Online lectures for blended learning: the good and bad

Way back when, perhaps 5 years ago, I created PowerPoints with voice over for every lecture in my intermediate microeconomics class. If I can recall my thinking at the time, I had wanted my students to come to class prepared, and so had them do the Mallard quizzes before I lectured on them. They complained bitterly about this saying they had to work too hard and they had to "teach themselves" the economics. I'll ignore the irony in that complaint and simply point out that I couldn't be comfortable teaching students who were angry that way. But I didn't want to lecture on the basics in the live class setting, because I thought that was a poor use of class time. So I put that stuff online.

If you go here, you can still see the links to those lectures
http://www.business.uiuc.edu/~l-arvan/readings.html
But if you follow those links you'll hit a dead end. The server where that content resided died and we had to change servers. Here are links on the new server for Lecture_03.
PowerPoint with voice over as Web Page (The audio probably won't work).
PowerPoint as asf file (Windows Media Format). This should work but it is progressive download, not real streaming.
PowerPoint without audio (for printing out the files).

I'm showing this old content to demonstrate in part how nondurable it is. The first version used to work with IE but not Netscape. When IE 6 came out, it did something that messed up the audio associations. So at least I understand why it doesn't work now. The second version works but it looks really rinky dink, as if tiles fell off the wall. I have no clue why this has happened other than that Windows Media Player has gone through several iterations. If one goes to the View menu and then chooses File Markers, one will see the various slide titles. When version 6 of Windows Media Player was available (that was the commonly available version of the player when I made this content) one could actually use the File Markers as a navigation tool - in other words move to that particular slide within the presentation. Unfortunately, that functionality does not work with later versions of the player. The plain PowerPoint without the audio still works.

Since that time I've learned some things about accessible Web design and about embedding audio in Web pages. Also, most students on this campus now have reasonable access to bandwidth. Therefore, playing the audio off a server is probably worse than having the students download it. Here is an example of an html alternative to the PowerPoint which has audio and has to be downloaded so probably shouldn't be done over a modem. (It's 2.5 MB). I like this in terms of the technology. There are no frames. The navigation is straightforward. The embedded players show the time of the clip and can be paused or stopped and then repeated. Making the first one of these is a bear, but then it can serve as a template for other presentations and that makes it much easier. If the sound files are named with a numerical scheme (sound001.rm, sound002.rm, etc.) the same html code can be re-used. Ditto for the slides themselves and the navigation between them and the index slide.

However, I'm completely unsatisfied with this pedagogically. It is thorough. But it is boring. Boring and thorough is good as a reference. Boring and thorough is horrible as a presentation. This takes the worst of classroom lectures and puts it online. Either the content must change or the format must change or both.

In the post tomorrow, I'll talk about alternative formats. I'm still experimenting with that.

Blogging: The Market, The College, or the Campus

Obviously, I think blogs are a good idea. You don't put in this much effort into something you don't believe in. When I set up this blog, I made a point of it being on a server with "uiuc.edu" in the url. Blogger.com has its own free hosting service, Blogspot, and that certainly functions well enough. I want to ask whether it matters where the hosting occurs and if so why?

Let me begin by pointing out the following. Although my blog appears at guava.cites.uiuc.edu, I compose the posts on the blogger.com site and there is an archive of those posts at blogger.com (which is necessary, functionally, if I want to edit any of the posts after they are published). So blogger.com has access to my content and since blogger.com is part of Google...... I'm not really sure what the right inference is to draw from this. Am I at risk of my content being used to exploit some weakness or invade my privacy? Obviously, I must not feel that risk is too great; after all, I'm incurring it. But is that ignorance or a calculated risk? Truthfully, I haven't thought hard about it for a while but I did make some post about this a while back which said, in effect, that as long as Google's economic fortunes are ok, the risk is minimal. (And in editing posts, I can delete them. )

Why did it matter to me to have a CITES server host this blog? Let me ask a different question first. Is the blog something I do as part of my job or is it outside that? Gary Becker (Nobel prize winner in Economics) and Richard Posner (Justice and Law Professor at Chicago) have their blog on a commercial site. I learned recently that Becker stopped writing his Business Week column to do this blog. I was initially surprised that the blog wasn't on a University of Chicago site. However, I do understand that the purpose of the blog is pure outreach to, I'm guessing, former Business Week readers and a host of others. It is interesting to note that the content is distributed under a Creative Commons license --- re-use is fine as long as there is attribution. So their blog is not a money making effort. Similarly, Paul Krugman has his column in the New York Times. Krugman moved from MIT to Princeton not too long ago. Neither institution is mentioned in any way in his Op-Ed pieces. I would interpret both instances as the "20" part of the 80-20 rule. For the time being I think of my blog as within the "80" part. If it proves out that there is little or no internal audience for it but there is an external audience, I'll change my tune on that (and then have it hosted on Blogspot or elsewhere).

What about using blogs for teaching and learning. Here's a piece from the Duke daily about professors starting to use blogs for teaching. The use is fine. The question is, who should be the provider? Some of my colleagues would undoubtedly argue, "We're a great university. So we should provide any tool that has value in instruction." I'm sure that is the expectation. But from where I sit, we don't have the budgets to support even what we're already doing. If the market provides a reasonable free service, why not encourage that? For student blogs, especially those that are not course related, I'm quite comfortable with that as an answer. Indeed, I believe that experiments with commercial providers while the students are enrolled will help make them smarter consumers of these type of services after they have graduated. So, for example, I interpret the proliferation of student Gmail accounts as a good thing.

I am harder pressed when thinking about this issue as it pertains to instruction or research. Some of the issues may seem mundane, but I think all them are important. An instructor can set up a discussion area for each student inside the course management system and require the students to make diary like posts. But the effort in creating those sites and the control is borne by the instructor. If the students made their own spaces and provided a link (to the site or to the xml) that would be less effort for the instructor and more power for the students. Should the blogs be accessible only after a log in, not available to anyone on the Internet but only to the campus? And what about the issue of user management? If an instructor wants the students to be contributors to the blogs (contributors can make posts, anyone can make comments to posts) how does the instructor manage the class list to enable the students as contributors? That is work.

There is a different issue. This campus is large and decentralized. At best, we at the campus level try to communicate and coordinate with what the colleges and departments are doing. We are not in a position to dictate. The idea is to avoid wasteful duplication of service, where possible, via the communication and coordination. But because any service we offer has to be done at scale (these are plain vanilla services that much of the campus will use) we're reluctant to enter into a new service quickly. We need to be sure the demand is there and that it is efficient for the campus to be the provider. There is less of this reluctance at the department or college level. So some of them are likely to take up the baton first. Maybe that is for the good in that a need is met. Yet there are coordination issues here as well and it is quite possible to imagine that a college or two doing something blocks the campus for doing that same thing, when the latter would be better for the campus overall. So should the campus try to move faster to provide the service when it senses that risk?

Some universities (Minnesota is an example) offer blog hosting through their Library. The Library is as much a part of this campus as CITES is. There are several joint projects between the two organizations. Perhaps blogs should be another. That has been mentioned. Yet upon reflection I would be against that, at the moment. This is partly because of the market alternative, particularly for student blogs. And it is partly because we as the provider of such virtual spaces will get tied up in free speech and decency issues. The campus has an obligation to promote free speech and deal with decency concerns. But we as providers don't have to go looking for that sort of thing, especially when the community is not yet pounding down our doors asking us to do so.

One last point. If blogs were the only game in town the answer to these questions could be determined by analysis. But blogs are the tip of the iceberg. Wikis and ePortfolios are other applications that are on my radar. And then there is content hosting, images and video in particular. For all of these, if we don't go to the market, there is the related issue of user support. I can say with complete confidence that we can't do it all. I am much less clear on how we choose our spots.

On an Excel Kick

Since I talked about using Excel for grading yesterday, kind of a natural and something that a lot of instructors do, let me talk about Excel for teaching, especially in some ways that may be less expected. In the process, let me get back to one of my key themes --- students as content creators.

Excel can be used as a numerical simulation tool and it's not half bad at it. Furthermore, I would argue that it has some distinct pedagogic advantages because one can make overt to the students how the simulation is generated. Here is a simple example of this sort of thing. (You must Enable Macros. If Excel won't let you do this, do the following. Launch Excel separately, go to the Tools Menu, then Macro, then Security and switch your security level from High to Medium. Then quit Excel and try again.) There are two tabs. Choose Simple_Motion, because this is easier for exposition.

Push the Run Sim button. Then move your attention first to the graph itself, then cell A1 which has the Time Counter number in it (and which changes during the simulation) and the Point Position which is given in cells A21 and B21. If necessary, reset the simulation and run again. You should have a sense of what is changing.

Next you can click on cells A21 and look at the formula bar to see how the Point Position depends on the value of the Time Counter. Do likewise for cell B21.

Now right click on the graph and choose Source Data and select the Series Tab. By clicking on the little boxes to the right on the X Values line and the Y values line, you can see exactly which cells are generating the graph.

Finally, run the simulation one more time (reset if you have to) but this time look at cell A2. This will explain how the time counter works and provide understanding for the underlying macro. The value placed in cell A2 is one plus the value in cell A1. Then cell A2 is copied and pasted back into cell A1 but as a number, rather than as a formula. After that the content of cell A2 is deleted (which is why you see it flash on and off). Then the entire thing repeats. There are 1000 iterations done via a Do Loop.

The point here is that students can readily hack the spreadsheet and figure out what is going on. for themselves. (They can also look at the Macros directly and hack those, but that's a little more detailed so I won't discuss here.) The hacking is a different type of learning than most instructors encourage. I think it has real value. It is the obvious first step toward the goal of getting the students to make their own simulation.

Let me turn to the other worksheet quickly, the one called Random_Walk. This is more complex than the other in several ways: (1) It shows the complete path not just the current position. (2) To record the entire path cells are inserted at each step and the old cells are pushed down. (3) It has real dynamics in that there is a recursive equation that generates the current position. The current position is not just a function of the time counter. The previous position matters. (3) It has a stochastic process as a driver of the dynamics. The model uses Excel's pseudo random number generator. A random number is generated during each iteration of the Time Counter.

This second simulation uses a fair amount of the processing power of the viewer's computer. With modern CPUs it runs with no sweat. With a computer that is 5 or 6 years old, it would be more like the Little Engine that Could. The point of considering this second simulation is that interesting complexity can be introduced. If one were trying to teach this stuff with equations, it would be a bear and the students would almost certainly not get it. But when they can see the process unfold, it is very easy to get it and that facility should encourage students to think directly about the dynamics.

One other thought on this. Because we are talking about spreadsheets that can reside essentially anywhere and are readily transferred, one can imagine class projects where the goal is to design simulations that high school students would use. A simulation would need an accompanying narration and would have to visibly convey the underlying idea. Having projects of this sort, I believe, would really engage the students and could very readily create a collection of simulations that would give some nice external visibility to the class.

It's Finals Week

One thing that gets a lot of discussion on my campus but very little attention in national discussions of educational technology is online gradebooks and managing course grades electronically. For years we had a home grown Campus Gradebook that was an outgrowth of Plato and that had some nice functions that are not in the commercial course management systems. One of those functions was to be able to sum say 15 different homework scores and delete the lowest 3 scores. A lot of instructors developed their teaching approach to rely on that function. But it is not in our course management system and I have not emphasized that function in my discussions with the WebCT company regarding the future development of their software. There are some other functions, a good example is producing graphs of histograms that are available to the students, which should be in the software but aren't there at present. (That will be in the next version of the software, but we won't implement that for at least a year.)

My solution has been to write some spreadsheets that can do these things. Here are some brief descriptions and links to a couple of these spreadsheets. It occurred to me to list these on the Merlot.org site. I was kind of surprised to find that there was no category for this sort of thing. Apparently grading is not teaching and so doesn't belong, or so it seems. But instructors do put in a fair amount of effort in computing grades and communicating those to their students. This is a place where the technology can help.

I actually wrote those spreadsheets over a year ago, but as far as I know they have not been used much if at all on my campus. (A support provider at Purdue told me they were quite useful.) So here I'd like to make a different point. How should awareness of these spreadsheets be promoted? The IT organization can only officially support a limited number of key applications because we have only so many staff and they already work quite hard in delivering the support they provide. But, of course, any member of the community with a little insight and effort can develop a tool like my spreadsheets that are potentially useful to others. The IT organization has some responsibility, in my opinion, to facilitate that type of sharing without itself being obligated to provide support for these community developed efforts. Merlot is potentially a way to "make such a market" but frankly I believe it aggregates at too high a level. I'd like to see a Merlot site just for my campus. We are a big campus and in some cases too big for community. But I think there would be more trust of something developed here and trying that out, then something from elsewhere that is available at Merlot.org.

If you are a consumer in such a market the operative expression is caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. It is in that sense that I offer up my spreadsheets. I know some of this does happen with other community developments, but the IT organization is not involved as facilitator. It should play that role. I hope we can move into that position in the not too distant future.

Tablet PCs for Science or Math

I have a group of friends who communicate online mostly about sports. These are economists, friends of economists, and friends of friends, etc. During the baseball season it's mostly blather about the Cubs. This past basketball season a lot of it was about the Illini. (Obviously, we were not unique in that respect.) A discussion started only recently on the merits of shooting the three pointer. Based on the Illini stats, the expected value of a three point shot was about 1.2. The expected value of a two pointer was about 1.0. So somebody opined they should have shot even more three pointers than they actually did. After scratching my head about this for a while, I noted to myself that the variance for a three pointer for the Illini was about 2.16, while the variance for a two pointer was 1.0. So the three was riskier, something that seemed obvious to me. So I thought the choice of shooting the two or the three was something like a portfolio choice problem and that teams like the Illini must be risk averse. I posted something to the group to that effect, got a delayed response from a Law faculty member who likes economics but who never studied it formally, and thought perhaps there is the germ of a paper here and the ideas should be fleshed out further. Also, I needed a diversion and playing with this provided me one.

I started to write up some notes on my Tablet PC (a Fujitsu convertible). I was amazed at how similar this was for me to the old days when I scribbled equations on yellow ruled pads. The primary difference was that I used colored digital ink and varied colors for contrast, the eraser tool for the Tablet works very nicely while in the paper world I had messy cross outs if I used ink and other ugliness from erasure if I used pencil. And, of course, I could save the file and find it quickly later. Anyone who knows me is aware that I have no concept of paper filing and since I'd scribble equations on the back of paper seminar announcements or elsewhere would often have no clue where the work was after I had put it down someplace. The one downside that I noticed was that because I didn't want the Tablet flat on the desk I was holding it in my left hand and occasionally that hurt my wrist.

Armed with this largely positive experience I took to write up those notes. I did that in Windows Journal. Unfortunately, if you export from that to a Web page it uses Microsoft's proprietary format, which I believe requires IE for viewing. (If you do look at this version notice that the ruled lines, which are background in Journal, show up.) However, it is not too hard to select a page in Journal and then copy and paste into a Word document. I did that in about a minute for the four pages I had made and then saved the Word document as a Web page. This should be viewable by any browser. (But now note that the background is white without any ruled lines.) If I were to experiment with this more, I'd import the ruled lines into Word as a background and then use Word with ink annotation rather than use Journal.

I've got to believe that anyone who does notation intensive stuff or simply likes to do formative thinking with a hand written approach would like to use a Tablet PC. It seems to me it has such an upside for this sort of thing and the convertible unit I have switches readily to a regular laptop with keyboard, so you can go back to that when you need it. But if I look at the actual uptake of Tablets among the faculty, it seems we're still very early on in that.

I'd like to see Microsoft do a promo of these things. I believe that if faculty used these for a while, they'd want one and procure their own. We need about 50 to loan out faculty so they can use for a month or so, get comfortable with it, and produce some content. But that won't happen unless there is some corporate largesse.

Regarding teaching with these, in a large classroom they would seem to be a must for any class that would use the blackboard if there were only 30 students. The way our classrooms are setup, in the smaller class setting the screen for the projector is only about a third the width of the blackboard. So chalk still has some advantages, especially if the instructor writes in columns and has multiple columns up at any one time. But since this is all recorded by the computer the students doesn't have to take verbatim notes if s/he doesn't want to. That might offset the multiple columns advantage. And in a large classroom, using a Tablet PC is the clear winner.

On Accessibility of Online Content

We seem to be on the verge of a minor breakthrough with the WebCT Vista quiz engine in enabling foreign language based quizzes for students with visual impairment. I'm not expert in the underlying HTML issues, but as I understand it for those using a screen reader there are problems at junctures where the language changes, say from English to Spanish or back from Spanish to English. If the screen reader doesn't know it is supposed to change languages, you can imagine the result. There are HTML tags to handle this issue but apparently in the response to the student's quiz answer the Vista software somehow disabled those tags. Now apparently, we have gotten to the route of this problem after a fair amount of investigative work on the part of experts in Web accessibility from my campus and other campuses that are using Vista and interested in accessibility as well as from WebCT itself. Interestingly, the modifications in the code apparently affect this function only with no impact whatsoever on other users. So here is a feel good story about how serious cooperation can produce a tangible result for user benefit. Let's look forward to more of that in the future.

However, it is equally apparent to me that there is a long uphill climb on the accessibility front and much of that has to do with awareness of the designers. The problem is not an issue of good will. It is an issue of being conscious of the accessibility concerns at a very drill down level when writing the code. Here is another example to illustrate, one where the Vista software still is coming up short.

Apparently Vista relies heavily on frames, including an invisible frame which contains much of the fancy programming. The invisible frame includes content that is regularly updated as a consequence of what the user has done on the page. The screen reader goes from frame to frame to check out what is in it. When the reader cycles to the invisible frame it sees new content there and begins its cycle around the page anew. The reader should actually ignore the invisible frame but there is no command in the code at present (I don't know whether this problem is rectifiable or not). This is why some accessibility folks have argued for frameless pages. (The CMS Angel offers a frameless alternative.) But the upkeep of a frameless alternative is expensive. If the version that everyone else uses were accessible, that would seem to be the preferable solution.

Did WebCT set out to design their product to fool screen readers? Of course not. Do they test their product with a screen reader? I doubt they did that at the outset. They do have a particular staff person devoted to these issues now and they might do that in the future. But these accessibility concerns were not part of the original vision of the product that was articulated a few years ago. I should point out that WebCT has had their product reviewed for section 508 compliance by an outside company and they passed that test. The point is that the legal requirement doesn't necessarily map very well into usability for a person with a visual impairment. The latter requirements are sterner and I believe not well understood.

What I'm understanding now, after talking with many people both who work for me and who specialize in accessibility is that these issues have to be addressed in context. Applying general design principles is fine, but that is not sufficient. The principles can't possibly cover all eventualities.

I think we will continue to make incremental progress in this way and I hope we have some goodwill in the group of folks who have been working on these issues. They should be proud of what they have accomplished. But I think we need to be quite humble about what we are offering to people with disabilities and as we are constantly pushed to expand the functionalities of tools such as WebCT Vista we need to understand that it may be at the price that use is less than universal.

Goulash

Sometimes it is helpful to look at other sectors of the economy to get a sense of the issues with learning technology. The Public Editor Column in the Times Week and Review had an interesting analysis of the malaise with print journalism. That same malaise was similarly reflected in Frank Rich's Op-Ed piece. The public holds all the news media in low esteem but print journalism is between a rock and a hard place with its use of "unnamed sources." Readers don't like hearing about news from people who will not go on the record - this is how we concluded that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But if print doesn't use "on background" sources, they are slower than TV and radio in getting the word out and with seemingly no offsetting advantage. The Times is in the process of changing its business practice regarding unnamed sources (to what is not yet clear). It is not that long ago that they had the scandal of "made up" news, producing resignations of many of the higher ups at the paper. I can imagine an analogous article about us with headline "Provost Resigns When It Became Clear Students Were Learning Nothing In General Education Classes." We're not likely to see that particular headline. But is something like that possible?

Education has been the primary way that parents have given bequests to their children. A college education has been the path to the good life. But in today's knowledge economy with global competition from China and India and outsourcing seemingly an endless threat, does that conventional wisdom still hold? And what is one to make of how few American students are going into Science and Engineering? A variety of Engineering fields do quite well in terms of starting salary out of college, but if you look at the majors that are popular the picture is quite different. According to Princeton Review (I know, not the most reliable source) Computer Science is ranked 9th in terms of popularity and no other engineering field makes the list.

One of the stated reasons for having the National Science Olympiad, which we are hosting here on campus in a couple of weeks, is to encourage bright kids to go into the sciences. The goal is noble but the approach seems to me to be elitist. My kid benefited from that elitism. When another kid dropped out, he got the tutoring of two teachers over a few weekends on a one-on-one basis to complete his project. But the thing is so out of the ordinary I'm not sure his participation (admittedly at the middle school level) will have any staying power.

What does seem to have staying power is video games and computer games. My kids spend much more time on the computer playing Age of Empires II than they do using the computer for schoolwork (word processing, occasionally a Google search for some research project). The school doesn't do homework (as distinct from projects) on the computer, I believe in part because of the equal access issue. I don't see that changing anytime soon. Why don't scientists try to co-opt the computer game market? Can science compete with entertainment?

My colleague Burks Oakley sent me a link to Tom Friedman's piece from last Friday. Friedman admonishes that an increasing number of Americans are watching Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" not just for entertainment but as their source for news. And the way Friedman argues, this may be a healthy tonic to the info-tainment that is delivered up in the supposed TV news programming. I recall way back when "That Was The Week That Was," which made David Frost a household name, was quite engaging, and put a dagger into many a politician. But right before the escalation in Viet Nam, we still had other alternatives for our news. Times change. Maybe hard science will venture into computer games as entertainment. But don't expect that to happen en passant from within the games industry. Science is hard.

My laments about budgets for educational technology seem to be mirrored by concerns about the economy overall. Apparently The Perfect Storm has become a more powerful metaphor than The Great Depression as indicated by this piece, also in The Week in Review. Misery loves company, especially if you profess to the dismal science. It is impossible to identify the likelihood of doom as prognosticated in this piece. But, when you read other pieces, such as a front page article on our burn rate on post 9/11 security investments that costs a lot and deliver little it's hard to think other than that the American century ended 5 years ago.

Promoting Student Engagement in Large Classes

Last night after work I watched an old movie, The Miracle Worker, with Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan and Patty Duke as Helen Keller. The story in essence is that the child Helen Keller was incredibly spoiled, treated as a pet by her parents as their way of coping with her disability. When Miss Annie arrived and started to work she treated Helen much more sternly, having great expectations about Helen's ability to function well in spite of the blindness and lack of hearing. There was much physical violence between the two of them and a war of wills ensued until Helen came to obey Anne and then to trust her. The breaking of Helen's bad habits was an intensely emotional struggle but when it concluded the reward was her beginning to comprehend the outside world and to tie together her baby experience before she was sick and had said the word "warrer" (water). The penultimate scene of the movie has Helen pumping vigorously at the water pump for the estate, feeling the water that came out of the pump, and again saying the word warrer. She had reconnected and that signaled her ability to recognize her environment (as well as the end of the movie).

I don't want to draw too many parallels from this movie to the type of teaching we do in college. But I think the following one makes sense. Many instructors I know in Economics view the students as spoiled in the sense that they don't work hard enough outside of class. (George Kuh's National Survey of Student Engagement has documented that students perceive they can do well in college putting in much fewer hours outside of class than faculty expect is needed to do well.) One can "combat" that student tendency by requiring a lot of homework. I did that when I taught the large intermediate microeconomics course, where there was basic work done individually in Mallard and the students worked in teams on problem sets from the textbook, where if they were graded low the team could resubmit the assignment for more credit. Many of the students in the class, especially the business students, acted angrily about this approach. (The engineering students didn't seem to mind and they didn't think it was an especially large amount of homework.) In a large class such as mine, I had about 180 students, there is the issue of some of this individual anger as protest against the work setting a tone for the class as a whole, making it harder to for the students to see that there might be good reasons - to promote their learning - for the structure of the course as it is.

I am not saying that offering a course that is stern and demanding is wrong when the class is a large lecture. But I do think that it is especially important for students to see why they are taking the course, other than that it says it's required in the catalog. The students need to connect to the material in some way. Establishing that connection early in the course seems to be a must. In microeconomics this is especially a challenge because the tendency is to teach the theory first and then the applications afterwards. The theory is likely not engaging for the students in itself.

I have written earlier about motivating the study of economics as the solving of puzzles and I think that is correct and that it likely applies to many other disciplines. Pose the puzzle, one that that students can grasp even without prior knowledge of economics, then tease the theory from that. Yet even the best textbooks on the market are not written that way. In my view that is because just about everyone who writes such a textbook likes the theory as a thing in itself. It hasn't occurred to them that the presentation should be otherwise.

So it is my belief that one must break with tradition in teaching to engage the students this way. This requires a lot of creativity on the part of the instructor and that might inhibit many from getting started. But once down this path, the students should be there too and then the hard work and the rigor might seem more palatable to the students.

What should students do during lecture?

This morning I did a Google search on "good lecturing" and found a vast array of interesting resources both about method and in defense of the form. Here is one particular gem (note that I like writing by grouchy and stubborn more mature males as that increasingly represents my own disposition), a reprint of an opinion column from the Chronicle. As is my custom when reading something provocative, I find things to agree with; knowledge is hierarchical and there are obvious benefits from novices learning at the hands of experts, and there are other things I don't agree with at all; students can't teach other students because they lack the requisite expertise. On the latter point, somewhere between the time of being a student and becoming a professor expertise is required. That one can be more expert than a peer seems obvious. Certainly there can be bilateral learning in such a circumstance.

Before answering the question in the subject line, I think it is worthwhile to consider a related question. Can anyone, student or otherwise, learn while sitting in the audience? Can one learn from watching TV? Can one learn from going to the movies, seeing a play, attending a concert? If learning is possible in those circumstances what does one do as the viewer or listener to make the learning richer, or more likely to occur?

I don't have a well researched answer for that, but here is my conjecture based on how it "seems" to happen for me. It is as if two channels are playing at once. One is "the absorption" channel. It just takes in what is going on and more or less stays in pace with that. The other is "the analysis" channel. It tries to figure out what is really happening at a more abstract level. It asks questions. It might linger on something that happened a while back or it might guess what is going to happen next. Both can and do exist simultaneously. When I become more intensely aware of one, the other seems to shut down for a while.

I think when I was younger (and I used to see a lot of avant-garde films) I could retain a fair amount of what I processed on the absorption channel. Now I don't think I even process some of the visual content at the time it is viewed and my memory for the event itself will be meager. But if there was some analysis, perhaps a good question, perhaps a way of reconciling some conflicting ideas, that lingers.

Now turn back to behavior during lecture, I know that I was never a good note taker. One part of that is poor handwriting, pure and simple. But probably a more important part is that if I am note taking then I'm not analyzing. Note taking is a way to keep busy. But at least for me it is also a way to suspend thinking about the issues till later. For this reason, I'm not in favor of note taking in my classes. I'd rather that students "pay attention" than take notes.

I have heard other instructors talk about the benefits of note taking. One benefit is in notation-intensive courses where sometimes the notation can become an obstacle to seeing the ideas. Writing the notation makes it more familiar to the student and hence the student can better reason with the notation. I can see the point. I know that for me I'd rather to that writing outside of class and see if I can reproduce the notation and equations that the instructor developed. It is my own test of whether I understand. But perhaps some of that goes on with note takers during the class and they are comfortable that way.

What else should the students be doing? Here I think the right question is what can the students do to make their analysis track function better. This is like asking how can one turn Dr. Watson into Sherlock Holmes. To answer I must say I'm not sure but as in my piece yesterday on the lecturer, I think also with the student that fear is a big deal and that some students don't ask off the wall type questions because they are afraid those will divert them and cause them to lose their track of what is going on. But asking those off the wall question is the key to learning and I think very bright people are asking those internally as they are watching what is happening. And with practice they get better at that and pick up more clues in a hurry.

I have no training as a psychologist. I've read a little bit by Maslow and some Howard Gardner stuff and a few others. But this is all strictly amateur stuff and my conjectures are nothing but little stories that make sense to me and are consistent with my own personal universe but haven't been tested at all outside of that arena. I do think one can't lecture well without having some model of what is happening inside the student's head during the lecture. I don't see a way to evaluate the various suggestions on lecturing that I found in Google without such a model. It seems to me this is an area where instructors would want to exchange ideas and their impressions about their own students. That in turn should serve as good motivation for instructors who are considering some modification of their approach to the lecture.

On lecturing and writing and their relationship

Fifteen years ago, perhaps a little more, I wrote some papers in theoretical labor economics and began to become friendly with the labor economists here on an intellectual basis. (The friendship already existed on a social basis.) One of my senior colleagues in labor econ must have read my work because I remember him saying, "Lan, the problem with your writing is that it is too terse." I didn't understand the comment at the time and took the comment more as indicator of my colleague than of anything about me. It makes sense to me now.

Our campus has an Active Learning Retreat each year in late January or early February and they have a featured speaker who is usually quite engaging. A few years ago the speaker (I wish I could remember his name) was talking about new instructors, fresh out of graduate school and of the common mistakes they make. I believe he had interviewed many instructors and got them to recollect about their early teaching experiences. The expression I recall is, "best graduate course a freshman ever had."

In live classroom teaching, especially for very junior instructors, fear is a big motivator and part of what the instructor is inadvertently trying to do is justify being in the classroom leading the students. The implicit thinking is something like, "I need to show off my expertise so they'll trust they are getting something important." Put this together with somebody who has had substantial training in "theory," irrespective of the discipline, where "elegance" of result and presentation are the ideal. So many instructors getting started, and I definitely put myself in this category, start off in the classroom trying to teach to young versions of their colleagues, aiming to produce elegant masterpieces to mask their fear of being found out that they don't belong. The reaction of students to this can be merciless. I know that on my first semester course evaluations for the undergraduate class I got fried. The teaching approach that emerges as the instructor matures is shaped significantly by this initial scarring.

Out from the the other side of the tunnel, I believe that the best teaching occurs during dialog and that, of course, is because the instructor can listen to the student and modulate the instruction accordingly; the instructor can adjust to the learning needs of the student. This is a form of conditional response and that is extremely effective.

However, promoting dialog is difficult and not practical in many circumstances. Our campus has 35 general assignment classrooms with over 100 seats and about 100 classrooms with over 50 seats. Most of these classrooms get heavy use. In other words, there are a lot of courses where lecture is the expected mode of instruction.

One can decry the lecture, argue for active learning activities within the class period, or encourage the use of interactive technology such as automated response units. But there is nothing to preclude active learning happening outside the normally scheduled class session and with good students that might be expected. Furthermore, especially with difficult content that one might expect is hard to penetrate, there may may be advantages for the learner to see the content presented by the instructor even if the students are dilligent and have done the assigned reading and other work before the class session. This is not to say that the instructor can't encourage students in their work outside of class via the design of the course and the use of learning technology, quite the contrary. But it is to say that we need to pay attention to the lecture as an instructional mode, ask what excellence within that modality looks like, and then to figure out how we encourage instructors to move their teaching toward excellence.

This will be a recurring theme for me as I believe many faculty feel that teaching is lecturing and those who have been promoting excellence in instruction have been running away from these people rather than helping them. It stands to reason that they are more likely to try other approaches than what they are used to if first they make modest improvements within their own domain and see the benefit from that.

To bring this discussion full circle let me point out the work of Michael Alley, which has recently come to my attention. His book, The Craft of Scientific Presentations, looks intriguing. At the aforementioned link, you can read the preface to the book which is both engaging and inspiring. I was struck by his identification of the main presenter weakness; instructors don't prepare their audiences sufficiently for the results they plan to show. I have no doubt that Alley is right on that point. And for the reason why I think we have some good explanations in why people like me learned to write tersely when coming up with content for a professional audience and why new assistant professors invariably teach that best graduate course for freshmen.

A current mantra of mine is "bring it down before you bring it up." If we get our lecturers to practice that, I think we'll have something.

On Writing, Teaching Writing, and Measuring Improvement in Writing

Today's Chronicle features an article, quite predictable actually, about the National Council of Teachers of English critique of the new writing part of the SAT. The critique goes in two parts: (1) in spite of what the College Board says this test won't measure the student's ability to write and (2) English teachers will teach to the test and have students practice formulaic writing that will be to the detriment of their general education on writing. I haven't seen the SAT but writing to a purpose in a timed situation without a lot of forethought is certainly problematic. (Allowing forethought in such a situation would invite plagiarism, but let's leave that observation as it is not the purpose of this piece.)

The Chronicle piece provides a link to the NCTE site. And from there one can find their Beliefs About the Teaching of Writing. These are a list of "principles," each followed by some articulation of why the principle makes sense and how it might be implemented. Most of these I agree with and endorse. I want to take issue of a sort with the very first one, or at least part of it; writing can be taught. There is a phrase missing at the end of this short sentence. The full sentence would be something like this. Writing can be taught in a class devoted to the learning of writing. This is where I'd like to begin my departure.

I'll start with my own formal education on writing. I believe I had very little of it. I didn't take English in college. This probably was more by accident than plan. When I started at MIT not surprisingly I had a full slate of math and science course and that allowed room for one "humanities course" which in my case was really more social science. I really don't remember much about it other than that we read The Organization Man. In the first semester of my sophomore year, I took a course on Plato and Aristotle (without having taken the pre-requisite) and that was it for humanities. Then I transferred to Cornell, but I had bypassed their first year experience. I had a slew of emotional issues I had to work through and while I continued to be a Math major I toned that down. I took a lot of political science (which I liked) and philosophy (some of which was opaque to me but I kept taking it anyway). Writing was part of these courses, they all had a term paper requirement of some sort and/or take home exams. If I did well on those it was because I nailed the idea. If I did poorly, it was because my idea was off track. I recall a question on a Philosophy of Law test; is punishment necessary for the Law? I gave an economic analysis (this was before I had taken any economics) but afterwards I understood that what was needed to address this question was an analysis of the role of conscience. The point was that there was some amount of writing but it was always in the background as a conduit of the ideas. I have no recollection of the writing being critiqued in itself. If anything, I was told I write well.

But I think that praise was earlier, in high school. There, of course, I did take English. I think those classes were uneven, more so than the Math classes which were usually good. (One reason was that a few of the English teachers were draft dodgers and I believe had not yet made a strong personal commitment to teaching.) We did read some interesting things in English and I know in 10th grade there was a specific period where we were given instruction about public speaking. The teaching to the test fears, I believe, are legitimate. My 9th grade teacher, who ran our College Placement office, drilled us on vocabulary words, something I didn't take to very well. But I believe he also had us write fairly regularly. I recall having done several one page hand written essays. I don't recall what I wrote about or getting any instruction on improving the writing. But I do remember on the back of one of them he wrote that I should try for the school Literary Magazine. (I didn't do that, in retrospect to my regret.) The point here is that this was 9th grade. My ideas about writing had already been substantially formed at that point.

To my recollection there was nothing you would call writing in Math or Science and only rarely was there writing in Social Studies. These classes did have homework and reading (mostly of the textbook variety) but they were about ideas, not about writing. So writing was over here, in English, and ideas were over there, in Math and Science and Social Studies. (This is not completely fair to English, which had its share of ideas. But somehow you had to "get it" in English and here I'm talking particularly about poetry which I know was opaque for me as was much of the symbolism in the fiction we read. In most of the Math and Science, on the other hand I either got it on my own or my teachers, and I had a couple of good ones who taught me in several classes, made a point of explaining things when I got stuck. Biology was the one science course, perhaps because it related more to direct observation than to theory and I never could figure out how to look into a microscope and see what I was supposed to see, where I didn't get it either or I felt it was rote learning, which did not appeal to me.) The thought that writing is a thing in itself and it is other than ideas is disturbing. So where I have my biggest issue with what NCTE says is how writing is taught and if it would not be better to let it be taught en passant in the teaching of ideas.

A little side story. Not too long ago I read Robert Cramer's biography of Babe Ruth. Cramer cites Ty Cobb on how Ruth learned his swing. Since Ruth started as a pitcher, nobody coached him on his hitting. He therefore learned to hit in an uninhibited way. Since "small ball" was the approach to baseball at that time, if Ruth had started as an outfielder he would through coaching have been forced to learn a more compact swing and would have never become the prodigious home run hitter and savior of baseball. I'll get to the relevance of this story in a bit.

Now I want to jump shift. In spring of 1996 I took a week long workshop on Writing Across the Curriculum and it was a kind of spiritual bonding, both with some of the other faculty attendees and the presenters as well as with the ideas we were exposed to. At the time I was getting ready to move into SCALE as a faculty fellow and so I was full of ideas on how to teach online. What I heard at the WAC workshop resonated with me deeply. If there was a guiding philosophy for teaching online, this was it. I have several colleagues, also earlier adopters in the use of learning technology, who feel the same way. Ironically, I never taught a WAC course. But I've used what I learned at the workshop in my own teaching and it certainly helps me in framing the issues when I think about teaching.

There is an oversight committee for Center for Writing studies which I've served on and there have been return workshops and events. I participated in some of those over the years and the best part of them that I can recall is our discussion of our own writing. A colleague who teaches Italian, is widely regarded as an excellent instructor, and who was a student here before becoming a faculty member so could comment on how writing was taught said that she struggled for a long time as a writer. She found it a painful activity and this really hurt her. It took a discovery that writing was part of developing ideas, something she could do, that changed her perspective. I on the other hand don't remember ever feeling that writing was painful (particular writing tasks, yes, but writing as a whole, no). I didn't have the training my colleague had and in that respect I was untutored like Ruth. I learned to find my own voice on my own. Consequently, there may be much in my style that is unorthodox. But generating prose is not a problem.

I struggle with whether my own experience should guide my view about good teaching. But I am convinced that writing in English class and not elsewhere is perncious. People need to engage in ideas and one part of that engagement is writing about those ideas. That needs to happen throughout the program of study, any program of study.

This is already a long piece but let me turn to the measurement of writing. A big issue is pre-writing and the role it plays. It is extremely important and it takes as long as it takes. It is comparatively easy to compose the draft when the pre-writing has happened, almost impossible if it has not. While I started today's essay almost immediately after reading the Chronicle article, some of the ideas here I've been pre-writing for months, perhaps longer than that. Certainly they have been percolating. In a timed environment with a prescribed subject, the student writer who has been thinking about the ideas beforehand and who has come to some conclusion is at a huge advantage over the student who is coming new to the subject. So if timed tests are measuring anything, they are measuring prior thought on the topic.

If one disciplines oneself and writes periodically, as I've done with this blog, there will be days when the essay is comparatively dull and unimaginative, because the pre-writing is incomplete or that particular idea should have been tossed into the waste basket but time doesn't allow that. So to judge writing at all, one needs to observe quite a few samples. Then one can get an overall sense as well as whether there is any growth in the skill of the writer. This, however, doesn't match what the College Board has implemented. So on this part I agree with NCTE.

But if one took these writing portfolios seriously, how does one make comparisons across students? Who is the good writer? Who is less good? As with anything we measure in college, I think I can answer that comparing one extreme to another. I don't need NCTE to separate the really good writer from the very poor writer. But I need help on how to measure gradations in between. This student shows a little bit more maturity than that one because.... I think there is some disingenuity here because there is much more overtly said about how not to measure writing (the way the College Board proposes) than on how to measure it. I understand that there are subjective elements in evaluating writing. But it can't be entirely idiosyncratic. If you and I are reading two pieces of writing how do we come to agree that one is better than the other? That needs to be answered.

The Organization of Higher Ed in Illinois

Some states, notably our neighbor Wisconsin, have all the public campuses in the state in a single statewide system. (New York is another example of this type of organization structure within public higher education.) It is noteworthy to observe that Wisconsin has implemented its enterprise course management system across all the campuses, which the production instance being hosted in Madison. Moreover, and I believe this is quite novel, they have imposed a common authentication framework for the course management system, so that those who are supporting the production instance only have to manage one type of authentication. (I believe Wisconsin is less homogenous on the Student Information System side. The SIS is used to populate the rosters in CMS course sites and is also where final course grades are reported.)

From where I sit there are substantial economies of scale in supporting a Course Management System, but this is also true for email and for any other like service (for example an ePortfolio service, or a Blog service). The source of the economies of scale is in the back end production service where there are specific types of technical expertise that should be sufficiently redundant. My guess is that there are many other types of service, IT related and not, for which one can make a good argument that there are economies of scale. Offsetting that notion is the idea of local control and local customization. We have that issue on our own campus where there are instances of other course management systems being supported by a department or college. But at least within the campus there will be some move to consolidation to the campus service as the department of Chemistry and the College of ACES each run their own Campus Edition server, but will move over to the Campus instance of WebCT Vista (Illinois Compass is our local branding) within the next year or so.

With the economic crunch that Higher Ed is facing the customization and local control become more a luxury than a necessity and leveraging potential economies of scale becomes more attractive. Given the issues about coordination one might very well argue that there should be consolidation not just in services but in the way Higher Ed is organized in the state. I could see one system for all the four-year schools and a different system for the community colleges. I could also see having only one system overall.

Indeed, I certainly can't explain our current arrangement. There are multiple systems for just the four year schools. For example, Southern Illinois at Carbondale and at Edwardsville form a system. But Eastern Illinois and Western Illinois are not in that system. And neither is part of the U of I. It is very hard to give an efficiency argument for the current arrangement in the present circumstance. Each campus optimizes locally for its own benefit, but it is doubtful that the outcome is even near optimal for the state as a whole. On the other hand, my campus is more unlike the others by its nature as a leading research institution. And with the Chicago Campus also an R1, with a Medical School and a large undergraduate student population, the U of I system already seems plenty big.

So why should anyone expect this campus or this university to take the lead in pushing IBHE and the governor to consider a different organizational structure? But if there isn't leadership from these sources will there be leadership from anywhere else?

I have a tiny role to play here in my support of the Faculty Summer Institute and getting the four-year colleges to play in the same pen as the community college folks who are part of the NILRC group that is talking about a consortial approach to licensing course management systems. This is another area where my economics fails me. I have no clue whether I should try to amplify that role or not. The likelihood of failure seems great but the economies of scale argument makes sense to me.

Online Textbook Publishers

Here is an area where my knowledge of Economics doesn't guide me and really I have very little instinct on how to move on the issue. There are both opportunities and concerns. The fundamental question is whether the textbook publishers should be our partners, whom we enlist to "provide content" particularly of the interactive kind for courses inside the course management system or if instead we resist these folks vehemently and try to deliver something without them.

As an aside, I sit on the campus committee (called a working group) for our new Institutional Repository (named IDEALS - Illinois Digital Environment....). Certainly one thought that has motivated the IR movement (from the Library's perspective, at the least) is that we gave away the farm with scholarly publishing and are forced to buy back from the publishers content that we (faculty in higher ed) generated and the buy back is at very high prices. I have that thought in the back of my mind when talking about online textbooks or online course packs.

The primary reason why we'd want to partner with the publishers is that first the publishers are good aggregators of content and second that they have the ability to reward good content contributions. In the old days we used to give out internal grants for faculty to generate content (and to adjust their course to be taught with a signficant online component). But those days are long gone. So the thinking goes let's use the marketplace to compensate the content contributors and then let's promote re-use of the content via the publishers. The faculty who want to have a good online component but who don't want design the content themselves and who don't want to be beholden to their colleagues down the hall have a reasonable alternative. That is the reason to move ahead.

There are several reasons to jam your foot on the brakes. For example, we discussed this issue briefly at our last Ed Tech Board meeting and an Associate Provost who was present opined that any model which forced the students to pony up a credit card number to get somePIN from the publisher as access to the course was too coercive an approach and also the approach discriminated against lower income kids who might not have the credit card and might not be able to afford the incremental charge. The only way around it that I see is for the campus to buy access for the entire class. But that has its own problems, particularly on whether the cost can be recovered.

In the old days of paper an instructor would require a textbook and a copy or two of the book would go up on reserve. (Incidentally, the Library is apparently getting tons of requests to "buy" textbooks now to have them put on reserve apparently so that students don't have to purchase the books.) So from the student's perspective there was both the purchase route (which gave maximal convenience at some price) and the go to the Reserve Room route, which was free but less convenient. The students sorted themselves by self-selection across these two alternatives and I'd guess that in some cases the conscientious student who had purchased the book also used the book in Reserves.

Now we're into the electronic approach and this possibility of a two-tiered model seems difficult. It makes sense to me that if we did go ahead the campus should buy instead of the students. And if that was the Library, it would be something that in some sense they are already doing. (To date, however, our Library has not purchased any content that would be housed inside the CMS.) But the Library doesn't have a budget to incur this additional costs and there doesn't seem like an obvious way for them to recover that cost. (Perhaps they should solicit voluntary contributions from the undergraduates the way Public Radio does fund raising drives from their listeners. I'm not holding my breath on this one.)

This is not the only concern. The other biggie is student privacy and whether homework grades will reside on publisher servers. I talked with a publisher rep last Friday and his response to that one is that we're really talking about low stakes assessment here - online homework - and for that the privacy issues are no big deal. In a loosey goosey way, I agree, sort of. But consider this argument. Instructors should put the weights in course credit where the learning is occuring. If that happens online, then that is where the credit should be. (For the moment, abstract away from the academic integrity issues.) So where there is good online homework, that might account for say 50% of the grade. Now the assessment is not so low stakes and the privacy concerns can step up and bite. At the level of the campus, we can't sanction an activity based on an assumption like assuming the instructor will count the work for no more than 10% of the grades. If we're going to trust the publisher on the privacy front it is because we've thought that through, given them some hurdles to clear, and they've demonstrated they can clear the hurdles. At the moment, we've done no such thing.

Where should I be on this issue? I really don't know. And I don't know what I need to learn to make a decision. But I sense this will be an important issues in the next year or so. The publisher rep said this industry is going through a significant transformation now. And I've been invited to a meeting by the IUB (campus bookstore) oversight committee because they are thinking about new models and trying to figure out where the electronic publishing part fits in. I would like to be a leader here but I just don't know enought to do so.

Is Economics Worthless?

There have been a lot of interesting pieces by or about economics and economists that have come out or come to my attention in the last few days. Let me start with the book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, which apparently has had quite a media blitz. Levitt has been on The Daily Show and has been interviewed for Weekend Edition on NPR. You can listen to the latter after the fact via streaming media (Real or Windows Media Player). Yesterday I listened to the interview. I couldn't believe that Scott Simon seeminly just read from the dust jacket for the book (really, from the Web site). His softball questions allowed Levitt to simply review parts of the book for the audience. It certainly wasn't a hard news interview. The question is why. Is NPR incapable of asking critical questions of an economist like Levitt? Or are they afraid that won't appeal to their audience? I don't know. Nevertheless, that is not a criticism of Levitt or the book, which is clearly a good read and quite engaging. (I got fairly excited yesterday reading excerpts and tracking down some ideas, including what is being written on the blog for Freakonomics about Michael Lewis' book, Moneyball.) I will come back to Levitt in a bit.

Today Nicholas Kristof had an Op-Ed piece called "The Greediest Generation" about Baby Boomers. (I'm one of them.) Thank you Mr. Kristof. This piece was the perfect tonic to Krugman's piece that I lambasted a couple of days ago. Kristof cites Larry Kotlikoff and a book he wrote with Scott Burns called the The Coming Generational Storm. Kotlikoff should be thought of as a modern day Paul Revere. He has been warning us for some time about the over consumption of senior citizens and that our economy is ready to implode. This is probably the most important issue our society faces, more important than terrorism. Yet Kotlikoff is no folk hero, unlike Levitt. Indeed, Kotlikoff and his correct advice are being ignored by the Bush administration, so reports Kristof.

This is a painful problem. It really is too painful. Leaders don't want to deal with the responsible, belt tightening approach. So they ignore the problem and thereby exacerbate it. This is one sense by which I think economics is worthless. It analyzes situations correctly, but it has no oomph to actually get anyone to do something about it. After all it is the dismal science. Acting responsibly is a political loser.

There is another sense, however, that may be more important where economics is worthless. Rather than look at macroeconomic issues, let's focus on the inidividual and how decisions are made. Consider the business executive who has an MBA. How does that person make decisions. According to Warren Bennis and James O'Toole in an article in the Harvard Business Review, the B-schools have lost their way because they teach what their faculty research (aka economics) and this has no practical relevance to the real world realm of decision making. The economic model is based on decision making under uncertainty where the model is well defined and a good Bayesian decision maker (somebody well versed in the theory of statistics and decision making) has a subjective probability distribution on which to base the choice calculation. But in reality the situation itself is ambigous and ill formed. It is not clear what model to apply. And there is little or no data to base the decision on. There is only anecdote.

Levitt, who insists on the line "let the data speak for itself" has really cast economics into a tool for historical analysis. Moreover, there may be many situations, even historical ones, where there is no numerical data to analyze. Of course Levitt's historical analyses are interesting and that is why he is on center stage now. But when I was in graduate school the first course in microeconomics taught us that there was "positive economics" meaning an explanation of what went on, the type of economics that Levitt does, and "normative economics" meaning a recommendation for a course of action. Normative economics at the individual level is dead. Good decision making is all seat of the pants.

The Inverse Pyramid

There are two basic economic theories of how a college education improves an individual's wage. These coincided with the nurture versus nature views of human behavior. The human capital theory is education as nurture. Nurture raises an individual productivity. The other theory is education as a signal about the individual's ability. In this alternative model the individual incurs a cost by getting education. (This cost is typically modelled as the foregone wages and hence is viewed as an implicit time cost.) For the signaling to be effective, this implicit cost must negatively correlate with ability. Then it is rational for high ability individuals to attend college and low ability individuals not to attend and consequently for employers to interpret attending college as a signal of ability and paying a higher wage as a consequence.

There are many variants of each theory, but I don't want to elaborate on them here. Instead I want to ask which of these theories do we inside higher ed subscribe to? Clearly, those who focus on finding good pedagogic approaches to the use of instructional technology are thinking about education as nurture and hence whether they explicitly recognize it or not at least in that respect they are in the human capital camp.

However, if one pushes on the human capital theory a little bit and asks how best to allocate over time a given investment in human capital, one comes to the conclusion that early intervention is best. James Heckman, the nobel prize winner from the University of Chicago has argued this, among others. College education, particuarly at large public university such as mine, seems to cut against the early intervention idea in that freshmen classes are often large lectures while senior classes are where the seminars are. Furthermore, the freshmen classes are more likely to be taught by graduate students, who, however bright and smart about their discipline, are less experienced as instructors, or by adjunct faculty who typically are not purusing a research career. We have had a highly publicized Freshmen Discovery program that had small classes taught by regular faculty. But that program was seen as a luxury and Discovery program offerings were one of the things to go when the first round of budget cuts hit.

Recently at a presentation by Paul Kelter a professor of Chemistry and director of the general chemistry program on campus he argued and I think fairly convincingly that he'd rather have instructors with experience teaching young people and expert in the issues of making adjustments from high school chemistry to the college offering than to have research faculty doing this task.

Undoubtedly these adjunct instructors get paid less than the research faculty, so in considering the issue of early intervention simply looking at dollar outlay is not sufficient. One must look at the appropriateness of the investment. There may be inexpensive interventions that have high learning value. My belief in using students as mentor/teachers is meant to be considered in this light. In other words, we must get away from thinking about every possible intervention as mean lots of cash, because that is a very scarce resource. The challenge is to produce inexpensive but successful early interventions.

Otherwise we run the risk that the human capital approach will be swamped by signaling theory and that college will become a more Darwinian experience for the students.

Taking on Paul Krugman

I must not be too swift. Yesterday I take on the Oblingers, who have everyone's attention in the learning technology arena, and today it's Paul Krugman, one of brightest economists of his generation. As an economist I'm a schlub and I know it. But that won't stop me.

Krugman's op-ed piece today in the NY Times is about health care and the demagoguery of the Bush administration on the issue of health insurance. I agree with his position that health insurance should be universal and that there is way too much bureaucracy in that industry. But the rest of his piece is demagoguery of his own - his way to counter the Republicans but in the process inadvertently lose the respect of thinking people everywhere.

Here's what Krugman conveniently ignores in his piece. The issue isn't only about the uninsured. It's also about what the insured get in their coverage. The simple fact is that coverage costs and more coverage costs more. I don't know why Krugman doesn't talk about this, but it is an important issue. It is an issue on the prescription drug side, it is an issue with the intense high end technology used in medical diagnostics, it is an issue with how R&D in health care tend to drive up cost, and it is an issue with the aging of our society and that the elderly disproportionately consume on the health care front.

The fundamental question with coverage is whether it can be limited to keep costs down. When a Canadian of means gets really sick and their health care system can't do anything more for him, does he come down to U.S. to seek treatment he can't get in Canada? When a woman in her 30's is facing pending blindness, has already had four operations which have done little or nothing to prevent further deterioration of her vision, and now she is looking for a fifth operation which the doctors describe as having no better chance than 10% for success, who gets to make the call that this operation is social waste and should be canceled?

I really don't want to be melodramatic about it, but ignoring the coverage issue entirely means Krugman really is as bad as the Republicans. The issue matters for cost and any social contract that involves universal coverage will have to squarely take on the coverage issue. In almost any utilitarian argument that one can make, veil of ignorance or otherwise, coverage will be limited. The woman going blind will not get her operation. My dad, who was a brittle diabetic for the entire time I knew him (he passed away in 1999 at age 86) would not necessarily be able to get a surgery on his pancreatic cancer when at age 85. (OK, that is melodramatic.)

My own view on health care is communistic. By this I mean I favor a system where there is universal coverage and where there are explicitly set out limits to coverage that get defined by an actuarial analysis of health care consumption and where such limits are set to keep the system solvent. Moreover, there is the stipulation that the rich can't go to the marketplace and expand their coverage via their private purchases of health care. (I understand that there will be leakages either through an internal black market for the rich and ill or for an external market of this sort, say in the Bahamas. But if the leakages can be bounded then the core system will provide decent care.) This approach is egalitarian and recognizes there is no free lunch. Further, it allows us to make a social contract of the form - let's with intent reduce the amount we as a society spend on health care so we can spend more on education, particularly education early in the life cycle. I believe we are spending too much on senior citizens and that is only going to get worse as the society in general gets older. We should change that. (I'm 50 now and my kids are in 5th and 7th grade. I wonder if I'll still feel this way when they have graduated from college and I'm "ready to retire.")

Krugman, in contrast, offers the free lunch - go to universal coverage so as to expand health care to those who are not currently working and to the working poor, and the bureaucratic bloat that is eliminated will pay for it all and then some. None of the other health care issues matter, such as the hyperinflation in health care insurance costs. Give me a break. Krugman, you are a John Bates Clark Award winner and a potential Nobel Prize awardee. We deserve more from you.

Why am I so infuriated with Krugman? And why talk about health care in a blog that is supposed to focus on learning technology? Here is why. The crisis in health care cost is perhaps 30 years old. There has been substantial reform in the way health care is provided to address the cost. issue. Most of this falls under the umbrella "HMO" (some but not all of the reform has been for the good). We should have a mature view of the health care issues and hence there should be some lessons to learn from health care as we work through the crisis in higher education costs. So I'm looking for useful parallels because we haven't yet had the time to work through a mature view on the higher education issues.

And too, I'm being cast in the role of Darth Vader. The smart classrooms are a perfect example. Historically we've taken the large lecture halls and made them into fully featured smart classrooms. Most of our smaller classrooms don't have modern presentation technology (an analog to the no health insurance problem). We get pushed by the instructors to put more and better technology into the classrooms. (The same way doctors keep writing those expensive prescriptions.) But the activity itself has never been funded to include recurrent replacement or refreshment of the equipment. And now we're going to hit a wall because of the general budget situation. The communistic approach I embrace for the health insurance area follows in large part because that is the approach I see we must follow in the classrooms. And in the smart classrooms the analog to limits in insurance coverage will be harsh, because we are severely underfunded. So I've got to come up with some brutal cuts in service.

Being Darth Vader is no fun. I certainly didn't set out to play this role. In a very real sense I'm just the messenger. But I will be blamed when we implement the cuts and yet I will advocate for the cuts as the most sensible thing to do under the circumstances. What is the alternative? Krugman, you could do a lot of social good preaching in your column that there is no free lunch. But instead you give us pablum. I could scream.

The OTH Generation

Some years ago the New York Times (perhaps the Book Review section, I can't recall) did a Special called "Writers on Writing." When those pieces were coming out, I thought them really excellent and a potential model for our own faculty to produce something similar, some insight into how they write, or how they teach, or how they go about their research. I did such a piece myself but wasn't able to generate any coattails. So I lost interest in that particular project. But I still liked those articles and think they are really great. The are very readable in the sense of not being over my head and only a page or two of text. And they are fascinating. I thought the Times had taken them down (to be published for $$ someplace else) but lo and behold the archive is online. What a delightful discovery.

I came to search for that archive because I started to read a piece by Diana and James Oblinger from the book they have edited called Educating the Net Generation. (Readers of this blog may recall a prior post on learning styles to acknowledge that I'm disposed against making teaching and learning arguments based on generational assumptions. I chose the title of this post to make the point that I'm part of the OTH (over the hill) generation and since I am I can make some crotchety arguments, which is what I intend to do in the rest of this post.) That the Oblingers try to typify a generation of students brought to mind a particular piece by Saul Bellow in the On Writing series.

Bellow was taking on the argument that reading is dead; it was killed off by the movies and other technological marvels. Bellow started off by saying for him as kid, self described as bookish, he nonetheless went to the movies and liked them. For him they were a different activty from reading. They didn't compete with each other. (Incidentally, I think this is true for my older son, 12, who does plenty of TV and video games, but also reads.)

Bellow then argues that even if the masses don't read, some people do. And they are whom he writes for. He quotes Cheever on the importance of the readers for the writer and the relationship that adoring readers have with the writer. Certainly, that there are readers sustains the writer. That not everyone is a reader is of no concern to the writer as long as there are some who are. This is not a utilitarian argument. This is an argument about excellence via making genuine reflections and observations. The good writer can do that where the film maker, particularly of commercial films aimed to make a buck, can't.

Bellow's antagonist is a man named Teachout who apparently was following in the tradition of Spengler. Out with the old, in with the new. reading is out, video is in. Teachout argued about the masses and the inevitability of progress. That argument notwithstanding, Bellow and his cronies kept on writing for their small group who cared about writing. They pleased themselves, they survived, and of course they produced some very good stuff.

I fear the Oblingers are like Teachout. Especially on points regarding visual learning. Video games are popular. That doesn't mean they are the only path to conveing rich ideas. On some of their other points I, a defining member of the OTH Generation, am just like members of the Net Generation. We like to learn things by figuring them out on our own rather than being told. Please, that is not a generational defining characteristic. That is a characteristic of being a thinking human being.

There is another point that needs to be raised. Students differ in their abilities and some universities are harder than others in their intellectual demands placed on the students. We're seeing that issue raised big time in Texas now with the top 10% of the high school class issue. There is a thought that because education has to be good and relevant (I share that thought), the university targeted at students of more modest ability should produce educational outcomes comparable to those at more elite universities and that the way to do this is by making the pedagogic approach better situated for the the students (I do not share this thought). There is a real problem of dumbing down the content, especially if that is to solve the "visual learner" issue. Kids should still read in college. I've said it before. We should not cave in on that. There are certainly graphical ways to illustrate complex ideas, but those should complement rather than replace the written word to describe and analyze those ideas.

Instructor "visualization" of the dialog with students

Let me begin here with a set of questions that might engage a student in a microeconomics class?

"What type of goods when you purchase them do you look for the lowest possible price and what type of goods when you purchase them do you care about the seller (or the full supply chain) making money from the transaction?"

This question offers a bit of a puzzle, of course. The natural first reaction is to say that buyers always want the lowest price. But it suggests there are cases where that isn't the case.

"Kids who grow up in middle income families have an advantage over kids who grow up in lower income families. There are many components of this. Let's focus on the differences in parental educational attainment (there is strong correlation between that and income) . How would you place a dollar value on the advantage on a per annum basis?"

This questions seems like it is from outer space. It is asking for a back of the envelope calculation. But what type of calculation? That is the mystery.

"Some retail merchants deliberately locate their stores in high rental areas like Water Tower Place on Chicago's Miracle Mile. Others locate their stores in surburban shopping malls. And still others do both. What explains the location choice? And do the stores in both locations charge the same price or different prices to reflect the location cost differences?"

The first obvious answer is that stores locate to be close to their customers. But the question about charging the same price or not is mysterious. What would affect the answer to that?

Showing that an economic analysis can lend insight into answering these questions is the way for me as the instructor to convey to the students that studying economics has value to them. These type of puzzles are of intrinsic interest. Resolving them creates a sense of accomplishment and understanding.

These particular questions can be addressed online fairly nicely with the "content survey" approach that I've described elsewhere. That is fine in one way, but making this type of thing the focus of the course departs rather dramatically from the traditional way the intermediate micro course is taught, content-wise.

Two of the three questions about fall under the general mantle "economics of information." That is the the cool, fun stuff to talk about in an economics course. But normally when one teaches that stuff is an overlay on top of some more basic stuff. The more basic stuff is less cool, less fun. I would argue that it is intellectually important for someone who will study more economics and that is perhaps the primary reason for teaching the course that way. But most of the students who take the class won't study more economics. Frankly, they don't like this course and since for most it is a requirement, they don't understand why it is required.

For example, consider consumer theory, which is usually the lead off topic in such courses and which, if you really put the students through their paces, should constitute between one third and one half of the course. The fundamental lessons from consumer theory are first, substitution (and complementarity) between goods and services, the notion of budget constraint, the notion of elasticity of demand, an important idea about compensation which is fundamental to cost benefit analysis, and revealed preference. There is an awful lot of machinery developed to convey these ideas. For those who love mathematical models (the few engineering students who take the class) the machinery is appreciated for itself and so this is a rewarding experience. For the rest of the students, and most of these kids have very high math scores as measured by ACT or SAT, this is torture. It seems relevant to nothing for them and it actually obscures any lifelong lesson that they may take from the course.

So the issue as an instructor in my shoes is to say, "to hell with those students, I'm going to do a bang up job teaching the rigors of price theory," or alternatively to make various compromises on that so the coure can be more real for the majority of students who enrol. Which choice should I make? My current thinking on resolving this dilemma is to put consumer theory at the end of the course and see if I can introduce more of the information stuff early, but from the firm side, where I think it is easier and more transparent. We'll end up covering about the same stuff but in a different order and with a different emphasis. At this point in my teaching career, I don't know how to do a good course well without drawing the students in. That has to be highest priority in any design.

Designing a course based on what I know

The last time I taught it was an intro course for campus honors students with a total enrollment of 15. The course was a success and it was fun to teach. I tried to teach it again this semester but was told that course had already been allocated and was asked whether I wanted to teach an intermediate micro course. I've taught that course quite a bit in the past. The students are much less motivated and in general instructor evaluations for the course are low. Also, I wasn't prepared to do that (I didn't want to use my old materials and hadn't done anything new in this course since 2001 other than some Excelets I had designed to accompany a textbook) and consequently I didn't think I would learn about the teaching and learning issues. So I told the department no.

But in the back of my head, I've been thinking about what it would take to make this course a success. Would it be possible to really click, armed with the knowledge I've got now, say if I had 60 students and no TA. (If the department offered some grading assistance, I'm not sure how I would use it.) On the one hand, I've got all these technical tricks up my sleeve - digital ink movies from my tablet PC with high frame rate screen capture, then voice over and then the whole thing converted to Flash; embedding such a mini-lectures inside a WebCT Vista quiz question, so that the one can meld presentation and assessment; designing Excel exercises where students "construct" graphical solutions to economic problems and have those automatically graded; customizing those exercises so each team of students gets their own personalized version; providing content surveys that again blend content and assessment but in this case put in a story telling component to the course; and having students make such content surveys as a course project, an alternative to a term paper.

Methodologically, this is quite an arsenal. The issue is mapping that arsenal onto the subject matter of the course. There is a lot of math modelling in the course. And there is no way around that. In the freshman course I did that only very little and concentrated much more on the story telling aspect. That was a winning approach. I'd like to do the same here but want to cover the requisite material. Landsburg's text may offer part of the solution. I'll have to take a look at that. However, I really would like to at the least assess student work online and I don't particularly want to rely on a textbook when I do that, because whatever I develop will be tied to something a publisher knows.

In subsequent posts I'll elaborate on possible teaching experiements in this course.

What if Google Loses Profitability?

In today's NY Times there is an article about Google starting to sell ads that are not related to their search business. The discussion is that Google (and Yahoo too) provide a brokering service between publishers (like the NY Times) and advertisers of content, because they have a good online auction model for the pricing of the advertising. But now Google is going to let in ads that are from high bidding advertisers, even if the content is not otherwise relevant to the readers - and ad for car mufflers on a page with an article about interior decorating. And the thought is this non-context sensitive advertising may become more and more of Google's core business. So what does that do for us schlubs who think of Google as a search enginge. Will they either further intrude into that space or so degrade it as to kill the goose?

On a different front, yesterday I realized that the Times has stopped allowing online readers to email full text of their articles and instead now allows email of the link only. This is what the Chronicle does. Of course the Chronicle charges for its subscription and doesn't rely on advertising to support it. The Times is free online, supported by the ad revenue. Are they too going to continually degrade the service in the quest for revenue. I already think they've degraded the quality of the writing to claim more eyeballs.

Perhaps the trick in all of this is to stay light and agile and always play what is hot out there. The thing is, we who support IT talk about scalability and sensible business models. It sure would be nice if there were something that continued to make sense a few years out. I really liked putting the emails of the Times articles up in my course site for my students, perhaps several months after they appeared. Now I'll have to see if Lexis-Nexis has them or some othe database, and I'll lose the ability to promote to the students that they should read the paper themselves. Or I could make PDFs of the articles, and probably violate fair use. Aarghh.