Back to writing my book

After going on a hiatus for a couple of months, mostly because of work related obligations, I've been back to writing my book for the last week or so. There is now a version of Chapter 6,
Guessing and Verification, posted on the book site. If you get a chance to read it, I'd appreciate getting your opinion of it.

First Session with Galen

Galen Rafferty is a student in our Professional MBA Program here. He is also a staff member for the CIC, which is how I got to know him. He is almost ready to graduate but needed one more course. So he and I agreed that I would mentor him through an independent study course that focuses on a work related interest but that is suitable for his program of study. Galen has a blog to record his current thinking and he will be producing a paper for this course. My role is more as a cheer leader and outside ear than as an expert in Galen's project - I'm not, though I've got some relevant experience from work so I can chime in now and then based on that.

We've decided to do live sessions in ooVoo so the sessions can be recorded and I can then use those for my work. I don't think we've yet nailed it as to how to hold these online sessions, but this sort of mentoring I'd expect to become a more regular part of people's professional development. So I want to showcase it here. The content might be of interest in its own right. I'm showing it for the style of interaction. Enjoy!

Reductio ad Absurdum

Yesterday I caught the tail end of The President's Analyst on TCM. I couldn't stop laughing. Totally ridiculous, it was perfect. Spies everywhere, the Phone Company runs the country, the cool James Coburn totally bereft, it feels like everything is upside down. And with the ridiculousness, there is a serious point.

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line
The Men come and shoot you down
Steven Stills

The last few weeks, it's been hard to read the newspaper. On the particulars one story differed from another. But on the main theme, dysfunction and decrepitude, they were all the same. I couldn't take it. So I stopped reading. This morning, I had a different reaction. Look at this piece on the North Korean satellite launch followed by this piece on how North Korea is pressing for political advantage from the test nonetheless. Or read this this piece about Larry Summers working for a Hedge Fund after he left Harvard, "earning" about $5.2M over two year for the effort, just one day a week, yet being meticulous about paying Social Security for the maid. Add to that it's already April yet it snowed last night - ridiculous.

Keep laughing. We'll get through this.

Going against conventional wisdom

Yesterday, after checking the ESPN Web site to see the score in the basketball game and noting it was close with Michigan State on top, I decided to watch the second half. The Big Ten hadn't fared too well in the tournament until then, so this was more a loyalty thing than expecting anything else. Michigan State has been a second half team all year so I thought they had a decent chance based on that. But what I saw surprised me.

As a rule I don't check the betting line before watching a game (Louisville was a 6.5 point favorite). The announcers kept making the point that Louisville was the overall number 1 seed in the tournament. But sometimes its a matter of match ups, game plan, and fight. Michigan State was quicker to the ball and scrappier than Louisville. I had the same sensation watching that second half as I did 30+ years ago watching the Light Heavyweight Championship bout between Mike Rossman and Victor Galindez. My recollection is that Rossman had a peekaboo style that Galindez never figured out. Galindez was more powerful but he never really connected solidly and eventually he punch himself out. Likewise Louisville never figured out that they needed to raise their intensity level and eventually they faltered..

Who had Michigan State in their brackets? Listening to the Michigan State coach, Tom Izzo, this wasn't an upset. Louisville had exploitable weaknesses and Michigan State found them. The question is who else saw it that way? I didn't.

* * * * *

There's an interesting piece in the NY Times Magazine this week about Freeman Dyson, worth the read even if it challenges your assumptions. Dyson is a Doubting Thomas on Global Warming, an outlier among scientists or so it seems. I'll get to the gist of his arguments in a minute. Whatever you think of those, some of the rest of piece is really quite fascinating. Dyson sees fundamental learning - creating knew knowledge - as a subversive activity. It undermines the establishment. He seemingly gets great pleasure from causing such disruption. How about this one on creativity?

“Being bored is the only time you are creative”

Sounds ridiculous, I know. Except when I was a grad student at Northwestern once a semester I'd drive back to New York to see my folks and I came to like those rides because it gave me time for my mind to wander. Now read this passage.

The breakthrough came on summer trips Dyson made in 1948, traveling around America by Greyhound bus and also, for four days, in a car with Feynman. Feynman was driving to Albuquerque, and Dyson joined him just for the pleasure of riding alongside “a unique person who had such an amazing combination of gifts.” The irrepressible Feynman and the “quiet and dignified English fellow,” as Feynman described Dyson, picked up gypsy hitchhikers; took shelter from an Oklahoma flood in the only available hotel they could find, a brothel, where Feynman pretended to sleep and heard Dyson relieve himself in their room sink rather than risk the common bathroom in the hall; spoke of Feynman’s realization that he had enjoyed military work on the Manhattan Project too much and therefore could do it no more; and talked about Feynman’s ideas in a way that made Dyson forever understand what the nature of true genius is. Dyson wanted to unify one big theory; Feynman was out to unify all of physics. Inspired by this and by a mesmerizing sermon on nonviolence that Dyson happened to hear a traveling divinity student deliver in Berkeley, Dyson sat aboard his final Greyhound of the summer, heading East. He had no pencil or paper. He was thinking very hard. On a bumpy stretch of highway, long after dark, somewhere out in the middle of Nebraska, Dyson says, “Suddenly the physics problem became clear.” What Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga were doing was stylistically different, but it was all “fundamentally the same.”

Hmmm!!

Dyson on Global Warming doesn't sound so unreasonable to me. The first point goes back to stuff we learned in grade school about the symbiotic relationship between plants and animals. You know, the stuff about plants consuming carbon dioxide and producing oxygen and animals doing the opposite. So if greenhouse gasses are on the increase, there is a natural self-regulatory mechanism in the biology. I have no way to evaluate that argument on its merits but I do believe in general that forecasting models, in economics as well as in meteorology, probably do a reasonably good job for small perturbations, but really go awry with big changes. However, Dyson's biology argument seems really there only to set the stage for his social argument, one I can better judge.

To literally fuel economic growth, access to inexpensive energy sources is indispensable. Nowadays, that means coal. For India and China, coal is a lifeblood, a means to transform their economies from peasant-agrarian to middle class/knowledge economy. Dyson sees this transformation as noble, a huge win for humanity. Of course coal as fuel is anathema to global warming advocates. It's the social agenda that drives the views about science, at least in the sense that morality moves our sensibilities, not the other way around. And on social agenda, Dyson is pure American Dream, but that we have no monopoly on that and the best we can hope for is that it spreads through the rest of the world.

Dyson is not for coal forever. He is for coal now, until other technologies (solar especially) catch up from an economic point of view. Let the already rich countries lead on alternative energy technologies. However, don't let them be paternalistic about coal. It's not the type of argument you hear every day. It doesn't sound loony tunes to me.

* * * * *

It seems that old NY Times Columnists don't just fade away. They become reviewers for the New York Review of Books. I really liked this Anthony Lewis piece, Shall We Get Rid of Lawyers? Lewis doesn't have much respect for the author of the book Lewis reviews, Philip Howard, but that seems because of Howard's poor journalism, he takes things as true with only a very limited set of sources and doesn't verify the information they provided, rather than because of Howard's Conservative disposition. Lewis, who had the reputation of being an outspoken Liberal, defies the current stereotype. (We seem to become those we make fun of. My wife has taken to watching MSNBC since Obama has become president and for me they are not much different from Fox News - though I've not watched the latter - Keith Oberman in particular wants to rush to judgment rather than help us understand what is going on.) He sees litigation for social causes as a balancing act, with excesses in both directions, and no quick fixes. His comments about the selection of judges, in particular, are telling. And his quoting Richard Posner, shows he derives his center of gravity from the quality of the argument, not from where the argument fits on the left-right spectrum.

I wish he were still writing for the NY Times because his voice is so true.

In memory of Helen

Everything seems backwards now. And it's not just the economy. Used to be

Ah gits weary
An' sick of tryin'
Ah'm tired of livin'
An' skeered of dyin',
But ol' man river,
He jes'keeps rolling' along.

Now death is the reward. Thankfully, the struggle is over, the end of pain for the matriarch and of anxious times for the children. We compare the well being of societies by their life expectancy. I wonder why.

Helen had her 90th birthday just a month ago. Most of us were here in Des Moines then. The real benefit of this marathon that had not yet come to an end is that the siblings, my wife one of those, and their spouses and offspring and for the adult offspring their offspring as well, all would gather for a meal in celebration, suspending the ordinary pace of life in the name of family.

But all was not joy at the birthday party. Alzheimers would not allow it. Helen, with grace and determination, kept up her charms in her joking way of interaction, though she couldn't remember who you were. And she was so anemic and frail. The kids worried about that. And they worried that she was beginning to outlive her estate. Who plans to be a nonagenerian?

Things also seem backwards in that we're scared of living. I relearned an old lesson on this trip. Technology can frighten us, especially those of us who seem otherwise to have life in their hip pocket. One of my brother-in-laws got a Kindle about a week ago. He hadn't yet started to use it. He quizzed me about what I did with it.

We who take technology for granted need to remember that not everyone else does and that anything unfamiliar can intimidate anyone, even the bravest. We must encourage those we support to overcome their apprehension. The obstacles with new technology are molehills, not mountains. Using the technology well is a way to live life to its fullest, a value we all can embrace. Thank you, Helen, for reminding us of that.

Interesting Whiteboard

There is an interesting Whiteboard tool that Norma told me about called Dabbleboard which one could use in conjunction with an LMS simply by linking to it. Each particular whiteboard get's its own unique url. While Dabbleboard does allow a login, it can be accessed anonymously. And the boards can be kept private so anyone outside the class wouldn't use it. It does seem to be a step up from the whiteboards that are in the LMS.

The Chat tool that accompanies Dabbleboard is actual a different product, Tokbox, which does voice and video chat in addition to the standard text chat, all through the browser without a dedicated client. It also allows video mail, a function I expect will grow dramatically in the next year or so.

Not everything works with these tools. We've tried embedding the Dabbleboard and the chat doesn't seem to function this way. Also that place where you change your name online appears flaky. But it does seem promising. I hope they keep developing it.

Two Additional Chapter Drafts Now Posted

I've written two more chapters for my book. They are up in draft form.
Chapter 4: Walking the Walk
Chapter 5: Just the Facts

Update: M&Ms Learning

YouTube did work on the Blackberry yesterday. I still could not get public radio to play, however.

M&Ms Learning

A couple of days ago my sister-in-law sent me email about KenKen, a math puzzle game modeled after Sudoku. This NY Times piece is a good read on it (with a link to the kenken.com site), particularly on the teaching approach embedded in KenKen - teaching without teaching. The students learn by working the puzzles, first simple four by by puzzles, then more complex puzzles as they improve. I've played it a lot the last couple of days, getting as good as an eight by eight puzzle. The nine by nine seemed overwhelming. I don't know if most kids would get hooked on something like this. But if they did, they'd learn a lot - about logic, algebra and factoring numbers. For the student who does get hooked, it's all very sweet, learning without studying, getting smart through play.

The design is extremely clever. I wonder if we could come up with this sort of thing in other domains, economics for example.

A few days ago I got a Blackberry Storm. I was thinking of getting an iPhone, but the rest of the family has Verizon as the provider so the incremental cost was just too great. I probably shouldn't admit this, but I've always hated cellphones and PDAs, though I've had a variety of them over time. Hearing on the connection, reading the screen, manipulating the buttons, all have been issues for me over time. The Storm is a step up. I could get to like it. The audio, both for listening and speaking (it has a voice annotation function) is very good. The navigation is fairly intuitive. The camera is excellent; it produces very high quality images. Reading email on it is quite good, very good clarity of the font and the scrolling is smooth. The touch screen typing in landscape mode - I've seen reviews where others have raved about it - is ok for me. It is still clunky and occassionally I put too much pressure on the screen, but I feel less of a ditz doing that than I did with my old Treo, tapping at it with my stylus and squinting to make sure I was getting the right letter.

So, I began to think of the Storm as a portable learning device, m-learning seems to be the craze so how would it work? Imagining myself as a student, would I be ok with it instead of a laptop? For me the jury is out. It's a more likely substitute in the field than in the classroom. I downloaded several of Google's mobile applications. Synching the Calendar and Maps worked fine but YouTube wouldn't play the videos. I tried listening to Public Radio online. The Storm does not have RealPlayer but it has Windows Media Player installed, however it didn't seem able to connect. (There are Internet Radio Stations that do play on the Storm, but of course if you want particular programming that may not solve the issue.) Perhaps these problems are temporary and I'll figure them out. The browser seems to work well but some of the Javascript stuff on Web pages doesn't show up at all. I couldn't play KenKen on the Storm. Bummer. I'm wondering whether unless everything goes xml if using a portable device means there has to be translation services or you miss out on the content.

At this point I have lots of portable devices: a Kindle, iPod, Tablet PC, and the Storm, for recreation as much as for work. Each either does a unique function or does its function so much better than the alternative that so far I wouldn't give any of them up in the name of convergence. There is, of course, also the matter of cost - of the device, of connectivity, and of content. The connectivity part is the one I least understand in terms of relating what we pay for wireless broadband versus the cost to the providers. If this is to truly become a learning instrument, the connection charges for the student have to come way down.

My sense is that m-learning is like candy. The idea is appealing, but it's still short of a real meal. At least now as compared to a few years ago, it melts in your mouth, not in your hands.

Closed Captioning with Camtasia - Tips and Tricks

Yesterday and earlier today I made some more content for The Economics Metaphor, my site for teaching Economic Principles/Intermediate Micro. Some of what I did was a screen capture movie of some Excel spreadsheets I had designed with my voice over. Thinking that others might like to give it a try, here are some of the tricks I used to get this thing produced.

First, note that Camtasia only does closed captioning if the output is Flash and at this point I've come to concluded that the move itself should be in .flv format, because it performs better and makes smaller files than .swf format. You can do open captioning (a movie with subtitles that are always there) in other formats and perhaps there is some virtue in doing it that way. But I'm going to assume most people would prefer closed captioning if they could deliver it.

Next, when Camtasia does this the captioning background is translucent. That background overlays the video. Based on experimentation, I've found that video itself should have a plain background where the captioning can appear - otherwise it looks noisy and the captions are hard to read. So I captured my video accounting for that.

Then, I want this to work reasonably well on a computer screen that is 1024x768 in resolution. And I'm making the video so it appears in my blog with two columns. The left is the main column where the video appears. The right is the sidebar column. This puts some additional limits on video width. If you were to design a video for its own stand alone page, you'd make it a little wider. I'll show where that occurs in the process.

The region I capture is 640x480. The Excel piece is 640x360 and right below it is background screen that is mono color of sixe 640x120. So there is some discipline in the size of the region that is captured where the action takes place. Those who make Tablet PC movies capturing their own writing might bear that in mind. When the movie is actually produced I shrink it slightly so it renders as 600x450. This is to fit in the blog. This step would be omitted if the video had its own page. If you want the video to render in the browser without having to scroll down to see the player and accounting for the fact that with several Tabs open and possibly a bookmarks toolbar the browser header can take up a lot of vertical space, you can't have a taller video on a 1024x768 screen.

Now let's talk about the captioning itself. (See the image below.) After experimenting with other alternatives, I've opted for 45 characters per line and two lines of text per screen as the rule. I don't always speak in short sentences or pause in the right places, but I think 3 lines of text is daunting as is too much text on any one line. So what I've got is a reasonable compromise. Also note that I put line space between the text on two different screens. It is rather frenetic to put the timings in as the movie plays. The line spacing makes that job easier.



That's pretty much it. My sense is that while we are being pushed to caption by our accessibility folks for any technical content students will really appreciate the captioning and students who are not native in English will likewise appreciate the captioning. It's really not that hard to do. And if the movies aren't too long, not that much work.

Rabbit Has Stopped Running

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
- John Updike

Obituary

Hideology

I love Russell Baker. I subscribe to the RSS feed for the New York Review of Books, in large part so I can track his pieces there. His latest is a review of several new books about FDR, the first 100 days of his administration. There were two big lessons for me. Fascism was in the air. Of course we all know about Hitler and Mussolini. But I didn’t realize that in the U.S. there was a big push for Roosevelt to adopt dictatorial powers, working on legislation with Congress would be just too slow so he should do it all himself. Fortunately that didn’t happen. Congress gave Roosevelt what he wanted and he produced a whirlwind of programs with the alphabet soup labels.

The other bit I learned is that going into the Presidency FDR was essentially non-ideological. There was an imperative to do something, really to do a bunch of things. But what those things should be and what grand idea would give coherence to the lot of them, that was a different matter. Roosevelt didn’t have that grand idea. Instead, he had a sense of experimentation. Try a program. If it worked, keep it. If it didn’t, get rid of it and try something else. This was Pragmatism but without the trappings, certainly not the Liberalism we associate with FDR today. Roosevelt brought in a Brain Trust of Washington outsiders. They constructed the programs. They defined Liberalism, but really that was a consequence, not a prime cause. Unemployment was over 25%. Hoover’s economic orthodoxy proved toxic. Something else clearly was needed.

Nowadays we seem in the habit of putting politicians into political boxes – Republicans in the Conservative box and Democrats in the Liberal container, the folks in one box with vitriol for their rivals in the other. William Kristol in his last column for the NY Times, treading gingerly as he can, nonetheless can’t avoid casting the Obama Presidency as a new test for Liberalism, whether it can claim the future. Why is this a helpful lens with which to consider the Obama White House? If his regime does something unpredictable, does that mean Liberalism is moving in a new direction? What possible benefit is there in labeling such new policy as Liberal except to create a visceral negative reaction to it from Conservatives. In a similar fashion, Paul Krugman in his analysis of Republican opposition to the fiscal stimulus package, castigates the Conservatives for being obstructionist. He doesn’t venture to try and see it from their point of view. But if pressed Krugman would be forced to admit that government programs initiated to jump start a sputtering economy have a tendency to remain in place well after the economy is on the road to recovery, when the stimulus is no longer needed. Then aren’t we implicitly having a long run argument about the appropriate amount of Federal Government spending while we’re working through the stimulus package? If so, shouldn’t there be some critique of the program based on purely long term views? Putting the opposition into a box blocks the argument when we should be encouraging it.

Sometimes I wonder if I believe in my own writing and when that happens I try to test what I’ve said. After completing the previous paragraph I did a Google search on “the benefits of ideology.” Midway down the first page of hits I found this recent piece by John Santore from The Huffington Post which, in turn, references this piece by Christopher Hayes from The Nation. Both are worth reading on this topic. We need values on which to base decisions and to determine whether outcomes are good, even if otherwise we claim to be pragmatic. In toto those values constitute an ideology. I agree. And sometimes deeply held ideology serves are as an appropriate counterweight to bereft ideas and morally bankrupt policies. That too is true. But I don't think it enough and I don't believe it fully explains away pragmatism as Obama (and FDR) intended to use it.

As a rule most of us don't fully articulate the set of principles that make up our core beliefs. Even if we do, such an articulation is not a commitment. When a real situation arises where the principle applies and we understand that it does apply, our behavior serves to test the principle. Sometimes belief in the principle drives the behavior. Other times not and what we may discover is, in fact, the belief is in a somewhat narrower principle. We may say, for example, we believe in some of The Ten Commandments, particularly, "Thou shall not steal." But we may cheat on our income taxes nonetheless. How can that be reconciled? Perhaps with a response like, "There is no harm." The narrower principle then is, If there is an obvious victim then thou shall not steal, but if there is no apparent victim then go ahead and worry only about the chance of getting caught, not the moral imperative.

Because we don't fully articulate our principles we may find a different issue in practice. Two or more of our principles may be in apparent contradiction or may suggest opposite forms of behavior. We are forced to rank order the principles so one may trump the other and lead to a clear decision. But we may surprise ourselves in that ordering and find it depends on experience, not on prior disposition. In Carl Sagan's book Contact, the space travelers (in the movie there was only one, the character played by Jodie Foster, but in the book there were several) have no evidence whatsoever of their trip through a series of wormhole "tunnels" to Vega and other points galactic, so though atheists themselves and people whose deepest beliefs are founded in science, they nonetheless feel impelled to ask others simply to trust them on their word in spite of the lack of evidence. Sagan has constructed a delicious irony which is why Contact is such a good story. The extraordinary experience and power of that experience trumps the prior held belief in all things science.

Then too there is the possibility that our principles are insufficient to determine a course of action and to judge whether outcomes are good or not. As an adult watching a parent or a parent-in-law go through progressive deterioration due to the onset of dementia, the inability of the parent to see reality and cope with it trumps any sense of rightness in the decisions on how to manage the parent's care. Expediency, not normally a fundamental principle, ends up the driver.

Let me make one other point on this topic, a point that Santore and Hayes would subscribe to. It is different to say that we each base our decisions and evaluate outcomes on the basis of an ideology than to argue that there are a small finite number of ideologies (conservative or liberal) within which our beliefs must lie. If there is substantial diversity of such ideologies but we are nonetheless to get along then compromise becomes an ordinary practice. It is well known that there is no equivalent to Duncan Black's Theorem about the Median Voter when there is more than a single dimension (left-right) where voters can express their preference which can lead to instability in outcomes or to manipulation by a Machiavellian Prince (or a Committee Chair) that others would deem unfair. A willingness to compromise, in this sense, can be seen as a commitment not just to get things done but also to a commitment in fairness of the process. I believe that is a value which many if not all people subscribe to. It also means that one wants to look at outcomes over time, not just at a single incident, and see if those outcomes "average out" in some rough way and as a whole trump the gridlock that opposing rigid ideologies often produce, but with that criteria it also makes sense that what looks like absolutely disasterous decisions should be blocked ratherthan negotiated to fruition, because the ill consequences will never average out with other more successful outcomes..

The quintessential decision in this regard is the Iraq War. The problem is not that no WMD were present and hence that we should not have gone in at all. The main question is whether we should have anticipated Civil War soon after liberation, a repeat of Yugoslovia after Tito, and then as a consequence the U.S. Military involvement would extend for upward of six years. If so, then the pragmatic approach would be to argue for staying out. This would not be an ideological decision. It would be a straight cost-benefit analysis. Jeanne Kirkpatrick,certainly nobody's idea of a dove, publicly embraced but privately was against the War for these very reasons.

* * * * *

I fear we face the same sort of tyranny with ideology in teaching and learning. The (mis) perception is that there is one right way to teach, one right way to design student assignments, one right way to assess that work. Think of all the jargon we now have to describe effective practices: student centric, active learning, authentic assessment. Instructors are either in this camp in which case students are the heroes and lecture is the enemy, with the characterization of the enemy approach particularly demonizing, or instructors have not yet found salvation and teach in a fairly traditional manner with no obvious way to implement modest but continual improvement. A Roosevelt-like approach to the situation should be welcome, but there is no way to fit it into this setting.

I want to describe a non-ideological view of the circumstances so we can frame how an experimental approach to improving teaching might proceed. Let's start with the student-teacher divide. Both Arthur Levine, in his chapter of the book Declining By Degrees, and Russel Durst in his book Collision Course, assert there is a substantive student-teacher divide. In the main students are extrenely practical about their learning and want to put what they are taught to good use. In contrast, Faculty are just as extremely theoretical about their teaching. Next, let's consider learner motivation. There is no doubt that "learner control" is empowering to the learner, first and foremost due to intrinsic motivation in the subject, then even with extrinsic reward as long as the reward is constructed in a way to encourage the learner's own autonomy. (See Ryan and Deci.) Then consider the effectiveness of the learning. Students have been socialized to study subjects as things in themselves, but experts believe it better to measure how students apply what they learn to new contexts. This is termed transfer. Transfer is facilitated by a theoretical approach to instruction since theory is generalizeable and hence applied in other contexts. A more nuts and bults approach might improve student understanding of the ideas themselves, but makes transfer more difficult because students don't see how to apply what they've learned. Last let's consider was is known about expert knowledge. Experts don't do "more thinking" than their novice counterparts. Rather they do better thinking. They have much better pattern recognition. They know what to look for to solve a problem in their area of expertise so can arrive at a satisfactory solution much more quickly. The develop their expertise via Effortful Study over a long period of time, perhaps 10 years of work, four hours per day each and every day in those 10 years. If learning is moving down the path toward expertise then students require challenges that are just out of their reach and they need to put in the time to meet those challenges.

All of this is pretty much agreed upon. There is no real dispute in each of those four components of the view. Put them together, however, and throw in for good measure that class size limits the amount of one-on-one interaction between student and teacher that is possible and the result is inherent tension - who drives, theoretical or practical orientation to the study, how much time does the student put in outside of class, how is the student tested? Based on what we know the answers should be idiosyncratic to the student, the subject matter, and the instructor's style. Yet such customization in approach is hard to achieve. Reality of limited resources forces things to be closer to one-size-fits all. The doctrinaire ideologically driven arguments on how we should teach ignore some aspects of this environment. A Roosevelt-like experiment would focus on one of those aspects by changing matters there and hope that it does no harm in the other dimensions, judging the overall result for whether it is a step forward or back. Such an experiment can be conceived only by an insider, the instructor who is familiar with how the course is going at present. Outsiders can be used for consultation, certainly. But they shouldn't drive because they can't directly test appropriateness and therefore can't see the wisdom (or lack) in what they recommend. Unfortunately, we don't seem to witness much of this sort of experimentation.

Instead, the prescriptive approach to faculty development seems ever with us. It's not just the pundits who put people into boxes.

Getting Rid of the Blur

The following Tip is from the Jing Pro site

Tip: YouTube displays low-quality video by default; if you want your viewer to see high-quality video, add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL when you send it to them.

Likewise, here is a link to explain how to get the higher quality in an embedded video. The video below is the same one I had embedded in the Google Presentation yesterday, but it is a lot sharper in view.



Blip.tv does this without all all the bother. But I know some folks don't want to put video content elsewhere than YouTube for fear that the provider will go under. Those fears might be self-fulfilling.

Presentations in Google Docs with YouTube Video

Here is a little example of a PowerPoint presentation with YouTube video embedded on each slide. You need to use your Google Account to access the thing properly, but it should be generally available.

Slides one and three have talking head video. It doesn't autostart. There are buttons for both video play and for slide navigation. But otherwise, I think that is pretty good.

Slide two has screen capture video. YouTube blurs that video. I wish I knew how to solve the problem. (I assume it blurs the talking head too, but the consequence is less to the viewer.) Here is the same video rendered clearly.

Slide three also has a link to a Form from a Google Spreadsheet. This is to show that a type of assessment can be tied to the presentation. Of course, there is essentially no security with this. The form is publicly available., as is the rest of the presentation. But in terms of ease of use and low cost (Google Hosts it all) this seems like an interesting alternative.

A Rhyme About Higher Ed

I wrote the rhyme in response to this piece from yesterday's Chronicle, which upset me. With apologies to my readers, because it is not elevating.

* * * * *
Higher Ed looks to be in big trouble,
From burst of the housing market bubble.

There’s a mad scramble for revenue and to reduce cost.
Some already feel all has been lost.

Others think modest cuts will suffice.
Underestimating problems has long been their vice.

Few have looked to reexamine the mission.
It’s far easier to consider raising tuition.

That would reduce access to those of modest means.
College no longer promotes upward mobility, or so it seems.

The issues have been with us for more years than twenty,
Student engagement, Campus commitment, and others, of which there are plenty.

Part of the trouble is rising income inequality in the larger society,
Causing wasteful inter campus competition beyond all sense of propriety.

Superstar faculty first come and then go.
So ambitious department heads can put on a show.

The movement of the stars cast a large net.
The rest of the faculty want to know what they will get.

The resulting dynamic creates constant hunger for new money,
Although this vicious cycle now no longer seems funny.

New research areas arise from discovery and need,
Creating new Centers and buildings at alarming speed.

While traditional programs keep on going,
Though their prestige and income is necessarily slowing.

The students too are culpable I fear,
It goes way beyond their drinking too much beer.

They’re jaded, incurious, and work not enough.
It’s not that the courses they take are too tough.

They go to college for the sheepskin rather than to learn,
For after all it’s well paying jobs that they yearn.

For freedom from responsibility college is one last gasp,
Before they graduate and enter into the rat race grasp.

All this has been happening for a while let’s be clear.
It’s not that it just started this year.

Though it finally seems that the dam has been burst.
Making the current situation feel like the worst.

Something surely true, though it seems strange.
Crisis affords the best opportunity for real change.

It alters our perspective about what we care,
Encouraging us to take the intelligent dare.

To demand more from all participants is a must.
That’s the only way to reestablish the trust.

Beyond that the entire system must reform.
Unilateral action by individual campuses will only worsen the storm.

But first we’ll think near term and so we will flail,
Only realizing later it was all to no avail.

Then we’ll finally be ready to ask,
Which really should be our fundamental task,

What would an effective system look like and how would it behave?
If we knew that surely it should be the road that we pave.

Until we ask those questions watch out for Higher Ed.
For if that doesn’t happen soon it might end up dead.

Project for the New Year

I've started to write a book. It's called Guessing Games. I'm putting up drafts at this site. The first few chapters are there as is the preliminary content. You can also see some of the remaining structure planned. Not there at present is a practical implementation plan. If after reading some of this you have ideas for the implementation plan, I'd love to hear them. I'd also be delighted to receive comments or suggestions on what is there.

I'm likely to be posting less to this blog while doing the book but I will put update announcements here when I have new chapters, and I will continue to make posts that are about the technology per se.

Doing this book is my New Year's resolution. Let's see if I can keep it.

Never Play Leapfrog With A Unicorn

We’ve taken Winter Holiday in San Antonio with my wife’s sister and her family. It’s been very relaxing, too much good food, and lots of time to catch up on my pleasure reading. The Kindle is a godsend. I’ve been getting the New York Times every day, more about that in a bit. I read the December edition of The Atlantic on the flight down. There’s a piece by James Fallows on the Chinese view of America vis-à-vis the economic crisis by way of an interview with Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, where if you get past his frustration with “American superiority” the view seems pretty sensible. There’s another piece about Rampage Jackson, a kickboxer who had been light heavyweight champion of the Ultimate Fighting Championship that makes for a compelling read, describing a part of our culture that is entirely alien to me, people who grow up to find a vocation in fighting, the fear about what these people do and how they behave part of what draws you into the story.

Reading on an airplane, part of the idea is to lose your sense of self in the story. The leg room is inadequate, there’s the worry about whether we’ll make the connection, or suffer delays in Atlanta where we have to change planes because the whole country seemingly was in a cold spell on the day we departed, Monday the 22nd, as it turned out we sat on the tarmac for a half hour after we landed and did have to run to make our connection, and there is the general sense of disorientation that travel seems to encourage, which I believe gets worse if you simply let your mind wander without giving it some task to perform. I did start to ask myself about how magazine reading compares to blog reading, even the slow blogging where the length of the pieces may be comparable. One obvious difference is the nature of sources. The Atlantic pieces are written by insiders who talk with other insiders, who are the eyes and ears for the rest of us, and who do this as their bread and butter. It’s very professional in delivery and the Editors of the Atlantic are seemingly quite aware of their need to produce value add for the reader, a difference in perspective, topic, or quality of writing from the usual fare. My goal reading blogs is quite different, either to get new or understand perspective within the profession. The blogs are written by peers for an audience of peers. Mostly the writing is not as crisp. Mine especially comes up short, too much setup where the point isn’t readily apparent, temporarily begging the reader’s indulgence to a deliver a conclusion down the road. The magazine pieces are written to keep the reader enthralled throughout.

Somewhere on the Atlanta to San Antonio leg I switch to the obligatory Le Carre novel, this time Single & Single, which I purchased the evening before. (This aspect of the Kindle I really love, though it is still the case that there are many things I want to read not available on the Kindle. I’ve got Michael Polanyi’s short book, The Tacit Dimension, out of the Library as something else to read, a more serious treatise, so I left it in the suitcase to read down here.) I finish Single & Single off in two days, a totally gripping story, the first day doing nothing else while recovering from the travel disorientation. Now, even with the family chatter and meeting with the various relatives from my wife’s side of the family, I’m halfway through Blink, have begun to read Tom Friedman’s new book, and am making some headway in Polyani, though it is a bit different from what I had anticipated. All of this is a delight, a great way to get some R&R.

On Wednesday, though, I got irritated. Tom Friedman’s column – Time to Reboot America – really put me off. (Apart from checking email on my cell I’ve not been online very much this week, though I did note that Stephen Downes likewise had a negative reaction to this column.) I was annoyed with his example - Kennedy (nee Idelwild) Airport, the international airport in New York City, looks dingy and damp compared the Hong Kong Airport from where Friedman departed, which he describes as ultramodern. The point is that we’re not investing in infrastructure properly, losing out in the global economic competition to the various East Asian miracle countries. In the back of my mind I’m thinking about the Yankees signing Texeira to this huge contract while paying a 20+ million dollar fine for spending too much in player salaries, which may make sense given the new Yankee Stadium, but seems an extravagance especially given the current state of the economy and, though I’m a big Yankees fan, a symbol of how the super wealthy can manipulate the economy for their own personal gain. I’m also recalling how as a kid we’d meet international visitors (relatives of my mom or dad) at Idelwild, how the individual buildings, particularly Pan Am, looked really cool with their futuristic architecture, and how we’d sometimes go to the observation deck in the terminal to wave to our guests as they got on their departing flights. That was forty some odd years ago. Maybe the airport does need a facelift. But who’d be the beneficiaries. Would it just be a sop to international business travelers, more of the rob from the poor to comfort the rich approach that seem to typify the times we live in, or would there be a benefit to the NYC economy that could be more broadly distributed.

Friedman doesn’t bother with that distinction in the piece. Indeed, he’s all over the place on infrastructure. (Maybe he had jet lag when he wrote it and his editor gave him leeway as a consequence. On that, I’m sympathetic.) I expect better, especially since Friedman’s issue de jour is the U.S. leap frogging our Asian competitors by taking world leadership in the turning the planet green. He needs a sensible view about infrastructure to support all of that. At least in this piece, he doesn’t deliver. With such a shaky foundation, one wonders whether the rest of his structure will implode on itself. So in the rest of my post, I’m going to sketch what I believe is the necessary elements of an infrastructure analysis. I’m not going to claim I’ve got it right in the answers. But I believe it is pretty much right in the structure. I’d like to see Friedman (and others too) elaborate and wrangle with these ideas before the Obama administration goes too far down the path to creating its counterpart to the WPA and other New Deal programs.

Providing A Reasonable Definition of Pork

If the other white meat is like beauty, we’ve got a problem. There is then no sensible way to determine which public works projects should be scrapped and it will be politics as usual to determine those projects that do receive funding. There are potentially two different ways to define pork, one via process, the other via product. The process way is far easier in conception, if not in delivery. At present there seems to be agreement that “earmarks” are an unfair way to allocate resources from the public trough. There is a lack of accountability with earmarks and consequently too great a chance that the spending will have only narrow benefit. One wonders, given the bad reputation that earmarks have, why Congress doesn’t self-police and get rid of earmarks entirely, encourage Bills to be clean, to borrow a phrase from Secretary Paulson, and thereby give more transparency to the legislation. I’m not holding my breath on this one, because there’d have to be leadership out of Congress as well as from the White House to get this done.

The other notion of pork would be about product only, irrespective of the process. The image is of the bridge to nowhere, the highway no cars or trucks travel on, the airport with no departures or arrivals. More generally, this notion of pork captures the idea that there are few beneficiaries relative to the size of the public spending. That may seem straightforward but there are several important caveats to consider which make this a harder notion to grapple with conceptually. Here are some of those factors.

For the Thanksgiving holiday the family drove up to Naperville to spend time with my wife’s nephew and his family. On the segment of I-80 we travelled on, just west of where it crosses I-57, the traffic was extreme and everyone had to drive well below the speed limit, even where it was a six-lane road. If traffic is even remotely like that the rest of the year, I could see justification for widening I-80 in that part of the state. To complete our trip, we took I-355, a toll road, north to Naperville. This is relatively new highway and there was very little traffic, except at the toll plazas. Is this an example of Pork? Or is it necessary infrastructure built in a proactive way to anticipate a growing demand? How does one tell the one from the other? This is an illustration of the first complexity to consider.

Illinois is a state dominated by one big city, Chicago, much of personal wealth is located in the surrounding suburbs, and then there is the rest of the state. Champaign-Urbana, where I live, is in that third category. We are reasonably well served by Interstate Highways, but Train service could definitely be better, there are no large planes flying out of our airport (Piedmont, when it was an independent airline back in the 1980s, did fly a large jet out of Champaign) and TV, Internet, and Phone service have fewer alternative providers than in Chicago. If you look at the urban-rural distribution of infrastructure spending, how does one determine the appropriate mix? Sometimes a notion of universal access conflicts with a utilitarian notion of the greatest good for the greatest number. How does one reconcile the two? I’ve got no magic wand on this one, but it did occur to me that for Federal infrastructure spending distributed to the states, one might allocate funds roughly proportional to the electoral votes from the state. This, some might argue, would create a rural bias in allocation. I believe there to be sufficient counter forces built into the politics, the Ted Stevens example notwithstanding, that a formula of this sort might very well be in order. In any event, this is an example of the second complexity.
The type of green investment that Friedman would like to see is of necessity speculative. One can make a strong argument that we need to do this sort of thing, while understanding that after the fact any such investment many not pay off. This is why most everyone who is arguing for green investment advocates for a portfolio approach, to get the benefits of diversification. But what type of portfolio makes sense, especially when some of these investments, i.e., nuclear power, are necessarily lumpy hold some rather obvious environmental risks? Portfolio management here is another possible source of pork.

Another factor to consider is that much public infrastructure spending is for social insurance (or social self-protection) rather than directly providing for service delivery. Think about the Food and Drug Administration, the Levee systems built and administered by the Army Corp of Engineers, and the Security Systems at airports. The beauty about insurance, at least the private kind that we have for home, auto, and liability is that we’re typically better off when we don’t collect on the policy because we haven’t suffered loss. While too little self-protection may not be prudent, too much looks like pork. How does one tell the one from the other? I know I feel that much of the security at airports is worth very little and I’m quite sure I’m not alone in that assessment. But I’m equally sure there are experts who’d disagree. This is yet another example of the dilemma.

Prioritizing non-Pork Investments

Personally, I prefer to think of various shades of gray in terms of thinking through the social benefit from any specific public investment. The shades-of-gray approach allows for the possibility of particular investment projects that are not pork, yet not sufficiently important to get Federal funding. But, of course, that leads to the question whether a particular investment project is worth funding. Politics aside, can we answer this question in the abstract based on rationality criteria alone?

I don’t know the answer to this. What I do know is that in the restricted domain of information technology, listening to security experts talking about infrastructure one gets a conclusion that other IT providers, let alone students, faculty, and staff who consume IT services, will disagree on the appropriate infrastructure to provide, the consumers care more about quality of use issues in the non-accident state and only turn their attention to the accidents once they happen. The perspectives are remarkably distinct. It is non-trivial to reconcile them. And this is just IT. How does one do this more broadly, and at a national level rather than a campus level? It would seem necessary to articulate some additional principles to aggregate these differing viewpoints. What are those principles? Rather than picking the winning investments ahead of time, it would be more useful to do the hard work to develop such principles. Friedman mentions in his piece that he’d like to see tax incentives instead of public provision. Tax incentives may help with speculative investments that otherwise won’t be profitable. But they probably aren’t helpful for providing rural access to infrastructure services. Is there a principle or two embedded in that observation?

Crumbling Infrastructure Investment

It seems to me that the issues of road repair, bridge repair or replacement, renovation of crumbling schools, in other words where making functional investments in publicly provided capital projects that are better thought of as upgrades rather than as new projects, these should be considered in a distinct way from fundamentally new infrastructure.

On my Campus, and on many campuses nationally, there is a substantial “deferred maintenance” problem. Older buildings have inadequate HVAC, electricity, plumbing, network, and other functionalities we expect in new structures. Performing the requisite maintenance is necessary, but it is completely unsexy. Other needs seem more import pressing and they rather than the deferred maintenance commence any and all discretionary funding. The only way to adequately address the problem is to have a separate fund that can’t be allocated for other purposes and diligently pursue the maintenance projects.

I believe we need to pursue something similar on the Federal level. The maintenance/replacement fund should represent some fraction, say 80%, of the total need. There would then be commission to the base closing commission, determining which projects would not receive renewal funding this year but would continue in operation, which would be retired entirely but they don’t deserve to be renewed, and which should be updated. The actual fraction would be determined by the size of the fund in a full-employment zero deficit government budget, by how much fundamentally new infrastructure investment is envisioned, and by anticipated GDP growth. I have no clue as to what the right fraction is, only that “boring part” of infrastructure must be provided for well, probably before the fun new stuff is considered. I don’t see anyone really talking about this in terms of identifying the order of magnitude of the spending. We need to get beyond the point of talking about the Minneapolis bridge disaster to talking about what we will do to address the problem by getting a sense of how large it is dollar-wise and how long it will take to get to a steady state where the problem has been internalized and addressed.

WPA-like Projects as Keynesian Economics

I believe it correct to follow the Paul Krugman dictate to ignore Federal deficits near term and try to spend our way out of the current recession. But to the extent that spending is in infrastructure, I think it reasonable to ask how much of it could be done and be sustained long term. It’s true we’re all dead in the long run, but our children and grandchildren are our beneficiaries and we should care about their welfare. It makes little sense now to invest beyond long run sustainable levels. Consideration of this sort might get us to a more sensible discussion of tax policy and appropriate tax rates. The public rhetoric on this issue is abysmal and completely non-informative. We need to do better in this dimension.

Conclusion

If the Obama regime is to produce substantial change, it will be necessary for there to be widespread support of the policies. Tom Friedman, with his Times column as bully pulpit, has the ability to influence opinion but within the Beltway and out in the electorate. Infrastructure is a hugely important issue. There needs to be greater sophistication in considering the issues. Some of them are hard. Better to identify those sooner rather than latter so we can have open debate on the right course of action, rather than simply have that imposed from above.

First Impressions

News of Caroline Kennedy throwing her hat into the ring for the Senate seat Hilary Clinton is vacating has me harkening back to my impressions of JFK's White House. Much of that was formed by a comedy album, The First Family. It poked fun at Camelot. But apart from one line about Nikita Kruschev ordering lunch, I don't remember it at all. Contrast that to the Allan Sherman album, My Son the Folk Singer, where seeing the song titles I can recall both the tune and the lyrics (not perfectly, of course, but a few lines). A few years later there was the Tom Lehrer album That Was The Year That Was where again the songs are memorable (you can't take six from two, two is less than six so you look at the four in the tens place..... base eight is just like base ten, if you're missing two fingers). I don't recall singing, humor, and satire as a bundle after that, at least part of the general culture. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had all the elements, but separate. Loudon Wainright, maybe, but he was less mainstream.

The form of satire/entertainment that survives today (Daily Show, Colbert Report) dates back to the David Frost invention TW3. I wonder if the other forms can be rejuvenated. Anybody want to take up acoustic guitar?

Spare the Rod and Spoil The Child

Goodbye Governor. I guess this means we're going to keep having to do the State mandated Ethics Training.

PLAs Please

Today we have my two most dreaded words – freezing rain. So I’m staying home, waiting for the temperature to rise and the slick roads and sidewalks to disappear. It’s the last week of classes here. Reading “Day” is Thursday, then final exams. I think everyone is ready for the semester to end. It seems interminable. We need some refreshment, a diversion from the grind, a way to kindle energy anew. In anticipation of that, I’m going to offer some suggestions via a little Proust-like exercise – remembrance of things past. And I’m going to do that via this operative question. What is it that school did for me that I couldn’t have done on my own?

I was a large kid. Early on, till I was about 9 or 10, maybe even a little older, my big issue was (not so) fine motor skills. Hands and eyes didn’t coordinate. In the private nursery school I attended (I really don’t know the difference between that and kindergarten, since I didn’t go to the latter, starting public school in the first grade) they coached me quite a bit on functions other kids could just take for granted. I made progress, but it was slow. I got something of a different sort of that a few years later. You wouldn’t normally think of reading as a fine motor activity, but apparently I read the way most people watch a ping pong match. My head would move to follow the text across the line, then back again, a hard return sans keyboard. I have a recollection of somebody with their hands on my head holding it in fixed position as I read aloud, literally forcing me to have my eyes do the work instead of my head.

Perhaps five years later when I was in summer camp, I played “flinch,” not the card game but rather a game where one person has their hands behind their back and the other with their hands straight ahead, palms and fingers touching, almost as if praying. The person with the hands hidden would try to slap the other person’s hands. If the slap was a hit or if it was a “fake” and the other person flinched, the person with the hidden hands could go again (and with a flinch there was a free slap). If it was a miss or the fake went too far so the faker’s hands were exposed, the roles reversed. We all played that game growing up, but in camp that year I played with a counselor who was a football lineman who could bench press over 300 pounds, and he slapped hard and fast. He was trying to toughen me up a bit. I did get much better at it, although my hands remained raw much of the time. Put in the right incentive and there is rapid learning, at least of that sort.

The other part of school that I recall being coercive was fifth grade arithmetic with Mrs. Stone. We did drill on multiplication, five minutes per day, rapid fire on the times table up through 12 times 12. I didn’t like it. But I didn’t have a choice. Eventually I got it. Now I think it is indispensable.

Reading was different. Pretty early on, perhaps fourth grade, we had SRA. This history by Don Parker is a fascinating read, if a little melodramatic. We also had individualized reading. (Those who preach a learner centric approach likely will be intrigued at how early this piece is and yet that its critique is not about “teacher centric” so much as it is about “grouping,” where all students read the same book.) And now I must confess that my memory fails, or that I’m not able in looking backward to attribute cause to school or elsewhere or in some combination.

Elsewhere in this case was the public library, but also books that were at home. I recall a series that I believe Random House produced. The books were numbered, each around 150 pages, dealing with a character or event in American History – Kit Carson, The Transcontinental Railroad, Fulton’s Folly, Appomattox, etc. I’d read at least one of these a week, sometimes one in an evening. And there were biographies by Clara Ingram Judson from the school Library. This was an enormous education. I soaked it in. Once the momentum started it self-sustained. I’m really not sure of the spark. What does it matter?

A little later I got a job during the school day working in the school library. My sixth grade teacher was also the Librarian. The work was putting those clear plastic covers onto the new book jackets, to protect them. The covers came in two pieces that you sandwiched onto the book jacket. There was some adhesive on one that you made stick to the other, with the entire thing adhering to the book itself. I must have done a hundred books that way. It was an opportunity to see the new titles. Somehow I wound up with a baseball craze, among which I read the Kid from Tompkinsville. Then soon thereafter a biography of Bob Cousy, and Go Up for Glory, which Bill Russell may or may not have been involved in writing.

In Junior High School, we had The Oxford History of the American People (hard cover) at home and I pompously, though naively, brought it into school so I could quote from it in class and do quick lookups during discussion. Somewhere around that time I must have first tried to read a newspaper. My dad was a dedicated Herald Tribune reader, not switching to the Times until after the Newspaper Strike. I believe I discovered Red Smith around then and then Russell Baker. A year or two later I was subscribing to the New Republic and Scientific American. Both were a bit over my head, at least at the beginning. But I gathered up nuggets and put things together. I recall the first week of biology class in 10th grade we were talking about origins – the Big Bang and that sort of thing. I had read about some alternative and offered it up to the class. The teacher put on the board, “Lanny’s Passing Star Theory,” my five minutes of fame.

The reading was accompanied by attendance at presentations, serious music and theater, along with the schmaltzy Gilbert and Sullivan and Broadway Musicals that my mom favored. Growing up in New York was a huge advantage for this. There was a wealth of stuff and once riding the train into Manhattan became an ordinary thing, I did it pretty often, with friends or acquaintances.

By now the point should be clear – this was all education outside of school. It was entertainment, leisure if you will, but leisure that is nurture of an intellectual sort. School may have been the driver early on. It had long ceased to be the driver by High School. Something else gave the motivation. It was me doing what I wanted to do. I wanted to be exposed to new ideas and found them wherever they came. This is not to say that I was all work and no play. I played piano, street football, basketball, and other ball sports. And I watched a huge amount of TV as a kid. (I can sing the theme song from My Mother the Car! How’s that for obscure?) But some of that time that was mine, not the school’s, was for things most would call learning. And the subject matter really had little to do with school although school and my independent learning would overlap now and again.

* * * * *

Caring more about alliteration and making bad puns than about accurately labeling the behavior, I’ve termed the above a Personal Learning Agenda, the PLA from my title. Really there isn’t an agenda, certainly not one that can be itemized or scheduled in advance. It’s a more amorphous concept, a recognition of a need to learn from the ideas of others by experiencing their works, through reading, watching performance, or observing their creations. And then out of that there is a putting sense to it all, fitting it into a larger picture, developing a sense of taste as to what is pleasing and what not, learning to write about the ideas and to talk about them, becoming aware of self in this and how self is other than these external ideas yet being part of them.

A kid with a PLA will do ok in school, perhaps very well. School will become a piece of a larger tapestry for them. They’ll see it that way and adjust their efforts accordingly. The exception is where they are overcome with boredom at school because there is not enough intellectual fodder there, in which case the PLA will trump school and then perhaps some need for self-expression in the kid will prevail. But then the kid will do ok anyway, because the kid is grounded in a good way. The kid has learned judgment and to trust himself at some level, to know when he doesn’t understand something and to have a sense of when he does, and not to take things on faith just because somebody else says to.

How many kids have a PLA? Do we know enough to say what starts them down the path? I don’t know the answer to either of those questions. Access to plenty of interesting things to read and view would certainly seem necessary. Whether it’s enough, I can’t really say.

I do have this feeling that we’re trying to do in College what individualized reading and the public library did for me in elementary school. And that if the kid doesn’t have a PLA by the time he graduates from High School, it sure will be tough sledding trying to get the kid to establish one thereafter.

I think its fine to think of kids learning in a broader community online, where the synthesis, analysis, and argument are a group activity. I'm not trying to argue against it here with my pun on PLEs. But I don’t believe that’s possible unless each participant has something to bring to the table first. That’s why I say, PLAs Please.