Cousins

One reason to go to College is to ask the meaning of life questions. They don’t stop mattering upon graduation, but mostly we get caught up in our work and social lives and they take priority because of immediacy if not importance. Those meaning of life questions lie dormant, waiting for some spark to ignite the fire. As we grow older we don’t look for the spark. So when it happens those questions find us, often when we’re not looking. 

 

Recently there has been an odd confluence of the personal and the professional that has made me refocus on these questions. Timing-wise, this centered around the Sloan-C Conference in Orlando. I want to reflect on two sessions from the conference – a community of inquiry framework for evaluation and what’s next for online learning. But I want to do this in my personal way. I hope others find this illuminating, though I admit the approach is a bit odd. 

 

My mother lives in Boca Raton. So I’ve made it a practice either before or after a conference in Orlando to drive down and see my mom. As it turns out my cousin Arlene (she’s a cousin on my dad’s side of the family) who lives in Davie Florida, a bit north and west of Miami Beach, had seen my mom on her birthday in August. Arlene sent a photo of Miriam to me and my sibs via email and in response I mentioned the conference and the trip to Boca and asked whether I might see Arlene then. Arlene invited me to stay with her after visiting my mom and I did just that. We had a good time with her family and during Sunday brunch Arlene’s children had some interesting to say about Miriam and Sidney. (My dad passed away in June 1999.) 

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You need to know I’m a shmegege when it comes to family, particular those not in my household and those I’ve not been in contact with for some time. The communication with them seems artificial and so I shy away from it. Last year Arlene attended my brother’s 50^th birthday party in Ann Arbor, as did my cousin Ann from Denmark. (Ann’s father, Robert, is my mother’s brother.) This was the weekend when I had my leg accident and odd though it may seem, that episode created a bond among us beyond what the party itself did. I have been to several conferences in Orlando. This is the first one where I saw Arlene afterwards. 

 

A week or two before Sloan-C, my cousin Debby who lives in Israel wrote both the Danish and American cousins that her father, Fred, had passed away. Fred had been suffering from a severe dementia. My mom’s been that way for a while. I don’t think she knew who I was this time around and she didn’t know me the last time I visited in March. The cousins on my mom’s side have had an extended email thread since, where the focus was on whether the siblings were disposed to this and indeed if we too are likely to suffer the same fate. 

 

Nowadays people are fascinated with their own personal genome, a newly opened road toward self-understanding, perhaps helping them to answer the basic question: why are they the way they are? With the cousins we did something similar – anecdotal comparisons of behavior, some based on memories from long ago about our parents and ourselves, to see whether each of our reads on how things were made sense. Did we get the story right or not? I found this enthralling and opened up quite a bit in my own messages to my cousins, in large part because I see in my son Ben some aspects of my mother’s personality and thought that highly relevant for the discussion. This was happening right during Sloan-C and not surprisingly it occurred to me that my extended family was engaged in a Community of Inquiry.

But it was a surprise to me how we got there and that we’ve had this thread at all. Debby likes to send email, much of it impersonal in my view and about the situation in Israel. Debby’s son is in the Israeli army and the war with Lebanon took a toll on her family. The issues were personal for her. But the emails did not evoke a real response from me or my sibs, nor from the cousins in Denmark. We had what could only be described as an awkward exchange when Debby sent an email asking why she hadn’t received more sympathy from us. 

 

Growing up Fred’s family lived 10 or 15 minutes by car ride from our place in Bayside. We had Seder at their house each year. They were Orthodox and we were ultra Reform, differences that were a cause for some tension. And further, Sidney was a brittle diabetic. He had himself been Orthodox growing up, but he rejected that in adulthood. Miriam placed taking care of Sidney’s diabetes well ahead of sticking with the ceremony from the Haggadah. She pushed the others to speed up the service, so we could eat and avoid Sidney having an insulin reaction. In turn they pushed back, if not at the time then in anticipation beforehand. Why didn’t Sidney take adequate steps ahead of time so he could sit through the entire service? Seemingly, we went through this ritual every year. 

 

We saw Fred’s family a few other times each year. I remember none of the specifics but tone-wise there was some tension; that I do remember. Occasionally on Sundays, Fred would come over to our house on his own, a lower keyed visit. I’m not entirely sure why he came, one might guess it was care about his sister, but because Miriam ran a language tutoring business in our house, she was often busy with a student. So Fred spent more time in these visits with Sidney or with us kids. 

 

Some time later, Fred and his wife Annette emigrated to Israel. So did Debby and her family and also Sharon, Debby’s sister, and Sharon’s family. Whether I was a grad student at Northwestern then or already a faculty member at Illinois, I’m not sure. Certainly I was living in the Midwest and not much aware of the goings on in Bayside. So Fred and the Israeli cousins “fell of the map” for me. Some of that had already happened with some of Sidney’s family. (His brother Dan, who was his law partner and unlike Sidney was a hard driving and good businessman, died of Leukemia in 1971. Sidney was the executor of the estate and that took a lot out of him. He had a hard time with Dan’s widow and we all became estranged from her and her surviving son.) Indeed, part of going to grad school in the Midwest was getting away from Bayside and my roots. So at the time all this happened without much notice from my view.

 

The Internet has brought the possibility of reconnection. Nowadays email is considered old fashioned, perhaps even a dying technology. Maybe we’ve lost the sense of wonder in the fantastic enabling that the technology provides. And I’m sure we continue to confound the effects of the technology as enabler with the essentially human interaction the technology can engender. After Debby sent out the announcement of Fred’s passing, my sister Marlene sent a condolence message and my brother Peter wrote a long and thoughtful message about Fred, with a personal anecdote to show Fred had something on the ball. I felt obligated to write a bit of the same, though I was not comfortable doing so. I ended up mentioning that upon occasion I played chess with Fred, on some of those Sunday visits. It was true, but meant as a throw away line, nothing more. 

 

It seems chess was more important in family relations than I had realized. This was a case in point of the life questions finding me when I wasn’t looking. Debby wrote back about an episode where I played chess with her husband at their house, with parents from both families interested in the outcome. I lost the game and as a consequence Debby’s husband rose in esteem in the eyes of Fred. The question was whether I had deliberately sandbagged, perhaps in anticipation of this happy outcome. Regardless of the answer, Debby thanked me for the consequence, intended or otherwise. 

 

Earlier this year Debby had visited Denmark and had some time to talk with Ann. I know nothing of the details but perhaps Ann spoke of the weekend in Ann Arbor where we celebrated Peter’s birthday, where she got to know me (again) and my family (for the first time) and since Ann had also been receiving Debby’s other email right along perhaps she was able to give Debby some other context for understanding how here messages were being received. Ann is quite a perceptive person and that is entirely possible. Alternatively, Debbie may have been genuinely grateful for the outcome of that chess game, even some 20 or 30 years later. In any event, that change in tone was the opening I needed to be more forthcoming. The other cousins seemed to want the conversation too. We debated Alzheimer’s versus dementia, whether our grandfather was properly diagnosed as schizophrenic (then as a Jew in not yet Nazi Germany it is now easy to spin other interpretations), and I contributed about the connection between Ben and Miriam. 

 

In passing I learned (or was reminded) about how others regarded Miriam, quite unlike how I thought of her myself. I heard separately from Arlene’s children, my cousins once removed, and again from Sharon on the other side of the family that Miriam was a genius. It is interesting how those with less formal education perceive us who live in the ivory tower. That’s me, not Miriam. Miriam was a language tutor and later a High School language teacher (mostly French). She was apparently an exceptional student in high school back in Germany and she was very good at letting everyone else know that. (Fred was more of an ordinary student.) Miriam knew six languages – French, Spanish, Latin, Hebrew, German, and English. She knew a lot of German poetry and, for example, could recite verse from Heine. When I was in high school and college, she wanted me to read the Forty Days of Musa Dagh. I might do that in the not too distant future, to get to know her better. 

 

I did not think of her as a genius because in spite of her aptitude she was so rules based in her approach, whether this was in teaching language or playing bridge there was always a rule to follow that would get you onto the right path. I didn’t like rules very much. I wanted to reason through the particulars of the situation and come to a conclusion based on reasoning. Miriam could not go from rules to reason and back again. Rules were it for her, or so it seemed to me. I couldn’t understand that, especially since there were notable times where following the rules let us down. And though I too was a very good student in High School, genetically I think that has to do more with Sidney than with Miriam. Sidney’s approach was more like mine. 

 

In our thread one of the core questions was how similar the siblings Miriam, Fred, Robert, and an older sister, Gertrude, were in spite of obvious differences, including those in academic achievement. And then the question was whether those similarities stem from heredity or upbringing. In turn we were asking about ourselves. What of them is in us and our children? And how much of that has to with bloodlines versus how we were raised? 

 

These were our core questions. I believe that every Community of Inquiry has to have its core questions. And one ingredient for the success of the community is the passion and intensity of interest that members have in pursuit of answers to the core questions. Right before the Sloan conference at Norma’s suggestion (Norma is my office mate at work and she also attended the conference) I started to read Henry Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture. Some of what was said in the intro to the topic and the insights of Pierre Levy that Jenkins cited resonated with me quite a bit. But there was a disconnect for me too. The first real chapter in Jenkins book deals with the community of “Spoilers” for the TV show Survivor. The participants were passionate and deeply engaged in the activities of the Spoiler Community. But surely the underlying motivation, identifying the winners and losers in the TV competition, was at base trivial and unimportant. Were the behaviors of such communities of inquiry relevant to what I was experiencing in the thread with my cousins? And was it relevant to the more formal learning communities that sometimes emerge in the classroom setting and that were at issue in sessions at the Sloan conference? Clearly there is a difference if it is not just the Communities of Inquiry that should be the focus but also the questions themselves with which these communities are engaged. Hmmm, how does one categorize those questions?

 

My tentative answer is to look at root as to whether those questions have any personal connection to the individuals performing the inquiry. If not, it is just sport. Sport can be engaging, no doubt. But one can walk away from it and move on to something else and be no worse for wear. If it is personal one can’t walk away. Even if we get wrapped up in other things, it is still there, to intrude on us whether we want it to or not. 

 

In much of our formal teaching, a question we don’t ask but should is whether we can make it personal for the students. Think of engineering education broadly conceived or of courses students take that are required but outside the major. Consider their motivation. What is there beyond the desire to get through that material, to earn a credential and get a good job as a consequence? 

 

I took special note of this issue because at a session on workforce education Frank Mayadas made a comment that ALN for worker education aimed at retooling these people in their current jobs or making them attractive enough to find new employment had none of focus that traditional General Education has, to make well rounded individuals with critical thinking skills who are able to participate in performing their civic responsibilities. Rather workforce education must focus on raising individual productivity and that is the acid test of whether it is successful or not. This is true enough, but from my limited experience with adult education (via professional development activities for learning technologists) I believe this issue of whether it is sport or personal matters a great deal and the more effective education has a personal aspect to it even if it also has a strong technical component --- people find their jobs a means for self-expression and the educational opportunity needs to make that overt. This does not mean people should eschew the technical aspects of their work. Instead it means they should be able to make connections to the work on many different levels, some of which are personal.

The last morning of the conference I sat in the back of the room in a session given by Chuck Dzubian and Karen Swan about the future of online learning. For his part Chuck dutifully went through all the reasons why prediction is impossible; we just don’t know enough. Chuck didn’t even have to entertain the Random Walk Hypothesis to make his case, but I felt he was on terra firma in doing so. He spent some time talking about the Black Swan (no relation to Karen) and the impact of highly improbable but important events. With that as backdrop he then went in to making predictions based not on what is likely but rather on what online learning students and faculty seem to want, much of which falls in the category of greater convenience. I don’t recall all of it (perhaps his PowerPoint will appear on the Conference Web site soon) but I do recall a request for materials to be more modular. That was part of the prediction. 

 

I want to make my own little predictions, somewhat contrary to the above, based on my experience with my cousins over the last several weeks and my thinking about teaching and learning these past several years. We need to engross our students in larger themes, those that make them see the big picture, those that can captivate them for some time to come. We don’t need modularity, we need a holistic approach. Students must be able to find something of themselves in the fields that they study. Their engagement will follow both from curiosity a la Jerome Bruner and self-actualization a la Maslow. And, in opposition to what most have been arguing, students will seek out depth of presentation, including in writing, as long as that provides illumination for their own inquiry. It is self-evident that information is abundant, occasionally overwhelmingly so. But that is not why so many students are non-readers or read only sporadically. Rather it is because it is so difficult to separate the chaff from the wheat.

Much of what we need to do as educators requires doing this task on behalf of students, particularly during their formative stages when the issue about their engagement remains in doubt and when the formalisms of the discipline might seem daunting and uninviting. We must see our jobs as touching the students personally so that they willingly make these commitments to their own learning. I heard a fair amount at the conference about the instructor’s main job being to get out of the way of the students, it is their inquiry after all and they should pursue it. One also reads a lot on that score in the edu-blog community, for example in the writing of Stephen Downes. I can understand why the argument is made. It makes the most sense once the passion in the student has been lit and the hunger to learn means the motivation problem has been solved. Then self-led inquiry within a community of others makes good sense. 

 

But students are looking to be led to areas of fascination that they have not yet uncovered and they welcome the professor with both the knowledge of such places and the human understanding to make it known why these are places of strong interest. The role of the teacher then is quite different, guide but front and center, playing a pied piper role and watching carefully whether any of his students follow the tune. It might seem this role of professor makes the most sense for 18-22 years old students, particularly for Freshmen or for those starting in on the major. Thinking as such the emphasis is on the overall immaturity of the students. Thus I believe it continues to make sense at all junctures in a person’s development, even if the student is much older, as long as there is fundamentally a new perspective to be gained, a new bridge to traverse. With respect to the new perspective the person is immature and self-inquiry might very well not find the path. The professor has the keys, even now, even with all the relevant information freely available on the Internet. 

 

The labels we’ve used to describe teaching and learning the last decade or so – teacher-centric versus learner-centric – have created a false opposition and some wrong headed thinking both about methods and about outcomes. If instead we could agree on the need for students to make personal attachments to the subjects they study, we could make more progress. 

 

Let me leave you all with this thought. As the holiday season approaches are there lessons we can learn from interacting with our siblings and our cousins and the rest of our family? What keeps them engaged with each other? What about tone and the type of banter? These are questions to keep in the back of the mind as we take our break. Sometimes the best lessons come when we’re not trying to learn.

Recording Video Chats

Following up on my previous post, I've enlisted Norma's help to find a way for non-techie end users to be able to record such conversations for on demand viewing. The idea being that one can do "online guest lecturers" this way in a low cost and low stress manner. One can try Skype or Oovoo or some other video chat software in a live classroom setting, but the occasional network hiccup or other mishap might make that less satisfying. We seem to be more tolerant of video quality on demand as long as the audio can be clearly heard.

So yesterday we futzed with Pamela, a helper application for Skype that does the recording. (Note that you need the "pro" version of the software that does have a fee but there is a free trial period. You can't do video recording with the free version.) The video that Pamela records is what shows up inside your Skype video call window. That is either the person at the other end of the chat or that with a picture in a picture view of you, as a thumbnail. (Oddly, my video works but that picture in the picture function doesn't work on my computer. It worked fine on Norma's.)

Pamela records that picture window faithfully. Unfortunately, it introduces a kind of reverse latency. The sound come first and then the picture come a moment later - you can hear laughter from a joke and then see the the person laughing afterwards. This is not bad for a joke itself, but it is unsettling for viewing a serious conversation.

We will experiment with Pamela some more, because it seems promising. But for now I'd use it only for audio recording. Those can be "Pamcast." And because of the comparatively low bandwidth in use while recording, I expect those to have reasonably good fidelity.

Two Heads are better than one.

Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus in Video Debate on the New York Times site.

bloggingheads.tv

Affection

Flying is for the birds. Actually, the trip from the Sea-Tac airport to O’Hare on Alaska Airlines was comparatively benign. We had the Jet Stream working for us in that direction so the trip took under 4 hours. And the plane was a fairly new Boeing 737-900, with reasonably comfortable seats and adequate leg room between rows. They even served Macadamia nuts along with the usual soft drinks. So what’s not to like? Well, for starters, how about a two hour layover in O’Hare? I had my le Carre novel, Absolute Friends, which I was enjoying and my iPod Shuffle to block out the outside noise and get into my own personal space. And I tried to break up the time a bit with a Starbucks. But even with the creature comforts, hanging out at airports is disorienting. I was baffled by why American Airlines has no flight to Champaign near when I arrived but then two flights 20 minutes apart around 7 PM. (Select ORD for From and CMI for To and then choose early evening.) I was on the earlier one of these and it was on time, no small blessing. Yet for those of you who have not experienced the delights of an ERJ 145 jet with 3 across seating, insufficient headroom to stand in the aisle, and a shoehorn-you-into-your-seat approach especially unappealing for a big guy like me, take my word that it’s those commuter flights that do you in. I was a zombie most of the weekend.

I’m not here to gripe, however, at least not about travel inconvenience. I’m very glad I went to the Educause Conference. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s opening lecture was incredibly good, worth the trip in itself. And I was in a variety of invited sessions where the conversation was stimulating and productive, though a particular talk by Terry Hartle of ACE Tuesday evening that was part of a dinner/discussion session hosted by D2L got me into a dither because he was so thoughtful and well informed but his subject – how the political climate in DC and elsewhere around the country is so into this notion of accountability – got me depressed because on the one had we need to wake up and address the problem while on the other it sure seems we’ll do more harm than good. Hartle used data about fatality rates at hospitals, data that does not reference other information about patient well being and hence data that can create quite a misleading picture, to emphasize the point. Of course in Higher Ed we’ve been reporting on graduation rates for years without, for example, indexing them by median SAT score at the institution, so we are likely confounding student capabilities with institutional commitment to learning. Hartle indicated that both in DC and in state capitols, the hyperinflation in tuition has created a fatigue with legislators about us in Higher Ed saying “we’ll study the problem.” They want action. Later during the same session when we were having discussions at each individual table, I asked Hartle whether FERPA puts a damper on us collecting data to show how the institution is performing. Hartle immediately brought up the Gonzaga Case, something I was unaware of, to make the point that FERPA doesn’t do much if anything to block efforts at institutional accountability. Too bad.

I’m part of several different overlapping groups where a good part of the Educause conference is to seek out group members and rekindle a spark with them. One of those is the CIC Learning Technology Group, where my role now is past chair (John Campbell is the current chair) and general contrarian. There were many folks from the group at that Tuesday Dinner. I’m on very friendly terms with many of them, a combination of shared experience and a sense that we have a lot to learn from each other. And it’s fun too because we know we can be open with each other on just about any topic and benchmark ourselves, not just the programs we support, in a way that’s not threatening. It is so much easier to talk with someone if there is a sense of an ongoing conversation. We have that in the LT Group. We don’t need to build the bond. It is already there.

A different group is the folks from my campus who have essentially the same title as I’ve got but who are in different colleges plus a few folks in the Campus Academic Technology unit (CITES). It seems ridiculous to travel 2,000 miles to meet up with folks from your own campus and have conversations with them there. But some of it is not so silly. I happened to be on the same flight out as Ken Spelke, so we chatted both at Willard and O’Hare and ended up having dinner together that first night. Later, on Wednesday I believe, I bumped into Deanna Raineri, my very good friend and my counterpart in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. We did a bit of a walk around the Exhibit Hall (I’m not crazy about the practice of having the box lunches all the way in the back so one must walk through at least some of the vendor displays to get to the food, but c’est la vie) and by accident while heading to the exit bumped into Xythos CEO Kevin Wiggen, who happens to be an Illinois Alum, and mostly by happenstance I have a kind of collegial relationship with him that mirrors the better relationships I have with my academic counterparts. Kevin gave Deanna and me an annotated tour of their latest release – quite nice.

Somehow later that day I ended up with both Deanna and Ken at the Starbucks in the Hyatt chatting about IT on our campus and how much we don’t know about what is going on. We’re in a brave new world with a new Campus CIO and much speculation about where we are heading IT-wise. I meet with each of them individually here in Urbana on a regular basis, but we rarely get together as a threesome. So what was meant as a restbit to gather energy (i.e., caffeine) for the evening festivities ends up as an extended and sometimes heated conversation about the campus direction. We had planned to have a College CIOs group meet monthly this year, but the group hasn’t gotten off the ground yet. If this conversation is any indication we’ll have no problem keeping up the conversation when we do meet. The sense of trust is the same as with the LT Group, perhaps even stronger. But in this case we care a lot about information flows – or lack thereof. Ours is a complex and decentralized campus. Also, we need to get each other’s perspective on recent events to see if our own take really makes sense.

Another group where there is a strong bond is my Frye class. I was in the 2003 cohort. Ten of us made it to dinner Wednesday night and I found it both charming and delightful that others want to get together as much as I do. Here the sense of common shared experience is most intense. The talk goes from work to paying for the our kids’ college to viewing IT as political economy to favorite TV programs all in a fluid, we-can-go-anywhere-we-want type of conversation. We don’t really talk much about nostalgia regarding our experience at Frye, maybe a bit but mostly not. But we do feel close to one another. That is unmistakable.

* * * * *

There was a different set of emotions on display at the conference because Brian Hawkins is stepping down as President and CEO of Educause and the conference was his swan song, with many people expressing their gratitude for Brian’s contribution and Polly McClure, in particular, talking of him as a model for her and the rest of us to emulate. It seemed as if everyone was taken up with Brian’s leaving.

I don’t know Brian well but some of the places where I interacted with him show up even better in retrospect. Brian, along with Pat Battin and Susan Perry were the “elders” who sat in the back of the room and assisted the “Deans,” Deanna Marcum and Rick Detweiler, during most of the time we were in plenary session at Frye, an institute that covers two weeks. Having more recently been a faculty member at the Learning Technology Leadership Institute, less than half the length of Frye and knowing how intense that was even as a kibitzer in the back of the room during sessions when I wasn’t a presenter, a big take away for me about Brian was the strength of his commitment. Much of that was exhibited just by his being there. Brian did give us a talk near the end of Frye – we need to expect to put in the time, a lot of time; we need to read the Chronicle and understand the job market and not just in our own area; we need to make some personal sacrifice to move up and likely if we want to advance we need to change institution (this is a toughie with a spouse who is also employed by the university and with kids who have friends at school that were long in the making ). So commitment and straight talk, that’s what I think of when considering Brian.

The conference itself is such a production and this time around some of the Educause staff seemed apologetic because the venue was sold out and in some ways too small for the size of the conference. I can only imagine what type of performance pressure the annual conference and all the other events put on Brian. He seemed to take it all in stride. I was a Nervous Nellie when I was hosting FSI – with only about 100 participants. Brian was always graceful in whatever context I saw him. That is a tribute to the Educause staff and their capabilities and Brian’s trust in them. Polly McClure was right. Brian is a great role model.

* * * * *

I could go on. I’ve been part of other Educause and also vendor-created groups and there is good camaraderie with some of those people, a few of whom I saw at the conference. But I want to change perspective here because I want to comment on some of the larger issues that were the talk of the conference.

With my friends I’m completely at ease, open and garrulous. Some may get the impression that I’m always that way, but they’d be quite wrong. Friends are insiders and there is a particular norm of behavior for them. It just isn’t the same with outsiders. Then one doesn’t know quite how to take their comments. There is little or no context. That goes likewise for how remarks I make might be understood. I want to illustrate with a personal anecdote first to show the problem. Then I’ll bring the discussion back to the conference.

When I was a teen I had battles with my mother, some of it standard “generation gap” problems – clean up your room. This particular incident is of a different sort. In considering High School, my mom wanted me to attend Bayside High, which was not then our community school. She wanted me to take Latin and for that there was a zoning variance so I could go to Bayside. The local school was brand new, Benjamin Cardozo HS, and as such was unproven. My sister, five years my senior, had attended Bayside in a similar fashion instead of attending the then new school, Francis Lewis. My sister liked going to Bayside and did well there. Language helped my sister’s GPA.

But I’m different from my sister in many respects and the circumstances had changed. Both Bayside and Francis Lewis required a bus ride; Cardozo was within walking distance. I was a math guy where my sister was not. As it turned out my Junior High School was in the process of converting to an Intermediate school and indeed I graduated after eighth grade. I believe the entire system was making that conversion but was doing so unevenly. Bayside High had a ninth grade but not one with much richness – my impression is it mostly had kids who went to parochial school but then didn’t continue to a Catholic High School and most of those kids weren’t good students. So the math and science I was getting there was too elementary for me and more to the point I felt isolated with little prospect of finding peers whom I could befriend. Ultimately I got very emotional and with my mom’s help arranged a transfer to Cardozo. (This was the same term, fall 1968, of the big New York City Teacher’s strike and while I was at Bayside for only a few weeks, it was several months before I started at Cardozo. In the interim I had my (impacted) wisdom teeth removed and attended a scab school… at Francis Lewis.)

I held a grudge against my mom for a very long time. She applied rules based on my sister’s experience without being sensitive to the particulars of my situation. She didn’t see my needs at all. I was a very good student and didn’t need language to boost my grades. I needed honors math and science for intellectual growth more than I needed Latin. And I took a great deal of comfort from being with my friends from Junior High. Cardozo was definitely better for me (and I believe it later proved to be a better High School overall). I thought parents were supposed to show that kind of sensitivity to their kids needs. It wasn’t until well into my twenties when my mother’s health began to deteriorate, and much later in my forties when I started to see some of her personality in my own kids that I began to see her perspective, though I still think the choice of Bayside High was wrong.

Accountability in Higher Education appears to be the “taking Latin” equivalent of today. There is nothing wrong with it ceteris paribus. Unfortunately, all else is never equal. Accountability as an issue is there to appease outsiders. This was made evident throughout the conference. In addition to Terry Hartle talk I heard Tuesday, there was a featured panel session with several member s of Spellings Commission Thursday morning. Among the panelists were David Ward of ACE, Terry Hartle’s boss and the sole member of the Commission who didn’t sign off on the final report. David Ward made several subtle points, and I applaud his intellectual integrity in sticking with nuance, but I thought his rhetorical style lost in the battle with the other panelists. Both Charlene Nunley and especially Robert Mendenhall were more effective in making argument, precisely because they had a simple model on which to base all that they talked about. As I’ve argued elsewhere, for example in this post, a rhetorical style based on a simple analytic framework is usually best for winning a debate, because it solves the framing problem for the listener. Capture the frame and all else follows.

But winning a debate doesn’t mean the argument is correct; it just means it is more persuasive. (Recall Lincoln on fooling the people and do note that subtlety is lost on those who have yet to think hard on an issue.) At the Tuesday evening dinner D2L did a good job of in the main staying out of the way. But at the beginning and at the end they made a pitch to get those in the audience to participate with them in writing White Papers on assessment with data. I for one will not take part in such activities BECAUSE I’D END UP SCREAMING. I will note here, however, that there is a need to articulate clearly the mechanism for quality assurance that is currently in play under the trust model.

We in Higher Ed say “trust us” but we don’t explain why it is that we should be deemed trustworthy. People have heard about publish or perish but they don’t know how it relates. They don’t know about faculty recruiting and the effort involved with that. They also don’t know about performance review.

They hear about what seems to be too few hours spent by faculty in the classroom and they implicitly get the idea that teaching is at odds with research. For undergraduate education, I think that perception is accurate, at least insofar as we continue to teach courses where the content is static, meaning it is essentially the same course as was taught twenty or thirty years ago. I’ve taught Economic Principles recently and was able to bring a freshness to the course by entirely abandoning a textbook approach, bringing in my own online content made with Excel, getting the students to read from journal articles in the American Economic Review Proceedings or the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and from such books as Freakonomics. But I did this as part of an experiment on how to teach, not as an extension of my current economics research.

There is a large issue, one that not too many people seem to be discussing now, about how to do the appropriate “translation” to make current research of interest and palpable for undergraduate instruction, particularly in a field like economics that attracts large numbers of students and that has a rich tradition, dating back at least to Adam Smith. That type of translation requires thought and effort, the results of which are largely not rewarded in the current model. (Those who argue for SOTL miss the point because SOTL work counts for naught by the faculty within a discipline who evaluate each other.) So all is not rosy for teaching and learning under the current model. But don’t think the accountability issue will help in this regard. That’s all about whether junior is learning what is being taught. It’s not about whether what is being taught is the right stuff for junior to know.

While normally outspoken on larger issues that engage the profession, I fear that there will be a garbling of the core questions if brought out in open debate, and so speak up here with mixed feelings. People “out there” want answers and they are impatient, to the point where they expect answers before they have the appropriate background to consider the alternatives. But I fear even more for my friends and colleagues within the profession, people whom I care about deeply. We’re being drawn into this argument whether we want to or not. We’re likely not of one mind on the answers to these questions. That could very well create distance between us, possibly even contempt for each other’s point of view. Our collegiality and affection for one another is our greatest asset. It would be a shame to tarnish it. Unfortunately, this seems to be the direction where we’re headed.

Edu Pause

I’m headed to Seattle tomorrow. I’ve got a pre-conference workshop Tuesday morning on Learning Spaces and the conference starts for real that evening. Since I missed the conference last year because of my leg injury, I really look forward to seeing folks. That will be great. But I continue to feel a sense of unease about where the profession is headed and how IT is perceived, both from within the profession and from those outside the profession in Higher Ed looking who are looking in.

Last week we had our Online Learning Symposium on campus. The opening keynote was given by Mark Milliron and at lunch there was a presentation by Sally Jackson, our CIO. Both talks were provocative though their emphasis was quite different. It was almost as if they were opposed to each other. In his presentation Milliron focused on forces from academia pushing us in Higher Ed, for example due to change in the technology itself or to the increased demand for accountability based on performance data, as has recently been the scourge of the health care. Sally, for her part, critiqued our past in Higher Ed with learning technology. Too many of our attempts at innovation didn’t stick. They were done with incentive that didn’t produce long coattails and when the incentive went away… She argued that our focus should be on those technologies that are embraced because they offer value in and of themselves and especially those where the adoption by one enhances the value for another. Examples of those technologies include eBay and Wikipedia, but of course the marketplace supports that type of technology. Within Higher Ed we need to support the long tail of research needs specific to disciplines, presumably with applications that are of interest to us all. But on whether this means mostly to keep doing what we’re doing or if it is a call to invest in new applications that have not hit the mainstream on most campuses is unclear to me.

Here are a few of the other dichotomies we are facing, or so it seems to me.

Openness versus Privacy

One of the second year MBA students, somebody who was on my advisory committee last year, bumped into me last week and he told me the students weren’t happy with Illinois Compass, the Campus Course Management system (it is powered by WebCT Vista). While he admitted that some of this might be transition issues, he also said the main complaint is that students don’t have enough control configuring the spaces to their liking and making discussion areas just for them – they had that in FirstClass, an application we’re trying to stop supporting in my College. Recently I’ve been playing with iGoogle and Google Docs in combination, along with other Web 2.0 tools that can be brought into an iGoogle page. Functionally, it would work quite nicely for the students. But the content would sit outside the university. I like the solution very much in terms of functionality and convenience. I don’t like it that the students would have to bear the risk, rather than the campus. In my own work, I’m ok absorbing that risk. But imposing that on others? I’m still trying to figure out where I come down on this. The powers that be on my campus don’t seem to think outsourcing these services are a good idea. But what we have to offer that is campus supported is much less convenient.

Respect versus Defiance of Authority (Copyright, Plagiarism, Accountability, and what else?)

I’m turning into a curmudgeon. There is no doubt about it. I’m beginning to enjoy “giving it to the man” to quote the Jack Black character in The School of Rock. I’ve got several posts in the last year or so in this vein. But this is not being contrary for no reason. It is because the maintained position has problems with it. When the MPAA and the RIAA raise a ruckus about student file sharing, and within recent memory we have DMCA, an example of their lobbying power to subvert the public interest, it is entirely unclear that we in Higher Ed should bow to the proposition – respect of the law – and end up being policemen of our own students. Absent an ongoing stream of effective rhetoric and policy making on the other side of this proposition, what should respectable folks in IT do, especially those not old enough to become curmudgeons like me?

Leader versus Follower

The Pied Piper myth gives us belief in miracle cure to intractable problems. Technology offers such miracle cures, at least it does so in the minds of the believer. This is the argument for technology as the driver, to take us to the new world. But too many technology “solutions” seemingly don’t end up fitting the problems at hand and end up being critiqued for not living up to their promise. One might get a better fit by choosing a technology base on a scenario articulated entirely absent the technology. This is the argument that technology should be second fiddle to the other issues on campus that we confront. Sometimes we call this the alignment issue.

I’m not happy with technologists who seem oblivious to this question. I’m equally unhappy with others on campus who don’t even try to see technology as a possible solution. But I have been arguing for some time that we in IT shoot ourselves in the foot by ignoring the question entirely. As long as the rhetoric within IT (and within Educause) promotes this dichotomy rather than attempts to reconcile it, we’re apt to be ignored and not trusted.

Data versus Trust

I’m still in pain over the Yankees being outed in the playoffs and Joe Torre no longer managing the team. This Buster Olney column puts the trust-data tradeoff in a different light. My reading of the sports pages the last few days is that trust wins. Old fashion values don’t always die hard. Sometimes they live on. It’s the new fashioned ideas that go the wayside. Does the analog apply to Higher Ed as well? I really don’t know, but I posed the question in this post. I’m guessing that at the conference there will be a lot of unquestioning folks arguing for the data side of the equation. I’m happy to have a beer with any and all of them. I’ll be less happy if they brush me off and take it all as a given.

Cost Add versus Cost Saving

It’s odd being in a Business School which has a $62M instructional facility due to come online next summer. We’re spending a pretty penny on the AV in the classrooms – our tiered classrooms are supposed to have three lcd projectors, the two on each side will show the same image and since the room is horseshoe shaped are there to guarantee all have a decent line of sight to at least one of the screens. The other larger screen in the middle is there to show a different image. Some of our faculty have asked for the ability to display multiple images simultaneously. Our flat classrooms will have two projectors, each for a distinct image.

Since buildings are funded by donors, its not hard to build up a case of use that justifies their largesse; multiple projectors in a classroom is only one comparatively minor instance of that. But elsewhere, where tuition and state funding combined seem inadequate to support our activities, we think of instructional technology different, as a substitute for the TA we don’t have or for the reasonable student/faculty ratio that we also don’t have, particularly in the gateway courses. That there is one or the other, I could adapt myself to that fairly easily. That there are both simultaneously makes me wonder repeatedly which will win out. I really don’t know. Nor do I know whether the Business school is special in this regard or if it just like the rest of campus.

* * * * *

I’m not expecting the conference to resolve these dichotomies but I am hopeful that they come up now and then during the week. Even if one doesn’t find truth, it is comforting to know there are others looking to answer the same questions.

It’s a Small World and the Nobel Prize in Economics

This morning they announced the Nobel Prize winners in Economics. One of the winners, Roger Myerson, was a professor of mine at Northwestern (Winter quarter, 1977) for a course in non-linear programming. That was my first year in grad school and I believe Roger’s first quarter teaching. Before that, Roger was Ken Arrow’s student at Harvard. Arrow was another Nobel winner. During that first year we learned about all the giants of economic theory. Arrow and Gerard Debreu were at the very top for their formulation of the general equilibrium model. (Lionel McKenzie was also a pioneer in this area but didn’t get quite the same notice.) The third great theorist we became aware of at the time was Leo Hurwicz, for mechanism design. It’s remarkable that he didn’t win the prize until now. He was a giant even then. The funny thing is that Hurwicz was once a faculty member at Illinois, before I was born. So was Franco Modigliani, another Nobel winner. Back then we let some very big fish get away.

Let me get back to Roger. Reading the New York Times piece and this piece in the Chicago Tribune, which is a little more informative, it seems these papers don’t think they can educate their readers as to what “mechanism design” really means so they talk about it but don’t explain it. I’m going to try to provide some explanation with an example.

Before the Internet and Websites like Travelocity or Expedia, one had to book flights either through the airlines themselves or through a travel agent, who would do the lookup on your behalf to find the appropriate flights at the appropriate fares. In turn, the airlines set the fares in kind of an arcane way but with a particular goal in mind – they wanted to separate out the buyers by their willingness to pay, and get those willing to pay more to do that, in exchange for some perq that these buyers would value. Equivalently, they wanted to give discounts to those buyers who were looking for a bargain, but they needed to provide some inconvenience in addition or else all buyers would want to buy at the lower price.

One mechanism that they opted for, a mechanism that persisted for quite some time, was the Saturday stay over. “Business travelers”, who had their travel paid by their employer, wanted to get home once their business concluded. But “tourists”, looking for bargains, would be willing to accept the Saturday stay over to get the lower fairs and accommodate their vacations to that.

In 1979 Roger wrote a paper where he introduced an idea called the “Revelation Principle” (I believe the same idea was later invented independently by Robert Townsend) where Roger showed that for every mechanism (Saturday stay over is one such mechanism) there is an equivalent “direct mechanism” that leads to exactly the same outcomes. In this case in the direct mechanism the traveler announces either “I’m a business traveler” or “I’m a tourist” and then the mechanism allocates both the travel time and the payments in a way that makes them “incentive compatible,” meaning it is in the interest of each type to report their type truthfully given the incentives in place.

The value of this finding was huge for economics research. For an arbitrary mechanism it is sometimes quite hard to work through the full implications of the incentive scheme. But for a direct mechanism where it is known that each type will report truthfully, it is much easier to design an optimal mechanism. During the 1980s and early 1990s, many economics papers (including a few I wrote) looked for the optimal direct mechanism within a certain particular environment that was deemed worthy of study, as a way to explain behavior in that particular environment. The approach was adopted in Industrial Organization, Labor Economics, International Trade, and other fields as well. Roger’s work paved the way for all this other work.

I’m glad he won the award. It makes me feel proud of the graduate education I received and that the whole thing really is close to home.

Where does active learning happen?

I’ve been scratching my head about whether my blogging is active learning, using definitions that are in common parlance nowadays. On the pro side, I do produce some new or a fresh perspective on what others are talking about by making associations between disparate ideas that are out there. This part fits in with constructivist notions of learning. But the activity is almost pure introspection, especially in the pre-writing phase. Then the activity becomes a blend of introspection, research qua Web surfing via Google (and some other sources of search), dictation to myself and modest keyboarding of that dictation, one phrase at a time, as well as some immediate editing to see if it reads back as well as it sounded the first time through and to catch obvious typos, all part of the process in what I call the composition phase.

So on the con side, it is a solitary activity without social interaction. Once in a while I will write in response to a post elsewhere by a friend or colleague and then perhaps there will be a response back to that, but more often than not I’m initiating based on what I’d call “external stimuli,” for example a New York Times article or an interview on the Charlie Rose show; and clearly I don’t have a co-author with whom I negotiate the content of a post. The lack of social interaction might disqualify it as active learning in the minds of some. Indeed, when talking about learning these days we don’t seem to talk much about introspection, reflection especially as a means of metacognition about some other learning activity, yes, but introspection as a means to initiate an idea, no. For me, blogging is a lot of that. Is it active learning? I’ll let others be the judge.

A lot of what I do in my job working on relationships with others around campus and developing new initiatives I would term active learning. The principal tools are email for asynchronous communication and then face to face conversation, either in one of our offices or more likely at a coffee place. It has the feel of an ongoing conversation rather than a one shot thing and it may very well be that we have multiple distinct but interrelated threads that we deal with in any single meeting. There are some smaller workgroups that also function this way. Larger committees don’t. In large committees, if I were doing the “whip” function I would treat members as a group of individuals and then have one-on-one interactions with each individual, which is where the active learning would happen. It is very hard to do brainstorming in the larger group absent those one-on-one interactions and the discussion will go nowhere in a hurry unless it has some direction based on prior interactions with individual members.

People do have busy schedules so sometimes a conversation doesn’t conclude within a given session. But the conversation doesn’t stop because somebody has to be somewhere else. We’ll pick it up again face to face in the not too distant future and in between there will be email aimed at furthering the ideas. With people I know reasonably well, we schedule generously to not feel rushed when we do meet and because we like these conversations. So for me, active learning occurs at the coffee place, somebody’s office, while at my computer, and if the introspection part counts too then any place I do that, which is basically anywhere and everywhere when I’m by myself.

With that as background I want to consider active learning by students in the courses they take. I have never been comfortable with that notion because it is something unlike what I described above. Often, it refers to quick hitter interactions that are a break from lecture or that are used to jump start an ensemble discussion. Often the active learning ends when the bell goes off signaling the end of class. And in many of the cases of which I’m aware these active learning activities are done as a one off. In the next class the students are paired differently. I know that most of those in the profession advocate for active learning of this type, but I think there are some pernicious consequences to the approach, mainly that a student can readily come to believe that good ideas are there for the having in short order, which in turn creates a sense of impatience in the students that learning should happen quickly (and that they need not put in a lot of time to learn a lot). Indeed, once an instructor has developed that perception in the students further accommodation of the perception requires the instructor to steer away from hard problems. The pressure to meet the perception helps to make the perception self-fulfilling.

If we want our students to engage in deep learning, it seems inescapable to me that most of the active learning has to happen outside the regularly scheduled class time, in small groups that persist for a while and which interact in a manner similar to the way in which I interact in my work, and if we agree that introspection can be a part of the process then also when the students are by themselves but focusing on the issues at hand. We are now many years into supporting our approach to active learning, both on my campus and in the profession at large, but on this basic point we still haven’t reached agreement that active learning should happen this way, at least when considering active learning in the setting of regularly scheduled courses.

And it seems to me that the reasons why we have no such agreement is that the instructor can readily observe what happens during the scheduled class session but can at best only infer what happens outside of class and then make only very coarse inferences, which are based on the work that students produce and often that work itself is only measured by how students do on exams.

Much current criticism of the lecture is based on considering that in isolation, instead of viewing the lecture in conjunction with the work that students do in study groups, which is where the active learning is apt to occur. It certainly seems at least possible, and I believe my first year in graduate school functioned much this way, that the in-classroom lecture during the day serve as fodder for the introspection and the study group interaction that happens mostly in the evening. When I was in grad school the study groups formed as a grass roots thing because many of the students needed it as a survival mechanism in the classes and the rest of us who could have done ok with just the introspection wanted to hang around with our classmates for social reasons.

Let us all agree that lectures that don’t engender active learning outside of class (and while I’ve not looked at the recent results, the NSSE from a few years back indicated that at many public universities we have quite a few classes of this sort) are quite likely ineffective. But what of those that do? In other words, what if lecture is accompanied by rather serious work for the students to complete out of class, with the lecture at least in part an instrument to help the students complete the work? Does that mechanism provide for effective learning or not? If not, does the study group approach fail because group activities are structured by the students themselves rather than by the instructor and hence the students apply themselves in a manner that is not efficient to promote their own learning?

I’ve not actually seen anyone argue on this point. Rather it seems the gospel that lectures are bad pure and simple and that active learning should happen in the classroom and only in the classroom. So I find myself at odds with much of the profession, because as I said that doesn’t make sense to me.

I could readily believe an argument that said some active learning in the class is necessary because students need to learn to scaffold their arguments and discussions in a way the produces results, not gridlock. But surely we shouldn’t be under the impression that the in class work is sufficient in itself. Look at Chickering and Ehrmann’s Seven Principles. They do make sense to me. But I believe it is possible to implement them all while still having some substantial amount of lecture face to face.

Addendum to Previous Post

I did test everything I wrote about in the previous message, but Norma tried the Calendar and it worked like the Gmail and Google Docs, not how I reported. I'm not sure what's up with that. In any event, there is a post in the Announcements area on how to get the group Calendar into your Google Calendars and then use it as advertised.

What’s in a name? And what’s with Google?

Here are a few things about Google stuff, some good and some not so. Let’s start with the good and if you have a Gmail account you can try this first one yourself. Log into Google and then follow this link, to add Prof Econ’s Group (Professor.Economist is a particular account in Google that I have for this demo) as a tab to your iGoogle page. Even if you don’t want to try that, you can get much of the idea by going to your own iGoogle page, clicking on the down arrow next to the active tab, and then following the Share this tab link.

When you do that, you get a window to invite people to share with. In that window there is a checkbox for each gadget on the tab and then there is another checkbox, initially unchecked, that says Share pre-configured gadget settings. I checked that box, then sent the invite message to another of my Gmail accounts. Here is a screenshot of the added tab for those who opt not to actually add that tab to their own iGoogle page. You can follow along with the rest by looking at the screen shot.

There are 6 gadgets on this tab. Prof Econ’s Place is my name for what others might call “Announcements.” It is created by a feed from this blog, which is from where it takes its name. If you’ve installed the tab, you can actually click through to the blog from the gadget. Likewise, the del.icio.us content is what others might call “Bookmarks” and obviously comes from a del.icio.us feed. Do note that the feeds sometimes take a while to update. Let me skip the next three gadgets and return to them. The Google Video gadget also comes from feeds. In this case you do a search to identify the video content so the content you want must be uniquely identified by the search. I did two different searches, each associated with its own tag.

The above three gadgets work pretty much as in any other feed aggregator, such as Netvibes (though I’d be curious as to whether the Google Video gadget works in Netvibes). The next three work differently and in my view inconsistently apply the checkbox for pre-configured gadgets. The calendar one works as advertised. It appears to show the particular Calendar from Prof Econ’s group, whether the user is subscribed or not. The other two gadgets show the most recent items from the user’s Gmail and Google docs, not the most recent items for these tools from Prof Econ’s Gmail and Google docs. That’s ok if it is understood how it works.

The Google docs gadget is really the most interesting one. For Prof Econ to get a document he has uploaded to appear in that gadget for a user, Prof Econ must share the document with the user. Sharing is managed via Gmail contacts. In the process of sharing the document, Prof Econ sends an email message to the user to which says that the document is being shared. The user doesn’t have to do anything with that email. It serves as a receipt only. One reason to show the Gmail gadget on the page is that for each document that Prof Econ shares there should be a corresponding email receipt.

In order to get this to function smoothly, Prof Econ needs to amass the Gmail addresses of all the users. At present, that is the single biggest headache to get this approach to work – how to amass those accounts. In a group with a few dozen people, this is a manageable problem and I’d encourage the approach. In a class with several hundred students, that problem may make the approach unwieldy. From my play with this, I suggest that if the group gets much larger than 5 or 10, that the person playing the role of Prof Econ actually set up a separate Gmail account just for this purpose, so that the contact list coincides with membership in the group. Then the distribution is fairly easy. If the contact list in your regular Gmail account has many names already, deciding who is in the group or not will be time consuming. Perhaps soon in the future Google docs will allow subfolders of Contacts and you can set up the group that way. But right now a separate account seems to be the easiest approach.

In some respect this post is a sequel to an early one, iGoogle and the LMS. I should point out that the LMS my campus uses, WebCT Vista, doesn’t have a document folder of this sort where the instructor shares documents with students and I know from comments I’ve received from MBA students that they’d really like to have such a feature. Indeed, the entire approach with iGoogle has appeal over an LMS approach in that everything is right there at the top level. For example, with the use of AJAX the user can read the message announcements by clicking the little plus sign next to the subject heading and do that without ever leaving that page. Likewise, the videos can be viewed right in the page, with a click-through possible if the user wants to see the video in a larger size. However, the issue goes beyond LMS in the sense that working groups of all sorts probably want this type of functionality, and for many of these working groups it would not occur to them to use an LMS. Convenience-wise, what is shown here can serve as a reasonable benchmark for alternative solutions. It may be less secure than some other possible solutions, and the content sits on Google servers rather than on servers run by the Campus, but in many instances those concerns are peripheral to users while convenience is central. I think this does quite well on the convenience front.

Let me also point out that if Google docs is really embraced this way, then the flow can go both ways and, in particular, students can share docs such as assignment submissions with Prof Econ. (As with the contact list for users, Prof Econ might want a separate account just for the “drop box” function, so to separate out those documents he has uploaded from those that have been shared with him by his students. But if Prof Econ manages his folders well, this may not be necessary.) The big virtue of using Google docs in this way compared to the more traditional drop box – no download is necessary. This makes the workflow of reading and commenting on the documents much easier and might really encourage electronic communication where now we still have a lot of paper flow.

If I were currently teaching the Campus Honors course I taught last in spring ’06, I’d try this approach.

* * * * *

Now to a more frivolous matter, but something that Google is doing that does bother me and I wish they’d stop. If you do a Google search on a first name, on some of these searches images will appear at the top. On others no image appears. As there is a Google Image search and a Google Video search, I’m not sure why they are allowing images in regular searches. At a minimum, it would be good for the user to control what comes back, whether it should just be Web pages or if images (and later video) should be allowed to come back too.

I know this from searching on my own first name. I get some substantial traffic to my blog from people doing that type of search. It turns out there is a porn star with the same first name and (not surprisingly) her site is the #1 response to the Google query. I’m ok with that. It’s what happens with an open Web. But why does her picture have to appear at the top of the page when doing this search?

I have not done a statistically valid experiment of searching on various first names and seeing whether they return images of well known people with that first name or not. But I’d bet that most of those pages that do return images show pictures of women scantily clad. I’m sure whoever at Google thought including the images this way was trying to cut down on the number of searches that the user makes to find what they are looking for. In general, I’m all for efforts that reduce the time needed to find stuff. But some sensibility should be brought to the endeavor. Folks who are actually looking for my site shouldn’t have to be exposed to these photos if they don’t want to. And the reality is that people are sufficiently imprecise with their search terms, so they very well might do a first name only search since my first name is somewhat rare and it’s easier to remember just one name rather than two. Google should reconsider its approach given this unintended consequence.

Do we plagiarize inadvertently?

This morning I read a blog post from Inside Higher Ed’s University Diaries. This one is called Plagiarism: Yours, Mine, and Ayres’ and concerns the apparent double standard where students receive severe punishment for getting caught plagiarizing but where highly visible faculty and administrators who have been found plagiarizing seemingly get off scot-free. The tone of the post is righteous indignation. And for some reason that bothered me, not about the faculty and administrators named in the piece and the sins they have committed, but rather on the question of how far from the norm they have strayed. If you recall the film, Breaking Away, I feel a bit like Dave Stoller, before he rode in the race with the Italian team where one of them rammed his tire pump into the spokes on Dave’s bike, forcing him to fall hard and drop out of the race, only to proclaim to his dad later that evening something to the effect, “They all cheat. I just didn’t know.”

On this plagiarism question, I just don’t know too. I’m not even sure about my own behavior. So I don’t think it a trivial question to ask. Let me illustrate what the problem is and then make some guesses on how to find the slippery slope.

First, having written a modest number of Economics papers published in refereed Economics Journals, plagiarism and correct citation in this case is a comparatively easy matter. A standard part of the writing is a literature review section and one covers the pieces that preceded the current work there. The incentives are in line to get the citations right – citations are one measure of influence of the work and there is a quid pro quo of sorts in citation, but really one needs to cite broadly to show referees that the author understands the relevant literature and to place the contribution correctly within that work. The only possible issue here is with comparatively new work that may still itself be under review. In any event, I’m not thinking about traditional journal publishing or academic book writing in asking my question.

I’m thinking about blogging, such as this blog. With informal publication of this sort, the set of potential sources is huge, one doesn’t typically try to do anything like a literature review, and there is no referee to please or clear standards to meet regarding citation. But that is not the real problem. The issue is how we get information nowadays. We are bombarded with information from a variety of sources: email, Web sites, radio and TV, information that is pushed at us by friends, colleagues, and business relations; information that we actively seek out on our own; and then all the follow up information after we have learned something and want to learn some more. Further, much if not most of this information is gathered with no intent whatsoever to write about it. Instead, we get the information to “keep up” or perhaps so we can feel on par when we engage in conversation where some of the information may come up in passing. Most of us are in this boat.

When I start to write a blog post there is something that triggers that main idea and I’m aware of that something, so that I cite by linking to the source if at all possible. But then a related idea might occur to me. I say to myself, “where did I see that?” And if I’m lucky I can do a Google search or two and find the source that triggered the related idea. Then I link to it. But sometimes I’m not so lucky and now there is an ethical choice to be made – mention the idea but with some faint disclaimer like, “I know I read this somewhere” or something else to that effect just to show that I don’t mean to plagiarize but I also don’t want to put in the research time needed to find the source, mention the idea without any disclaimer whatsoever with the intent most likely simply to make it cleaner reading since the disclaimer is a sidebar and not the topic of discussion, or choose not to include the idea in the post because one should not make claims that can’t be substantiated.

I believe that I do each one of these on occasion. I don’t have a rule book to follow and simply make some judgment at the time (based on what I’m not sure) as to which is the most appropriate. I have no sense of how frequently this occurs. One doesn’t set out to write something with sources that can’t be identified. And it’s not something I fixate on. There are a variety of other small transgressions I make quite regularly – I jaywalk around campus, indeed I do it deliberately sometimes so I can retain my New York roots while at Illinois – at home I believe we violate a codicil to our community association’s bylaws in that the size of our satellite dish is too large – and a bunch more of this sort of thing that are in the mild if not totally benign category. Life is too short to worry about this stuff. But what stuff should it be that we do worry about?

And that gets us back to plagiarism. I have to conclude that I’ve done it on occasion in this blog, though I don’t know when. Certainly, I was not trying to cheat. Nobody is requiring me to write a blog post. And, at least directly, I make no profit from the activity. But do I always cite my sources? Probably not. Should anything be done about that? I hope not. I’m not sure what could be done that makes sense. My inkling is to put this in the mild category and not worry about it, but seeing stones thrown about plagiarism as in that Inside Higher Ed blog, I’m not entirely comfortable with that answer.

Yesterday in my support role for the course management system used by instructors in my college, I read the citation policy as stated in one particular course. There was very strong language used, akin to a Do Not Trespass notice. If I might get shot at by the owner of the private property, I’ll obey the no trespassing notice, no question about that. But if there are strong rules that are mostly self-policed my adherence to them will be adjusted to my personal sense of reasonable behavior and in my world view a modest level of violation is typically ok, especially if there is no apparent harm.

In general, we don’t educate students with the aim to achieve an acceptable norm. Instead we give them absolute norms and then fret when we witness egregious violations. In the case of plagiarism, in particular, we may not be aware of our own behavior, think only of our scholarly publishing and not at all of our informal communication. Those distinctions may mean less to our students. For them, the rules of citation may seem arbitrary. What larger lessons do they learn when we make them follow the rules this way? I don’t know but I do know how I’d react if I were in their shoes.

Who will win the Nobel Prize in Economics?

It's that time of year. The Nobel Prizes in Medicine have been awarded. Time to guess who will win this years Economics award. A list of past winners can help in weeding out who won't get the award this time through.

Whether you teach economics or some other subject, I wonder whether getting students to predict the winner of some well known prize in the field, giving them some reward for a correct prediction, and thereby encouraging them to do some research on who are likely candidates, is a good way to drum up some interest in the subject. Call it the People Magazine approach to instruction.

For what it is worth, I'm predicting William Baumol, using the improbable criterion that among all economists (other than myself) I believe he is the one most frequently mentioned on this blog. (And Paul Krugman seems still too young to be a candidate.)

Online Presentation Ideas

As there are plans to teach a new course offering, Business 101, in blended format and because we are doing a pilot with Adobe Connect, the eLearning Team in the College has been playing with Adobe Presenter, a complementary application. Here are some observations about online presentations based on that experience.

Self-Tests within the Presentation

My office mate, Norma, liked the look and feel of a Presentation done with Adobe Presenter – it does have a clean look where one can readily see the slide titles and timings fore each slide, along with a search capability as another way to get random access to the content. But I was intrigued to learn that you can intersperse quizzes that are “graded” within the presentation – the viewer gets immediate feedback.

The use of this seems manifold. The WebCT Vista course management system that my campus supports does not have a self-test feature within a quiz that is for credit. It only has a stand along self-test. So to deliver the requisite functionality within a quiz for credit, one could put in “hint links” to self-tests in Adobe Presenter. That should work fine.

A different use would be for mini-lectures delivered online. As a way to chunk the content there could be short quizzes that are really there to let the viewer ask the question: “Am I getting this stuff?” Also, the quiz allows some planned pause time for reflection before going on with the presentation. This post from the Tomorrow’s Professor blog makes it clear that breaking up presentation in this way is quite effective.

Do note that the quiz questions must be text-based, no multimedia, and there is a limited range of question types. But one might go reasonably far with what is there.

Examples: Audio Only or Talking Head Video?

Here are two different versions of a similar presentation. The audio only version has the dual virtues that it is very easy to make – the audio can be recorded directly in Adobe Presenter – and it launches quite quickly even though in this case this is on a regular Web server, not a Flash streaming server. The talking head video version takes longer to make, because the video must be recorded outside of Adobe Presenter and then brought in, slide by slide. For viewing it takes some time to buffer the video content, even with a good network connection. And relative to how the videos looked before they were inserted into Adobe Presenter, which resized them to fit into the presenter box, they are kind of grainy here. But might the viewers prefer this mode anyway because it seems more personal? Perhaps the answer depends on the context. Both versions are available so you can make your own judgment.

Moving away from the PowerPoint Style?

Folks who are used to presenting with PowerPoint likely will be comfortable with Adobe Presenter. But do note there are other ways to go and once you start to think about that, other possibilities will suggest themselves. Here is an archive of all the videos that were made for the previous presentation along with two some additional clips, one by me on hyperinflation of college tuition, the other joint with Norma. I think the joint stuff is much more compelling to the viewer. In any event, the video can be delivered on its own via the archive, or a clip can readily be embedded in a Web page such as a blog. One loses the interactive quiz function this way, but there might be other activities which would be more meaningful for the students than quizzes while still achieving the desired chunking of the presentation. For example, perhaps they should do some quick writing in private reflection, or instead make a post to a discussion board with questions they have. Moreover, if there is interest in getting the content out to others, it is an interesting thought that the above mentioned archive is on Google Video, it is readily discoverable by a search there. (Such a search also searches for video content in YouTube, but not vice versa.)

Screen Capture Video

Talking head video has its place, and the interview style makes for interesting viewing, but in many cases it will just be the instructor doing the presentation. Consequently, the instructor will want to look for other ways to spice things up. Several people on campus are already using Jing. This quick demo looks indistinct from a capture done with Jing’s cousin, Camtasia, but it is made much more quickly, and Jing is free. (One suspects there might be a charge in the future. If not a direct charge, TechSmith, the company that makes Jing, will need to find some other way to generate revenue for the service.) Short captures can add spice and they really are easy to make. Further, file size is typically small so Jing movies can be sent out via email if that is preferred to putting them on a Web site.

One thing Jing can’t do is to make a second pass at the recording. I’ve found making my own screen captures that if I talk and capture at the same time then I tend to ramble and the entire thing becomes too long. One needs to be merciful to viewer of these things – get in, say your piece, and get out, quickly. So I do better by doing the screen capture on first pass and then doing voice over onto the previously recorded screen capture. This makes the process more elaborate but gets a better end result. If you’re making movies of 5 minutes or more, I’d recommend being more elaborate in this way. If your entire movie is under a minute, Jing is fantastic.

Modeling for Student Presentations

Instructors will first think of this as a lecture alternative for themselves, but one of the nice things about all of these approaches is that students can use them too. So an instructor might want to embrace an approach that is not just suitable for herself but which also make sense for her students and then try to envision her own presentations as giving her students tips on how to do their presentations.

Getting Students IntoYour Presentations

If your presentation is mainly response to questions that students pose, it will be more compelling to watch. You might elicit questions from the students in advance so you base your presentation around those questions. Or, better still, you might invite the students to participate in Q&A that you record. Podcasting (audio only recording) is quite easy to do this way. Talking head video is only a little bit harder. Also, you can add slides or screen movies to the recorded audio content afterwards if you think it will benefit the students.

Writing versus Presentation

Once the presentation moves online another consideration is what to deliver as written text, for example in a blog post, and what to deliver as presentation. My own view is to mix and match. Highly technical content probably can be delivered more effectively in presentation style (I’m thinking about economics with a lot of graphs and equations) so the students get both the visual information and the audio explanation. But otherwise, I’m guessing that what is best is what is most comfortable for the instructor – if the instructor likes to write…

Do Some Assessment

Given multiple possibilities in method of delivery, it doesn’t hurt to try a few different approaches and then ask the students which they prefer (and why).

Re-Use

Online presentations can be used again. Realistically their half-life can’t be too long because the technology changes and they begin to look dated and the content itself may also lose its freshness. But certainly some re-use is likely. This should encourage the instructors to think of what they want to do up front not being determined solely by the time it takes to produce the stuff. There will be some time savings down the road.