Facsimiles

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

Don Marquis
US humorist (1878 - 1937)

I’m part of a dying breed – faculty in a former life who have since moved on to become learning technology administrators. As dodo-heads go, my lot is not so bad; there are certain groups within the broader population who treat me and my brethren with much respect, sometimes even reverence. I was with such a group last week at the Educause Learning Technology Leadership Institute. This post is about the experience there and how it fits into the bigger picture of things that are happening at the moment.

We are in the midst of the post competence era. As I’m sure you’ll agree, the Bush White House can rightly claim naming rights for this new epoch that we find ourselves in. And thanks to the likes of Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, for making it clear that the Bushies make the same mistakes over and over again, due to a combination of extreme hubris and an abiding cronyism.

Given the religiosity of the President and the right wing neocons with whom he is aligned, one might conjecture that we are witnessing the just desserts for the essentially Philistine crew working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But let’s put that conjecture on the back burner because, sad to say, it seems something else is amiss, and that something else is happening outside the world of national politics. Consider, for example, the auto industry. This story about the debacle at Ford for having acquired a variety of high end auto companies: Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo to name a few, only to find them hard to maintain and with sales that have not come close to the rosy forecasts that Bill Ford anticipated when he bought the companies in the first place, shares none of the pious rhetoric we associate with announcements from the White House on Iraq, Al Qaeda, Catrina, you name it. Yet there are some striking similarities between the two. Both emblemize the taking of dramatic action when a more cautious alternative was available, with the decision justified by an overly optimistic view of the future. Both were driven by a 60,000 foot view of reality, only much later when the initial optimism provided to be incorrect to be forced to reckon with more low-to-the-ground concerns. And both have led their respective constituencies to a precipice.

“What has really evolved here is that the scenario has changed so dramatically,” said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. “Because of that change, you’re looking at things in a far more pragmatic way, with the thought that if you screw up in labor negotiations, or you screw up in product development, the company may go down.”

When I was a kid I watched the movie version of Li’l Abner with the famous line “What’s good for General Bullmoose…” and, of course, that was a mild satire of “What’s good for General Motors…” Satire doesn’t get written unless the object is worth poking fun at. GM is not what is used to be. And many of our other institutions seem to be in the same boat, some of them closer to home. The Times Magazine is running an essay contest for College students. “Fine,” you’re likely to say. But check out the theme for this thing – “College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.” And read the essay by Rick Perlstein to “introduce” students to the topic. It’s all very depressing. That’s precisely because it seems so accurate.

I’ve got this feeling that we’re reliving the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s all compressed into one (note that Nixon was a significant part of all three decades; how’s that for paranoia?) and whereas 30 years ago after much anguish and torment we experienced a rebirth of sorts, that road has already been traveled down and it sure seems as if it can’t be crossed again. We’re trying, but we’re barely treading water.

Here’s another dimension of the problem. Bush gets blame for callous indifference in the lack of management of relocating citizens of New Orleans after the Catrina debacle --- no arguments from this quarter on that score. But the reality is that Bush inherited the levee system that was in place, which if it had worked might have meant that citizens wouldn’t have had to be relocated at all. It was the Army Corps of Engineers at fault for the levee system, not the White House, because the system they had designed simply could not hold up to a storm as severe as Catrina, and then there were errors in how deep into the ground the levees were built to boot. With that thought in mind, now ask about our infrastructure on our respective campuses, IT and otherwise, and ask further if an analogous disaster could happen at your place. I get sick thinking about it.

The problems seem to be mounting and the talent of the people addressing those problems, able as they might otherwise seem, doesn’t appear up to the challenge. Within IT specifically, budget-wise many of us manage by what I call the secret $20 bill theory – do the IT project first and find the funding for it afterwards (in that part of the wallet where the secret funds are stashed); in other words assume (or pray) that the funding will be forthcoming. In case it’s not obvious, the secret $20 bill approach does not scale well. Further, that project which seemed so exciting at the outset eventually begins to lose luster. But it doesn’t go away; it has developed a constituency of its own. And then the cycle repeats, again and again.

This particular dodo-head can analyze the problem out the wazoo. That is something of a talent. After all, sometimes analysis can lead to a solution. But analysis of the problem is in itself not enough. Indeed, nowadays analysis mostly seems to lead to paralysis. So this dodo-head starts to think of a different bird, a very large bird, one that is known for keeping its head in the sand. That’s the opposite of what they teach at LTLI about “chin up” leadership, true. But the dodo-head knows that the ostrich is not going extinct.

* * * * *

Though the original designers of the institute may have had something else in mind, the LTLI turned out be a bunch of latter day Morpheus’ (I was one of those) getting an even larger group of Neo’s (the 50 or so attendees of the institute) to take the red pill and go down the rabbit hole. These folks in attendance are good people and you could see they had an emotional need to make the journey. As it turns out, learning about IT leadership is very much like seeing the “real world” for the first time.

But that initial journey is harsh and especially during the first evening some of the people in their table teams were uncomfortable with each other. They didn’t know how to work through a group process to decide things. They didn’t know how to disagree with each other and get to a resolution of the issues. And they seemed to feel on stage.

In that they were right. We were watching. We were looking for stars. We’re always looking for yet unrecognized talent who might take the next step up. But mainly we were looking for trouble. We spent a lot of time beforehand talking about trouble and what we’d do if we found it. Prior institutes had some non-functional “Making the Case” teams. History repeats – sometimes. Turns out it doesn’t repeat if you’re watching too carefully. Our teams had a momentary impasse that first evening, but they got through it. They bonded. Then they were fine. I don’t know if our worrying mattered or not. I do know that near the end some attendees reported a strong emotional experience from the institute. I felt that too.

Four years earlier I had attended the Frye Leadership Institute and in many respects was in the same boat then as the attendees at LTLI were last week. But, dear Obiwan, it is now I who am the master. I’ve made this rapid transition by embracing the dark side of the force, oh the lure of the dark side, the fascination with self when so many others require attention.

There were seven of us faculty at LTLI. Among this august group, I was tasked to represent the professoriate and true to my calling, profess I did, whether it met the circumstance or not.

And now a little aside. My first semester at Illinois, fall 1980, I did a horrible job teaching intermediate microeconomics to undergraduates and, perhaps unsurprisingly but still painful for a young instructor, some of my teaching evaluations said I had to be the worst professor on campus and I should be fired. (I’ve since learned that there are many candidates for worst professor on campus, with new ones each year.) The next semester I got to teach graduate math econ in the style I learned from Stan Reiter at Northwestern while taking essentially the same course from him. (Stan indirectly got the approach from Plato.) I liked playing Socrates with the economic theory and I was comfortable in that role. The course went well. The grad students liked it in part because they hadn’t experienced that sort of thing in their other classes. It turned out I wasn’t the worst instructor on campus after all.

I was half my current age then. I’ve had a chance to mature since. I don’t have as much opportunity to play Socrates nowadays, at least not with a large group like at LTLI. But from my experience as a faculty member at LTLI last week it is clear that I still like doing it, especially when  I’ve given some forethought to the issues to get at without feeling the need to lead the dialogue from a pre-written script. That’s what I did in my first plenary session with Larry Ragan, which was on “Building Relationships.” That session was supposed to provide insight on relationships between the learning technology leader and many different types of players on campus. When it came time to do my spiel, I got to spend an extended period on building relationships with faculty members, in particular with emphasis on just what it is that drive faculty in their actions. I did that through Socratic dialogue.

We mingled at the breaks and sat interspersed with the attendees at the meals. I professed there too, whether I knew what I was talking about or not; I was comfortable in holding forth, if not with the specifics of the issues we discussed. As I said at the outset, sometimes dodo-heads like me are accorded respect. I took advantage of that.

A centerpiece of LTLI is “Making the Case.” Near the end of the first plenary session on Sunday the attendees were grouped into teams that would persist throughout the remainder of the institute. The teams were tasked with coming up with a plan to resolve a serious campus issue and then on the final day of the institute they were to make a public presentation to the institute faculty who at the time of the presentation would be role playing as campus administration. The other attendees would be in the audience during these presentations. Immediately following each presentation the faculty, no longer role playing, would critique what they heard. The critique was intended for all in attendance.

Each afternoon the attendees had time to work in their Making the Case Teams. They also did a working dinner and several of the evenings continued in that work group mode into the evening. The team work on this project was interspersed with attendance at plenary session on various aspects of leadership. The sessions had relevance to doing the projects and in that way the institute design made sense holistically.

Each of us faculty were assigned to observe the first afternoon meeting of one of the Making the Case teams. We were there to see if they were functioning and making progress, to answer their questions if they should arise, and otherwise to keep our mouths shut. We were not to be the guides on the sides. We were supposed to be quieter than that, like good children, seen but not heard, speaking only if first spoken to. The other faculty stuck to this script. I knew it would be difficult for me to do so. With my group I kept butting in from time to time.

I don’t feel I’m much of a leader. Leaders have a certain pace for doing things and get things done in tempo. Mostly, I don’t get things done; instead I supervise gridlock. The gap between aspiration and accomplishment for me is huge, the sense of inertia strong. Supervising gridlock is one, unfortunate approach to management all too common nowadays --- post competence era, remember? But supervising gridlock is not leadership.

Getting things done, however, may not be leadership either. King George III, one of the object lessons in Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, accomplished a lot. He succeeded in getting the American colonies to achieve their independence. Of course, he didn’t set out to do that. American independence was an unanticipated consequence. I would not call King George a leader.

Underneath my façade I was asking myself before the institute what it was really that I had to contribute. The implicit idea of LTLI and indeed of the other Educause Leadership Institutes is that a more experienced generation of proven leaders pass along their wisdom to the next generation, the up and comers who are soaking in knowledge so they can climb the chain of command. What wisdom would I pass along?

Leadership and thinking are not identical, but they are related. The only President whom I have a living memory of and whom I think of when the word leadership is mentioned is Kennedy. Kennedy had a remarkable brain trust, the power behind the thrown so to speak. I couldn’t help the Making the Case Team directly with their leadership, but I could help them a bit with their thinking. There were lessons to learn on that score.

The team I observed was very eager to make progress to solve the problem they were assigned. They did not have the patience at first to ask whether the problem itself was well defined --- it wasn’t. As it turns out there was a need for them to make important assumptions to give the problem a real definition. Lesson 1 – before solving the problem, do note that most IT people are pretty good problem solvers given a pre-specified problem, ask what problem it is that should be solved. That is harder. The solution may be far from obvious. One doesn’t get to that in a linear fashion. One negotiates to that end through a sequence of iterations by developing an increasingly subtle understanding of the complexities at hand.

Because I didn’t feel constrained to help the group directly with leadership, but I had recently written this post Writing as Problem Solving, I had a strong predisposition as to what they needed to learn on the thinking front. They needed to learn to guess and discover what a good guess looks like. And they needed to develop a process of confirmation as to whether their guesses held up. For my part, after listening to them for a while, I’d play Socrates. “I’ve got a question. If you’re assuming such and such, why doesn’t that mean this? And if it does mean this, doesn’t that create a train wreck for what you’re proposing?” They didn’t like the questions because they impeded their “progress.” I left them that first afternoon after about an hour feeling a bit unsettled, but I had a sense I accomplished something in affecting how the group should proceed with their work. I wonder if the group members reflecting on that experience would feel the same way.

The institute had a strong sense of theater and I believe that the dramatic themes, a subtext rather than a fully fleshed out idea in our planning prior to the institute, contributed strongly to the emotional feeling that many of the attendees experienced. One way the theater manifest was during the presentations of the Making the Case. Several of the teams brought in nuggets they had garnered from institute faculty, delivered in the same way as the faculty had originally presented them, but integrated into their overall presentation. The effect was to show they had been listening, to create a good chuckle, and to give the faculty a sense of looking in the mirror. Imitation may not just be the sincerest form of flattery; it may also be an effective way of persuading others.

I believe the institute’s main impact was cathartic rather than intellectual. It was intense while it lasted. For the institute to have a lasting impact the attendees must now spread their wings and fly from the nest and not have big birds on the brain, extinct or otherwise.

Reruns

Within the family we’ve reached a more mature point about giving and getting presents. For Father’s day I let my wife know about some DVDs and CDs I wanted. Lo and behold, that’s what I received from her and the boys (plus a gift card to espresso royale – my tastes are very predictable these days). One of these was a boxed DVD collection of old Dick Cavett Shows, this set with “Hollywood Greats.” (For the nitpickers in the crowd, the date that amazon.com has for this is wrong. It says 1969 on the site, but the shows seem to be from 1970 and 1971.)

Nowadays Cavett is now one of the regular bloggers at the New York Times and I came to wanting that collection from reading one of his posts. It’s a bit odd to write a post promoting something commercial where the writer stands to benefit from the sale, especially given the imprimatur of the Times. But blogging about one’s personal experience from work or private life is de rigeur and in Cavett’s case he spent a significant amount of his work time very publicly as ABC’s alternative to Johnny Carson, with less mass appeal for sure but a bit more depth in the conversation, and since there are clear lessons from that experience it seems right to me that Cavett should bring it up and that the rest of us can take part in his past by buying these videos.

There are three shows per DVD, I’m in the middle of the second disc, in a show with Groucho (irrepressible as ever, but getting a little senile) and Debbie Reynolds, with Dan Rowan too but I’ve not yet reached the point where he makes his appearance. The entire previous show was an interview with Bette Davis. While I haven’t quite put the stopwatch to it, all the Dick Cavett shows originally aired as 90 minutes but now with the commercials taken out they are about an hour to view. I wouldn’t know this but for the way I watch them. I dread exercise so much that I need some sugar coating to get me to take that pill. We’ve got an old TV hooked to a DVD player where our stationary bike is set up. I pedal and watch then get off the bike and do some other light exercise and watch all the while and back and forth in that manner till some of my guilt feelings are erased, or the show has ended, or I’m too pooped to continue.

In the old days when I used to jog regularly (people who’ve met me in the last 5 or 6 years wouldn’t believe this, but I used to do 4 or 5 miles a session though not very fast, about 10 minute miles, and do that either every day or every other day) after about 20 minutes or not quite halfway in, I’d find a sense of rhythm. The breathing would have reached a plateau and my heart would be beating pretty well with an elevated pulse rate, the melody of the song I’d been listening to would have somehow been brought into accord with my stride, and altogether it created a feeling of exhilaration, especially when the air was crisp and the sky a sharp blue. In my head I’d feel a kind of reverie, away from work thoughts, not expecting this time to be anything but R&R.

Riding the stationary bike doesn’t quite do that for me. My urge to quit during the session is pretty strong (are we there yet?), which is why I need the DVD to watch. And I’m doing some of the same type of reflecting that I do when I watch TV sitting on the couch, trying to tie what I’m seeing and hearing on the screen to specific issues I’m dealing with at work or to those other more broad issues that are confronting us in the learning technology profession. It’s both a blessing and a curse to be in reflective mode most of my waking hours.

The first disc has two sessions just with Katherine Hepburn – well worth watching, quite compelling actually. And then the third session is with Fred Astaire. As a talk show guest, Astaire is kind of stiff. But Cavett got him to agree to perform, singing Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter, and to do a bit of dancing as well. It was quite amazing how good he was in the singing – all timing and style, not a great voice like Sinatra, but do know that the composers wrote their songs specifically for him; timing and style count for a lot.

The Hepburn interviews were unusual. Apparently Hepburn didn’t do TV interviews. This was a first for her. She made a preliminary visit to the studio to check it out. She’s there in slacks and Cavett is wearing tennis shoes. As it turns out, part of her reticence in going on television was abject fear about appearing in that medium – too spontaneous and not enough control for here. The walk through visit was done mostly so she could try to overcome the fear. Once in the studio and with her emotions in check, Hepburn decided to do the actual interview then and there.

Cavett, fully cognizant of how difficult it was to get Hepburn to be a guest on the show, accommodated in full. Actually he was more devious than that, making me guess he was onto her discomfort right from the start; they were filming from the outset of the walk through. And the entire show ends up being one continuous segment with no real separation between the walk through and the interview. There was no audience at the start, only the crew for the show. Somehow word got out about the interview and an audience trickled in while the interview was going on, unbelievable actually except for it clearly being how it was done.

I’ve seen Hepburn in a variety of films – The African Queen, Pat and Mike, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond are some I can recall off the top of my head. There are many adjectives that come to mind about her from seeing these performances – smart, gutsy, spirited, quick witted, tender, and insightful are a few of those. Fearful is not on the list. It’s very hard to think of Hepburn as cowering and afraid. That doesn’t match the mental model. Yet at least insofar as appearing on television, she certainly was. During the interview she talked both about why there was no good reason for her not to appear – one might have thought she’d argue that TV was drivel and not worthy of her attention, but she didn’t press that point at all. Quite to contrary, she seemed to feel that TV was a worthy medium for artistic communication. (Remember again this was Cavett’s show, not the Tonight Show.) It was herself that was the problem, not the medium.

On edge already because of this phobia, she talked about being in constant fear while acting in movies. (Bettie Davis made the same point in her interview but she didn’t seem as ill at ease during the actual interview with Cavett. Hepburn took the entire first show and some of the second show before she settled down. Both of those were filmed the same day.) It was never quite clear from what she said exactly what it was that she was afraid of, but being in a similar boat on numerous occasions myself, it almost certainly was fear that her current performance wouldn’t stand up to the standard set by her previous work. She came back to the predominance of fear in her screen acting on multiple occasions during the interview. Yet clearly she overcame the fear and is one of the icons of Hollywood filmmaking. She was not explicit on how she did that but certainly other motivations were at play as well – ambition, a need for self-expression that seemed especially strong during the interview, and the kindness of her co-actors were a few that did come out in the conversation.

Cavett asked her why she wasn’t wrecked like so many other leading women in Hollywood. (I think it was in the Bette Davis interview where he asked essentially the same question that he specifically mentioned Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe.) Apparently booze and debauchery were ok for Bogie, John Huston, and Spencer Tracy, but not for Hepburn. She reported she had a strong sense of discipline and staying physically fit and being able to perform at a high standard with boundless energy during that performance was an imperative for her; so booze and pills were out. She attributed the sense of discipline in full to her New England upbringing. Her parents encouraged her to speak her mind, but they also required her as a youngster and on into young adulthood that she be attentive and listen to the wisdom of her elders as expressed through their conversations, not just her parents but the many house guests they had. And her parents had a genuine curiosity in how her day went, what she had accomplished. They were quite supportive in that sense, though apparently her dad was not very happy at first with her going into acting.

So here are two key themes for us to think about. Even the best and the brightest of us, perhaps especially in them and then even more so in those for whom acting or more broadly performance is a critical part of the work, have to deal with stage fright on an on going basis. It is a constant demon with which to do battle. Stage fright does not vanish even for those with great experience and great talent. In that sense there is no cure. But there is a tonic, much of which is a sense of rootedness and rightness that comes from proper upbringing. The tonic is not simply the need for self-expression. That need evokes passion. The sense of discipline does not emerge from that. The discipline comes from elsewhere, from family and the lessons learned there. At least that was true for Hepburn.

I think that is worth pondering now, as we try to teach leadership and ethics to our students (while plagiarism and disengagement seem to be on the rise). What is the foundation for the students on which we can build? Is it rock solid like Hepburn’s seemed to be? What can we do if it isn’t?

I want to turn to a different part of her interview where she talked about acting. There are lessons from that as well. Hepburn was quite modest about her own acting and during the interview you could see why. She had a certain quickness to her talk and would flit from one point to another in reaction to Cavett’s prodding, mildly annoyed that he had interceded but seemingly incapable of resisting the temptation to react to what he said. She reserved the highest praise as an actor for Tracy. This is not surprising, of course, given their relationship. But it is what she praised him for that was interesting and to me a bit unexpected. She said that Spencer’s great power was his concentration. He could stay in character and continue to focus in spite of the distractions and with that concentration could go deeper into getting at the essence of the role.

Concentration is not a word we talk about much these days, certainly not as a mode of behavior we should aspire to. Yet for Hepburn, concentration was the absolute key to acting. According to her Tracy had it, in spades, and all his fellow actors knew it and they wanted to work with him just for that reason. He could elevate their concentration as well and in turn that would produce marvelous performances. It certainly seems that way from the pictures he made. I watched Inherit the Wind not too long ago, a case in point, truly a wonderful picture and an apt commentary on the religiosity of today in America.

I suppose it is on this point (about the importance of concentration) where I am most removed from the bulk of the profession. I find support in my view from this comparatively recent interview on NPR, though I get more solace from listening to Hepburn and hearing her voice her seemingly timeless Yankee values on the subject than I get from learning that neuroscience seems to tell us that we don’t function at a high level when we multi-process. Others in the profession seem to allow for concentration only as a byproduct of the environment and thus we must seek immersive environments for it is those that produce concentration. And in general the profession seems to attribute great power to the environment and looks there for a first cause.

In contrast, Hepburn clearly thought that concentration was an individual power, some have it more than others, and Tracy was her ideal. She really didn’t say in the interviews whether it could be learned or not through she thought her own powers of concentration not as strong as Tracy’s. People of Hepburn’s ilk will look inward to improve their concentration. They will not look to technology for that.

There is benefit in watching these old Cavett shows, if not for the lessons I’ve drawn from them then simply to get a glimpse of the stars as they were when not in a film. And, too, the shows can remind us of where our views have changed over time and where they’ve remained the same. I was in high school when these show first aired. On some of the key themes, I don’t believe my views have changed very much.

Can one learn skepticism from a video game?

It seems that I get irked more easily these days. Something others might find innocent or bland I take as pernicious. I now subscribe to Inside Higher Ed’s Daily Update and one of today’s items is mentioned as follows:

When ‘Digital Natives’ Go to the Library

Colleges urged to teach information literacy by embracing the learning styles of video games. more

This line so annoyed me. I found it inane. I’ll explain why in a bit. But let me first point out other recent remarks I’ve found equally ridiculous. In arguing against the Senate’s recent measure to toughen CAFE Standards, Rich Lowery on the News Hour said that even if the standards improved fuel efficiency they’d have negligible impact because people will drive more. Oh my! (Presumably, smart consumers compute a cost per mile by dividing the price of gas by the car’s fuel efficiency and when the cost per mile goes up, for example as has happened recently with pump prices, we drive less and when that goes down, we get the opposite effect. But it is more complex than that, for example because driving can be a substitute for flying, the demand for which is also affected by the price of gas, and further, we really don’t know what the demand elasticity is, nor do we know what will happen to future prices at the pump.)

And then there is Vice President Cheney’s argument that his office is not part of the Executive Branch because the Vice President is also President of the Senate, proving once again that the real sin of power is hubris and that the exercise of hubris leads to outcomes that can’t pass a reasonable man test. (This is not an academic debate. At issue is whether the Vice President’s office must comply with and Executive Order requiring all “entities” in the Executive Branch to, on an annual basis, turn over classified information to the Information Security Oversight Office, a unit of the National Archives. The Vice President has wanted to keep these documents secret. And let’s recall that Scooter Libby worked for Cheney, so he seems well past the point of deserving the benefit of doubt on this one.) This incident makes you feel that instead of teaching Checks and Balances in grade school they should have the kids go straight to reading The Prince.

Second, if you do follow the “more” link at the end of the Inside Higher Ed blurb to get to the actual article by Scott Jaschik, you will find that the expression “information literacy” is not mentioned even once. Whoever cooked up that blurb must have surmised that all instruction Libraries provide for students falls under the mantle of “teaching information literacy.” Perhaps that’s true, but perhaps not.

The message of the article itself is mostly benign --- the Library as Temple is an outdated concept, student inquiry should drive Library Instruction, and Library tools should be easy to use so a novice can find things. These points closely parallel the current message we’re hearing about classroom instruction – we should move from a teacher-centric to a student-centric approach. So there is not too much to get worked up about there. But then in multiple places in the piece there is explicit exhortation to embrace games. (This included a bit about LAN parties, which aren’t parties that I host (or attend) nor are they parties about local area networks, but rather are parties held after hours, from which I gather that LAN in this context is short for late at night.)

The irony to me is that none of this seems like promoting information literacy and much of it seems like escapism. I’m quite ok with escapism and do my fair share of indulging. But what about information literacy? Is that still on the radar for Libraries? Does any of what is being advocated by James Paul Gee, George M. Needham, and others have anything to do with teaching information literacy?

I want to move from ALA’s orientation to information literacy, to my own and in doing so I want to return to the title of this post. In my way of thinking about information literacy we enter situations with a prior world view based on what we’ve experienced, what we’ve been taught, what we’ve argued with others, and what we’ve reflected on by ourselves. When we confront a new piece of information we do so with that prior world view operating in the background. We test the new piece of information. Does it fit? Does it contradict what we believe to be true? Is it redundant or does it add something new? Then, if it seems new and especially if it seems to contradict something else we believe, we perform other tests. Does the author of the content stand to gain from having you believe one thing or another? Are there others saying the same thing? Where do those others fit in the political spectrum? Has the author or any of these others said different things that you’ve come to believe are true? What else would I have to believe to make this true?

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of questions but rather was intended simply to open up the process that we go through when we speak of information literacy. Much of the time that process is implicit. We don’t actually make such a list of questions but we do zero in on whether the information is to be trusted as well as how we can incorporate it into our world view.

Information literacy is the critical issue of our times and, in truth, we’re failing at it. But it’s not just our students. Think of WMD and Iraq and consider the dismal failure of the Fourth Estate to challenge the grounds for invasion in a meaningful way that would have prevented the war. Read Frank Rich’s latest column about the Bush Administration’s current effort to downplay the failure of the surge.

But don’t just consider information literacy from the perspective of national politics. Think about it in your job. Ask whether non-learning technology types (other IT professionals, Deans and Provosts, faculty) are sympathetic to learning technology or not. Consider the furor over the Gorman posts about blogging.

Then think about information literacy in other aspects of your life. Think about the Lincoln quote on fooling some of the people, and ask whether the insidious effort to get Intelligent Design taught in the K-12 science curriculum as an alternative to Darwin is really about fooling some of the people. Then ask yourself whether you too can be fooled, especially if you don’t have the opportunity to bring to bear your usual process for incorporating new information into your world view. Think about the Stockholm Syndrome and what that means for information literacy.

We’ve become a society where debate is absent; marketing prevails instead, the promotion of Madison Avenue, the White House, Fox News; the source matters not. It is the style of presentation that matters. How are we to evaluate that content? We’ve matured to the point where humor and lampooning seemingly have more credibility than straight news.

Then return to students in the classroom and ask about the “Will this be on the test?” mindset and the “I don’t know what you want” type of frustration that students express when they are receiving instruction from a faculty member. Ask whether students surrender their own world view in this classroom setting because survival in school qua grades seemingly demands it.

And with that brief tour of information literacy you’re now ready to consider where video games fit in. To me, they don’t. That’s why I got my dander up.

Like Father…

The house we lived in where I grew up in Bayside had a fair amount of wear before we moved in, I believe that was summer of 1959 when I was 4. So by the time I was a teenager there were a variety of minor things in the house that needed repair and my dad spent a good deal of his weekend time doing little fixit jobs. His instruments were many and varied but I recall a lot of use of popcicle sticks or wooden toothpicks, string, and scotch tape. He got a certain delight from his handiwork though the rest of us had to wonder whether it really would do the job. Mostly it did, at least for a while. But it definitely didn’t look like it was professionally done. That was part of the charm.

I don’t have any of my dad’s desire to do home repair, but I do have a yen to create online objects and most recently I’ve been making video clips, either little screen movies with voice over or talking head videos. It occurred to me that those should be combined – introduce the screen movie with the talking head – to give the viewer an idea of who that man is behind the curtain. This is an early attempt at trying that. It is definitely not slick. I wonder if it gets the job done.

Here we are trying to get the College of Business to standardize on Illinois Compass (WebCT Vista 4.x) to use as a courses portal, to take advantage of the fact that the calendar tool allows a pooled view across courses, and to see if we can deliver something that satisfies students and faculty alike and yet is hosted by the Campus rather than by the College (take advantage of economies of scale and lower incremental cost for the College). We’ve been doing some training sessions for instructors and for administrators responsible for some of our professional programs, notably the MBA and MSF programs.

Those sessions are reasonably effective and I believe are a good gateway toward an ongoing relationship between my staff and those receiving the training. But not everyone in the College will want to avail themselves of the training and if as I prefer you make the training a dialog partly driven by the inquiry of those receiving training, then some things may not be covered at all and other things may not be done in sufficient depth. Short videos available online might fill those gaps nicely.

Also, there is something different between these little movies and a Web document with screen shots, parallel to but perhaps not identical to the difference between lecture and presentation from a textbook. My sense is that the Web documents tend to be quite functional in their orientation. They are therefore quite good as reference, especially for someone who is looking to do a particular task. But as a first pass they may leave the reader missing the forest for the trees. In the movie you can be more conceptual and not try to be exhaustive in what is covered. That might be better as an entry.

Now let me talk about a variety of factors that contributed to how the video turned out. I’ve got my dad in mind thinking about them. First, I don’t want these to be a life’s work. So I didn’t story board at the outset and I didn’t do enough takes so that every part went perfectly smoothly. I did put some effort into getting the microphone volume setting appropriate, but you will notice that in going from the talking head to the screen capture there is a jump in the volume, the consequence of recording in two different applications, and I did nothing to smooth that out. I also put in some effort into determining the size of the window to capture so it would display reasonably in a browser. If I’ve got my Bookmarks toolbar hidden, then the entire movie displays within the browser window comfortably. With the Bookmarks toolbar enabled, the stop and start controls at the bottom show up, but not fully. That effect is just like my dad’s handiwork, ok for use but definitely not perfect.

There is one other parallel with my dad. I like to do things with inexpensive equipment. The webcam and headset that I use are really cheap, about $70 in total. (Camtasia at the educational discount is under $200, but I wouldn’t call that cheap.) For things I do on my own, I much prefer cheap. I don’t know if the reason is genetic or upbringing, but I really do prefer that and the question what can you do reasonably well for very little money appeals to me as the right type of ed tech question. I can rationalize my instinct by saying that for all forms of content creation it makes sense pedagogically only if the students themselves can do it. Cheap means the students can do it where they live and need not go to a lab. That’s something to consider. But my own comfort with the approach doesn’t derive from that rationalization. It comes from something else, a more basic feeling.

I believe my dad did some of his handiwork as therapy, a form of self-expression and a way to do other than his job. My dad rarely talked about his work at home, but I believe he wasn’t very good at it, he was in a Law partnership with his brother who was the more senior member of the firm, and I believe there were a variety of frustrations about the work for him. Self-expression and therapy are definitely two core needs for me. Kind of makes you think about blogging.

Will Socialism Make a Rebound?

When I was a first year grad student at Northwestern, 1976-77, each day during the school week I would drive up from my apartment in Rogers Park and spend most of the day on campus. Northwestern was on the quarter system and I believe most of my classmates took 3 courses per quarter. I took 4, initially because I didn’t understand the difference between the quarter system and the semester system and 4 courses didn’t seem like such a heavy load, and later so I could try out some things other than the prescribed curriculum and take some classes with students who were past their first year. Aside from attending classes, I put in a lot of time in the reserve room doing the required reading and working through the economic models – you read economic papers with a pencil and a pad of paper and you show yourself you understand by deriving the equations/model.

I had hardly taken any economics as an undergrad and I didn’t know whether I’d be any good at it nor, and more important for me at the time, whether I’d like it. I told myself to suspend judgment on that, give it my best shot for a quarter or so, and then see where I was. During the first quarter I was quite certain I had never worked that hard before, especially over an extended period of time. It’s funny. After a while just from putting in the effort the subject matter co-opts you, your speech becomes laden with the jargon of the discipline, and then almost subliminally you ask how is it possible that you’re putting in all that time if you don’t like it?

Even with all the classes and the time in the Library I still had some free time on hand and I needed some release from the regular studies simply to keep my wits about me. Frequently at the end of the day a particular classmate and I (and sometimes his girlfriend) would go out for desert. There was a pie place in Skokie, as I recall on Dempster, that we went to often and as an alternative we’d go to a deli that had a wide variety of cheesecakes located on Sheridan Road across from Loyola. But it didn’t make sense to go off campus during the day and since I didn’t have office space (I may have had a carrel in the Library but that was even more spartan than the Reserve Room; starting in my second year I got a desk in the Math Center) I’d hang out in public spaces on campus. The two main ones that I’d frequent were the Cafeteria at the Norris Center (which is still there today) and the Library Lounge (which I believe has since been repurposed for other Library use).

Many of the other grad students on campus, particularly those in their first year, were more or less in the same boat as I was. So there was a tendency to see the same faces in these spots. That classmate with whom I frequently had desert with had been a bit of a Marxist as an undergrad (he went to the U of Colorado in Boulder, came from a well to do family in Philadelphia, and had some sort of authority thing for his old man). This classmate introduced me to some sociology students, one of whom also was a Marxist. We had interesting discussions, if a little bit on the b.s. side of the spectrum as compared to what I was getting in my classes, and I believe I read the Communist Manifesto just to feel comfortable in those conversations. Since I took a Linear Programming class in my first quarter there, I was able to appreciate the Labor Theory of Value on a technical level, though I don’t believe it came up much in my courses (we did spend a lot of time on National Income Accounting in the first quarter of Macro and I recall that the underlying model was a general Leontief System) so could give back in these conversations on the technical side of things. These conversations plus one course as an undergrad on economic models of politics where we read Schumpeter was essentially my entire education about Socialism. The bulk of my formal training was on neoclassical economics.

This little lead in is my mea culpa in talking about Socialism when really, I’m not expert in this at all and so maybe I’m saying things in an awkward way or perhaps even incorrectly. But it seems to me that in a lot of what I’m reading these days or watching in film there is lurking behind the scenes the question of whether some version of Socialism is where we are (should be?) headed. Let me give some examples so you can see what I mean.

Last week I saw Freedom Writers on Pay Per View. The first half hour or so was horrible, a lot of senseless violence and utter despair, and I was getting pretty disgusted with the picture and ready to turn off the TV when the tone of the film changed. I understood that they were trying to set up the situation, give the viewer a sense of the accomplishment of the teacher and the students by noting the brutality of what had come before. What I didn’t understand till after the film was over that you the viewer actually need to have the feeling of being assaulted in order to make an emotional connection with what the teacher does in getting through to her students. And the only way to create that sensation was to have the first part of the film seem to drag on forever. That created a sense of the abyss, with no way out.

The teacher goes through a period of disconnect and distrust with her students. You the viewer have a sense of hopelessness but the teacher remains optimistic and determined. Eventually she figures out a way for them to open up with each other by acknowledging the common horrors they’ve experienced – friends and relatives being shot to death – and she does this in a clever pedagogic way where the students not only indicate their own circumstance but see the circumstance of their classmates at the same time. This was the bond they needed to accept her as a teacher and to cross racial lines and accept their classmates as human beings. Once the bond was formed the teacher was able to get remarkable communication and depth of expression from the students because it was the first time in their lives where they could talk on an emotional level about the realities of their own existence. They had a need to get this out. The teacher filled that need and taught them how to right at the same time.

The teacher goes through a remarkable amount of self-sacrifice to achieve a quality learning environment for her students. The supplies at school are inadequate – the department head wouldn’t let this class use the books that were in the school warehouse for fear that the students would ruin them and because she had a pejorative view of the students’ ability to read – so the teacher worked additional jobs after school in order to earn enough money to pay for books and other supplies out of her own pocket. This was another demonstration to her students that she cared and that demonstration extracted a strong response in kind from the students. But the teacher paid a high price for her own dedication. Her husband felt neglected and they end up separating before the end of the film. It also seemed that she was more of an achiever than her husband and he couldn’t deal with her drive and ambition for her class. She couldn’t reconcile her work life and her family life. So the message seems to be that wonderful things happen at school, even at a tough school like this one, but there is indeed a big price to pay to get those wonderful things. The teacher pays the price willingly, as if to say her kids are human beings and they deserve the attention, don’t they?

Ultimately, the picture turns into a tear jerker in part because this outcome is so exceptional, though the student needs for personal dignity and to tell someone what they are going through seem so basic and so ordinary. And precisely for that reason I started asking myself whether something like this could be done on a large scale --- in other words, socialism.

Let me turn next to Health Care Plans that the candidates are advancing and how those are entering into the Presidential Campaign. Atul Gwande had an interesting piece on the Obama plan, noting that the particulars of the announced plan may mean less than the ability to shepherd a modified and renegotiated plan through an inevitably difficult and painful process with Congress to come to something that can both get the necessary votes and yet solves the mess we’re in now with so many uninsured and premiums skyrocketing.

I started to ask myself how Obama and indeed how any of the other candidates might work their way through such a negotiation – what will inform them on those subsidiary issues where they can be flexible and those principles where they need to make their own personal line in the sand. And in thinking through that question I thought to myself that the candidates need some personal ideology to serve as a guide for hashing all this out. For the Republican candidates, perhaps it’s enough to think of health care primarily as an issue about the cost of doing business, and containing such costs so we can maintain our competitiveness. But Democratic candidates, of necessity, have to consider health care from the perspective of the well being of those unemployed (and uninsured) as well as those who have jobs and insurance but are fearful of losing both. What other principle is there to advocate for a system where all get insurance regardless of employment status unless it is Socialism, though some may prefer other euphemisms (Social Safety Net?).

Health care, though clearly an important issue (health care costs have been rising faster than the rate of inflation and in the U.S. we have the highest health care expenditure as a fraction of GDP, see this table) is still just one issue. Perhaps a more fundamental concern is income inequality. This afternoon I found a current version of USA Today at the coffee place and while I normally don’t read that paper for some reason I went to their Op-Ed page and found this piece. Income inequality is front and center there, something for us as a nation to be ashamed about. That column is about the pious nature of our public religious face; if we really believed in the Golden Rule how could we possibly endure so much poverty in a land with so much plenty? But many of us, brought up with a strong notion of the benefit from the separation of Church and State may look for a non-religious argument for reducing income inequality. How about this essay by Albert Einstein? It’s called, “Why Socialism?”

USA Today certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on the income inequality issue. The New York Times Magazine devoted the entirety of its most recent issue to the income inequality question. It looks at this question through many lenses: the candidacy of John Edwards is the feature, but there is also a stimulating if a bit disconcerting piece on the preaching of Ruby Payne and getting insight into attitudinal and behavior differences attributable to class differences and in particular why middle class teachers have such a hard time teaching the children of the poor, a discussion of how to manage promoting growth of the economy on the one hand where a superstar approach gives the right incentives to create new ideas and new product with providing a decent quality of life for those who are less fortunate on the other hand.

But the piece that got me most thinking about this, even if it was a bit of fluff, was the article about Larry Summers, where apparently Summers is reconsidering the views he had during the Clinton-Rubin years where he was pretty much a free trader and government’s role was to make trade as unfettered from regulation as possible, to considering a latter day “Industrial Policy” so that workers would not suffer so much from the inevitable dislocations that have resulted from Globalization. Summers, for all the hoopla surrounding his leaving the Presidency of Harvard, is a serious thinker and someone who probably would prefer to couch his own arguments within a broader framework. And if his big issue is how to tame the beast of competition in global markets, will he go so far as to embrace Socialism? He’s not there yet, clearly, but has reached his final resting place on this? My guess is that he is still in intellectual transition.

So far in this piece, I’ve considered Socialism as a kind of income insurance. That is certainly an aspect but it’s far from the whole picture. There is a different type of question to ask, one that is not yet getting as much press, but a question I think that may be more fundamental. Consider the Robin Hood type of income distribution but coming not through banditry but rather through volunteerism. Think of the Peace Corps, of Teach For America, even of the United Way. These programs matter. They matter to the recipients of the services and they matter to the providers. But ask yourself whether these programs are enough, taken altogether. Do they matter in a macroeconomic sense? Or are they a drop in the bucket?

Consider volunteerism as a coordination problem – it’s a lot easier to get people to do the volunteer work if friends and peers are also doing the volunteer work. This means if you want the volunteerism to matter in a macroeconomic sense you need government to play some role to encourage participation. That role is not social insurance. It’s more like instilling social responsibility and encouraging the resulting behavior (something Einstein argued in the essay linked above). The government does play this type of role with military service. Why is that the only way that young people can show responsibility for their country? Given the issues we face, does that make sense?

It’s my sense that we need to advocate for a kind of social responsibility on our campuses and make that real to our students, giving them opportunities to do the equivalent of volunteer work while they are pursuing their studies and making that part of the fabric of their education. How else can we combat the cheating, the nihilism, the disengagement? And how else can we give meaning to their education in the here and now, education for itself, not only a deferred gratification, as a gateway to good jobs.

Yet socialism is a dirty word. We think of Red Scares, of the Iron Curtain, of cumbersome state sponsored bureaucracy. We’ve embraced the rhetoric of Milton Friedman. Friedman’s key word was freedom, individual freedom. His TV show with his wife Rose was called Free to Choose. Socialism, even Social Democracy of the type practiced in Sweden and not just the Scientific Socialism we associate with Marx and Lenin, clearly has elements that restrict freedom. As long as it stays a dirty word, the ideas can’t make a comeback, though if one looks at the issues we’re focusing on now, the ideas should be front and center. So I don’t know how this will play out. But I know what my heart tells me.

Mini-Lectures via Camtasia

Today I've been doing some recording in Camtasia in part to provide demos for faculty in my college and in part to think through the pedagogic implications. This is my latest effort, a mini-lecture on "Block Pricing," a particular type of price discrimination. I'll discuss briefly on technology/implementation issues and then another brief discussion on pedagogy.

First consider sizing of what you are seeing. The movie should display in the browser without the need to scroll, either horizontally or vertically. I've captured about as big a region as is possible to do that (when viewing on a laptop) and yet preserve a reasonable aspect ratio. Excel is helpful for this sizing effort because it counts rows and columns. I've got 22 rows displayed (and note that there is one tool bar open that appears below the Menu bar) and the columns displayed are A through M. If you size an Excel window that way you can then use it is a guide for any other application that you may wish to record; just size the window of that application to match the Excel window.

In the settings in Camtasia I did a screen recording with voice narration. I maxed out on their settings for video and audio quality - bigger file size, but who cares. Then I saved the file in the native format and made ready for Web delivery. When Camtasia does this, it uses Flash and produces the video as an .swf file. As an alternative I tried a custom setting in Camtasia to make a Windows Media file, but the video quality is not as good - there is discoloration. So I'm sticking with their recommendation for Web delivery. Camtasia produces an entire folder of stuff, with .xml, .css, and other files to accompany the video file. One of these is an .html file. When Camtasia is done I drag that entire folder onto my Web space on the College of Business server and then click on that .html file. That launches the presentation at the url where the presentation appears. Voila!

I'm doing this at the office where I have a very good connection to the server and the presentation appears almost immediately. I need to try at home to get a more realistic sense for how long it takes to load. I'd appreciate learning your experience with that.

* * * * *

The movie is of an "Excelet" that I had written (to accompany a textbook by Baron and Besanko). The Excelets were originally written as ancillary material to accompany the book, but I think these type of mini-lectures can be used as gateways into the content. Note the duration. This one is under 4 minutes in length. If you were doing a chalk board lecture on this topic it would probably be 20 minutes to a half hour, and that is because all the content would be derived from scratch --- the way we were taught to do it. I think the derived from scratch approach is fine for a student who will go on to grad school, but other students don't have the patience and need a quicker way to penetrate the ideas.

So here much of the construction has already been done. The Excelets have the virtue of literally being able to visualize the comparative statics from that construction and thereby get some insight into the construction itself. Note that the presentation in the video is mostly to explain how to use the Excelet and read what is going on. While there is some theory presented, most of that is in passing. They pick the theory up in the play with the Excelet and the video is aimed at encouraging the play.

For presenting theory of this type, I think this is the right type of design. No doubt building the Excelets is time consuming. But the Excelets are durable and can be re-used from semester to semester.

In my opinion, this type of content lends itself to online delivery. In teaching Economics, one can parse the course into two parts, one a math/theory part and the other a story telling part. We need to teach both and students really understand the economics only if they are comfortable with both. The story telling part is much better done face to face and in small group work during the live class time having students hash through a sensible story to match the economic situation seems like a valuable activity. The analytics, on the other hand, at least getting the basics, can be done online and via self-study. This type of online mini-lecture would seem a boon for that.

iGoogle and the LMS

I continue to find that my preferred approach to discovery about all things technology is what I’d call “learning by futzing.” By this I mean I stumble onto something without trying to find it, then get curious, then try some things, then some search to learn more, and after a fashion I feel I’ve got a reasonable understanding and something to show for it. This morning’s example (that found itself well into the afternoon) was Gadgets you can make yourself for iGoogle (formerly Google’s personal page; don’t call it a portal). The two that I started with are first one that can store a sequence of YouTube videos that will play within the Gadget window and second a Gadget called Daily Me that could be used for Course Announcements. (Windows Live is a possible alternative to iGoogle but I didn’t see any gadget-like object you can make simply by filling out a form.)

Indeed, I started to think about using iGoogle as a way to deliver a whole bunch of Course Information. Some of this info would be Gadgets that are specific to the class, such as the ones I mentioned above. Others would be for tools that are more generic, like Google Calendar and Google Docs, that could be used in many different classes. (The specific calendar would be course specific and docs might carry a class tag and might have access controls on a class by class basis.) Here is a screen shot of what I came up with in short order.

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/www2/iGoogle.jpg

Certainly my first stab can be improved upon with gadgets for bookmarks, images, and other external but course related content. I wasn’t trying to make the be all and end all with this effort, just a quick sketch of the possible. Having done that, I uncovered some challenges as well. Here are some issues with doing this for real.

1. It is very easy to export individual gadgets so others can put that on their own iGoogle page. I couldn’t figure out, however, how to export a whole page of gadgets in one fell swoop. So there is a bit of an issue of getting that whole page information out, including the layout. I don’t think this is insurmountable. But it is a tad clunky doing it one gadget at a time.

2. The various Google tools handle access control differently. For example, Google Docs allows one to give access via Gmail Contacts and then to use Groups for that (very nice). Google Calendar, however, appears to only allow access via individuals. Someone creating access, like me, might prefer restricted access to public access for a variety of reasons, but if each member of the class has to be added one by one, that’s a pain.

3. Incidentally on this, I was able to create a class group using email addresses from a course I had taught a while back, but I had to do some manipulations in Excel to import that into Gmail and I’m not sure that other instructors would be up to that.

4. The Banner on the iGoogle page takes up a lot of room. I’d like to squish it down so that more gadgets can show up. This issue about vertical space is something that Google hasn’t mastered. When some of the gadgets have video feeds or image feeds, they will take up substantial vertical space. My sense is that you should be able to get in about 6 gadgets (two rows of three across) in view without scrolling. Of course that depends on screen resolution. I design for 1024 x 768 – standard for laptop viewing. My font size may be larger than most, but if you can only get the gadgets into view by having miniscule font, you’re cheating.

5. The Daily Me gadget (Class Announcements in my example) doesn’t have a line for the time of the last posting, it should have that, nor does it have a way to archive previous postings, it should have that too.

So there is room for improvement. But what is there is not half bad, in my view, and I believe it does a better job than the LMS in terms of giving some useful information about the content in the various gadget windows without requiring a click through to get at that information. I’m betting that students would like this to be used for classes. Certainly, that would be an interesting thing to test.

There is one further obvious benefit from the approach, at least for when the student is working on his or her own computer, especially if iGoogle is set as the homepage in the browser. (That’s what I do at present.) Then the class page is just one click away – another Tab in iGoogle. That is quite convenient, more convenient than logging into the LMS. Consequently, for the content that the instructor is pushing down to the students it might very well be a better way to distribute that stuff.

I started to think of whether instructors who tried this approach would use the LMS in addition. Some, who are only using the LMS for content push to begin with might not, although if they have copyrighted content in PDF format this approach won’t do the trick and they’ll need either the LMS or eReserves. And if they want to track use, this won’t do the trick either.

Others who have been using the LMS quite extensively but have wanted a public space for their course as well might like this approach for the latter need. The widgets that aren’t just RSS feeds are extremely easy to manage. And the RSS feeds brought in this way might get more of a look by the students than if they are brought into the LMS course site in some fashion (e.g., by using RSS to Javascript and pasting in the result.)

I don’t have a good sense of how actual LMS use is divided between content push and more interesting pedagogical use. (I do know a fair amount of the use here is simply for the grade book function.) If you take the content push out of the LMS, what does that do to the demand for this type of environment? Ask the question again if online content push can be seen as a textbook substitute. Textbook publishers seem to like the restricted access form of distribution that the LMS enables, for example consider the Pearson buyout of eCollege, but the iGoogle approach may be more engaging to the students, in large part because the content can be dynamic and shaped by events, not fixed in advance.

I’m not as up to speed as I was last year about LMS vendor developments and how they might respond to content push efforts via iGoogle. I know that Blackboard has launched Scholar.com, but I don’t have a good sense of how that is faring. And I’m not well informed about what the other vendors are doing here nor about what the other open source LMS are doing here. Student-centric and particularly constructivist approaches to learning minimize the value of instructor content push. So Moodle, in particular, might not feel very threatened by this. I’m not sure.

If I were an LMS vendor (not very likely but for the sake of the argument let’s maintain the pretense) I’d be moving hard to differentiate the product away from the content push area and toward tools that have clear pedagogic benefit, or like my FSI session I’d argue that content push and assessment need to be melded in an effective way for which the LMS is well suited. But I’d also be worried because as a vendor I’d know less about my campus clients and their use patterns than I’d like. Further I’d worry because Google Apps, at least the standard version, is being marketed as a freebie so it’s hard to compete with that, especially as budgets for IT seem to be tightening.

Going back to my role as Dean for eLearning in the College of Business, I’m thinking about this purely from the convenience angle for students and instructors. And I suppose for that it comes down to whether iGoogle starts to get used for content push in other domains. On the student side, I think many of them are already using Gmail, so this is not such a stretch. On the faculty side, I’m less clear. It will be interesting to observe as this unfolds.

Writing as Problem Solving

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

This July I’m one of the faculty members at the Educause Learning Technology Leadership Program in Madison. There is a lot of planning that goes into this thing. A couple of week ago I learned that in the opening session we will be doing something on Interaction Styles based on the Myers-Briggs Typology. This triggered a memory (I learned about Myers-Briggs at the Frye Institute a few years back) and much curiosity about my type, INTP. I did more than my usual amount of Web surfing on the subject and read many descriptions of this type. I found this site where you can take a test to determine your own type, took the test for myself, and confirmed my INTP classification. I was pulled in more and more by the seeming high accuracy in which these descriptions identified me. I had a friend who is an economist take that test; he proved to be an EFTJ, almost the exact opposite of me, and yet the description for that type fit him quite well.

Some of those descriptions for INTP actually use the expression “Absent Minded Professor” and most of them describe the type as “Architect” meaning somebody who builds theoretical constructs to address problems. If you are a regular reader of this blog, ask yourself how many of the posts provide a theoretical argument for a structure aimed at addressing a certain problem. I believe I’m doing that all the time. The descriptions talk about INTPs having a need to make connections between the theoretical constructs and a wide range of experience. I believe I’m doing that too. And the descriptions talk about the fundamental motivation – creating understanding of reality out of complexity. That’s right on the button.

In the process of my Web surfing about INTP, I found Richard Feynman’s Noble Prize address. It so well matched what I wanted to write about that I’m leading off with it. But, to be truthful, I didn’t understand the physics in it. Some of the little points – positrons can be thought of as electrons moving backward in time – yes, I got those. But on the big picture physics issues with which Feynman was grappling – no, that was over my head. I thought it was a great essay nonetheless and I’m going to highlight what it was about it that I found so intriguing and that I think is worth trying to emulate in our writing.

The essay as whole is a recounting of Feynman’s discoveries that were the basis for his Nobel Prize and in choosing my title for this post, slightly inaccurate but I hope you’ll forgive the imprecision, I’m referring to this type of recounting. We might distinguish between introspection coupled with happenstance that produces the original spark of idea and reflection on that thought experience that produces the narrative, the recounting that I’ve referred to. For me writing doesn’t really help with the spark, though it does help remarkably on pushing the idea further and refining it. But that’s not enough to get me to the keyboard. I need an idea for a story. That’s where the recounting comes in.

Feynman’s style is matter of fact, almost reportorial. He doesn’t embellish his discoveries nor does he shun his misperceptions, of which there were many. He falls in love with his own ideas just as one falls in love with a woman, and indeed he uses that metaphor early on in the piece. The passion in pursuit of the idea is love; there is no doubt about it. The essay has an aspect of symphonic music that starts in a minor key and builds slowly. By the middle of the piece there is a strong sense of crescendo. So many ideas are seemingly tying together. It is hard to contain the sense of excitement, on the verge of an important discovery. And interspersed are nuggets of perception such as this one, which make the reader feel they are getting the same sense of the beauty of the ideas that spurred Feynman in his pursuits.

A thing like the inverse square law is just right to be represented by the solution of Poisson's equation, which, therefore, is a very different way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what it means, that nature chooses these curious forms, but maybe that is a way of defining simplicity. Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.

Another aspect of the essay that is delightful and something that we really need to talk about more is the importance of guessing in discovery. Guessing is mentioned quietly at first, then it comes front and center. But equal attention is given to the time spent on verification, careful checking of the equations to make sure the calculations were correct. Guessing and verification are two parts of the discovery process that must go together. One must abandon belief in an idea when it can't be reconciled with observation or other known theory. But one may persist in trying to save an idea from abandonment by seeing whether a suitable modification or an alternative perspective can bring about such a reconciliation. There is learning in this too, thought it might very well come with the emotional baggage of feeling jilted by a lover.

And he makes a big thing about “artificial mental constructs,” what we first fall in love with when we pursue an idea, that turn out to be less important in our understanding when we have a more mature view and that may be outright wrong, but were critical for moving down the path of discovery. This too is something we need to talk about. Feynman notes there is great risk in taking a non conventional approach to thinking about a physics problem; there is a likelihood that it will lead nowhere. But by taking a non-orthodox approach, one of the individual’s own making, there is likely deeper learning about the ideas at stake, and there is the possibility of new perceptions from the unique point of view.

* * * * *

The rest of us won’t be Feynman’s. Our discoveries will not be as fundamental nor as profound and we very likely won’t be able to make a career out of them. But we can embrace his style in telling our own stories, producing interesting narratives in the process and using those as a way to promote the ideas that we do come up with for the consideration of others. Here’s one from me, another byproduct of the infatuation with my Myers-Briggs type, INTP.

I was unsure of the reliability of what I read after doing the initial INTP search in Google, so I did another Google search (INTP .edu) thinking I’d find a more credible listing if it were at a .edu page. The third response is to this site at Murray State pertaining to the first year experience. It appears that at Murray State they take the Myers-Briggs inventory seriously as a way for the students to identify themselves and come to a greater sense of self-understanding. That was interesting in itself but my attention turned elsewhere. I became taken with the first bullet under “Playing” where it says that lectures may very well be a source of entertainment. This rather innocuous observation became the stimulus for my problem solving.

Here is the chain of my thinking. Indeed, I used to go to lectures a lot when I was at Cornell and then as a grad student at Northwestern and here I’m talking about lectures outside the courses I was taking. Lectures were a source of intellectual entertainment. (Nowadays I watch The Charlie Rose Show for this same sort of information.) I know that on occasion in thinking about the debate over whether lectures are a good or bad mode of instruction, I’d mentally note my own predilection for attending them. Then, the not quite syllogism is that if lectures are a good form of entertainment, they must be good for classroom instruction as well and indeed there were many lecture-based classes that I took where I got a lot out of the course. Then I make the simple inference that if lectures were good for me they’d be good for other students as well, naïve egotism as the basis for my thinking. Indeed, one of the really disturbing ideas that has come out as a result of reading about INTP is a questioning of whether my core beliefs about learning are really robust for everyone else, or if instead these ideas only make sense for INTPs. That questioning has left me with a sense of unease. I don’t yet have a good feeling for how to resolve the issues.

Then I recalled a lesson about egotism that I learned from Naomi Miyake, a Japanese scholar (with a degree from the U of I) whom I meet on a trip to Taiwan where we along with other colleagues toured to discuss our early lessons from efforts with learning technology. In her presentation Naomi showed two Mercator projections, one produced in the U.S. the other in Japan. For the logic of such maps, it is completely arbitrary where to chose the latitude line that “cuts” the globe so the map unfolds. Naomi showed us that the U.S. ends up at the center of the map produced in the U.S. while Japan ends up in center of the map produced there. What could be a better demonstration of the universality of our egotism? This made me comfortable in the thought that I could use myself as representative of all INTPs, particularly those who are faculty members.

Summing up where we are now, we have that INTPs like lecture, they tend to be egocentric (which among other things tends to contribute to the belief that their non-INTP students are lazy), and there is a concentration of INTPs among the professoriate. Then throw in for good measure that INTPs typically have a strong streak of stubbornness. Is it any wonder that they are inclined to believe that lecture is a good form of instruction?

Now a little aside for my explanation of why lectures work for INTPs, because others may very well be confused on this point. INTPs live to process their own ideas and they come to know things through their internal processing. When a conclusion has been reached that idea no longer holds interest. The issue arises – where should the INTP next focus his attention? Lectures are fodder for such processing. They point the way to questions that need to be asked, to theories that need to be understood, to ways an argument unfolds. The lecture is an excellent source of intellectual fodder.

In large part for this reason, I’ve never understood why so many others take notes during lectures, particularly when the ideas are available elsewhere, such as in a book or on a Web site. Taking notes seems to interfere with processing. It is a deliberate suspending of thought, with the busy work of recording the ideas as an inferior substitute to thinking about them, a caving in on the critical issue of whether the student is sharp enough to understand what the professor is speaking about. I never much cared for those lectures where a lot of detail was spewed out with that as the main purpose, where the Professor expected the students to take extensive notes to capture that detail. I always preferred lectures that gave the big picture, that tried to convey a mental image of the issues at stake, that constructed a long and thoughtful argument to prove the proposition at hand. And I suppose, if I were to reflect on it, I would have come to the observation that note taking and raising one’s had to ask questions is negatively correlated, because in those type of classes one asked questions that were about the implications of the big picture ideas, and the note takers weren’t focusing on that.

To my knowledge, the research on teaching mode that condemns the lecture in favor of active learning methods, consider this site for example, does essentially nothing to confirm the professor’s own learning and the role of the lecture as intellectual fodder. As an INTP who is well aware of my own learning, if only implicitly, at first blush I’ll likely reject the findings of that literature. Patently, they must be wrong. For you to convince me to abandon lecture in favor of active learning, you need to make a more nuanced argument along the following lines.

1. Typical students are unlike me in their Meyer’s-Brigg typology. Very few are INTPs, who count for only about 1% of the population. Indeed most of our students are probably Extroverts rather than Introverts.

2. Typical students likely don’t process internally like I do. They may find trying that difficult and unrewarding. They may not see relationships across ideas like I do. They will need other ways to draw out those relationships and make them overt.

3. In a hypothetical study where INTP students were separated out from their peers, it should be found that the INTPs did indeed do well in a traditional lecture format. But that same study must show the peers of INTPs did poorly in the lecture framework. The peers did better when the approach embraced group problem solving. This sort of study would confirm my own learning, not deny it.

4. In a different hypothetical study, one that focused longitudinally on career choice, it should be found that INTPs disproportionately enter into doctoral programs upon graduation and among doctoral students INTPs disproportionately enter into academia.

5. In yet a different hypothetical study, student evaluations of teaching should show a correlation between student satisfaction, on the one hand, and the closeness Myers-Briggs type, on the other. In other words, the egotism idea about preferred teaching styles and learning style should be confirmed.

6. It should be found that some INTP faculty do succeed in providing courses that students find satisfying, in spite of the M-B type differentials, but such faculty are not “naturals” as teachers and have to put considerable effort into modifying their approach to be suitable for students.

Points 1 and 2 are garnered from the writings about the Myers-Briggs typology and empirical work done on the MBTI. (Note that this Wikipedia page offers a type breakdown by frequency in the population and disputes that INTP is only 1% of the population.) Points 3 to 6 are my conjectures. They are guesses that I think are reasonable and if they are true provide a theoretical explanation as to why the lecture persists in spite of the increasing evidence that lectures are not an effective mode of instruction. Further, one can readily get the result for lectures without an appeal to the idea that faculty shirk in their teaching and lecturing is low effort mode that is tantamount to shirking.

In order to make 1 – 6 the basis of an appeal to faculty to alter their teaching, there would first have to be an embrace of MBTI. This would require showing first, that an individual’s type doesn’t change over time (here is such a study that focuses on such time invariance of type) and then the type must be shown to be a reliable predictor of behavior in many instances that are relevant to teaching and learning in the higher education setting.. Those pre-conditions don’t exist nor are they likely to exist any time soon. Thus, my piece may seem like idle theorizing.

But I think there is value to the approach especially if we consider all of us faculty as instructors in the role of students with regard to choice of the mode of instruction. If you as evangelist for a new mode of instruction want me to abandon my lecturing, how can you make your arguments on my terms. The current vogue seems to be to situate the arguments in the learning of the students, but to entirely abstract from the learning of the instructor. That, it seems to me, is a serious error.

An effective argument needs to engage the learning of the students and the learning of the instructor simultaneously, to make a case for where similarities prevail (and hence where the instructor is best able to be sympathetic to the learning issues that students face) as well to identify where there will be mostly differences (and hence where the instructor needs to be careful not to indulge his own egocentricity when determining the pedagogic approach). The MBTI is a construct to aid in coming to this type of argument. Once having reached this point, however, it has served its useful purpose and can be abandoned, just a Feynman abandoned some of his own early constructs. What remains is a more mature perspective of how we learn and why we teach the way we do.