Educational Content To Be Read On the Screen - Some Experiments

I spend a fair amount of time reading stuff on the screen, and now I'm not talking about my iPad, which I view as a dedicated reader. I mean on a desktop computer. There are reading issues based on the quality of writing. I remain sensitive to those and react strongly if the writing is opaque or ideas are poorly expressed. There are also reading issues based on how the writing is displayed. In the main I've become insensitive to those issues, in part because I've made it a habit to readjust the view so it is appealing to me, usually fairly large font so there is no eye strain. But others may stay with the default and then find the writing display difficult. I've been made more acutely aware of this issue recently, as a colleague of mine on another campus complained about how some of my content on my site, The Economics Metaphor renders, such as this essay entitled What If Analysis. In particular, he reported that in online reading of dense stuff content-wise, not only should there be large font but in addition the content should be rendered in narrow columns.

I took the criticism to heart and have been playing with alternative ways of addressing the critique. On thing I tried (and then I've repeated the experiment several times) is to record an aloud reading of the writing so that one can listen online in addition to or in lieu of reading the content. I can't say that I'm very good at reading aloud or that my writing is designed to be read that way. Some of my sentences are fairly intricate and on occasion I have parenthetic comments that read ok but stray from the original thought so are a bit hard to follow on listening. Also, the pace varies in a way that pleased me as a writer but might not work very well for a listener. This is the first of such readings, for my essay on Retail Markets. Since I chunked that essay into 8 separate bits, I recorded a clip for each bit. It is interesting how the archive.org site where the audio is housed renders that content. (Follow the link at the post to the archive.org site.)

I would give myself a "B-" for that reading. There are stumbles at various points. And, particularly when reading questions, the voice intonation doesn't sound real to me. But it certainly is audible and perhaps of some value. Interestingly for me, I wasn't discouraged by that experience. I've done more readings since.

Part of that is simply having a lot of time on my hands at present, so there is freedom to try things. Another part is thinking about the usefulness of such read content. For international students, in particular, but for other students as well, the reading aloud may help the students penetrate the writing. And it occurred to me that the podcasts could be listened to away from the computer, which might encourage the students to access the content more. This latter thought started me on thinking about doing this for other than my econ content.

So I began to fiddle with making a Best of Lanny On Learning Technology archive, starting with early posts that were shorter. I did an aloud reading for a few of those and I posted a cleaned up (typos removed, some other edits) pdf version of the original posts as well. Not having posted pdfs before to archive.org, I was interest to see how many different ways it rendered the content. Also, it matters which sort of file is posted first if multiple files are ultimately posted under the same heading. When an mp3 is posted first, it assumes the content is primarily audio and puts a player into the page. When it is a pdf, it assumes the content is primarily a book. It then gives several different forms for the content to be read. For book length stuff (my own book, Guessing Games is in temporary hibernation but wheels are spinning in my brain now about how I might promote it online when I get back to it) this is very attractive indeed. What did occur to me immediately in seeing how the content renders online, is that one needn't narrow the column. There is nothing else on the screen to make for a visual distraction. However, I'd really like to query others on this point. As I said at the outset of this post, I'm not really sensitive to the display issues.

Since I've also been posting a fair amount of content to Google Docs as of late, I tried that as an alternative for the pdfs. It has one distinct advantage over the archive.org hosting, but then is less general in other respect. The advantage is that the default rendering of the document is in pretty large font. At the archive.org site, the default rendering is to put a full page on the screen, but that makes font small enough to be unreadable (at least for me). It also occurred to me that one could link to this online document via capture of an enticing paragraph using Kwout. I've done this for an essay I just finished called the Economics of Time. I'm kind of pleased with this approach, but it is for others to determine whether it is effective. The aloud reading of this essay is in a separate post, though it would not e hard to have the Kwout cutout and the embed of the aloud reading in the same post. What is a harder is to have an embed of the pdf document and the aloud reading in the same post. One can use an iframe for this purpose, but that would limit how much the pdf font can be enlarged in the viewing, so I've not opted for this approach. If someone wants to listen and read along at the same time, then two tabs of the browser must be open at the same time to achieve this result or the document needs to be printed out. I don't believe that having two tabs open is a big deal, but again, users need to determine that.

Before closing, let me pose a different question. Would having students do such readings of their own writing be a valuable exercise for them? Technology-wise this is not that hard, so the question is about the learning benefits. I may try that when I teach next. We'll see.

Governing in prose or sausage turning out stillborn

Sometime in the 1960s, probably when I was in junior high school, I read a series of books - political novels - where the political system seemed to be in jeopardy or worse. These included Seven Days In May, Fail Safe, and It Can't Happen Here. I don't believe that last one was ever made into a movie, but we know the other two now from the film versions, though I'm quite sure that for these I read the books before seeing the movies.

So too it was with Advise and Consent, which must have made a strong impression on me. When our family made the drive trip to Washington D.C. sometime later, we stayed at the Sheraton Park Hotel, the first time the family stayed at a hotel outside the Catskills. The book opens with Senator Robert Munson beginning his day at the Sheraton Park Hotel. I have distinct memory fragments of that trip. We stopped for lunch somewhere outside DC at a Howard Johnson's and I recall having what we now know as a Big Mac, before McDonalds had branded the idea. The parking garage was adjacent to the hotel and designed so you could park on the same floor your room was located on. That was the coolest. And I recall visits the U.S. Mint and the FBI building.

The movie, with Walter Pidgeon as Robert Munson, the personification of the dignified statesman as U.S. Senator, was on a few weeks ago. I recorded it and watched it a bit later. It is still an intriguing film, with multiple layers of story, great characters such as Charles Laughton as Seeb Cooley and Henry Fonda as Robert Leffingwell, and a mixture of dignity in external behavior coupled with an extreme viciousness in the politics. It is helpful to watch such a film nowadays, where things appear so dysfunctional, to understand that maybe they never were quite as rosy as we sometimes seem to imagine.

Switching to modern day politics, yesterday after reading Tom Friedman's column, where the dysfunction is given its due, I read a piece in the New Yorker by Ryan Lizza, As the World Burns. It is a disheartening read, where the Obama White House is severely criticized by not more strongly championing energy/climate change legislation. Quite possibly this indictment is deserved. But I want to focus on something else that became apparent in the piece.

Harry Reid is no Robert Munson. Reid is brought into Lizza's piece as a saboteur, blocking the legislation because it would have hurt him in his own election prospects in Nevada. He is characterized as being entirely self-serving, without principle, and seemingly otherwise unconnected to the legislation. One has to wonder why he is Majority Leader and the consequence of his being in that position. I don't have any inside poop on that but I can speculate.

When Tom Daschle lost his election rebid back in 2004, the Democrats were reeling. Being the Democrat leader in the Senate during the Bush White House at that time must not have been a coveted job. So Reid too the job for the good of the party. Obama became a Senator during that same election. The story is that Obama was frustrated in that role, because nothing seemed to get done. Robert Munson had a strong relationship with the President in Advise and Consent. They were junior Congressmen together. There was no such parallel relationship between Reid and Obama.

There has been much written about the Senate has over and over again blocked Presidential initiatives, with the Filibuster implied or utilized. But I've not seen any pieces on the relationship between the Senate leadership and the President. Dick Durbin, the current Majority Whip, would be far better as the Leader than Reid, in my view. Chuck Schumer would also be better. There was much greater alignment between the Presidency and the Congress when the Republicans were in the Majority. Obama rode into office under a post partisan mantel. Knowing how much he is actually into real politics, perhaps much of that was because he didn't think a partisan approach could work, in spite of the majority. Blue Dogs get mentioned here, but leadership does not. I wonder why.

An alternative gradebook without using an LMS

I'm linking to a screen movie I made rather than embedding it, because it probably should be seen full screen to get the effect. (Also, the movie is at archive.org which doesn't compress the mpeg4 video. YouTube made the image quality of the video very ugly.) It shows how to keep a course gradebook in Excel, but then have an individual online gradebook for each student using Google Spreadsheets and entering those grades via the Google Forms tool, set up in a way to make grade entry easy. There is manual labor involved in the setup up. But it seems pretty functional to me. And since I've tried this sort of thing before (each student had their own spreadsheet). It is something I would do in a smaller class. I wonder if the idea will catch on with others.

When will Orszag get around to talking about Doctor pay?

When I was at Cornell we had classes on Saturdays. I wonder if people will take Orszag's point and translate to Higher Ed? But, of course, we have Football on Saturday and for home games, that makes parking a problem.

Contributing Columnist - Health Care’s Lost Weekend - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com via kwout

Translations and "Twins"

I thought this was quite a good read. It helps in thinking about the writer's task. I'm guessing that it goes beyond writing.

Op-Ed Contributor - Found in Translation - NYTimes.com via kwout

Before reading this piece I had been thinking about people whose faces seem similar to me, the twins in my title. One of the thins I'd like to know, as I give a couple of examples below is whether the similarity only appears in my own mind or if others see it too, though it shouldn't just be the physical similarity but also our visceral reaction to the images.

The first pair are from current events. Tony Curtis passed away last week. A dramatic actor known for his good looks and moxie, he was more famous for his comedy roles, particularly Some Like It Hot.

And for his look alike I've selected Rahm Emanuel, the now former Chief of Staff, a politico who craves the limelight. Indeed, on the News Hour last Friday, Mark Shields gave a sort of indictment about Emanuel that he cast too much attention on himself on issues where he disagreed with President Obama.

Here's a completely different pair. Last night I watched Bonnie and Clyde. Arthur Penn had also recently passed away. It was his tour de force, not only a great picture in its own right, but a trailblazer for many other films that followed it. Of course when you think of Bonnie and Clyde you think of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. But there are some other compelling faces in the film. One is Michael J. Pollard. It's the impish smile that is so memorable.

I'm also a Yankee fan, as regular readers know. The past two years the Yankees regular right fielder has been Nick Swisher. He has a reputation for keeping the clubhouse loose, not taking anything too seriously.

The question is, when making a translation of this sort, can we be sure we're emphasizing a relationship that is real? Or might it just be a figment of our own imagination? One of my favorite pieces of all time is The Streak of Streaks by Stephen Jay Gould, which debunks the "getting hot" myth. Does the same sort of thing hold for translation too, finding associations that just aren't there?

I hope not, for I seem to do it all the time.

Whatever happend to the wrinkles?

A classic case of over promising from the 1960s.

It's Official Now!

A certificate and everything.

Success in College and Discipline

I suppose we don't know how to teach inclination so we go for a proxy that we can teach, discipline. And maybe a little of this at the appropriate time in the kid's life is helpful. Nevertheless, I wonder if there is another approach, one that might captivate the imagination rather than rely so much on determination.

Our Rating Is Grating

We're not in River City, but we got trouble. And, I fear, our new President is making too much out of a symptom, ignoring other problems that are more serious, and not yet focusing on root causes that require us to change our approach. It didn't make this piece but I've been told by several people that we are becoming uncompetitive in recruiting talented low income students. Our scholarships are insufficient and our tuition is among the highest among our peers. A couple of years ago the Director of the Campus Honors Program informed the CHP faculty that we had for the first time lost an in state student to a Community College. I don't know if that is happening at scale for the Campus as a whole. It's hard to get reports on that sort of thing. But it wouldn't be surprising. Several of my son's High School classmates are attending the U of I but living at home, surely not a preference but a cost saver. I haven't heard the President yet talk about access. Even with State of Illinois funding waning, we remain a public university. We should not turn into a private in public's clothing. Will some faculty get cherry picked this way? They certainly will. That could spiral out of control or it could level out and then we could get on with our business. We need some leadership if we are to get onto a good and sustainable path.

Drop in rankings gets UI's attention | News-Gazette.com via kwout

What if this announcement preceded Romer's and Orszag's?

Wouldn't it be funny if Krugman got offered Summers' job? I thought the line by Summers that he'd lose his tenure at Harvard was pretty funny. Somebody is falling on his sword here, but I'm not sure who it is.

Obama Adviser, Summers, Will Return to Harvard - NYTimes.com via kwout

Intriguing Interview

I enjoyed this. It is hard to believe that Herbie Hancock is 70. Still making music.

The Purpose of General Education

I am beginning to get involved in a project to move some high enrollment Gen Ed course to blended format or totally online. A grant proposal to an outside Foundation is being prepared and I'm helping with the conceptualization of what should be in the proposal. As I've been thinking about this the last couple of days, I've found that I can't separate the question – what is the benefit from moving a course in good part or totally to online? – from the other question – what are the big picture goals of the course or set of courses? Then I ask myself whether I know something about the answers to these questions based on personal experience. Here I start to scratch my head.

My undergraduate education was odd in that I can only remember a very small number of courses that I took because "they were required." My first semester at MIT I took two math classes, chemistry, and physics. There was a humanities/social science distribution requirement. I took a course with a title like: Men, man, and machine. There was some interesting stuff in the course but I wasn't ready or disposed to give the subject its due. And the school signaled it was less important than the other courses, which were 4 credit hours (transposing MITs system of assigning credits which imputes the out of class time). This social science course was only 3 credit hours. That course continued into the second semester. As a sophomore I took a course on Plato and Aristotle. It wasn't the first course in Philosophy but MIT was willing to waive prerequisites, which for my own learning has been my view right along. (We tend to enforce prerequisites here at Illinois.)

When I transferred to Cornell, I found I was quite far along toward the math major, so I stuck with that because it was a milestone within reach and it gave me maximum flexibility to take other courses as I saw fit. I had to fulfill the language requirement. Either the rest of the general education requirements were waived as a result of my transfer or I satisfied them via courses I wanted to take anyway. I had a desire to take political science classes – where I believe I learned quite a bit – and dabble with philosophy - where I couldn't penetrate it or it couldn't penetrate me, with the possible exception of a philosophy of law course I took as a senior.

That first semester after I transferred I took a course on Women and Politics. Werner Dannhauser was the professor and I believe I took the course because of him. Among other readings we read Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Goethe, Elective Affinities, and Simone de Beuvoir, The Second Sex. This was a tonic for me. The next year I took a course on American Politics and another on American Political Thought. In that latter we read Croly's, The Promise of American Life, which was an eye opener. I remember the feeling of personal awakening more than the content of the book, something I next felt again more than 20 years later when I read Democracy and Education, which I was then predisposed toward having thought a good deal about ALN at that time. I do recall the big question with Croly was why we so revere Abraham Lincoln and what was his lasting legacy. Further, Croly was writing around 1900 when the Progressives needed a rallying cry. In that same course we discussed Heimert's book on evangelical origins of the American Revolution. I can't say I penetrated that very well. But it again opened my eyes to a different way of thinking. Taxation without representation didn't make sense as a cause – for the poor farmer who did most of the fighting. For the signers of the Declaration of Independence, sure, but they were rich landowners. For the majority of the people, the revolution wasn't about economics. It was about the tyranny of the Church of England. (Recently I read a biography of Roger Williams that made a similar point and indicated that the idea of separation of Church and State stemmed from this cause.) In the American Politics course I recall reading a variety of Bobbs-Merill abstracts that were journal article reprints, my first exposure to scholarly publication in that form. I don't recall the particular pieces but among the authors were Seymour Martin Lipset which I thought was great stuff and we read some things by Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, though I don't believe the complete Beyond The Melting Pot. The course was full of ideas that were either entirely new to me or that challenged things I had been taught in High School or earlier. I loved that stuff.

Along with this formal social science education I had had wonderful out of the classroom learning, both with my housemates at 509 Wyckoff Road discussing politics of the day and variety of other topics and by attending a film series at Old Rusty. I watched a lot of Truffaut, some films of Jan Kadar, and oneoffs like Closely Watched Trains and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. It was a way to get interesting ideas from a variety of perspectives, quite different from the American point of view. This viewing was a good chunk of my PLA (personal learning agenda) which I often did on my own, because I felt the need and inclination. (Going to the movies alone is a weird thing to do, as a social activity, because obviously it isn't. But as an intellectual activity akin to reading a book it is perfectly natural.)

Back to my head scratching. I'm wondering what's the difference between the course type of learning that is the basis of General Education and the PLA type of learning that I'd hope most of us do because we are inquisitive human beings. Does one lead to another? Or are they entirely different animals? As my earlier post on PLA indicated, I had a good bit of that already before college. What about students who don't. (Increasingly I believe even the good students are so over programmed that they end up doing many things for the credential rather than to pursue their own intellectual interest.) I wanted the coursework because I'd get insight and exposure to ideas that I likely couldn't produce on my own. And perhaps the political science interest was a sensible precursor for the economics I was to study in graduate school, though I'm less certain of that connection. What about students who don't have the inclination for social science?

It is tempting to respond with the Dorothy Parker quote, about when she was asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence. But that would be unfair to the students. Not knowing what would be fair, I will instead give an aspirational response. Whether it is realistic to expect students to meet these aspirations is a different matter.

Most of what students learn as undergrads have value not so much as things in themselves but as pathways into the larger meta skills, the biggest of which is learning to learn. In turn learning to learn requires being open to new ideas, so not being a closed book. General Education then is a guarding against our own provincialism. However, as I indicated in the opening quote by Eric Hoffer to my Inside Higher Ed piece, there is a natural tendency to be fearful of the new. Quite possibly, the new could hurt us. So General Education must be about overcoming that fear or, at least, coming to grips with it, by which I mean not a complete cave in. Once so exposed there is then the added dimension of how one internalizes the new and takes some of it for one's own while rejecting other parts of it entirely. General Education needs to help with the internalization processes and with the development of a sense of taste about what should be internalized. And quite often it is not that the new makes a wholesale replacement of the old. It is rather that they both coexist, distinct but related. General Education has to be about seeing gray when beforehand everything seemed black and white.

When most educators get queried about what college education should produce, both general education and the major, the response is usually laced full of reference to "critical thinking" and the ability to communicate, to the extent that both have become bromides essentially devoid of meaning. So let me use some other terms that don't get discussed that often. One is sitzfleisch. The word perseverance may come to mind, but they are not synonyms. With sitzfleisch, the persistence results by force of personality. With perseverance, the persistence can emerge from a variety of causes. Tom Friedman had an interesting column on this last Sunday. But he uses the expression, "deferred gratification," which I don't like because it conveys the wrong meaning. With deferred gratification the object of attention changes but what we really want lingers in the background. Sitzfleisch means that no other objects even comes to mind until the particular situation reaches a complete resolution.

Another term is reading comprehension. Mainly it is assumed that students have that capacity upon entering the university, though many do not. It is not just making out the meaning of individual sentences. It requires the ability to suspend judgment on an idea while retaining skepticism as to its truth. It also means having methods of testing and corroboration that make the idea appear increasingly credible when it is true, but otherwise not. And it means not applying one's own spin to what is happening in the piece when so doing distorts the meaning that others would make of it. My fear is that reading comprehension is mainly about reading – there is learning by doing – and many students don't read enough. We end up sorting those who do from the rest. General Education should be about getting the rest to read more and more deeply.

Let me make a little aside before getting to a third term. A few nights ago I saw Dersu Uzala, which I had recorded on the DVR. It's with subtitles, which I used to think would be off putting on TV. But now we have a reasonably large flat screen in the bedroom on which to watch, so the text was large and quite readable and appeared below the movie, which was in letterbox. After a few minutes of viewing where I was quite conscious of reading the substitles, I lost all sense of that and simply got into the story. It is a wonderful and charming film. I had thought it was a Russian movie, but Kurosowa was the director. The story takes place in between 1902 and 1910 in Siberia. It is a story of an accidental but deep friendship that develops between a Russian Military captain, who leads a party to survey the territory and a native Goldi "mountain man" Dersu, who becomes a guide and advisor. The picture is about the nature of the wilderness and the gentle and respectful tone the two develop for each other. Dersu, primitive as he is, values his fellow man, irrespective of race, and his humanity as well as his skill in navigating the wilderness is what so impresses the captain.

During the time period of this film, the Russians fought the Japanese in a brutal war. My grandfather left Russia for America then, to avoid the fighting. There is no mention of this conflict across nations in the film. And I really don't know if Kurosowa intended this movie as a social commentary. But I took it so, and in that way the theme is similar to the theme of The Visitor, which also has characters that are exceptionally gentle, though trapped in a world that is otherwise not. In Kurosowa's movie, the captain is Caucasian. Dersu is Asian. Overcoming their racial difference matters for the story.

So my third term is warmth, human warmth, the type begat by gentleness, and denied by militancy. I really don't know if it is teachable or not. If it is, then it should be a primary goal. Compassion and empathy stem from it, but human warmth is a precondition and not one and the same with these others. It can be found in silly interactions and other exchanges that are of no consequence. It is not reserved only for the profound moments. Above all, it shows some comprehension of the human condition.

If the foundation is not already there, my hope would be that General Education would push students to develop in each of these dimensions and to develop a lifelong desire to continue to improve this way. Does anyone else conceive of General Education this way?

I can't answer that. I know that in thinking about teaching intermediate microeconomics next spring (it is not a gen ed course here) I've been thinking a lot about what will motivate the students and get them interested in the economics. I've been reading Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers and I think I will use it as a parallel reading for the students so they can get the history of economic ideas and see them exposited in a captivating way. I had read it as an undergrad in introductory macroeconomics, but it didn't stick with me then. So why I should expect it to stick with my students next semester is a mystery I will have to work through. But I can say that I'm enjoying it quite a bit now, in large part because the historical circumstances under which the economic ideas were invented are largely paralleled today. The relevance is immediate to me. And I hope that taps into student motivation.

Near the conclusion of Heilbroner's chapter on Keynes, he offers up a bit by Keynes writing about his old teacher, Alfred Marshall. It seems fitting so I will close with it.

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher – in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.

It must take an economist to presume that the purpose of General Education is to produce other economists.

In re: Previous Post

This piece answers the rhetorical questions I posed. I wonder if Larry Summers will survive Obama's first term.

‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’ | The New York Review of Books via kwout

The politics of macroeconomics - What ever happened to the Political Business Cycle?

For some reason I can't explain, my feed for the NY Review of Books in Bloglines was pointing to pieces from last October. So I read this piece by Elizabeth Drew on Health Care and got about halfway through it before I realized it was quite dated. But it's a useful read to help set the tone for what is happening now. One does have to wonder whether Hillary Clinton would have been a more effective President because she'd have been belligerent to the Republicans from the get go and with battle lines drawn would get her legislation passed accordingly. I don't fault the President for his initial "post partisan" posture. But when it was evident that it wasn't going to happen that way, why not rethink the pose? Now the part of this which I really don't understand, especially given how it appears that the bulk of obstruction has been in the Senate, where the Filibuster seemingly gives too much power to the minority, why does the President take on the House Minority Leader to symbolize the opposition? Why not make Mitch McConnell the focus? Is it because all the House seats are up this fall? In any event, we now seem to be having the sort of partisan contest one might have anticipated over macroeconomic policy.

Editorial - Debating the Economy - NYTimes.com via kwout

Noblesse Oblige
Is under siege.

There's no latter day Robin Hood
To redistribute income for the good.

The Republicans in Congress crave lower tax rates.
While efforts to extend UI, they do frustrate.

So it seems the modern day political creed
Is to let the rich indulge their greed.

Alas, it is almost as crass
To pander to the middle class.

Expand Teaching Efforts Along The Intensive Margin

Yesterday evening I was looking to veg out, sleep deprived from the night before. I'm not sure why, since I've eliminated much of the day to day job stress from my existence. I suppose other worries endure and I have a hard time letting go. Having surfed the various channels on the satellite for something that might grab me and coming up empty, I checked the DVR for possibilities. There I found Copying Beethoven, which grabbed me right away. It is a fantasy situated in the life of Beethoven at around the time he composed The 9^th Symphony and the events that followed (he died three years later) and his further explorations in composition as epitomized by The Great Fugue. Yet Beethoven, convincingly played by Ed Harris (I thought of his acting in Pollock, which seemed good preparation for this role) is the supporting actor in this story. The protagonist is the fictionalized Anna Holtz, a very good student of music composition, who has the fortune, both good and bad, to become Beethoven's copiest, copying Beethoven's later works for publication.

Their relationship, somewhere in the realm of master-apprentice, superstar and acolyte, patient and nurse, is almost immediately symbiotic. She wants to learn what it means to really write music. Where does it come from? How does it take shape? He is mostly deaf and knows he can't function solely on his own. He is very proud, extraordinarily demanding, and with huge ambition for his work. With that he is a boor, intimidating ordinary people with his demanding and impulsive behavior. At the same time he is weak and dependent. He needs to rely on someone else, somebody he can trust because that person has taste about the music. Anna Holtz is that someone. Considering his music as the expression of God and his deafness as evidence of God's cruelty, he presumes she has been sent by God so he can continue his work.

Their exchanges are fascinating. Trust is built almost immediately. In her first round copying she spots an error in the work and makes a correction. (Some of the individual reviewers who can't tolerate the Beethoven story being altered for this fictionalized account were really upset with this plot device.) He reviews what she has done, is mildly abusive to her, and it's unclear whether he's angry with her or appreciates what she did. He goes out to the pub for his dinner while she continues to copy, whereupon his interchanges at the pub make clear he has admiration for the work she did. Thereafter she is his trusted confidant and assistant and, with one marked exception, she devotedly has his back. She wants to be a composer of her own accord. In the middle of the film she shows him some of her work. He belittles it in a way that creates great offense and she leaves him. He is lost and is immediately remorseful. He finds her and apologizes, offering to work with her on her composition. The relationship picks up where it left off, with its full intensity.

If one ignores the Beethoven story entirely and thinks of it as the exchange between the demanding teacher and the gifted pupil, the film offers a captivating story. He is violently opposed to pedantry. The creator can't be a slave to convention. The music will be found by listening inwardly. One needs to be unencumbered to let that happen. She appreciates that. His vulgarities are not the expression of the devil himself, but acts of frustration owing to his physical limitations or mere trifles because he is impatient to focus on the important things in life.

It is the impatience that I suppose we would not accept in an instructor today, though I wonder. Do we do a disservice to others when we are nice to them though we don't like the work they produced? I am not Beethoven and I don't want to make any pretensions to the contrary. But these issues are ones I've written about, in my post a while back Killing The Puppy, and more recently in a column I wrote for Inside Higher Ed.

A movie or some other work of art seemingly takes on more importance when it portrays themes you've discovered quite independently. The feeling emerges that the piece was designed to speak to you.

* * * * *

I've been having lots of discussions with colleagues, many on my campus, some elsewhere. People are worried. An expression keeps coming up – race to the bottom. That's what it feels like now, with everyone scrambling for revenues to keep things going. Here's the latest.

With state governments across the land pulling their support for "Public Universities" in an effort to keep the fiscal house under control, it is clear that in the future more of the university budget will be funded by tuition. Summer school tuition is treated differently on many campuses. The offering units get a greater share of the tuition revenue and enrollments start to look like $$$. Many students look to fill General Education requirements in the summer. And quite frequently those appear to be hurdles to get under, through, around, over, or by with little concern for any lasting benefit that might accrue from taking the course. Students enrolled at a particular institution during the regular school year have some incentive to take the summer courses from the home institution, because they know it will articulate with the rest of the curriculum. But convenience and level of difficulty are also factors. If you are math phobic but need to fill the quantitative reasoning requirement, you are looking for a gut, not a challenging course. And if the course is offered online and is in the main or totally asynchronous, that maximizes the convenience benefit.

The conditions are ripe for the Digital Diploma Mills argument that David Noble warned us about a long time ago, and now not from upstarts or for-profit institutions but rather from traditional places that you'd think would offer a decent quality education. This seems to be happening at some places right now. If the trend continues, might not it spill over in to the rest of the school year as well?

Before proceeding further with the rest of my argument, let me go outside the educational context to see the point I'm trying to make. David Brooks had an interesting column today, a kind of refutation of his colleague Paul Krugman, with whom I agree that there hasn't been enough stimulus. But Krugman tends only to look at overall spending, not its composition. Brooks argues we need a kind of tough love spending, like what was done with the U.S. auto makers – structural reform and spending increases in one fell swoop. Instead we got spending increases that seemingly rewarded Democratic party loyalty, but no tough love. (I made a kind of Brooks argument in my post Lessons for Higher Ed from the NBA, where I argued that we need a salary cap for all of Higher Ed and that individual campuses can't really solve the problem.)

But instead of sensible and thoughtful structural reform, what we seem to be getting is knee-jerk reactions in the name of accountability, witness this piece from the Chronicle yesterday, which says that instructors at Texas A&M will be evaluated on their teaching by how much tuition revenue (number of students) they are generating. This sure seems like it is setting in place the race to the bottom forces that we should be quite nervous about. The problem, you see, is that when looking at the issue this way, the entire focus is on what economists would term the extensive margin. There the focus is on volume. Quality is treated as a residual. When attention is on volume incentives get in line for quality to deteriorate.

Now let me make a different sort of segue, this one as a parent who witnesses the homework his teen aged son is getting in High School. Actually, he gets quite a lot of math homework, but it is not graded. If the kid (any kid in the class, not just my son) is struggling on some point and needs some help, how does that obtain? The responsibility is on the kid (or the kid's parents) more than I'd like to see in this instance. I'm sure the teachers are quite heavily burdened. But somewhere or somehow we need to find a way where meaningful assessment can be had other than in tests. Tests are summative assessment and if the results are not good, that can be bruising on the ego for the students. Let the early failures happen in a lower stakes setting and let the kid learn from his mistakes. For that to happen, he needs meaningful feedback on the homework. In his chapter of the book Declining By Degrees, Murray Sperber makes essentially the same point about evaluating student writing in Higher Ed.

And here is one last departure, this one an observation from the College of Business, where I worked for the past four years. I wouldn't have learned about this had I not been exploring the benefits of purchasing scheduling software for the College as it was planning for the utilization of the new Business Instructional Facility. So to do my homework I went to the Campus Timetable and took all College courses for one semester and plotted them in a spreadsheet, by classroom and time of day. I learned some interesting stuff about classroom utilization that way. But I then made a surprising discovery. Two of the three departments in the College offer their courses with 3 contact hours. Accountancy, however, offered its courses with 4 contact hours and occasionally there was a "lab" period on top of that. Teaching loads for faculty are almost always communicated as course loads, not contact hour loads. So what explains the difference across departments? One might envision that some courses are more difficult than others, so would have more contact hours. But it is hard to believe that all the difficult courses are offered by one department. I would attribute the difference to "culture" based on the Project Discovery curriculum in Accounting, which has been buttressed over the years that the Accounting program at Illinois has been remarkably successful as a feeder for incoming staff at the Big 4 accounting firms.

The type of tough love structural reform I envision for Higher Ed involves a refocusing onto the educative value of the activities students and instructors engage in. Courses need to be taught more intensively – more credit hours, more work that the students are accountable for, more contact between students and instructor both about the subject matter in general and about the work students are completing as well. (On the last of these, see my post Rethinking Office Hours.) This means incentives for faculty need to be severely realigned to reflect these goals. My point in emphasizing the Accounting Department example is to show that is possible as long as there is sufficient commitment to the goal.

But in another sense, Accounting doesn't have to make tough choices this way because of the 150-hour requirement for sitting for the CPA exam. A systematic approach to making teaching more intensive (we have many excellent examples of individual instructors doing this, but systematically the incentives are in the opposite direction) would seem to raise cost. We are, however, operating in an environment where costs must be brought down. How can that be done?

The only way this is possible is for students to take fewer courses overall and for the institution to reduce its offerings. Therein lies where the tough choices need to be made. Many students have very few free electives as it is. If they are to take fewer courses overall that means there have to be fewer required courses. This means reconsidering the General Education requirements and reconsidering the major, both of which must be pared down. Then, of course, the accreditors have got to come to the realization that this change is good for all interested parties.

Now let's look at this from a different angle. The current system favors the elite student. They get to take honors classes that are small seminars; they get to do research with a faculty member; they get to be president of the student organization where they are a member. Cream rises, even with a race to the bottom. Some of the students undoubtedly do very well with the current approach.

But too many do not. The tough love solution that we need must provide more of the students with a high caliber education. Rather than cut corners but otherwise try to preserve the status quo, which seems to be the agenda at present, we need to make the instruction more intensive.

An emphasis on the intensive margin seems opposite to the direction we are headed at present. Perhaps if there were more calls for the sort of change I suggest, some counter force could be built up so that we don't make undo damage to our institutions as we pursue the cost cutting measures that are necessary at present.

Faculty, even the well-meaning ones, are likely to push back at suggestions to make instruction more intensive. The students, after all, are mainly not Anna Holtzes. These faculty will have a point. But for any of the students to transcend the limits imposed by their prior education, they need great teachers. We should be in the business of moving that from the exception to the rule.

Calling out of Gmail and Google Voice

I've been futzing with the new calling service that Google is offering and will report some of the things I've experienced.

On Google Voice -
1. I got a phone number for them. I searched on my area code, 217, and my zip code. Neither of those gave numbers. (Champaign-Urbana is not a big SMSA.) I eventually searched on my first name. That provided several numbers. I chose one with a 312 (Chicago) area code.
2. I have it set to ring to my cell phone. That works quite well.
3. If calling from the Google Voice application, I can have it use the cell phone and that works fine. My other alternative is to have it use Google Talk. That doesn't work. I'm not sure why.
4. I haven't tested enough on the transcription application to see how reliability it is, but the way the text and audio are displayed is very good in my view. Somebody who used this application repeatedly would become sensitized to the need to caption video for universal access.

On calling from Gmail.
1. I have many Gmail accounts and have tried this on a couple. On one without a Google Voice account, it seems to call from a phone number that exists just for that call. If from the number that was called I try to return the call, I can't. So to me, since so often you get voicemail instead of getting the person, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use the service without having a Google Voice account.
2. When you have a Google Voice account Gmail knows this and uses that number.

On them together.
The interface is a little weird at present, since it is another browser window (or tab) rather than seeing it all from a unified view (like an inbox and a sent items box in email).

At present, none of this is available on my iPad. For browsers others than Chrome one has to download an extension to enable the calling functionality. But otherwise, this is pretty interesting and I think I may use it for real in the near future.

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.