Rainy Day Woman

Midi Version
Lyrics

This has been a weird week for me, at times surreal. We had FSI, this time an event jointly for Four-Year College and Community College faculty, support staff, and a few administrators. FSI has always been something of a catharsis both because of the intensity of the experience for the attendees but also because hosting any conference has something of that element in it, and one with technology all the more so especially because of Murphy’s Law and the consequent need to manage more of the details. In this case both because some of the EdTech staff were handling a good part of the program and especially because Michael Lindeman of ION was putting in yeoman’s effort, it was easier for me to relax. So, why worry? Well, that’s only for starters.

Monday morning, before FSI started, the CITES Roundtable (this includes all the administrators at my level plus all of our direct reports) was greeted with the news that my boss, Pete Siegel, is headed off to new stomping grounds, UC-Davis. Bully for you, Pete. We wish you well. But what does that mean for the rest of us, both within CITES and those on campus who care a lot about IT? No matter the ability or character of the interim person named as replacement, things usually come to a standstill during that period, so they can be left for the next permanent person in the job. And it’s definitely a seller’s market now. There are a lot of CIO openings nationally and within the CIC I believe about half the positions are vacant, either due to retirements or to turnover. It’s not unrealistic to expect a long time before we fill the CIO slot with a permanent hire.

Because at this point I’m the old veteran of FSI, I got to kick off the opening session with some brief remarks. In trying to be a little humorous, and playing off all the attention at present to Biblical ideas stemming from the DaVinci Code movie release, I coined an expression “BG” meaning Before Google, and referring to the time not when Google was formed but rather when it first entered into our consciousness. I’m really not sure when that was for me, but for the sake of this presentation I was referring to summer 1999. I do think that now Google is the most profound force shaping how we use the Internet today and so it is worth marking when we became conscious of it; even if I’m a bit off in my dates.

From my own personal perspective, however, all of these things pale in comparison to what happened to me starting at 12:30 AM Tuesday morning, when I woke up feeling a pain in my lower back on the left side. Thinking I had wrenched something, I started to walk around just to try to loosen up. But that wasn’t helping. After about an hour or so of that, I decided it was a kidney stone. I had a kidney stone perhaps twenty years ago. Then it happened over a weekend. A friend took me to the emergency room. My recollection is that they fluoroscoped me and found some of my “pipes” quite swollen indicating something was blocking them. But by the time that discovery had been made I had passed the stone on my own accord. My friend took me home and though shaky, I slept it off and was fine the next day.

So I started to drink water with the hope that I could replay history. And I was pacing around our downstairs because that seemed like the best way to relieve the pain. Of course, I was asking myself what I should do about FSI (and my other work). I had no formal obligations in the morning, but did have a meeting in the afternoon and one of our featured speakers was arriving at the airport and I was supposed to pick him up and take him to dinner. Could I bluff my way through the pain? Somewhere around 5 AM I decided that after my wife took my kids to school (she is between jobs and not working this week) that she should take me to the doctor and also that I needed to have a contingency plan about my obligations in the event I didn’t pass the stone by early afternoon.

That turned out to be prudent. It’s now Thursday evening and I’ve still not passed the stone. The doctor gave me some Vicodin after a basic urine test confirmed something wrong with me and kidney stones seemed a plausible explanation. I didn’t take the pain medicine immediately, because I wanted a clear head in case I had to deal with FSI stuff. But by around 4 PM, the pain was overwhelming. So I caved in and took the stuff. They had given me Demerol twenty years ago. My recollection is that it made me nauseated and the pain persisted, so I wasn’t that optimistic this time around. To my surprise, the Vicodin surpressed the pain substantially and for a period of time it seemed the pain went away entirely. I can see why this type of drug is habit forming.

One of the lessons learned from being in intense pain like this but still having important work obligations is that it is a must to rely on others to get things done. It was literally not possible for me to do my job. In a pinch, others stepped up. I don’t know if it was a big deal for them or not, but they did it and FSI ran smoothly without me. The dependencies are almost certainly there even when there is no kidney stone, but then I’m apt not to ask for help (I’ve got the male gene) and I’m not sure people would be so responsive and willing to step up to the plate otherwise. This is something to ponder. A more cooperative less individualistic approach probably makes sense but I’m not sure my persona is fit to shape that. For now I’m just appreciative of their efforts.

Sometime Wednesday, I started to think of Dylan’s song, “Rainy Day Woman,” and especially the tag line, “Everybody must get stoned.” During the previous day or so I know I had promised myself to repent on my worst sins, if only the pain would go away. And for whatever reason, probably just play on the word “stone,” I started singing that song to myself.

That song was extremely popular with some of my high school classmates in 1972, the year I graduated. And of course then the tagline referred to smoking pot, which all the kids I knew then thought was the hip thing to do (but I only knew one kid who actually smoked pot in high school and it was only him and his mom, his dad having passed away).

I’m not sure what I thought about smoking pot when I was a senior in high school, but I know the first thing that comes to mind now is the Bill Clinton line, “I didn’t inhale.” Why did he come up with that one? Of course he came up with other gems of moral certitude, such as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” thereby paving the way for the know-nothingness of the religious right. So lesson here is that with a kidney stone and a little Vicodin you can get pissed off at Bill Clinton.

But let me turn to the other meaning of stoned in Dylan’s song. This is the same meaning as in Shirley Jackson’s story, The Lottery, which I believe was read aloud to us in English class, either in middle school or early on in high school. Stoned in that sense is a brutal assault on someone by others, both in Jackson’s story and in Dylan’s song. In my case this assault was from within, physically and painfully from the kidney stone, and emotionally from some of my other demons. If one believes that everybody must get stoned in this sense, then asking why is paramount. The answer I can come up with now, and I’m still looking at some more physical pain for me before this episode is over, is my need for absolution, a commitment to mending my ways, and in particular in placing greater trust in others as I’ve already mentioned. If I’m looking for a larger meaning in getting this kidney stone, that is the meaning I would attribute.

But this is a purest solution and Dylan’s song is anything but pure. Everybody must get stoned, in the sense my high school classmates understood the song, to drown out the pain and take on a sense of gay merriment. I achieved that with the Vicodin.

This morning, after having gotten a CT scan yesterday that confirmed a kidney stone and also that it might still be several more days of the same before it passes, I decided I could function well enough and returned to FSI to be in the audience and listen as the various “Learning Teams” gave their 5 minute reports to showcase what they had accomplished.

It was weird for me. I knew I was quite drugged up and so I was registering things with a lag and felt like I was inside an echo chamber. The Learning Teams concept was not one I had come up with. My sense is that it was Robert Baird of EdTech who championed the idea after some prodding from Michael Lindeman that he didn’t want an FSI with many plenary sessions. Some of the people at the podium giving the reports had a lot of fun with their presentations. One team literally sung their lyrics. The mood in the room was festive, not scholarly. And the attendees being in high humor is how we marked that the session was a success.

For me, in a glazed torpor due to the Vicodin, the presentations at this session seemed other worldish, and my own emotional reaction to the situation – elation for the mood of the attendees, some jealousy because I was not responsible for that success, and some disappointment because the depth of conclusion didn’t seem to be there, with all of these feelings interwoven but also muted and therefore less profound. I don’t think I’ll linger on that. It’s just how I felt then.

Perhaps everybody should get stoned when seeing something new. Then first impressions don’t mean as much. And we can linger on a worthwhile idea rather than discarding something that is promising because the book cover didn’t look quite appealing enough.

Baby Boomers and Lack of Retirement Planning

Computer Generated Voice of Post via TextAloud

Last night on Frontline, I watched the beginning of a Hedrick Smith documentary with the basic premise that many baby boomers have not prepared adequately for retirement and hence are going to come to an unpleasant reckoning when they reach the point where they want to leave the labor force and have “quality time” with family, only to find out that they can’t afford to do that. In other words, whatever pension or other retirement plan that these people have, they will often find at this reckoning point that the plan is inadequate either because of stock market vicissitudes, self-delusion, or inattention to the saving activity and managing the portfolio funds that are to finance retirement.

That data on savings in this country, particularly in the last year or so, is truly abysmal. (See this chart from the Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis.) The only way to rationalize zero or negative savings rates is to have personal wealth increase without needing to save, i.e., there are capital gains to be had on already held assets. In the mid to late 1990’s this happened, of course, due to the massive run up in the stock market, fueled by the astonishing growth in technology stocks. More recently, it appears to be the boom in housing prices that is the primary driver. Some economists, notably Robert Schiller, have warned there may very well be a bubble in housing prices. This makes the low savings rate all the more disturbing.

The documentary starts off with a focus on the United Airlines bankruptcy and restructuring under which many of the long term United employees lost a substantial fraction of their pension benefits and many of those who continue to work for the company today have had to do so with lower wages and benefits, while upper level management and the lawyers and bankers who crafted the re-org made out like bandits. Unfortunately, in my view, this later point of corporate greed triumphing at the expense of the ordinary Joe in the company, while good for creating empathy with those employees who have been disadvantaged by the process, is really a distraction from what I think is the fundamental point.

That point is the death of defined benefit pension plans in the private sector, because companies that have them and have a substantial number of senior employees can strategically profit from gaming ERISA and the bankruptcy laws, by forcing such a restructuring. Hence a modern company will not offer this type of retirement plan, opting instead for 401Ks or other defined contribution options. Under the defined benefit plan (assuming the company does not go under) the employee is “taken care of “ and doesn’t have to worry about retirement except in the event of a premature severance from the firm. (Thus these plans served as a way to bond the employee to the firm.) In contrast, under a defined contribution plan, with the contributions optional and left up to the employee, then of course the employee does have to worry about contributions and about how those contributions map into an adequately sized nest egg.

Because I love Excel and to make little models in it that illustrate issues such as these, I made up this spreadsheet to give an idea of what is going on. Let me explain a bit of that here.

First, you are setting the time path of income during the lifetime of the individual over which savings occurs. (One of the points of the documentary is that many people are not forward thinking on this issue so while in their twenties and thirties they don’t save for retirement. They only begin to think about retirement in their forties when they’ve been working for quite a while and the day they stop working begins to seem like a possibility. However, do note that if they are paying off a mortgage they are indirectly saving through that vehicle, by building up equity in their home.)

To set the time path, income is fixed at three different times along the trajectory: at the beginning, at the end, and somewhere in the middle. The duration till the endpoint is also set as well as where that middle point lies. With that information, the graph then plots a quadratic function consistent with those set points to give the entire income trajectory till employment ceases. You can change parameters to see how the graph changes. The graph moves after you let go of the relevant spinner button. One of the key variables to play with is the Years of work.

Having set the income path during the working lifetime, I next assume that savings per period is a certain percentage of income and one can set that percentage for the entire working cycle. In other words, I’ve assumed it fixed throughout the working lifetime. That is not realistic when contributions are optional, but it makes us able to vary the savings rate easily over the entire trajectory rather than adjusting it on a year by year basis. The penultimate parameter is the interest rate, which should be interpreted as the real interest rate, meaing the market rate net of the inflation rate. But it doesn’t mean that the investor is in bonds rather than stocks. If the investor has a portfolio of stocks, this should be interepreted as the average annual return on that portfolio. The interest rate determines the interest income generated by the nest egg.

Then, putting your cursor in the lower window and scrolling down, you should be able to see how th nest egg accumulates. In any period the contributions toward increasing the nest egg are the current savings out of income plus the interest return on the previous asset value of the nest. Thus the nest grows faster the higher the interest rate or the higher the savings rate. Regarding the former, it is certainly true that high interest rates can cover up other sins with respect to preparing for retirement. And, conversely, there is the temptation to overestimate the rate of return so as to offset the need to save vigorously for retirement. Regarding the latter, the fact that actual savings rates are much more modest suggests that collectively we don’t understand the issues at stake.

Finally, you can look at the the income per period during retirement, which is the bolded number in blue found in cell C10.. This is a function of the size of the nest egg at the end of the working lifetime, the interest rate, and the number of years during retirement. The per income per year during retirement is calculated in a manner similar to the calculation of the monthy payment in a fixed rate mortage. In other words, there are a pre-specified number of periods and a fixed payment per period such that over the duration the payments are set to pay off the loan and outstanding interest charges but to provide no surplus beyond that. If the interest rate were zero, then this annual payment would simply be the final nest egg number divided by the number of periods in retirement. With a positive interest rate, however, and since the nest egg that does not get paid out all at once, the asset earns interest and hence that gives more to distribute. Equivalently, we can think of dividing the nest egg among a fewer number of periods. Cell D10 gives this dividing factor. It is interesting to observe how that value changes with the interest rate.

What, if anything, does this have to do with learning technology? I’m sure some of my readers found the previous few paragraphs a bunch of econ mumbo jumbo. So let me get away from technical details and move to the main point. If there are a lot of people approaching retirement who are not adequately prepared, these people will look to enhance their income in the labor market. To the extent that these people can’t do this by staying in their old jobs, or returning to their old jobs, they may very well demand education to assist them in finding different type of work.

So the Baby Boomers’ debacle may turn into a big reward for Higher Ed, cementing a demand for online programs that heretofore seemed real but hard to identify, as these Boomer’s are looking to improve their incomes in their next careers, and additional educational credentials are viewed as the path for achieving this goal. Think of the possibility of an equivalent ot the GI Bill, targeted at encouraging these Baby Boomers back to school so they don’t have to work at McDonalds or WalMart in their second careers.

Advocating for education of this sort is the upside of the under saving problem. The downside is noting that the retirement age will have to be be pushed back because these folks won’t be able to retire otherwise. I wonder if the politicians will steer clear of the education part, because of this uncomfortable fact.

Is IT The Solution Or The Problem?

Computer Generated Voice of Post via TextAloud

Today’s quote of the day (from the Google homepage) is by George Orwell. It says

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

Sounds like a a motto worth adopting. So what are we looking at or at least trying to see? The big issue from where I sit is that we on campus don’t know how to cannabalize, by which I mean end services, departments, or even larger units that either are no longer in demand or perceived as of quality below the rest of the institution. Every activity has some constituency and is considered important by them. Schumpeter talked about creative destruction. In contrast, we have uncreative, and really unspoken about, retention.

What’s the big deal. Universities keep on keeping on. We’ve known that for some time. Anybody who adopted learning technology in the ‘90s and wanted to see that as the spur for institutional change had to wake up to the fact that universities are conservative instituions, especially because of faculty governance, but also because the interdependencies are substantial, its not very likely to excise units or activities that under a “corporate” approach would have been axed a long time ago.

The implication is that to do anything new either new revenues have to be found to fund the activity, or the activity itself must be cost saving in other areas so it is implicitly self-financing, or it just can’t be done. This wouldn’t be so terrible, but for the politics. New revenue comes with strings attached. There are earmarks. So for bottom up activities, and while I’m reasonably highly placed in the campus administrative hierarchy, I still view teaching and learning with technology as primarily a bottom up activity, new revenue becomes something of an oxymoron. This leaves cost saving or doing nothing as the viable alternatives.

But let’s not focus on teaching and learning here and instead consider IT more broadly. One might sensibly ask, “How can IT be part of the problem? It’s such a big factor in our lives. It’s an integral part of the way we work, how we communicate, what we produce. It’s the solution, not the problem, isn’t it?” And from the point of view of a home owner who has a PC in the office with a cable modem, some other rather inexpensive hardware and software, it sure seems like total cost of ownership is low, while benefits from use are extremely high. The access to information, timely stuff, interesting stuff to read, reference stuff to fill in personal gaps of knowledge, fun stuff to entertain when the mind goes blank from work, all of that is a wonder in itself. And, of course, it’s not just the getting but also the making and communicating about it. There’s email, blogs, IM and a lot more. It creates an unbelievable sense of connection. And most of the stuff is free. Surely IT paves the virtual road to the brave new world.

Consider Google. I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned, for the most part, to ignore the ads and promos, unless I’m actually in shopping mode when that is what I’m searching for. In this respect about using Google, it’s like TV commercials, press the mute button, get a tall one, and come back when the programming has resumed. Many of us learn this type of behavior and once learned it’s not that big a deal to have this type of external presence. But, of course, if everyone behaves this way than the ads don’t have impact, Google can’t generate sufficient revenue to support its exploding infrastructure, and then the walls start tumbling down. So, we who are in love with being online but also in love with being cheapskates hope the rest out there are “power shoppers” and give Google’s commercial clients a tumble. We can then leech, er, really I mean free ride, on these others who actually do provide the financial skids to the system.

So all the cool software services that are provided out there seemingly for free to us have at root a Catch-22 style foundation – it’s the ads that make it work, but we try our darnedest to ignore the ads. Is this a stable business model on which to rest the case about IT being part of the solution? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that I don’t find this a comforting thought.

Now let’s turn to big IT inside the university, where clearly there is no ad financing of university activity and, I believe, state law actually prohibits that from happening. (But if the state share of the university budget continues to wane perhaps that law changes and then maybe the university starts to emulate Google in this resepct. Perish the thought.) I believe the new hot issue is data integrity and data security. Research data, financial and personnel records, grade information, etc. All of this needs state-of-the-art storage and archiving, insurance against power outage or hardware failure, and proactive steps to ensure confidentiality and privacy. The needs in this area are growing geometrically as our business processes become digital and we increasingly rely on those.

State of the art, in this case, means having expensive “data centers” with appropriate environmentals – temperature control, no direct sunlight, redundant electric power, secure physical access, and as leakproof as possible. Big servers take up a lot of physical space. As our data preservation needs grow, the square footage of data center space that is needed also grows. We are currently estimating new data center growth on the order of 1% or 2% of the campus operating budget to handle needs for the next five to ten years.

Normally, it is a mistake to consider capital projects like building a new data center, which has a multiyear lifetime, and therefore the installation costs should be amortized over the lifetime of use, with operating budgets, which are calculated on an annual basis. This is the standard stocks versus flows distinction that we teach in economic principles.

But in this case I made a point of making “this mistake” because new data centers typically won’t carry additional external revenues with them (although one could argue that the revenue is there in the overhead from federal grants, but there is the countervailing argument that the overhead money has already been fully allocated) and hence such data centers are not self-financing. They also don’t seem to be directly cost reducing. That leaves only one other way to get them built, via a diversion of operating revenues from their current allocation. With this line of thinking, its not hard to view IT as part of the problem.

To an economist, the real problem is an abence of markets. Things like data centers are funded off the top and are therefore lumped in with unavoidables like increases in heating bills do the the rise in price of crude oil. Instead we’d argue there should be Pigouvian taxes (or their Groves-Ledyard equivalent to ensure incentive compatibility) so that we jointly determine the level of public good provision and who pays for it. But this really only makes sense if every individual faculty member and administrative officer plays the role both of tax payer and consumer.

Yet this idea is so alien from our culture that I don’t believe it will ever happen. Instead we live in a world where deans are customers, in the sense that they control budgets that are potentially subject to a campus imposed tax, and individual faculty and administrative officers are users, who want every service on campus to be provided according to the “Library Model,” where except for late charges everything is offered up for free. In this world there is a gap in expecations and demands between the customers, who tend to be more penurious about IT, and the users, who tend to be more expansive about IT. A big part of managing IT on campus is about reconciling that gap.

Is IT part of the solution or part of the problem? I say, “yes, it is.”

final final test

netfiles post

I changed the url for the file from https to http to see if feedburner makes the feed. Netfiles, I believe, is smart enough to bump that back over to https. Let's see.

last test

Another russian song and a link to the campus home page.

still one more test

a russian song

this is from someone in the math department. the one from netfiles didn't work. i wonder if the url starting with https:// matters.

testing again

this is from an online lecture

and some additional text but no additional links

Dialog with Computer Generated Voices

Audio of Script Below

The feedburner site didn't create an enlosure with my prior attachment at Netfiles. Now I'm trying again, with a different file, this time on guava, the same server that hosts the blog.

This audio file was computer generated using a program called TextAloud. The script is below. I'll make no claims for the quality of the dialog, but the voice itself is pretty good.

* * * * *

This is an attempt at dialog

I'm Paul and we're starting this presentation with me. I'm patient but masculine and sometimes show a little bravado. I need to be tempered by a softer side. {{Pause=1.0}}

I'm the softer side. My name is Kate. Though I'm a girl, I can be tough. Don't you believe me? Just watch out. {{Pause=1.0}}

Now that you know my better half, let's think of what we can do with this sort of capability. We can script a presentation as dialog. That seems pretty cool. {{Pause=1.0}}

Sure. But good dialog is hard to write. If the writing isn't well done, this will sound tedious and less interesting than if there is only one voice. How many people know how to write good dialog? {{Pause=1.0}}

Paul, don't be such a Doubting Thomas. Of course most people don't write good dialog. That's a skill not usually called for. Let them practice a little and see how they do. Don't judge them on their first try at it. {{Pause=1.0}}

Kate, you're probably right. Let's see if people can learn to write dialog and yet convey the type of useful information that they would have done, had they been writing a blog post where they focused on the content only and not the form of presentation. Let them get used to this new approach before we give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. {{Pause=1.0}}

Patience is a virtue Paul. {{Pause=1.0}}

I suppose it is Kate. See you later. {{Pause=1.0}}

Bye.

test post

Just trying to see if the mp3 file that is linked shows up at my feedburner site as an enclosure. The mp3 file is on my Netfiles site and I was having trouble getting links from there to work.

De-constructing Community

I’m just back from Chicago where there was a Sloan-C Workshop on Blended Learning. It was interesting for me and I’ll comment about some of the things I learned there below. I did skip out of the workshop early because I’ve had a hacking cough that seemed to be getting worse and making me feel kind of out of it and since I knew I was looking at a three hour drive, I thought I’d take that during the middle of the day rather than latter and be pooped out for tomorrow.

I’m prone to compare my own undergrad experience (as modified in my own memory by the 30 years or so since I graduated) with what I’m hearing now about good approaches to encouraging learning. So let me review a few quick points about my college experience. By my junior year at Cornell (I transferred there in the middle of my sophomore year) I had a very complete and engaging intellectual/social life with the people who lived at 509 Wyckoff Road. This was entirely outside the course experience. None of the people I lived with at Cornell took classes with me. This contrasted to my Freshman experience at MIT, where my roommates and I had several classes in common. The courses, in contrast, created their own contacts/friends and the work I did in them was entirely at an individual level. For some of these course – a topology course in particular but some other advanced match courses as well and some advanced political science courses – the work relied on intensive introspection and I really don’t see an alternative to that. On the other hand, I had plenty of social argument on issues and construction of ideas, with my housemates. I am thankful, in that respect, of being able to have both of these things are integral parts of my education. I view them to both be essential. That prefaces for what I have to say next.

For students who either are commuting in face to face instruction or who are taking a totally online class and who are holding down a job at the same time, there is probably no chance to fit in an intellectual social life on top of that which resides outside both the world of work and school. There just won’t be enough time for that. As a consequence, there may very well be a reasonable role to be played by school as a provider of intellectual social interaction and hence having the pedagogy done with that in mind may make good sense. For residential students of the traditional age, who are busy to be sure but without the burdens of work and family to compete for their attention, one wonders whether many of them do intellectual activities outside of class, for their own entertainment and personal growth. My sense is that it happens much less here and now than it did for me at Cornell. I’m not sure about this, but my impression is that this is far from the norm. So I can see, even at the undergraduate level, some folks arguing for a social and constructivist approach to education in the formal classes, as a way to provide this type of intellectual life.

However, there now seems to be an argument being made, implicitly if not overtly, that intensive introspection – hard thinking, working through a complex argument that solves a difficult problem, and doing that on one’s own and thereby establishing a sense of competence in being able to think this way – is not a necessary part of education and that all problem solving can be done in a social context. I believe there are many, including most of my colleagues in Economics, who think otherwise. If the two sides are to do more than simply growl at each other, it would helpful to sharpen the issue and also to ask whether there is any middle ground.

Yesterday afternoon, there was an interesting presentation by Gary Brown from Washington State University on joint work with Tamara Smith and Tom Henderson involving student evaluation in online and hybrid (some but reduced seat time) courses on something parallel to but not identical to the dimension I discussed above. Gary and his co-authors pose two possible and intended to be mutually exhaustive constructs for learning. The first is “School” and the second is “Community” and students were asked which construct most aptly reflects the learning in the particular course where the survey was administered. The principal finding in this work is that novice learners appear to be neutral to these constructs but more experienced learners speak more about community as being important and particularly that peer assessment is of value. I found this provocative but also a little unsettling.

On the drive back today I stopped in Kankakee at a Starbucks for a coffee and a sandwich and read through Gary’s PowerPoint for the presentation. Reading the slides confirmed my initial impression. I thought the cards were stacked a bit unfairly against “School” in that it was presented in an unappealing manner, not attached to personal growth of the student at all but only about getting a good grade via doing well on the tests. With this characterization of school, the results are less surprising. So I wonder whether one might get a more interesting picture (though probably not so strong results statistically) if one made a better case for School and in the process peeled the onion a bit more.

Consider these further issues. There are some courses where “students feel lost” and if the students were interviewed by somebody outside the class who was knowledgeable in the subject but who because they were not in a position of authority in assigning a grade could get the student to open up, would readily establish that the student felt a sense of incompetence in the course. There are other courses, however, whether the student though a novice feels that she is gaining mastery of the subject and making good progress and capable of functioning well with the material.

From the days when I had office hours at the same time as my undergraduate TA and could witness students walking past my office though I had nobody else there so they could meet with the TA, I’m quite convinced that many students who feel lost don’t want to talk with the Professor about it. It is painful to show intellectual weakness of this sort, especially to someone in authority. It is understandable to such students that they would want to seek out a knowledgeable peer, who might help without creating that feeling of embarrassment. But if this is the primary driver of why experienced students want peer critiques, it might be rightly criticized and resisted as the blind leading the blind.

Now consider a different type of student. This student is not just progressing nicely in the course; she is proceeding at a more rapid pace than her peers and is getting deeper into the subject matter. How does this very able student express her questions and issues since most certainly anybody with this type of aptitude will be curious about what comes next? Does she do it with her classmates? Wouldn’t that be asymmetric and unsatisfying? Or does she seek out the instructor whose authority is now not a threat but an opportunity for arguing about the issues that she is confronting. Does this type of student choose “School” on the Brown, et. al. survey?

Students who are in the middle between those two extremes and who find themselves interacting mostly with like students (neither clueless nor prodigy-like) may find that they work better in groups and getting some fresh ideas from peers while holding their own on the giving up of ideas as well and that might be satisfying.

But what happens when the subject gets really hard? Do these type of students avoid such courses? Does the social form of interaction and the group problem solving overcome the inherent difficulty in the subject? Or do we get blather of the blind leading the blind type.

While the Physics faculty here don’t practice constructivism per se, I know that they do follow a Just In Time Teaching Approach and that they reported some time ago that the approach tends to give more focus on the middle students and the very high level students feel they are being held back. Is this focus on social settings for learning and constructivism as an approach in particular really a veiled argument for taking a utilitarian rather than elitist approach toward instruction? If so, might there be a flipside argument that we should be encouraging these middle student to jump a bit higher and not be so comfortable in their mode of learning? And does it matter whether we are thinking about this with adult learning in online or blended courses or traditional college students in on ground courses?

Who else is asking these type of questions?

Getting Testy

Sometimes justice is delivered through life’s little ironies. According to this article from yesterday’s New York Times, we’re experiencing a shortage in psychometricians, those who practice that esoteric “science” a big part of which is to assign the mapping from raw scores on standardized tests into percentile rankings. This, apparently, is an indirect consequence of No Child Left Behind and its reliance on such testing for measuring learning (or non-learning as the case may be). It seems we’re testing so much that we don’t have enough of these measurement folks to validate the tests. First, there was the scandal with the SAT scoring. Now this. If I didn’t know better, I’d think God was trying to send a message to President Bush.

Here, it’s Finals Week. Many of our high enrollment courses (and some smaller classes too) use those scantron sheets for scoring final exams. Apart from individual student complaints about erasures not being treated correctly, I’ve never heard of us having scoring problems with the scantrons. But as far as what those final exam scores mean about student learning, I am more doubtful now than I’ve ever been as to what the exams actually measure and on why the entire culture is immersed in this type of high stakes testing.

There are some narrow instances where I understand what the tests do and indicate. After I had entered the doctoral program in Economics at Northwestern, I was told that the GRE in Economics was meaningless, but the basic GRE in Math was a strong predictor of success in the Economics program. That made sense to me. More recently, I learned something similar about the Chemistry sequence here. The Math part of the SAT is a very good predictor of performance there. This is not surprising: math aptitude is necessary for doing well, both in Chemistry and in Economics. The SAT and GRE provide reasonably good measures of a simple type of math problem solving skill – exactly what I mean by math aptitude. But I’m guessing this is the exception rather than the rule.

After getting killed in my course evaluations by students with comments like “test us on what we know, not on what we don’t know,” I stopped writing exams in my intermediate economics course where to get the right answer the student would have to show some cleverness in set up of the problem and its analysis. Coming from graduate school, I had thought it was that cleverness that the instructor wanted to encourage and hence that should be a big part of any exam. The students, in contrast, wanted something else. They had studied and put time into the course “learning” the material. They wanted some way to show that on the test. After about 10 years of teaching (I stopped teaching intermediate microeconomics after my second year except for an honors section and only returned to it 7 or 8 years later) I figured out that if students had seen essentially the same type of problem in a homework assignment or a practice exam, then they would feel the exam was fair because they’d be prepared for it. They had their bag of tricks and my test questions could be found in it. Even with that, my exams were perceived as hard by the students. But beforehand, they were viewed as impossible.

Impossible tests, of course, don’t measure very much, unless there are a handful who can actually do them. When that is the case, it is really not very hard to identify these individuals. But for the rest, it is not at all clear that gradations in exam performance measure much of anything. That has always been my issue with relying on tests. So in the Honors course that is just ending, I didn’t use exams at all. I had homework and projects – that’s it. I learned about what the students knew from their writing and their discussion in class. It seems to me to be far more informative, and clearly preferred if their performance doesn’t have to be sited on a bell curve and I can rely on my qualitative judgments in giving them their end of semester grade.

Then there is the issue of the stress in the students that exams can cause. We know there is good stress and bad. The good encourages elevated performance as if running a race. The keyed up individual “competes” whether the grading is on a curve or not and taking the test is a way of proving oneself worthy (though of exactly what I’m not sure). I was a good test taker when I was a student. I know the feeling. I’m guessing that most of my Honors students know the feeling as well.

But what about those students who don’t have reasonable expectations that they will perform well on the tests? How do they feel under this stress? Don’t many under prepare because they hate the feeling of coming up short and thus have a ready excuse in their lack of prior effort? And for the diligent types who do put in the hours beforehand but feel that their performance might not show the benefits from their work, where is their reward? Do they benefit from the pressure induced by the exams?

My own sense of irritation (the instructor can get testy too) is that we’re so enveloped in this method of evaluation without much if any critical thinking on why. We do it because that’s the way it’s been done. If we don’t do it, then somehow we’re cheating, getting away with it.

Maybe, just maybe, when God is speaking to Mr. Bush, he’s speaking to us too.

Durable or Ephemeral?

Today was my last class session for the semester. I’ve been having the students do “book reviews” on a team basis where each team of three students would have two hours spread over two class sessions to do an in class presentation on the book. I coached the teams ahead of time on things that they might cover during their presentation and on methods for engaging the class in discussion so that the other students also contributed. This worked partly ok, but sometimes not so great. Sometimes they posed questions that the other students could only answer if they had the book open and at the appropriate page. And sometimes they asked a good question but the rest of the class sat on their hands. Then they got flustered and moved on rather than reframing the question or asking something related to get the class started in response. Sometimes I let this happen and sometimes I intervened. I had no firm rule, other than a gut feeling that if there was important economics being omitted I should step in.

During the second hour of class I had been covering other economics or talking other issues that I thought would be of interest to the class. (These kids are in the Campus Honors Program and they find it fun and interesting to reflect on their own education, particularly their last couple of years in High School. So we would sometimes do that and I would try to tie in to issues I’m engaged with as a learning tech guy, even if it wasn’t directly about economics.) Monday, in our penultimate class, we did a brief review of how the class went for them. In the main they liked it and apparently it was quite a tonic to their engineering courses, at least for some of them. But they were a bit miffed about my deliberately being vague on how final grades were to be determined. I wrote them up a document where I argued that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are in conflict – typically one can be effective but not both – and that I really was trying to appeal to their curiosity in the course and so tried to eschew a focus on extrinsic motivation. In a regular class this approach could be seen as capricious grading but because this was a seminar with only 12 students and because what I was trying to do is exactly what the Campus Honors program wants to achieve with such courses, I felt within my rights. Some of the students were ok with my argument. A few of them wanted it both ways.

So I had to come up with something to do in the last hour of the last class – a way to end the semester. I tried something wacky but consistent with my initial goals of getting them to be interested in economics beyond the course. I decided I would do a book give away (really a book loan over the summer program) where my choice set was partially affected by what books I had on my own bookshelves at home or at the office that I thought either would be enjoyable and educational for them (a distinct subset) or some other books that I thought “would be good for them” even if reading them might be a struggle. And I included some titles of non-economics books that were either political science or humanities.

Their assignment, so far none have done this but the class ended only a few hours ago, is to email me with what books they took. I told them I wanted that just so I can have a record in case I want to track them down next fall. But, truthfully, I also want to know if they’ll actually read the books they took. Some would let me know anyhow. This way I can contact the others and perhaps exercise a miniscule prod in the process in case they haven’t.

It is certainly a peculiar mechanism. But how else can I tell whether I’ve given any of the students “the economics bug,” and if teaching the course had any impact on them beyond the semester? In that respect, it is so much easier teaching a course in the major.

For those who might be interested, here is the annotated list I sent out.

Half Full Or Half Empty

Yesterday at our brownbag, we had a very nice talk from Gary Cziko, who though a Professor of Educational Psychology in the College of Education is an enthusiast for using online technology to support language learning. This was the topic of his presentation and he showed us an array of interesting and readily available tools to use, both freeware and inexpensive hardware, as well as pushing the idea that we may learn from others online who are similarly interested in learning language by exploiting the obvious comparative advantage that we are all experts in our primary language and hence if you are a native Spanish speaker and I a native English speaker and we want to learn the other language that is the basis for a partnership. I was struck during the presentation of how Gary’s approach has been driven by his own needs as a learner of languages and his preferences for using the technology --- for example he does not want to be tethered to his computer, so portability was a big deal for him --- and how unlike the approach that would be taken if the query had been driven by somebody teaching language acquisition by others. There were several of those faculty in the audience but for whatever reason they didn’t engage in discussion about Gary’s findings during the talk. This dichotomy between how you would learn if driving that learning by yourself and how learning is structured in courses that provide academic credit seems a topic worth discussing further. Right now I’ll leave it with the observation that the two are certainly not the same.

I had a little follow up thread with Gary afterwards on some technology issues. We’ve both been playing with Google Page Creator. He really likes it for quick Web publishing. I thought it was excellent as a starter tool for undergraduates who otherwise don’t have Web publishing experience and further that could be used by students who have to make Web pages for course projects or assignments. The template approach that Page Creator uses is probably easier for the novice than using a WYSIWYG editor for the same purpose. And to the extent that the students are already using Gmail as an alternative to campus provided email, this would seem to be a natural extension for them. But for faculty use, the lack of branding with the campus would seem to be an issue.

Given how nice Page Creator is, I’m kind of surprised that Google has not yet “wrappered” all the services that are accessed with the same Gmail login and password (Google Calendar and Google Talk, for example) and that other services like Blogger and Groups have different login and password strategies at the moment. So they aren’t yet offering a “unified online space” approach to their services. Apple seems to have to have done this, and merged it with their desktop tools, but Apple doesn’t have big enough market share on campus at present, especially among the undergraduates. So we’re still in the mix and match world and in that sense the glass is half empty.

Let me turn to Blackboard and what they’ve been up to since the merger has been announced. I’m somewhat upbeat about the merger because in the prior world of the separate Blackboard and WebCT I believe they were dissipating resources that can now be redirected to product development and innovation. But for obvious reasons it is prudent to take a wait and see attitude and I believe early signs can be read either up or down.

As a WebCT Vista customer, today I received the April Newsletter and following links in that I came to the Blackboard Blog. On the one hand, it is good to see them with an open space like this that is distinct from the corporate site, where individual posts can be attributed to specific people and hence so the views expressed are more personal. I do not know, at present, the four bloggers listed on the left of the page. But I was happy to see the post from Karen Gage, someone whom I do know from WebCT, and it suggests that the space may be used in the future for other folks within Blackboard to express their individual views openly. I would certainly welcome that, especially if the commenting was a little bit less like the glossy brochure type of communication that comes in the newsletter itself. This is all on the glass is half full side.

On the other hand, I was put off by the copyright notice on the blog. I don’t recall seeing a copyright notice on any of the blogs I follow including such corporate blogs as the New York Times blog or the ESPN blog and it seems to me that one doesn’t embrace the open sharing of information that blogs are supposedly about via a copyright notice of this sort. Further, the location of the notice on the page just didn’t seem right to me. (The Creative Commons notice that I use is at the bottom of the page.) I could be overreacting. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that. Sometimes I incorrectly go off the deep end. But for the time being I don’t believe that is the case and believe instead that I’m correctly interpreting that copyright notice as evidence of the presence of the Dark Side of the Force within Blackboard. (On a different but related front, I was curious about what software powers this blog. Is that Blackboard software? If so, it is certainly more open than I had been lead to believe by reading some other commentators about the Blackboard Blog tool. If it is by somebody else, where is the attribution?)

I do want to know from the company how they are going to embrace Web 2.0 apps in the future, and while I don’t expect a dissertation on the subject now, it would be comforting to have the feeling that they “get it” and, frankly, I’m not sure they do. From where I sit, and my prior comments about the Google tools were intended to indicate that, we are in a multiple environments world from here on out. That is the reality. We need to adjust to it. We need the LMS, absolutely. But it won’t do everything for us and we shouldn’t ask that it does. It would be really good if it were friendly with these other environments. However Blackboard (and other LMS vendors) may fear these other environments because not all clients may make the conclusion that the LMS is absolutely necessary (especially when Google is giving the software away instead of charging for it directly) and instead view these alternatives as substitutes rather than as complements. So I believe I understand the issue from a business perspective. From my perch, I’d like to see a sufficient expression of confidence in Blackboard that it feels comfortable with its offerings having substantial comparative advantage that the Web 2.0 apps won’t erode its business and that consequently it can accommodate the openness of Web 2.0. As I said, right now there are signs that can be read both ways on this.

Let me turn one more time and now focus on my own campus, where we have a brand new Provost and where we are immersed in a strategic planning effort. This suggests opportunities, especially for those who make the good argument and can gain support for that from others. There are possibilities for a blended learning initiative here, an IT minor, and a more broad sweep of IT within the overall curriculum that would justify a larger investment in learning technologies across the board. On the other hand, there are possibilities that the new research initiatives will squeeze out other activities that compete for the same scarce funds and that we will limp along with learning technology as with other campus infrastructure.

I suppose it all depends on how one looks at things.

Throwing Stones In A Glass House

Fortunately for me the Draft due to the Viet Nam War ended just as I turned 18 in January 1973 (and I lucked out with getting a very high lottery number as well). So, thankfully, I did not have to serve in the military. And as I reported earlier, I missed out on the Peace Corps and VISTA, opting instead to go directly to grad school at Northwestern after finishing up at Cornell. So while I’m going to talk the talk in this post, I haven’t walked the walk, and I know it. I’ve been an academic and spent most of my life on campus at the U of I. It’s been comfortable. It makes for an ideal environment to do serious reflection and in that sense it has been well suited for me. But it has not forced me to confront reality, particularly the issues of living in a large urban environment, since I lived in Chicago while attending grad school.

This above is my mea culpa. Now I’ll make the case as if that doesn’t matter.

In going through the track back on an earlier post, I came across Barack Obama’s Web site and in particular this speech on 21st century schools. Unlike me, Obama does have the personal history of activism and community service. His speech is moving and sensible on several levels. It shares several ideas with the Louis Gerstner led Teaching Commission report that I’ve referred to earlier. Yet Obama’s speech departs from the motivation of the Gerstner, et.al., document by leading off with mention of Jonathan Kozol and his new book Shame of a Nation, rather than by focusing on potential future decline in GDP growth (because we will be out competed by India and China and others) that is at the heart of the Teaching Commission report. I have not yet read Kozol’s latest, but some years back I did read Savage Inequalities and based on recollection of that Kozol has no need to appeal to macroeconomic issues to make his points. For his arguments, he need only appeal to basic notions of fairness and justice and a sense of human decency. I think it is wise of Obama to cast the education issues in these terms.

But to me either Obama doesn’t have the argument quite right or he is playing his cards too close to the vest now and is still holding back on some critical aspects. He mentions efforts like Teach for America and the New Teacher Project and several others as well, though he does not try to pick winners from this list and while he tells us these efforts will have to scale up eventually he doesn’t tell us how that will happen.

To the extent that the argument depends critically on young people just out of college taking up the call to teach, basic economic reality is likely to get in the way of this vision. Many of these young adults will be carrying a debt burden with them and will need to find work to service that dept, if not to pay it off immediately. Those who are financially unencumbered might choose the path that Obama implicitly suggests for them, but for those carrying a lot of dept, isn’t this asking more than can be expected? And with the rising cost of a college education, one should expect this problem to become more acute.

So, behind the Obama argument there is another that has not yet been articulated --- taxes need to be raised to fund debt relief for those college grads who opt to spend some years teaching in the schools, before pursuing some other career. This is what will be needed to make the approach scale. Recognizing that, the question is whether one can make a compelling appeal to increase taxes for this purpose.

Here Obama’s rhetoric casting the issue in moral terms may serve him well – but the case still has to be made. Now, if a young adult serves in the military, a totally voluntary act, the individual receives funding for college in return. (And similarly, if one enrolls in ROTC the college education is funded by the promise of future military service.) So with respect to the military, the case has already been made that service justifies a subsidy for enlisted people to get their higher education and that quid pro quo is part of the deal and readily funded by taxpayers.

Hence it seems to me that Obama must make the case the teaching in the schools after college is an expression of patriotism worthy of general taxpayer support, the moral equivalent of serving in the military, with rhetoric to match the argument, such as better to fight the inward battle to what Kozol calls “Third World America” to support values we all believe in than to fight the outward battle in Iraq, to support we’re not sure what. But one doesn’t see ratcheting up of the rhetoric this way in Obama’s speech. Perhaps he feels we’re not ready to scale up these efforts. To me, however, it seems an appropriate time to push these points.

Let me leave that and turn to a related point. Economic incentives can only go so far in bringing new graduates to the call of teaching. Other motivations must also be in play and one has to wonder whether the college experience itself should be neutral on this point or if instead it should prepare the students for a period of service after they graduate. In other words, the ethical tone while in college might have as much or more to do with addressing the labor supply issue for new teachers than any debt relief program that might be instituted.

In some posts from last August (from 8/9 to 8/21) on “Inward Looking Service Learning” I argued that the needed reform at public research institutions such as mine, which attract relatively strong students but that seem to be breaking from the dual pressures of promoting student engagement and containing costs, is to have those students themselves provide service to the institution by teaching and mentoring other students and with the advice and counsel of the faculty develop online environments that aid in instruction. One of the key parts of the argument is to make this the regular business of the university, put it front and center, and make it a point of pride that students are part of the productive environment at the university, rather than an object of scorn and derision that instruction must be of low quality because much of it is done by undergraduates. In other words, this was meant as a self-help approach to addressing the needs that like institutions have and putting all the members of the community: faculty, staff, students, and administration into an ethical environment where self-help and support of the community become a habitual response to serious issues.

Whether this can work is, of course, an open question. But if it were implemented and did work, it would then stand to reason that it would impact the labor supply of teachers from newly minted graduate students who now saw service to the community as a part of their essence. Right now, we do see courses that bring undergraduate students in contact with K-12 students in the community, perhaps a step in the right direction, but this too is not done at scale and though there is some rhetoric to the contrary, there is no real impetus to have this occur at scale in the current environment. I don’t think that will change until the service-based approach is perceived as addressing our own internal issues rather than simply as filling some good citizen requirement for the University’s image.

But I think it is possible, by making this potential tie explicit, that leaders such as Obama might look to Higher Education and encourage reform there so as to make it more likely that the improvement in the schools has a real chance. Why start by making an appeal to young graduates to turn to public service when a fuller and more sustained recruitment can happen by having the students engage in serious service during their college years? It’s the logic behind this question that encourages me to be somewhat optimistic about the possibility.

This is a long haul issue. There is no quick fix. But that is not a reason to delay in getting started.

Dual careering and getting K-12 students to do schoolwork during the evening

Its not often that I find the commentary of Stanley Fish striking a chord with me, but his point that some of the best instruction occurs outside of regular courses seems dead on. And while he is particularly concerned here with adult education via TV and radio talk shows, I believe the lesson applies as well or all the more so to youngsters, who get much of their education through play and their interactions with peers outside the classroom. So it is worth a moment or two of pause to scratch one’s head and ask whether we really help students out by piling on the homework or forcing them into “educational” extra curricular activities when that isn’t of their own selection. I make the point up front because I’m going to argue that in many cases we should be doing that and certainly when the home or neighborhood is not itself nurturing, then there is an added obvious reason to encourage the school to make up for that.

Let me make a big aside first. I’m confronted with the my kids school in two ways. First, since I drive them in, I’m occasionally involved with getting the backpacks ready and loaded into the car. These backpacks are behemoths. Both kids have two loose leaf binders (I have no clue why), a textbook or two, some folder for transmitting papers to be turned in that don’t have key holes punched and miscellaneous other materials. Then during the evening when I arrive home, much of the backpack contents are littered on our counter where we have our informal meals. (The younger kid likes to do his work on that counter.) The unmistakable message that I take from these observations is that the kids middle school is a world of paper – the computer and the Internet intrude at the outer reaches of this world but have made nary a dent in terms of the core processes involving student homework.

One other point, this one may be specific to my kid, but I believe it is more pervasive than that, is that the amount of homework seems minimal, at least for the sixth grader. The eighth grader does seem to have a fair amount of work, but the younger one often reports – I did it already at school, or – I don’t have homework tonight. My younger kid tends to zip through things, often without sufficient care, especially when he doesn’t see the derivative benefit from the activity, so the “did it all at school” line might reflect that rather than that adequate homework has been assigned, but my sense is that this is not the full explanation and that another part of this explanation is in this paper world in which this school exists homework provides a big burden on the teacher, not just in the reading and evaluating of the student work, but in the record keeping as well. This acts as a deterrent to assigning more homework.

So perhaps it makes sense for the schools to utilize learning management systems and have online homework, which in addition to addressing some of the issues I mention in the previous paragraph have the benefit that the homework can begin to become a teaching device in addition to an assessment mechanism where students can have multiple tries at a problem and get feedback on earlier attempts that help them understand the source of the mistake they are making.

There is only one sensible reason that I can see for not doing this, which is that there is not a good way to provide universal access to the technology and absent that, differences in class, income, and race that already tend to cleave the schools will be accentuated via digital divide issues. This is, of course, a serious concern and the public schools certainly have to embrace universal access. But I believe the trend is toward universal access at home (I’ve read some stuff on that front recently bud didn’t bookmark it and can’t find the reference now) and when some threshold that I’m not sure how to specify is crossed, I believe that with providing access at schools after hours and at libraries and other public places that we’ll get close enough to the universal ideal that we can assume using a learning management system for homework (or other online tools) will take a serious hold.

As that threshold is neared we can then start to think through the question I asked in my post on Second Careers and K-12. How does one bring bright and talented people who otherwise wouldn’t become teachers into instruction? An alternative to the answer I gave there (and I still favor that solution as a primary focus but do recognize that many approaches need to be tried) is to imitate the University of Phoenix and hire adjunct instructors who interact with the students online. These adjunct instructors would need to have other jobs, hence the expression “dual careering” in the title of my post, and that is what would make them affordable as employees in the K-12 environment. Unlike how the University of Phoenix works, however, these adjuncts need not be the sole teacher of a course teaching a prescribed curriculum, but rather might be partners for the on ground teachers who need assistance and they might bring in their real world experiences from their other jobs as they interact with the students.

I certainly don’t have a fully worked through model of this, but it seems clear to me that one could encourage more writing by the students in discussion boards, blogs, surveys, or what have you and get interesting critique of the work if there were additional adults to the in class teacher looking at this work. On the flip side, these adjunct instructors might enjoy very much interacting with the students online and expressing something of themselves in these interactions so that it would get away from the dreary type of grading and be more compelling as a form of human interaction from the point of view of these online instructors.

In other words, once the school has gone the route of online homework, this then becomes a potential mechanism for bringing in other instructional staff with minimal other logistics to manage. In contrast, to bring in dual career instructors without the technology the only way I can see that working is to start having classes at night so that either the students would have to return to school a few days a week for an evening session or the students would stay in school continuously from the daytime through the evening, so these adjunct instructors could teach them face to face. This might work at the senior high school level in some cases, but the transportation, safety, and other logistics issues make that seem a less likely solution, absent the idea that students will spend more hours in school overall across the school year, with some of those hours in the evening. While I would embrace that idea myself, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. The online approach, in contrast, could happen much more readily --- if an online homework system were already in place.

Dual careerists can’t pay as much attention to the second career and if they do that work primarily for love and not for money they will periodically be conflicted because the primary work will make demands on them that they can’t ignore. So there are limits to what can be expected from this sort of innovation. Nevertheless, it seems to me worth a try in those school districts that have already committed to online and solved the access issues.

Google Calendar and the CMS

This will be a quickie. I will get back to my personnel in K-12 posts soon.

Yesterday I was futzing with Google calendar, which requires a Gmail account to access, and I thought it was a nice app with potential broad use. On my campus we don't offer a calendaring tool to the students, so this would be useful for them and we relaly don't have a way for instructors to share their course calendars with class outsiders. It would be helpful in that vein as well.

So I started to ask myself how might the CMS accommodate groups of students to use a service like google calendar. We've had discussions internally about having a registry for student's "other email" address, but my sense is that this is a bit of a loser unless that other email is primary, because students maintain multiple personas online and change those with fluidity. We want the persona they'd like to use now, for this purpose, and that might not coincide with what is in the registry.

So I think we want a decentralized way to do mini-registries that are relevant only for the near term. The obvious tool in the CMS for this is the survey tool. It's fine for data collection of the sort needed for the group to share their calendars. But, as far as I know, the instructor would manually have to intervene to distribute the survey results to the students. That is a loser. We need for the instructor to decentralize the data collection and sharing, otherwise it won't happen.

One other point, this regarding the evolution of CMS functionality. We need the CMS, as I've argued earlier, but the rapid development of tools such as Google Calendar that operate outside the University enironment entirely and are seemingly more functional that tools within the CMS, suggests a need to carefully consider comparative advantage and where the focus should be in CMS development. I do think it is correct for CMS developers to cede functionality to the broader marketplace rather than to try to do replicate that functionality within. Then it needs to figure out how to make the two environments couple and I believe the guilding principle on that is to encourage this via decentralization, such as in the example above --- give the students the ability to use the CMS environment to build their own bridges.

Second Careers and K-12

Because I tend to think of issues in a theoretical way, I occasionally stumble into interconnections of ideas, each interesting in its own right, that speak to one another in a way to make a novel synthesis. I’m hopeful that I achieve such a synthesis in this post. However, I’m the first one to admit that in the process of abstraction critical institutional detail is omitted and so there may be numerous reasons for the ideas to fail that I don’t envision here, were one to seriously attempt to implement them. While this risk is there every time I generate something, when I stray to the K-12 arena where my knowledge is limited and stems mostly from my role as parent and chauffeur of my kids to school and the assorted memory fragments of my own experience in K-12, hardly a way to come up with a full picture of the situation. For the record, I’m a product of the New York City Public schools, first P.S. 203, then I.H.S 74, and finally Benjamin Cardozo H.S., all in Queens. Sometimes, reading about K-12 issues, such as the reforms in the NYC schools under Joel Klein, I hearken back to those experiences.

The general issue I want to consider is how to attract talented people, who otherwise would do something else, into serving as teachers in K-12. In today’s post I will focus on the “second career” solution – these talented people are in their mid 50’s or older and have retired from their first career job, they have a pension from that and quite possibly good health benefits as well, and while their intellectual and physical capacities may be on the decline (relative to how these people performed when they were in their mid 30’s) they nonetheless are able and productive and want to do something socially useful with their lives, rather than idle away their retirement playing golf and bridge and what not in an enjoyable but essentially purposeless existence. In subsequent posts, I’ll consider alternative paths in attracting bright people into becoming K-12 teachers.

I came to think of this by wondering whether I could teach in K-12 (probably closer to the 12 than to the K). I’m 51 now and by the time I’m 60 I’ll have 35 years of experience at Illinois, if I don’t leave the University before then. I started at a fairly young age right out of grad school and was studying economic theory when I could have been doing Peace Corps or Vista or teaching grade school. But anyone who knew me at the time would say that grad school was the right path for me – I had all the academic tendencies, I really didn’t know how to do much else than be a full time student, and if one is to engage in serious study like pursuing a doctorate in economics at a high profile program such as the one at Northwestern, there are big advantages in doing it straight away after getting the bachelors degree.

But none of those reasons will apply in a few years when I’m eligible to retire from Illinois. Might I teach in K-12 then? Would I have the wherewithal to make the job switch? What inducements would I need to make that change rather than continue on here? (I have tenure, so I’m thinking about all of this as a voluntary move, not a coerced one.) And would I be any good at it? I think I have something to offer, but I’m not sure I could deal with the institutional rigidity. I’ve had many years to do it, “my way.”

Let me leave the personal issues for now, I don’t really need to address them at present, and turn to some other sources of thinking on this subject. One is this really interesting post by Gary Becker on the Japanese Retirement system from the Becker-Posner blog. It’s this post that got me thinking about second careers more generally. I highly recommend this read (and indeed, the entire archive for June is filled with posts and comments by both Becker and Posner on retirement) and in general I agree with the view put forward that the problem with retirement in America and most West European nations is that retirement happens too early in life. (Both Becker and Posner are well over 65 and still are faculty members at the University of Chicago.) The irony here is that while the “official” retirement age is 65 (there is no mandatory retirement, so instead of using the word “official” it is more appropriate to say “according to conventional thinking”) many people take early retirement and the average age at retirement is somewhere between 59 and 60, the situation is reversed in Japan. There the official retirement age is 60 but most continue on in the labor market after that via the second career mechanism, with full retirement happening closer to 70.

So I want to talk about modifying the Japanese approach to the situation here and making K-12 teaching the locus of second career employment. There are many plusses that can be assigned to this solution and I’ll get to those. But now let me consider a different source. Thomas L. Friedman had a column in the Times a couple of weeks ago, which focused on the quality of the schools and the relationship between school quality and our national wealth. The argument, one that makes sense to me, is that our prosperity will start to decline if our school system remains second rate. I do want to qualify that a bit, because there is such economic inequality in this country and there is inequality, as well, in wealth generation. So I believe one has to be careful making conclusions of this sort and there is some trouble reasoning too much by looking only at statistical means in school performance data. But that said, there does seem to be general deterioration in the schools that both blocks the human capital development of the children of the highly productive folks in our society and, perhaps more importantly, impedes the upward mobility of the over achieving segment of low-income people, whether immigrants or native born.

Friedman’s article cited a report from The Teaching Commission, which is a bunch of luminaries gathered to make recommendations on how to reform the schools, aiming at an audience of state and federal government. The Commission was led by Louis Gerstner, former Chairman of the Board at IBM and the report is entitled, Teaching at Risk: Progress and Potholes. I’ve read only the Intro and the section, “Revitalizing the Profession.” If I can dig out from under, I’ll read the rest of the report in the near future. I believe that I’ve read enough for what I’ve got to say here.

The report is based on the premise that to improve the schools the single most important factor is to improve the quality of the teachers. I agree with that one, though if there is another variable to consider it is class size, but my recollection of that literature (which I looked at maybe eight or nine years ago) is that the effects are pronounced but tap out when a class reaches twenty students or so and, realistically speaking, the capital infrastructure supports that size and larger, so I think focusing on teacher quality is sensible. Further, the report provides some evidence that teacher quality matters in terms of student achievement (though as above, I’m a bit suspicious of how much the statistical evidence reveals and how teacher quality is defined and the direction of the causality).

Then the report goes into a litany of problems with teacher quality – the majority of college grads who go into K-12 nowadays were poor students in college, ranking in the lowest decile of their graduating class, there is huge turnover in the system and many teachers don’t last five years, the system is heavily biased towards seniority and obtaining continuing ed credentials that, unfortunately, are orthogonal to ensuring that the teachers are up to date and engaged in their own teaching. Moreover, there is a substantial confidence problem in that the public doesn’t trust the teachers and so the report recommends a vigorous testing program for teachers in their field of expertise so they can periodically verify their competence.

The report is likely correct in this diagnosis, but I believe the cures that they are suggesting likely won’t work or won’t be sufficient even if they work part way. Consider the issue of poorly performing college students going into teaching. On my campus the best students (measured by ACT scores) go into Engineering, Bio Technology, and on down the line. Are we talking about diverting some of the Engineering students into teaching? The irony here, of course, is that Friedman in The World is Flat argues that we need more engineers. I think we can agree is that there is shortage of very good students, but we really don’t want to divert them from other growth areas of the economy, even as we want to bolster K-12.

Then, too, there is the (perhaps controversial) issue of the MRS degree. (In economics MRS refers to marginal rate of substitution, the ratio of the marginal utilities, so I innocently enough learned about the MRS degree from my students as I was cutting teeth learning to teach intermediate microeconomics.) As I mentioned in a post from January, Linda Hirshman argues that many women who have attended elite academic institution and who did remarkably well as students there, nonetheless end up as stay home moms or part time employees to accommodate their family life, whether by choice or implicit coercion. Taking that as truth, doesn’t it make sense that women who are less good students in college and not all that career oriented major in a field where it is easy to exit, to accommodate those family responsibilities once they kick in. For better or worse, K-12 teaching fits that bill. If it is to get out of that bind, either some other field will take its place or the MRS degree will have to disappears entirely. I don’t see another field stepping to the fore and while in principle I’m fine with the MRS degree going the way of the dinosaur, if I were betting that is not where I’d put my money. And given that, certainly it is a contributing factor to why the schools attract comparatively weak college students. It is too bad that the commission report doesn’t touch this issue.

Then consider pay. The report argues that teacher salaries must keep up with the market generally, if the field is to attract talented people. That is correct. But the report focuses on public education and there, of course, the teacher salaries are financed via taxes, not tuition. The report gives some high marks to governors of a few states who have started to spend more on K-12 and bully for them. But more spent on K-12 means either less spent on other government services (higher ed is obviously one of those) or it means more tax revenue collected. And both of these set up an intergenerational politics that simply doesn’t favor the continued increase of teacher salaries. I’ve got no problem voting for a governor who wants to raise taxes to fund the schools now, when my own kids are in K-12, but when I’m retired and my kids have kids, they quite likely will live in a different state from me, at which point even though I’m sure I’ll love my grandkids, voting my pocketbook means I won’t want to put money into the schools. Because society will continue to age, the intergenerational politics is going to make it extremely difficult to sustain funding teacher salaries this way, especially with the bulk of K-12 funded at the state level. As with the MRS degree issue, the report doesn’t consider the intergenerational politics of funding teacher salaries.

Now let’s return to my proposal. The fact that people are living longer and that more people who are early into their retirement are in good physical and mental health suggests that following the Japanese, a move to a second career approach for the entire economy is a sensible thing to be doing. But, clearly, we are not yet there. So there is an opportunity to use the need to attract talented people to teach K-12 as a way to cherry pick from the population who want a second career outside the industry in which they currently work. (Note that The Commission embraces the idea of streamlining red tape so that talented people from all backgrounds can find their way more readily into the teaching profession, see page 19 of the PDF in the paragraph starting “Three.” But they don’t provide further arguments for why these other background people would go into teaching.)

The potential for cherry picking means that quality-wise these people might be much better than the schools otherwise should be able to expect. Further, the income requirements of these second career people are likely to be modest. And to the extent that second-careerism becomes fashionable among some seniors, the inter-generational politics would be entirely different. Then, too, larger companies might use this as a vehicle to enhance and round out their own retirement programs and thus they might have a reason to invest in the schools as a public service, complementing the second-careerism. These are the plusses.

There remains the dual issues of first, whether it is possible to teach old dogs new tricks and second, of whether second-career teachers have enough energy to keep up with the students. My sense of this is that to make this work the role of these second-career folks needs to be thought through carefully. Perhaps in some cases they would be there to substitute for regular teachers who’ve come through the more traditional way, but mostly I’d imagine they’d complement these teachers, by mentoring smaller groups of students and by mentoring the teachers themselves about how learning and communication occurs in the industry from which they from. They would be treated differently from how student-teachers are treated now, but there would need to be an analogous systematic adjustment to this potential labor pool.

So there are certainly risks to implementing this suggestion, but the upside seems sufficiently high to me that it is worth exploring.

Faculty Development in the Style of Open Source 3: Instructors as Hackers

Two of my core assumptions in working through the approach are: (1) if you drill down enough everyone is a hacker and (2) instructors have an intrinsic need to talk about their teaching. I want to talk about the implications of these assumptions, but first I want to offer some justification for making them and also to clear up what I mean.

I will do this via example. On our campus we have a highly dedicated and super knowledgeable (about the technology) leader on Web accessibility. His name is Jon Gunderson and he has a good and dedicated staff working under him. Over the years, Jon has taught me a lot about accessible design, though I still have much to learn. (For example, I don’t know how to use CSS and position elements on a Web page without using a table.) Occasionally in the past, I’ve taught Jon a thing or two about how instructors “think” about design. We’ve made some progress on bringing those two distinct ideas into alignment. But convergence is not yet on the horizon. While that is clearly the goal, there is some benefit in not yet achieving that goal from the point of view of understanding how content creators actually use the tools that are provided to them.

I’ve now seen Jon make the point a few times so it resonates with me that almost nobody learns how to use the Microsoft Office tools (think of Word, primarily, and also PowerPoint and for now ignore anything more exotic) via formal training and hence rather than learn “the correct” way to do things, many people “hack” solutions to formatting issues that work visually for them and so seemingly solve the problem they are trying to address when they design the document. (And I might add that some secretaries are as bad as the faculty in this regard and don’t have a clue about the appropriate use of Tabs, Indents, Tables, etc. as distinct formatting elements.) As a reader of such documents one is typically oblivious to this type of hacking, but if one is editing a document done this way, God help you. One small change seemingly destabilizes the entire piece.

I believe we all do analogous things in our teaching, because there are a lot of issues that come up which have not been anticipated beforehand so of necessity have to be addressed on the fly. This might include when it is appropriate to grant exceptions to stated course policy about deadlines for assignments, how to adjust the course schedule if a topic takes longer than anticipated, or what to do if the server acts up right before an assignment is due. My guess is that this list is the tip of the iceberg. In this sense all instructors are hackers.

Eric Raymond in the Cathedral and the Bazaar means quite something else by use of the term “hacker.” To him hackers are very good programmer who work on trouble shooting some code. Indeed, the general “problem solving” use of the word hacker is either out of vogue or hasn’t made it to such august sources of reference a dictionary.com (being a bad golfer is one definition they provide) and wikipedia.org, which has the Eric Raymond meaning and the evil alternative – folks who break into other computer systems for illicit reasons. I’m going to keep my alternative for a while in this post because part of what I’d like to discuss is how to modify the approach to be more like what Raymond means.

Let me turn to the other assumption, that instructors want to talk about their teaching. There is an important caveat. Many instructors have been scarred by teaching. The experience was unpleasant if not outright painful. And the students may very well have been hostile to the instructor’s efforts. Under that circumstance there may be very good reasons for the instructor to clam up, even if the instructor is desperately looking for ways to improve the teaching approach. So the conditions must be set to get past that initial shyness.

The second assumption really follows from the first and thus it follows from the more general idea that if one is engaged in problem solving, one typically wants feedback from others who might have a different perspective. And in reciprocation, the instructor who gets such feedback might very well be willing to provide such feedback for others, as long as on the receiving end the feedback is useful and timely.

So what I envision has faculty at various stages in their development as teachers initially interacting one-on-one with Linus Torvalds styled leader and discussions of both the teaching and possible technologies to advance the approach. This one-on-one interaction is in the style of a co-author relationship, because that most suits the cultural environment in which the faculty member operates.

In this milieu the leader offers tips and suggestions of possible things to try. At some point in the trajectory, the leader moves to suggestions that come from the problem solving/issues of other instructors. The leader needs to give a focus on common issues and then when solutions emerge try hard to transfer those among the group of instructors.

In this context, open content generated by the instructors (sharable learning objects) might be very useful as the embodiment of solutions and therefore as templates for transferring such practice. Consequently, any such approach to faculty development must include as part of the effort a repository for sharing these type of learning objects. Ultimately, instructors might go to the repository to learn about teach approaches in an unmediated way, but initially it will be the leader who recommends that the instructor look at specific learning object that might serve as a template. And conversely the leader serves in the role of encourager and provocateur in moving instructors in the community to create such objects. The leader also marshals the support resources so that the instructor doesn’t feel overwhelmed from this type of participation.

The leader also makes the ideas and findings of the members public, first in a very informal way such as via a blog, but then in a way that is more systematic and meant to be generalizable. This is what I referred to as the primer, in an earlier post. By making these things overt to the community, the leader is both encouraging the same type of social/intellectual interaction that Raymond identifies with open source software development and also aims squarely at improving the quality of instruction practice, as it is rooted firmly in the community development activity.

The key issue and what seemingly will make or break the approach is if “majority” faculty members (as distinct from early adopter faculty members) are made to feel first comfortable and then interested in seeing their questions and problem solving solutions being discussed openly by the leader. If they can be made to both approve and participate in the process then they should increasingly look like early adopter faculty, who likely will readily contribute their solutions from the start. And if that happens, these faculty members who are hackers in the original sense that I described will in the process of moving down their own learning curves transform into the type of hackers in the sense of Raymond, whose contributions have social value beyond what they use for their own purpose.

So what I’m proposing is that faculty development change from a process where pre-established knowledge from the outside is brought into the development process and where the faculty are viewed as the recipients of the development activity, to the alternative where the faculty members make new, situated knowledge in the process of their own teaching, and the assessment and diffusion of that knowledge becomes the basis of the development activity.

I wonder if this can work. I’d like to give it a try.

Intermission

I will get back to the Faculty development pieces, but I wanted to comment on all the recent discussion on No Child Left Behind.

Yesterday the Times ran this article about how schools that are performing poorly on the standardized tests are narrowing the curriculum. While there is some concern about this potentially damaging these kids because of a less rounded education, how can one be worried about not learning history if the kids can't read? So I was less bothered by that. I did wonder with all the emphasis on reading in the schools, whether the kids were doing any reading outside school. When I was in elementary school, in the mid 1960s, we did two things for reading. One was SRA which was color coded modules that forced certain type of reading for comprehension and combined with a testing/assessment mechanism. The student proceeded through the colors at their own pace, and progressed to the next level when proficiency was attained. I'm guessing that SRA is something like the current focus with testing for reading.

The other things we did was called Individualized reading. We read outside of class and kept a list in a notebook of what we read and then perhaps a sentence on the book. During the reading time in class the teacher would have one on one consults with the students about their individualized reading. I'm not seeing anything like that discussed in the papers. Everything is about the testing. But are the kids reading outside of class?

I did a quick Google search and found a piece from NPR on the issue.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5149640
The commentary by David Dunn, who is a spokesman for the Department of Education, confirmed my fears. Lots of emphasis on looking at scores, no discussion about whether the kids are reading on their own.

From that I found this other piece about a new Delaware Middle School run by the clergy that is having success with high risk students
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5280100
But the regime they have in place is draconian. In essence, school becomes the total life for these kids, because their home lives are so debilitating. With such intensity of commitment the kids do learn --- and they read, real books according to the piece.

So the question seems to be whether absent a middle class home life that gives the kid the support to develop the reading habit on their own, if this type of commitment at the Delaware school become a necessary condition for real learning. It seems to me the answer is it likely is.
Hmmm.