. Instead, there has been a recent very heavy focus on eTexts. I'm seeing it on the listservs I participate in. I'm having discussions about it with friends and colleagues, mostly because textbook pricing is a prominent issue. And the popular press has embraced the story, for example, see this online debate at the New York Times Web site. I believe that because of budget problems in most of Higher Ed, the cost issues are getting the attention and causing the profession to lose track of the learning issues, which undoubtedly are larger and more important long term. And on the learning issues, courses that are entirely steeped in the textbook are taking a 19th century teaching approach and not well instructing the students on the learning to learn skills that should be the essence of a well prepared 21st century mind.

If the students were learning deeply, the cost of readings issue would fade into the background. Absent any deep learning, the entire education becomes expensive indeed and the cost of materials appears to be rubbing salt into the wound. We may very well be in crisis now. The solution, however, doesn't lie in electronic versions of the traditional approach. It requires a different approach entirely.

The Geometry of Innocence

When idealism meets reality, what happens? My experience is that history repeats, but in a different, parallel universe.

There has been a tension in learning technology as long as I can remember, between the individual and the computer on the one hand and social interactions between individuals that the technology facilitates on the other. I first encountered the "thinking of the discipline" on this tension when I and my co-authors wrote the paper on the SCALE Efficiency Projects, back in 1998. SCALE was funded by the Sloan grant program for online learning and our philosophy came very much from them, as interpreted by Burks Oakley. But there was no prior Sloan writing on using technology to achieve efficiency. I discovered examples of such writing via NLII, which if I recall correctly (my memory is weak here) had a library of white papers housed on the Educom Web site.

Many years later, with the Sloan grant so far in the background that it no longer appeared in the rear-view mirror, the universes collided again. The occasion was the appearance of a paper by Massy and Zemsky called Thwarted Innovation, which many took issue with, including several members of the Sloan-C listserv. (I participated in that list and am still a member.) Somebody decided it would be useful and interesting to invite Bill Massy onto the list to discuss and debate the issues. He agreed. For a while there was an interesting discussion though some of it seemed to me like two ships passing in the night. Then there was a blowup, as comments got personal, which seemed to conclude the discussion. On the substance, however, I thought we weren't done. So I wrote this post to the Sloan-C listserv back in fall 2004, to resuscitate the conversation. I received a handful of emails from well regarded people on the list thanking me for this post, as it did provide some synthesis. But no further discussion of the topic ensued as a consequence. (This bothered me and was one of the reasons I started blogging the following winter. If my posting wasn't going to generate discussion, why restrict the eyeballs that might read what I had to say to just the Sloan list?)

Now these themes seem to be emerging again, with locus the Educause Review issue that has recently appeared and its theme on Openness. My attention turned immediately to the piece by Brian Lamb and Jim Groom, Never Mind the Edupunks; or The Great Web 2.0 Swindle. Lamb and Groom are two of the brighter lights in the Ed Tech constellation. They tell a cautionary tale, alerting us to the risks of proprietary but open software. As an alternative they propose creating a safe zone: online, open, and for education only, no commercial interests represented and therefore a self-sustaining space entirely funded by education. Implicit in this view of Ed Tech is a playground designer's mentality to design. It is sufficient to put in a jungle gym, swings, a seesaw, and lots of space for the kids to run around. Let's leave the games the kids are to play to the children themselves. They can invent that on their own. Our job is to ensure they have good facilities to play in.

There are too many heroes in this domain to list here, but we offer a shout-out to the jaw-dropping CUNY Academic Commons (http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/), which seamlessly integrates the open-source WordPress, MediaWiki, and BuddyPress platforms into an appealing and highly sustainable environment. The power placed into the hands of the users reflects the stated intent of Luke Waltzer, administrator of the CUNY platform Blogs@Baruch, "to gradually integrate into the school's general education curriculum the deep, critical examination of how digital tools are changing the way we think and live."¹⁹

I don't think the playground designer way, I suppose because I'm an economist. I think of the technology environment in much the same way that I conceive of an incentive scheme, something aimed to influence behavior in a certain way. I'm currently reading Nudge, a book I might use in a course I hope to teach next spring. A good part of the reason why that book was written was to develop an acceptable paternalism, one that leaves free choice with the individual but nonetheless encourages a certain types of behavior. Surely we in Ed Tech are paternalistic. There are behaviors that we'd like to see in the teachers and students we support and other behaviors we'd prefer to proscribe. Just as surely it is safer for us to zero in on the technology and take the playground designer approach. But being safer doesn't mean it's right. Overt paternalism might open us up to criticism. But it would make it clearer what we're really after and whether we've achieved our goals.

There is another serious reason to focus on the behavior specifically. There may be multiple ways to achieve a nudge (e.g., social interactions need not be technology mediated), hence good nudges (least intrusive, lowest cost) and bad nudges (heavy handed, very costly). It may also be the case that if one hasn't worked through the full chain of causality, then the outcome one gets might be quite different from the one that was intended (e.g., using the LMS to push PowerPoints at students instead of to extend in-class discussion online). Does the Open Education safe haven make for a good nudge? How can we know that?

And then I've got my own personal reason for wanting to take an other than playground design approach. I'm turning into my dad. He came of age during the Great Depression and though while I was growing up our family was comfortable financially, he remained a cheapskate on certain things - for example he'd buy the store brand paper towels, the kind that would melt in your hands while you were using them rather than one of the name brands. In his view, store brand was good enough. Save the cash for something else more important, for example giving a bequest so the grandchildren would have their college education paid for. My sense is to be a cheapskate with the technology. It needs to work, no doubt. It doesn't need to be perfect. This is a view I got exposed to as a Sloan grantee. I still believe it.

In my EQ column about the LMS, I made the point that ROI is linked to the behavioral issues. So CIO types, if not Ed Techers, should have some interest in the resulting behavior as they attempt to see what type of ROI they are getting from whatever online learning environments they do support. My guess, however, is that many CIOs, especially those with a heavy IT background, don't have a clue as to what type of behavior they'd like to see. Who will help to educate them on this?

Inspired by Atul Gawande's The Bell Curve, what I'd like to see is an ongoing and institutional-level embrace of teaching and learning as experiment - there is something new to try each time a class is offered. The experiment need not be radical, but it must follow in a sensible way by what has come before, borrowing from the experience of others and one's own prior experience, and there needs to be a new experiment the next time around. We have had something like a pure behavioral approach to this goal in the form of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), which has captured the minds of a few early adopters but has not diffused broadly at all. SOTL places a rather high bar for the instructor to leap over. And SOTL seems such a solitary activity; other instructors interested in it likely share no disciplinary affinity. So to see broad-based experimentation with teaching and learning we need something more do-able. And we need a nudge, quite possibly several nudges.

I can't really say whether the online, open, for education only safe zone would be an ideal nudge, the irresistible force, if you will. I do have considerable experience, however, with that immovable object, faculty inertia. Truthfully, it's not completely immovable. Encouraging a regime of modest experiments is possible, at least for some faculty. Is that the best we can hope for with the best possible interventions? I don't know. I wish it were more. And I wish we'd agree that is the goal.

Ed Techers, many of whom are apt to be innovators or early adopters themselves, certainly Lamb and Groom are in that category, aspire for a technology environment that appeals to their own aesthetic demands, driven by their own learning needs. They can be playground designers because surely they'd have a grand time in a playground of their own making.

But there are pessimists in the crowd and they'd be miserable no matter what the environment and there are optimists too who, as we know, only need the possibility of a pony.

* * * * *

Post to Sloan-C listserv, fall 2004

We are just starting the fall semester here and it has been more than a week since there has been a post on this thread. Perhaps it is time to resume. I am in the middle of reading Bill's book, "Honoring the Trust.....," having just finished the chapter on Technology's misunderstood potential. For those who don't know me, we had a big Sloan grant for "On Campus ALN" called the SCALE project. It ran from 1995 - 2000. My goal is to contrast the Massy view, as I understand it, with the Sloan approach. I will then conclude with the question: do these distinctions matter and should we emphasize them or should we live happily together under the umbrella e-Learning?

Here are my organizing questions:
1. What is the innovation?
2. What are main sources of productivity enhancement?
3. What is the "correct" way to diffuse the approach?

I hope I don't offend here. It is not my goal. So please do correct/modify the responses to make this more accurate. With that disclaimer, I will write "Bill's view" and "Frank's view" to describe my understanding of the two positions.

1. What is the innovation?

Bill's View: The technology, of course. Most broadly, this is the Internet. It is also email, Course management systems, streaming media, java applets - any Web based or computer based application that can be used for teaching and learning.

Frank's View: The technology is secondary. Off the shelf software will do. (When we tried to get Frank to fund software development projects, and we did try, the answer was invariably, no. This is not Sloan's way. Contrast this with what Mellon is doing. They are putting lots of $$$ into open source software.) More important is to focus on the social organization of the class. I recall reading something by Frank early on where each student was viewed as a node on a network and all nodes were important. Students were contributors of knowledge as well as receivers of information. The technology enabled this type of social organization to communicate "asynchronously" and thereby accommodate work and lifestyle patterns of the students. To the extent that technology enabled the social organization and the asynchronous communication, it was obviously critical. But the improvements beyond that were really secondary.

Comments: On the teaching and learning per se, I believe these views are opposed. Frank has made a point that there is insufficient infrastructure on advising, pointing students to appropriate offerings, etc., and on this dimension there may be more agreement.

2. What are the primary sources of productivity enhancement? (On this one I think the two views are most compatible and this is more a matter of perspective.)

Bill's view: Let the technology do what it does well - this is pure capital for labor substitution - and in particular get students introduced to the subject via technology based presentations and assessments. Assign the instructional labor, research oriented faculty in Honoring the Trust... to more in depth interactions with students after the students having gotten through the introduction to the material and proven their mastery of the introductory content. There is substantial waste in the current lecture mode approach in that instructors spend a lot of time presenting introductory material and students are not well incented to be prepared for class.

Frank's view: The issue is primarily pedagogy, which given the answer to the first question means taking approaches to make the communication within the social network effective and meaningful. An example might help here. Burks Oakley was a featured speaker at a faculty summer institute I ran in May and he was very highly evaluated by those in attendance. Burks spent some time talking about how students in an ALN course come in expecting to behave passively (hit reply and then type "ditto" in a discussion thread) and that they have to be coached into becoming active contributors in the course. (Burks suggested requiring the students to enter a descriptive phrase into the Subject line even when they were responding and requiring them to make a novel contribution in the body of the message and to let them know they'd be evaluated as doing such.)

Comments: The LON-CAPA approach at Michigan State has received funding from Frank but is pretty squarely in the capital-for-labor approach to instruction. Likewise for Mallard here. Bill certainly talks about "active learning" so he might very well say "of course" to Burks' approach, but Bill emphasizes faculty-student interaction occurring when the student has gone further down the learning curve and is more ready to appreciate the faculty member's expertise while Burks' approach emphasizes early faculty intervention with the students because getting their full participation is critical.

3. What is the correct way to diffuse the approach?

Bill's view: Learning Objects are extremely important (they are needed for the capital-for-labor substitution that is critical for the productivity enhancement) and hence there must be a large up front investment to get things to work so that there is an ample stock of learning objects from which to proceed.

Frank's view: Up front development should be modest. (I believe we used to quote figures of around $15K - $20K per course.) There is much more benefit in following the old Nike approach, "Just Do It" and improve the course through repeated teaching than to do massive development up front.

Comments: Bill's view seems more in tune with Carol Twigg's Pew program in course redesign in that the focus seems first and foremost on the high enrollment introductory courses. We have 20 - 30 such courses on our campus that are "super large" (enrollments in excess of 800 per semester) and about 1600 other undergraduate courses. Frank's view seems to focus on the other 1600. At a conference earlier this month at Parkland college I heard a representative of the Sakai project take the Bill view in reference to the British Open University approach and that there is much efficiency to be had to have a "master course" that is very well designed and that all instructors teach out of and by extension of this logic there is benefit to share learning objects across campuses when there is a common curriculum. Perhaps true, but does that mean that we are going to go through a deliberate consolidation of those other 1600 courses so they are suitable for the Bill approach? If not, then Frank's approach seems more realistic and learning object sharing of ephemeral value.

Conclusion: I've drawn these distinctions to try to explain why it seems we have been talking past each other in this thread. There are differences. I don't think the question of whether e-Learning succeeded is the right one to ask. Better, I believe, is to address the question at the beginning: should we make a point of highlighting these differences in discussions with outsiders: The Chronicle, our Provosts and CIOs, our faculty and students, taxpayers, etc.? Or should we be one all inclusive tent of e-Learning?

Lanny Arvan
Assistant CIO for Educational Technology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Tired Again

Today marks the first day of my retirement, both the end of a long previous working life and a new beginning.  Over the weekend I had a couple of related turning points that marked the change. 

I finished Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, ultimately a book about woodenness of mindset, the March of Folly to use Barbara Tuchman's expression.  In this case folly with regard to a persistent belief that market based reforms can cure what ails American public schools.  These beliefs resulted in a drastic narrowing of the curriculum, a movement away from a broad based curriculum to one that emphasized math and reading at the expense of other subject matter, an over reliance on testing to demonstrate where school performance has gone afoul, and a move to charter schools which unlike public schools could exclude the under performers. 

It was hard to read this book.  I felt like I was being bludgeoned with one bad reform after another, each eventually going awry, a horrible amount of self-induced destruction.  Instead of learning from the mistakes many in positions of authority attempted to conceal them.  Midway through I wondered if the real cure might be a broad airing of The Oxbow Incident.  America has become Fascist and exhibits its authoritarian nature vis-à-vis school reform, how ironic. 

Ravitch's history seems fairly complete and, the bludgeoning notwithstanding, is well told.  She is quite even handed in her presentation and mainly non-judgmental.  At the end she does provide her pronouncements and there is no doubt about what they will be.  But during the rest of the book she provides arguments for the reforms, arguments she once believe in herself, but no longer subscribes to.  I did puzzle over some things and have some quibbles with what Ravitch advocates.  I detail those below.

Reading and performance on the reading portions of standardized test seems incredibly important to the reformers.  Yet I saw no mention whatsoever in Ravitch's book about any attempts to measure how much the kids were reading outside of school and what it was that they were reading that wasn't assigned to them as homework.  This seems rather strange to me since it is something that can be tracked and evaluated, even if much of the data are self-reported.  I really don't get why this sort of data collection is not being done on a widespread basis.  Ravitch argues that the tests are indicators at best.  The reformers overstate the value of the tests and regard them as sufficient.  Ravitch argues that the reformers only want to look at quantifiable information and that is a mistake.  I agree, but I'd also point out that it is fairly easy to represent outside of school reading in quantifiable form (measure volume and grade level of what is being read).  Ravitch does point out that in the high stakes environment we find ourselves in many people go out of their way to manipulate the measurements, ergo my previous post on Campbell's Law.  The same would likely be true for out of school reading.  But that doesn't explain why such data are not collected and discussed. 

Ravitch came of age as a Historian of Education studying the New York City Schools in the late 1960s, in particular the tensions that arose in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn that precipitated the Teachers' Strike of 1968.  I was a ninth grader then, starting the school year at Bayside High School, where I had to take a bus, and then after being miserable there transferring to Cardozo High School, which was walking distance from home.  In the interim there was the strike, during which I had my wisdom teeth out (mine were impacted and I was pretty sick afterward).  Then I attended a scab school held at Francis Lewis High School, but ultimately my mother became a member of the teacher's union and I stopped attending the scab school and/or the strike came to an end about that time.  (My memory is a little fuzzy on this detail.)  In any event, my recollections of this period suggest that Ravitch perhaps painted too glorious a picture of the past before the current reform era. 

The schools had busing to achieve integration but the integration was really only partial.  Gym, art and music were integrated but most of the academic classes were not.  We had a tracking system for the academic classes.  Tracking was achieved via the diploma - academic, commercial, or general (which I believe was found discriminatory right around the time I graduated in 1972) and within academic by a system that featured Honors classes for so-called bright students.  In math, we even had extra honors classes.  The sole academic class I had that was not tracked was economics.  It was a terrible course that taught us very little.   I wouldn't, however, attribute the outcome to lack of tracking but rather to the school not knowing what should be taught to high school students about economics, yet it being required within the curriculum. 

My point here is that the sorting out of the students far precedes the reforms of the last 15 - 20 years.  Housing patterns will create such sorting.  Beyond that, the schools themselves will do it.  Charter schools may push the idea that much further.  But the idea was already present quite a long time ago. I wonder if such sorting existed in the Houston public schools of the 1950s, schools that Ravitch extols as exemplar of good local public schools.  The sorting certainly was a feature of the schools I attended in Queens during the 1960s and early 1970s. 

Here is one further thing.  Since the reformers are so vilified in Ravitch's book (Kozol in The Shame of the Nation makes essentially the same points as Ravitch does, though Kozol is more explicit about the role race plays in the equation) there is not much room in the book to ask whether there are alternatives to what Ravitch argues for the antidote - have a sound and thorough curriculum.  The curricular approach can be critiqued for imbuing much disembodied knowledge that never gets connected to anything else.  For example, on that list of Hirsch's I cited in an earlier post, we were all taught that in 1066 William the Conqueror led the Normans to victory in the Battle of Hastings.  (Indeed, my dad in some one-upmanship taught us that in 1166 there was the Assize of Clarendon.)  So I know the factoid.  But I can't connect it to other English History or to American History in a meaningful way.  It is just an isolated and therefore meaningless event, as it exists in my mind.  Clearly Ravitch doesn't want to fill the heads of students with isolated factoids.  But apart from her bit on her own favorite teacher from high school, Mrs. Ratliff, there is no argument put forward in her book that a rigorous curriculum will provide the right intellectual fodder so that students so taught can weave the facts into interesting and coherent narratives.   I would argue that desired outcome requires more than curriculum.  Ravitch does say the pedagogy is important, but she also indicates it can be quite idiosyncratic and nonetheless be good, though she doesn't make me confident in that proposition.  I do not quite understand why she didn't argue for some kind of curriculum-pedagogy nexus, whether she thought it really was unnecessary or rather that it would open up its own can of worms.  Regardless, that is not in the book. 

Later Saturday afternoon I decided to get some exercise on the stationary bike.  (My blood pressure meds say to avoid excessive sunlight though the nurse this morning said with sunscreen and a hat I'd be fine being outside.)  For some reason I couldn't get the DVD player to work so I looked for something on the satellite to keep me amused.  Ultimately I found Compulsion and I watched the second half of the movie.  This is the fictionalized version of the famous Leopold and Loeb case.  (Afterward I asked my kids if they had heard of it.  They hadn't.  But they knew who Clarence Darrow was from Inherit The Wind.)   As a kid I was both frightened yet fascinated by the story.   I read the book and saw the movie.  (One of my high school classmates was fascinated with the TV show Adam 12 so it was interesting to see Martin Milner in such a different sort of role.)   The idea was to commit the perfect crime and get away with it, to murder an innocent kid, a way to demonstrate the inherent superiority of certain people.  The plan was impeccable and the execution of it near flawless.  It unraveled nonetheless.  One of the perpetrators dropped a pair of glasses at the scene of the crime.  The glasses had a unique design.  This provided the telltale evidence the District Attorney needed to make his case.

Orson Welles, appearing worn but still with some spit in him, makes an interesting Clarence Darrow (Jonathan Wilk in the fictionalized version).  After the six days of impaneling the jury he switches the plea from innocent to guilty, thereby eliminating the jury from the decision about punishment.  His closing speech, intended mainly for the judge but which all in the courtroom heard, is all about compassion. A hanging would be pure vindictiveness and provide no deterrent.  It is stirring oratory, influencing the aforementioned Milner (Sid Brooks in the movie) to change his mind about what the defendants deserved, where earlier he was completely unsympathetic to them owing to their barbarous act, after Wilk's speech he could see there was still some humanity in the defendants and that they deserved to be treated with decency. 

I wonder if in the near future we will come to regard the current school reformers, Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein to name two of the more prominent figures, as tragic figures a la Leopold and Loeb, so convinced that what they are doing is right that they remain oblivious to the vast destruction of human potential they are responsible for. Ravitch would rather us preserve our compassion for the children who are now being poorly educated. But if Ravitch changed her mind on these things, why couldn't the reformers do likewise? And what would more likely succeed in bringing them to a different point of view, a compassionate argument or another bludgeoning? How would a modern day Clarence Darrow go about convincing them that they should change their approach? 

I don't know. It seems in many respects that we in America are on the path to destroy ourselves.

Very Prescient

This was invented in 1975. I learned about it from Diane Ravitch's book.

Campbell's Law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia via kwout

The Flow Pigou Effect.

This is what Paul Krugman has been saying for some time, but now from some official types at the Fed. It doesn't really seem that they have the instruments to stem the tide. We need a public works program. The ordinary Pigou Effect says that with a drop in the price level real financial wealth has increased so spending should rise on its own accord. The flow effect, however, predicts the opposite. If deflation is expected to persist, there are gains to be had by hoarding cash. That becomes self-fulfilling.

Subtle Shift Within Fed Toward Deflation Concerns - NYTimes.com via kwout

The curse of the early adopter

If there is one consistent lesson that one gleans by studying school reform over the past century, it is the danger of taking a good idea and expanding it rapidly, spreading it thin. What is stunningly successful in a small setting, nurtured by its founders and brought to life by a cadre of passionate teachers, seldom survives the transition when it is turned into a large-scale reform. Whether charter schools are a sustainable reform, whether they can proliferate and at the same time produce good results, is a question yet to be resolved. Whether there is the will to close low-performing charters remains to be seen. Whether there is an adequate supply of teachers who are willing to work fifty-hour weeks is unknown. The biggest unknown is how the multiplication of charter schools will affect public education.
The Death And Life Of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
Chapter 7, penultimate paragraph.

We early adopters think it should be otherwise. That our early success should readily replicate. We do not see ourselves as exceptional, so why not? Our greatest sin is hubris. But we aren't the worst sinners. At least, we react to evidence and try to keep our beliefs consistent with the data.

Weekend Edition: Bernanke’s Fairytale & Keynes’s Quote « Alpha Dinar- talking GCC finance via kwout

Are We Ketman?

I have been reading the Diane Ravitch book The Death and Life of the American School System after being intrigued by the review written by E.D. Hirsch. Once I realized this was the same Hirsch who authored Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know which, once upon a time, I actually read I was surprised by how much of what Hirsch said seemed reasonable to me. When I used to teach the large section of intermediate microeconomics (about 10 years ago) my experience was that many of the students couldn't read the New York Times and make good meaning of the pieces I encouraged them to read. I found a Newsweek piece from back in 1987, A Dunce Cap for America (this link is to Ebsco which your Library must subscribe to to get to the record) that talks about Hirsch's book and Allan Bloom's The Closing of The American Mind. The Newsweek piece actually has a line, "Should it take a Ph.D. to read The New York Times?" Then a little later in the piece it has a Pop Quiz:

Here are some things E. D. Hirsch says literate Americans should know in high school. He asks only general familiarity and common associations -- instant recognition, not encyclopedic expertise. (Answers are NEWSWEEK'S.)
1. 1066
2. absolute zero
3. beginning, In the
4. big bad wolf
5. Currier and Ives
6. demonstrative pronoun
7. Doctor Livingstone, I presume?
8. Earp, Wyatt
9. epistemology
10. flapper
11. Get thee behind me, Satan.
12. Hegelian dialectic
13. Hickory, Dickory, Dock (text)
14. I think, therefore I am.
15. Jolly Roger
16. Kafka, Franz
17. Knock on wood
18. lean and hungry look
19. Marx Brothers
20. Nantes, Edict of
21. n.b.
22. open shop
23. Planck's constant
24. Presley, Elvis
25. quadratic equation
26. Remember Pearl Harbor!
27. Remember the Maine!
28. Sherlock Holmes
29. Slough of Despond
30. Typhoid Mary
31. uncertainty principle
32. utilitarianism
33. vector
34. wave-particle duality.
35. Win this one for the Gipper.
36. X-chromosome
37. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
38. Zeitgeist

Answers 1. Norman conquest. 2. molecular motion ceases. 3. Genesis 1:1. 4. Who's afraid? 5. quaint printmakers. 6. this and that. 7. Stanley's greeting. 8. brave, courageous and bold. 9. knowing about knowing. 10. '20s party girl. 11. Jesus to Tempter. 12. thesis, antithesis, synthesis. 13. mouse in motion. 14. Descartes routs doubt. 15. pirate flag. 16. "Metamorphosis" author. 17. to ward off bad luck. 18. what yond Cassius has. 19. Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo. 20. right for French Protestants, 1598. 21. nota bene (Latin: "note well"). 22. nonunionists allowed. 23. quantum theory cornerstone. 24. king of rock. 25. has a squared unknown. 26. World War II battle cry. 27. Spanish-American War battle cry. 28. Elementary! 29. swamp of despair in "Pilgrim's Progress." 30. famous carrier. 31. you can't know a subatomic particle's position and momentum simultaneously. 32. useful=good. 33. line showing size and direction. 34. light behaves like both. 35. Ron's gridiron tear-jerker. 36. the female one. 37. newspaper's reply to doubting tyke. 38. spirit of the age.

I didn't know a few of these - I'm a bit weak on religious references, especially Christian ones, I never read Pilgrim's Progress, and while I think I know what a relative pronoun is, that to which we refer, I was hard pressed to identify a demonstrative pronoun. But I took the point of the whole list. In order to understand stuff, you have to know other stuff. So as an author or a teacher it sure helps to know that there is some common ground of stuff that your readers or students can be expected to already know. Indeed this is true for any adult communication whatsoever. There must be a common base.

But I associate Bloom and Hirsch with the right wing on education, particularly William Bennett, to whom I have a distinct aversion. So I was surprised to read in Hirsch's Wikipedia entry that he is described as a Liberal, which perhaps explains why some of his review resonated with me, though I still had some reservations. Hirsch has it in for John Dewey and his disciples. So, I wonder. Does it really have to be one or the other but not a little bit of both? Must these ideas be argued in such a doctrinaire way? Can't we enjoy reading Hirsch and like reading Jerome Bruner too? If in fact we want to know what we should know then there appears no tension whatsoever, at least to me. The issues arise when it appears that ignorance is preferred and, then, what to do about it. I will write a subsequent post on Ravitch's book when I've finished reading it and try to take on those questions.

I found her history of the events immediately preceding and succeeding A Nation At Risk fascinating. I was an Assistant Professor at the time and pretty locked into my econ research, so this gave me a different perspective of what was happening in the Department of Education then. I should add that the ANAR document itself is well worth the read. It seems to hold equally well today as it did when it was written, though now the risks are even greater having gone through No Child Left Behind, and the emphasis on accountability that continues under President Obama.

Ravitch's history makes the following argument. Politicians shy away from divisive issues that split right down the middle. While in the immediate sequel of ANAR there was a push to define standards, the Left and the Right could not agree on what those standards should be. This produced stalemate that never has gotten resolved, a quagmire that might have produced a new synthesis if we persisted and worked away at it but instead generated a search for the quick and easy way out - which was found in testing and accountability. This part of the history has some interest to it since the evidence in support of the new approach apparently can be substantially questioned because aggregate test performance depends on demographic factors - race and income of the student families - and evidence that originally seemed to provide strong support for the learning benefit of the new methods in retrospect seems to be attributable entirely to a change in the composition of the population that received the treatment. But after reading this I started to get depressed because there was stonewalling on this point. It seemed like a WMD-type argument applied to student learning.

So I looked elsewhere for solace. What I found was this recent blog post by Tony Judt, which gives a comparative of Czeslaw Milosz's Captive Minds, written in the earlier 1950s and focusing on the plight of intellectuals living within the Soviet sphere who couldn't openly argue their ideas and ultimately succumbing to the totalitarianism, since then their thoughts didn't have to be challenged by an unwelcoming public, with current day intellectuals in the U.S. (and perhaps elsewhere in the West) who have remained too passive in the wake of WMD and the horrific excesses of capitalism that led to the burst of the housing bubble and what ensued thereafter. That thinkers get cowed and then ultimately come to be like that in some way because they feel they are not threatened is an interesting idea, one worth exploring. Milosz refers to these intellectuals as Ketmans - minds without moral backbones.

The thought hits close to home. Ravitch in a later chapter that I've yet to read takes to task the charitable Foundations which are providing funding for much of the new school reform - mistakenly applying business principles to the learning environment according to her. One of those is the Gates Foundation, which has recently funded a new Educause initiative, Next Generation Learning Challenges. Will Ravitch's concerns find their way into this program? I know too little about Ravitch's concerns and what NGLC is likely to do to comment intelligently on that question now. As I do learn more, if I see a cause for alarm I will chat this up a bit with colleagues. What then?

Is Daniel Pink Confusing Us About Motivation And Economic Incentives?

A couple of days ago I ended up in a "video trading" episode with Norma. She wanted me to watch this one, a mock radio broadcast, from a few folks at Michigan State. Norma liked the message of the show, particularly the bit near the end that a lecture was a lecture and can't we do better than that. I was less impressed with the video. Technique-wise it was too cutesy for me and message-wise I thought it was a bit too much singing to the choir. Focusing on the technique, I responded with this particular RSA Animate video, which is compelling to view even if I don't fully subscribe to its economic message. Since our group is constantly looking for ways to improve communication between instructor and students, I sent it partly to provoke Norma on whether it were possible to produce some of the effect of the video without the need for skilled animators. Norma responded with this other RSA Animate video that features the voice of Daniel Pink, reflecting on that video triggered this post but I didn't view it for a while. Then, getting back to a critique of the first video Norma had sent, I responded that I didn't believe faculty who lectured and were skeptical about the benefits of learning technology would be convinced by that video. This presentation by Eric Mazur (where he does lecture himself quite a bit) is more convincing because he talks not just about his teaching but also about the students response and in that describes "plug and chug" a method for arriving at the answer while not illuminating at all why the answer is correct. So Mazur had a need to change the teaching method because the students weren't "getting it."

I mentioned to Norma when we went for a coffee that I had seen Pink's TED talk so I knew most of what he was going to say. But afterward I felt that was too smug of me, so I did watch the RSA Animate video. I found it off putting so I watched again to figure out why. It begins with an attack on a straw man version of homo economicus, which given my disciplinary affiliation may have roused my hackles. But it's what he says later in the presentation that I believe is truly pernicious.

Pink is a very slick presenter and he does emphasize an important point, which I put in my own words as follows:

Main point of Dan Pink's talk: When we are already intrinsically motivated applying extrinsic motivation, in the form of reward for good behavior or punishment for bad behavior, is self-defeating because it detracts from the intrinsic motivation, a much more powerful force.

I completely agree with this point. When intrinsically motivated we lose sense of ourselves. We are totally into the activity, whether reading a great book, watching a fascinating movie, or working through a problem or puzzle that has captured our attention. The object of that attention becomes the entire universe. It is as if we are in a bubble that we are permitted to remain inside so long as we focus only on its contents. Extrinsic motivation of any kind makes us self-conscious. It bursts the bubble. Intellectually, it is like holding up a mirror. Once we look at ourselves, it is very difficult if not impossible to re-enter the bubble.

Some examples from the world of sport bring home this point forcefully. In the movie Chariots of Fire there is a scene were the coach, Sam Mussabini, is teaching the sprinter, Harold Abrahams, about why the one American sprinter, Jackson Scholz, lost the 100 meters race in the previous Olympics to his compatriot, Charles Paddock. The slide shows Scholz looking not straight ahead but rather to his side so he could eye his competition. The looking askance cost Scholz the race and the prize of being known as the "World's Fastest Human." In the recently completed British Open, the gracious and understated champion, Louis Oosthuizen, repeatedly gave the response to interviewers before he started the final round that what he must do on the course was to "stay in the moment" and not "get ahead of himself." He had an idiosyncratic method for doing that, with a red dot on his golf glove that he would look at just before making his swing, a reminder to focus on what was at hand. Golf more than sprinting gets at what Pink is talking about with tasks that require cognitive engagement because most of the time the golfer is planning and considering his next shot. So high caliber golf is mainly about management and planning. Then that gets interrupted periodically by the need to make shots.

Unfortunately, Pink can't leave well enough alone. His presentation creates the impression that we have a complete understanding of the psychological and economic incentives when acting in concert. On the latter he says the following: (The full transcript of the presentation is here.)

Fact: money is a motivator at work, but in a slightly strange
way. If you don't pay people enough they won't be motivated.
What's curious is there's another paradox here, that the best
use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take
the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough that
they're not thinking about money, they're thinking about the
work. Once you do that, it turns out there are three factors
that science shows lead to better performance, not to mention
personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

This is a bad message for the rest of us to hear, at least in this form, because it creates the impression that the bubble can be preserved. That is wrong. Even sans the economic considerations, the bubble will eventually burst of its own accord. The movie ends; we finish the book we are reading; we find a complete resolution of the problems we have been working on. And economic incentives can intrude entirely from the outside. In solving that set of problems we come up with an interesting and novel resolution. Word about that gets out, in large part because others are interested in the solution. But then, some of that interest gets transformed into interest about us. Though we were happy with the job and what we were getting paid in it, that was then. This is now and now the situation is different. Or, perhaps more realistic at present, the economic downturn has forced the old economic relationship to become untenable. Now there has to be downsizing or wage givebacks or other economy measures to keep the institution afloat. These are changes unrelated to individual performance. They are nonetheless present and force employees to be self-conscious about their own employment.

I have been singing the praises of Maslow as of late. Maslow argues there is an ongoing tension in all of us. We must make a choice for growth or for safety. Having made one such choice we are soon confronted with another. Maslow is extremely generous in regarding the individual, arguing essentially that the choice made is always the right one because the safety needs are in conflict with the growth needs (which are realized by putting ourselves in a bubble) and while the latter are higher level the former are primary. The individual only opts for growth when safety appears assured and the individual himself is the best arbiter for when this is the case. (This seems entirely consistent with what I took to be Pink's main point.)

Pink does rightly point out that economic incentives are mainly about eliciting participation. Call it "buy in" if you will. But the need to do that is definitely not one and done. Just as with the individual choice for growth or safety, the economic unit must elicit participation of each individual on an ongoing basis. There is therefore an inherent tension between the next elicitation of participation and the desire not to want to burst the current bubble. Sometimes the schedule for annual performance reviews and annual salary increases (remember those?) comes while the employee is immersed in an important project. A supervisor does his or her best to balance these two out. There is no magic formula to manage both of them perfectly.

* * * * *

Now I'll be more pedantic and get at Pink's straw man. Pink begins with a presentation of a tournament or contest, where higher performers get greater rewards and then Pink segues to a piece rate scheme where an individual performer gets more reward the more (or the better) he produces. Pink seems to confuse the two though they are actually quite different and should naturally emerge in different circumstances. He then goes on to imply that economics taught us long ago the lesson that one of these two schemes is the best way to elicit effort out of people. When I was in graduate school (the late 1970s) the rage was implicit contracts, the birth child of Arthur Okun. There were no tournaments or piece rates in Okun's conception. Wages were flat and sticky. There were two core underlying reasons - risk aversion and fairness. Risk aversion argued that units which were large enough to diversify against economic risk should absorb risk from others who couldn't diversify. So firms should absorb the inherent productivity risk of their employees. Fairness meant that similar employees should be treated similarly. When performance differences could be readily attributed to idiosyncratic variations that the employees couldn't control, that meant flat wages instead of tournaments.

The implicit contract view was about long term relationships and required fulfillment of promises on both sides of the market in exchange for which both earned "economic rents" from the relationship. For their part, employees were obligated to fully engage in the work. Implicit contracts provide a view about work that I embrace and I believe many others do as well. Yet it is not perfect. Long term relationships based on promises rather than contractual agreements are subject to one or both parties "cashing in" at the expense of the other party. Indeed, this is a serious problem. But rather than focus on how to best mitigate the problem we seem to have arrived onto the belief that it is not possible. Enter Pink's straw man, who resides in a much more myopic universe.

Implicit contracts don't perfectly resolve the tension between encouraging intrinsic motivation of employees and eliciting their participation. Nothing does. But implicit contracts do give a much better tradeoff than does the naive economic incentives that Pink takes to task. Because of his visibility, Pink could do a big service to the economy as a whole by embracing a more sophisticated view of the economics part of the equation. In the meantime, the psychologists rule and the economists drool. And the rest of us scratch our head about how to get even a glint of intrinsic motivation into our employees as the economy remains in the crapper.

Troddle

Everything cycles back to kid games. When our boys were toddlers my wife taught them and me a variety of nursery rhymes. One of those was Trot Along. With one kid on your lap you'd say the magic rhyme inserting the kid's name at the appropriate place, and then having the kid fall over or in, depending on the verse. We loved it, great family fun.

Kids learn mispronunciation first so before long trot along got transformed into troddle. And silliness begats more silliness so I started to improv on the locations.

Troddle off to Italy.
Troddle off to France.
Watch out (kid's name).
Or you might lose your pants.

Troddle off to Ithaca.
Troddle off to Poughkeepsie.
Watch out (kid's name).
Or you'll turn into a gypsy.

Not too long ago I told a colleague about this sort of childlike improv. Now she informs me that she can't stop doing it and is getting her family to do likewise.

On a listserv I participate in, we've been discussing the Newsweek piece on the decline in creativity. Somebody on the list asked how we are doing about providing a good environment for creativity in our own workplace. I mentioned this to some of the folks I work with and got one response that people who need a creative outlet will find it outside of work if they don't have the opportunities at work.

Looking for a place to start? Try troddle.

Troddle off to Venice.
Troddle off to Rome.
This guy has been at work too long.
So now it's time to go home.

Lessons for Higher Ed from the NBA

When I was a grad student taking the middle of the three core macroeconomics courses, in early 1977, we got exposed to a debate that I didn't really understand at the time about economic policy - rules or discretion. This was specifically for "Monetary Policy" but thinking back I wonder if "Fiscal Policy" also was part of the equation for those advocating rules - mainly the so called Monetarists. Discretion was a Keynesian notion. The argument for rules was that it would help in the forming of stable long run expectations which, in turn, would drive the demand for money and affect other economic behavior. Discretion adds noise to the system, which would make things worse long term. This was the start of the Carter years and stagflation vexed many economists at the time. Carter mostly inherited the problem, a long run consequence of not taxing enough to finance the Viet Nam War and the ensuing Wage and Price Controls that were implemented under Nixon, which put substantial inflationary expectations into the system. The OPEC price hikes then served as a trigger to make things unravel.

At the time I was for discretion. The economy was under performing and we learned that stimulus was the way to move toward full employment. I still believe in that to a certain extent and mostly agree with Paul Krugman that we need another stimulus package. This country needs to do a lot more in the way of infrastructure spending, the renovation or replacement of bridges and the improvement of our water systems kind of infrastructure, even if investing in that is politically unpopular. And there is a need to boost aggregate demand near term. But I disagree with Krugman in his total fear of deflation. We need some targeted deflation in my view. The two most obvious areas are in Health Care and Higher Ed.

Before getting to that, take a quick look at this income distribution table. It is based on U.S. 2005 data, so before the financial crisis started. Roughly 3/4 of the over 25 population were earning under $50,000, with a majority of those earning less than $25,000. Some significant fraction of those must be retirees, but it is actually startling to consider the size of the low end part of the income distribution. The table shows that less than 7% of the over 25 population are making more than $100,000. (Those who work in the "cash economy" may have significant income that is unreported, though obviously that has fallen off considerably since the economy has gone into its tailspin. And even without that let's not fool ourselves into thinking people who reportedly make under $50,000 are well off. Mainly, they're not.)

Now let's briefly look at physician salaries. This post has a nice table that gives median salary by specialty. Do note that some component of the salary is a compensating differential for malpractice insurance premiums, which can be substantial and which correlate with salary. So it would be more informative to net out these premiums and have a table of that. Then one would like to see a time series of such a table. I don't have that here, but I think it not unreasonable to conjecture that there is hyperinflation - in physician salaries as a whole but particularly in those specialties that are at the high end in physician compensation. I bring this up simply to raise what I think is an obvious point. In the rather long and heated debate about Health Care Reform, there was comparatively little written that I am aware of of how much much physicians are compensated. There was much more on the form of compensation and that fee for service provides perverse incentives. Those perverse incentives don't, however, explain hyperinflation in salary. Something else explains that - persistent scarcity.

Now let's turn to Higher Ed, particularly research institutions. Here's a table of average faculty salaries by institution and by rank. It is important to note that faculty salaries in this table are given as 9-month salaries. The vast majority of these faculty earn an additional two ninths in summer salary, paid by a research grant or for additional teaching or other service rendered in the summer. A disciplinary division of these salaries would be even more informative. Humanities faculty are surely paid substantially below average, while Business faculty are paid well above. Stars in a discipline might command a substantial premium, earning double the average, perhaps even more.

The market for the stars has historically been a big driver in the Higher Ed hyperinflation. A star who is at institution X gets heavily recruited by institution Y. The star gets a big bump, whether movement ultimately occurs or not. The bump is mainly entirely orthogonal to the star's productivity. It is a recognition thing. The star will have pretty much the same productivity at either institution. Then, under the old rising tide lifts all boats theory that was in operation before the recent financial crisis, other faculty salary would also go up so they would not be envious of having the star present. If the costs could be passed on, either to donors who endowed chairs or to students in the form of higher tuition, why not? There has been historically little to no counter pressure to apply the brakes in the face of this salary escalation.

Now with revenue drying up the question has emerged, though still not yet front and center, what reasonable brakes can be applied. This piece, which appeared yesterday in our local paper, makes clear that leaders on my Campus are between a rock and a hard place. In spite of the economic downturn, the market for star faculty remains unabated. The Campus either runs the risk of losing its better people or runs the risk of raising expenditure at a time when it should be cutting spending. We've already had furlough days. Ask the rest of the the faculty and staff to take further cuts so the stars can get what the market will bear is a a very bitter pill to swallow.

This is a problem that can't be addressed on a campus by campus basis. It needs a systemic solution for Higher Ed as a whole. We are not the first sector of the economy to witness an out of control competition for the stars of the profession that had the potential to fully undo the profitability of the sector. The problem is a collective Prisoner's Dilemma played at the Department Head, Dean, Provost, Chancellor, and President level. We'll be better off if peers didn't compete for the stars, to hold salaries down. But these campus leaders can't afford not to. Just because the economy has gone into the tank, it doesn't mean this problem will go away on its own accord.

The world of professional sports has found an imperfect but workable solution to the problem - a salary cap. The salary cap doesn't completely rule out the competition, as all the to do about LeBron James surely demonstrates. But the cap does act as a real and credible brake on overall spending. So we witness stars voluntarily taking less so the team can better operate within the cap. And as a result of the cap the entire system is more transparent.

Applying a salary cap system would be much harder to do at the research universities. There is no one cartel like the NBA to administrate and enforce a cap system. There are many more personnel who would have to be covered by a cap and even if there were firm caps at the Campus level how those would get pushed down to have effective caps at the College and at the Department level would still be a significant thing to work through. But, cycling back to my original macroeconomics theme, rules could be designed that would do precisely that and we in Higher Ed could learn to play by those rules.

Of course the devil is in the details. Yet there is a lot of mileage to be had simply by recognizing that we need a solution that is systemic. Responses by individual institutions, no matter how well intended, can't solve the problem. We aren't there yet with that recognition. I hope we get there quickly.

In the meantime, however, there will be a look for other solutions. At my university the State of Illinois pays the lion's share of the benefits for employees - mainly health care, also retirement (though the state has not been making its contribution for the last several years). As the state pulls the plug on funding the university (and all other public higher education in the state) those benefit costs will be passed on to employees. That seems inevitable and appears to be a substantial savings, in reality a wage reduction to the faculty and staff. But the stars will have that cut offset and perhaps even see other increases, for the reasons I've already articulated. This will offset the savings and leave budgets out of whack.

There may then be a further adjustment, to select areas of excellence where this luring of the stars remains but then either to entirely get out of other areas of specialization or to stay in them but have a more cursory presence. This sort of response is predictable. But it is not stable, especially if there isn't coordination on this point across all of Higher Ed. One might envision regional cartels forming to counteract this. My university is part of the CIC, which could become a virtual mega university. Each member institution can maintain excellence by being part of the consortium and cut down substantially on the need to be great across the board. But I think that mainly a pipe dream. The member campuses, even if in fiscal straits, are strong while the CIC is weak. And further, even if the CIC were successful there are still other big publics (think about the big athletic conferences), the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, etc. all who very likely will still be playing the game of competing for star faculty. So it won't truly solve the problem.

We really should be talking about a salary cap for Higher Ed as a whole. I wonder when that idea will see the light of day.

Sad

Bob Sheppard, longtime Yankee Stadium announcer, dies at 99 - ESPN New York via kwout

Running Economic Experiments Online for Teaching Principles and Intermediate

When I was in graduate school, probably during my second year though maybe it was toward the end of the first year, we spent an afternoon of fun doing tw0-sided auction experiments to do a live simulation addressing the question whether a market comes to equilibrium. I'm not sure the experience had a profound effect on me. Occasionally when I taught intermediate micro I would take part of a class session to do such experiments in an abbreviated format. Students want to know that a market will come to equilibrium. The session was aimed at providing the students with the requisite intuition.

Now many years later I've been thinking about teaching intermediate online and what might be done to engage the students. In the back of my head when I pose a question of this sort to myself, I have a technology in mind to facilitate the teaching. In this case It was the forms tool in Google Spreadsheets. Students could submit their information via a form and the spreadsheet could tabulate all submissions so the class as a whole could monitor that. (Also, the url can otherwise be kept private so the rest of the world wouldn't monitor the activity.)

For about a month or so I've been keeping this thought on the back burner, envisioning that the experiment would be done in rounds delivered asynchronously, perhaps one round a day. But I wasn't satisfied with that for a variety of reasons - students might find it insufficiently compelling so wouldn't be drawn in, the rules were that the first one who accepted an offer had the rights to it but that rule was inconsistent with asynchronous participation, and it just seemed clunky. Because I wasn't satisfied I didn't act on it.

Then a few days ago I asked - what if the auction were held in a live synchronous session, either face to face or online, but where all the the student participants submitted their offers via the forms. All of a sudden this started to make sense to me. I envisioned that if I could get this to work in the simple two-sided auction that I had participated in while a grad student then I could modify the economic environment and do many other experiments as a way for the students to "experience" the economics they'd be studying. So I started to play with this by building forms and seeing what would happen as I submitted various responses with the forms.

Envisioning this as totally online, I thought we'd do a live chat session during the auction. The spreadsheet would record the offers, but there were issues. What if a students made a mistake in submission and sent something in that was nonsense. That would have to be voided. Could it be done automatically or was there a need to do it manually. Likewise a student might want to withdraw an offer, seeing it disadvantageous relative to other recent transactions. How would that work? And when an offer was accepted that would have to be recorded and then then offer would need to be taken off the list of currently active offers. Could all this be automated too? I reasoned that if I'm the "auctioneer" then either I'd make mistakes with manual recording or it would be a time consuming process. So I wanted to automate as much of this as I possibly could.

Alas, I made a discovery yesterday with the Google forms. It is simply not possible to keep running totals of results. Each new submission adds a row of data to the spreadsheet. The newest data comes into row 2. All previous data gets pushed down a row. If you have formulas in other columns than where the data is being collected, those formulas get pushed down two. Not being able to keep running totals, it is not possible to automate the entire process. But I've come up with a reasonably Spartan schema for the manual recording.

You can check out the form and the spreadsheet. Make a submission or two or three to see how it looks. The key to the manual recording is that if a letter (A for Accept, W for Withdraw, V for Void) in front of a price, then from the spreadsheets perspective the entry has been converted to alpha format and so gets ignored in the calculation of maximum bid or minimum ask. The rest of the recording should be just a copy and paste. Still, I don't yet know if this really can work work for the students. They will need three tabs open - one for the spreadsheet, one for the form, and one for the chat. Perhaps each can be put into a frame within one page, and in the not too distant future I'll experiment with that a bit. But there will be a lot of info on the screen then and I'm not sure that will work. So that needs to be tested.

Also, I need to test how long it takes to run one round of such an experiment and how many students can be accommodated during it. Ideally you can do 4 or 5 rounds in an hour with a few minutes left to spare for reflection at the end. But that needs to be tested too.

I should also add that earlier I tested using mail merge in Outlook as a way of giving the students in advance the data they need to have to start the auction going. (Buyers know the value of buying one unit of the good. Likewise sellers know the cost of providing one unit of the good. Both the values and the costs are idiosyncratic. The students don't know their distribution in advance. At the end, the distribution can be shown and if the transaction price settles down it can be compared to the theoretical equilibrium price.) From a sending point of view, that works like a charm. There is quite a different issue whether the students read their email frequently enough to use this as a good way of distributing the information for participating in the auction. That too needs to be tested.

Assuming all those tests get passed, perhaps following substantial modification of how to teach the course, it then becomes incumbent to integrate these experiments with the rest of the class and to figure out how many of these experiments would be fruitful to use over the duration of the semester. In my head I've been able to come up with quite a few different scenarios to e run as experiments. Whether once the novelty has worn off students continue to enjoy participating in them and taking them seriously, I don't know. But I would like to try this.

Mumbling

The coffee in the army,
They say it's mighty fine.
It's good for cuts and bruises,
And tastes like turpentine...

* * * * *

Never Volunteer.

* * * * *

Facing external stress,
We are prone to repress.

* * * * *

In the seminar on the memoir that I took at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, we spent a good deal of time discussing and trying out techniques for unleashing dormant memories. These activities sensitized me to the need. In my book I want to argue for the proposition that intuition is largely a learned thing and that developing intuition is something others (friends and teachers) can foster. But based on my reading since I've returned, primarily Maslow and now Marion Milner, see my previous few posts plus the comments there, perhaps I've been underestimating the impediments. This got me to think about impediments in the development of my own intuition.

I started high school in 1968. Though I was a very good student, I had several serious sources of frustration. I was a fresser, completely undisciplined about my eating, and prone to use food as a safety valve. I had a poor body image, deeply ingrained from always having been the largest kid. And I didn't know how to be myself in front of girls, so didn't have a girlfriend. My parents were useless for helping to work my way through all of this. Indeed my mom, who pushed quite hard on things including making me choose to attend a high school that was inappropriate for me and which I transferred from after only a few weeks there, ended up seeming a source of authority that I had to contest or end up suffocating myself.

But I didn't know how to do this and lacked both the wherewithal to learn healthy coping strategies and the confidence that I could arrive at a good place on my own. Yet I couldn't shut down completely. That's not my nature. I had ideas, lots of ideas. They required some form of expression. So I started to mumble.

If the right people aren't there to listen, you end up talking to yourself. I still don't completely understand why that expression needed to be aloud. Somehow it is tied up with the urge to raise your hand in the classroom when you have the answer to the question and you know nobody else does. There's a showing off in that. I wanted to show off to my mom even while I didn't want her to hear my answer, resistance and non-resistance rolled into one. There is no courage in mumbling. But it demonstrates an unmistakeable need for self-expression. The doing something in the moment can trump a longer term sense of preservation.

I love Maslow but I think some of what he says requires refinement. He says that at every juncture we have to make a choice between safety or growth. That much is correct but then I believe he errs. I had a taste for growth. Much of my childhood was quite wonderful in that regard. When the need for safety became paramount after having opted for growth for quite a while, I didn't all of a sudden go cold turkey on growth. I looked for a compromise instead. With foresight, the compromise almost certainly can't work. Mumbling creates tension. Other people want to know what you are saying. The tension contributes to what can become a downward spiral.

The issues didn't instantaneously resolve when I went to college, but I believe the mumbling stopped when I moved away from home.

Could a friendly teacher or counselor have helped me to give up mumbling while I was still in high school? A variety of people tried to make me tougher, not to address the mumbling specifically, more as a necessary survival skill in general. I don't think it was the right answer. I needed something that was very gentle yet also strongly affirmative.

I will need to think a lot more about whether that can be produced with some abundance and, if so, how.

Gems from Maslow

These are all from the 2nd edition of Toward a Psychology of Being in hard cover.

The primal choice, the fork in the road, then, is between others' and one's own self. If the only way to maintain the self is to lose others, then the ordinary child will give up the self. This is true for the reason already mentioned, that safety is a most basic and prepotent need for children, more primarily necessary by far than independence and self-actualization. If adults force the choice upon him, of choosing between the loss of one (lower and stronger) vital necessity or another (higher and weaker) vital necessity, the child must choose safety at the cost of giving up self and growth.
p. 52

5. The person in peak-experiences feels himself, more than at other times, to be the responsible, active, creating center of his activities and his perceptions. He feels more like a prime mover, more self-determined (rather than caused, determined, helpless, dependent, passive, weak, bossed). He feels himself to be his own boss, fully responsible, fully volitional, with more "free will" than at other times, mast of his fate, an agent.

He also looks that way to an observer, for instance, becoming more decisive, looking more strong, more single-minded, more apt to scorn or overcome opposition, more grimly sure of himself, more apt to give the impression that it would be useless to try to stop him. It is as if now he had no doubts about his worth or about his ability to do whatever he decided to do. To the observer he looks more trustworthy, more reliable, more dependable, a better bet. It is often possible to spot this great moment - of becoming responsible - in therapy, in growing up, in education, in marriage, etc.
pp. 106-107

They also show a surprising amount of detachment from people in general and a strong liking for privacy, even a need for it (97).

"For these and other reasons they may be called autonomous, i.e., ruled by laws of their own character rather than by the rules of society (insofar as these are different). Is is in this sense that they are not only or merely Americans but also members at large of the human species. I then hypothesized that they should be more like each other across cultural lines than they are like the less-developed members of their own culture."*

* Examples of this kind of transcendence are Walt Whitman or William James who were profoundly American, most purely American, and yet were also very purely supra-cultural, internationalist members of the whole human species. They were universal men not in spite of their being Americans, but just because they were such Americans. So too, Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher, was also more than Jewish. Hokusai, profoundly Japanese, was a universal artist. Probably any universal art cannot be rootless. Merely regional art is different from the regionally rooted art that becomes broadly general - human. We may remind ourselves here also of Piaget's children who could not conceive of being simultaneously Genevan and Swiss until they matured to the point of being able to include one within the other and both simultaneously in a hierarchically-integrated way. This and other examples are given by Allport (3).
pp. 181-182

In other words: (a) self-actualization is repressed by concerns for safety, which take precedence, (b) all of us have peak-experiences in which we are most completely human and true to our natures, and (c) the drive of the self-actualizers is essentially inward but it is also universal.

My career fork in the road framed as what to do in entering college

I've been thinking a lot about developing a personal philosophy and that perhaps the most important thing we can do in Higher Ed is assisting students in developing their own personal philosophies. A lot of this thinking is a selfish sort of reflection. I'm faced with options and opportunities because of my retirement, and I'm finding that instead of simply plopping into what's next I feel a need to give some definition underneath to what it is that I want and what it is that I value. So I suppose it is not surprising that I've been reading older texts to look for wisdom on this - Thoreau, Hoffer, and Maslow. And I've been thinking about the choice of what to do in college, partly because it seems so similar, partly because I struggled with that and ultimately transferred from MIT to Cornell at a time when I had a lot of trouble coping, and because my son is entering college now and while I know I can't push any of this on him I'd hope he would have some of the same sort of questioning. So, without further ado, here's my set of answers to what I'd do if I were going to college for the first time.

If I were attending college this fall for the first time, I would…

…find an intellectual hero to serve as my guide. The hero need not be in the field of study I will pursue. Maybe it’s better if he isn’t. But he must have a personal philosophy I can embrace. My entire college experience will be richer if I can frame it within a coherent personal philosophy. A current hero of mine is Abraham Maslow. I believe his humanistic psychology, particularly his emphasis on self-actualization via peak experiences, provides a very good norm that would serve most students quite well. Maslow’s book, Toward a Psychology of Being, is a great read. I’d hope most students find time for it, though it may be a bit much for an entering freshman. This transcript of an interview with the great man, Remembering Maslow, is more accessible and can be read in one sitting.

…discover the treasure trove that is the University Library, particularly its electronic resources. As wonderful as the Internet is as a ready source of information there will be much to read in college that I won’t be able to find on the open Internet, including most of the work of my professors. On occasion I will end up using the University Library without even being aware of it, simply by having been logged into the campus network. But that will not always be the case, so I must learn to use the electronic catalog to find full text articles that I want to read. The Remembering Maslow piece is freely available to students on my campus via the license from the publisher that the Library has procured.

…regularly place myself outside my comfort zone intellectually and socially too, where of necessity I’d have to take on my shyness, but not to the extreme of making me neurotic. This means persisting at reading things I’m apt to find more than a bit difficult. It means attending lectures and performances in areas with which I’m only vaguely familiar. It also means having one-on-one and small group conversations with faculty and with students of other cultures, even when there is some initial discomfort in doing that. Struggling in this manner provides a good source of empathy for the struggles of others. Over time, it likely will breed confidence though progress is apt to be gradual. Consequently, the admonition not to overdo is imperative because slow and steady does win the race.

…keep from over programming myself to assure enough free time for writing, reflection, and serendipitous conversation. I need some down time to chew on my experiences and what I’m learning. On days where every hour is scheduled with an activity, there is no opportunity for such introspection. Sometimes that will happen, but on an ongoing basis I want to carve out time for inward looking learning so I can keep in touch with myself and have a sense of what progress I’m making as well as to reckon with the challenges I’m facing. I also want to engage with others who are similarly situated so I can learn from their experiences and their thinking. Students are apt to become extremely competitive with one another. The over programming is one consequence of this competition. Alternatively, students can bounce the other way, becoming cynical and nihilistic. The habit for reflection provides a healthy alternative to both of these extremes.

…refrain from looking at the finish line to maintain as broad a perspective as possible and to recognize that I’m getting an education for a lifetime, not just to prepare for the first job that comes along. I know I will narrow later, as I get deeper into the major, where attending graduate school or getting a job becomes more proximate. I need not narrow straight away even if there is a tendency for my classmates to do otherwise. And even when I do narrow I want to maintain some balance by pursuing other interests in my leisure time. Ironically, students will find that having a diversity of interests unrelated to the field of study will help them greatly with their critical thinking and communication skills.

It is perhaps strange to frame my upcoming choices with an attending college metaphor, but it is helpful to me. One particular need I have is to be open in my social environment and not feel a need to be guarded. In college the social environment is where I learned, in some sense more than what I learned in my classes. Particularly since I've gotten involved with learning technology I've tried to emphasize an approach that stems from social environment at 509 Wyckoff Road in Ithaca. I want to do new things as I move forward. But I want to retain the feel that I had my junior and senior years in college.