Rabbit Has Stopped Running

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

Obituary

Hideology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Getting Rid of the Blur

The following Tip is from the Jing Pro site

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

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



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

Presentations in Google Docs with YouTube Video

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

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

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

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

A Rhyme About Higher Ed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Project for the New Year

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

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

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

Never Play Leapfrog With A Unicorn

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

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

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

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

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

Providing A Reasonable Definition of Pork

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

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

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

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

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

Prioritizing non-Pork Investments

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

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

Crumbling Infrastructure Investment

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

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

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

WPA-like Projects as Keynesian Economics

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

Conclusion

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

First Impressions

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

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

Spare the Rod and Spoil The Child

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

PLAs Please

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

Who are the Tarriers?

As we stumble forward into the future, seemingly yanked in many directions all at once, we’re also inextricably circling backward in time. For the economy as a whole, it’s the 1930s again. The pundits are hoping Obama will be the reincarnation of FDR, as the parallel between Bush and Hoover seems all to clear, a perfect backdrop to set the stage, and Obama’s latest announcement of a massive infrastructure investment reminiscent of the New Deal programs.

But I wonder if we need a different sort of comfort, one more recent, within our own realm of experience. I’m reminded of this scene from one of my favorite episodes of West Wing. Josh is suffering badly from post traumatic stress disorder, giving back talk to the President (which is simply not done) because he is not in control of his own emotions, fearing for his job since it is full of work tensions and denying the situation since he has no outlet to vent his anger. After a long session with a psychologist who eventually gets Josh to make the connections between what happened after he was shot and how he has been acting for the previous few weeks leading up to the Christmas Holiday, Josh has a (not so) serendipitous encounter with Leo. As his boss and dear friend, Leo has also had to conquer his own demons, pills and especially alcohol, and indeed that his most recent prior abysmal performance as a high official in the Democratic party came when he did some heavy drinking right before the Bartlett nomination, and worse that political opponents knew that was the case. Leo had weathered the storm in good part because of Josh’s loyalty and quick judgment. His reassurances to Josh were real, just for that reason, and his support was total, because Josh had likewise been that sort of friend when Leo was mired in the muck.

To the extent that the economic morass is the consequence of each of us caving into our weaknesses, spending more than we can afford, emphasizing the material benefits in our existence, cravings rather than ideas and people, we can liken ourselves to Josh and hope to find our own Leos. The economic morass is more than that, of course, and some of the things that ail us require government intervention and macroeconomic cures. Personal salvation, however beneficial individually, simply won’t fully address the range of economic problems. But the converse is also true. This is a time when personal salvation is especially needed. If we’re to make substantial economic sacrifice to get through the present harshness, we won’t be able to cope without it. Will we as individuals get better this way or fall back to our own bad habits once the economy starts to rebound?

In this piece, however, I don’t want to linger in talking about the economy. Instead, I want to concentrate on learning technology, where I’m having my own personal circle back, to the 1990s when I ran SCALE, where we supported Mallard, which is still up and running, about ghosts from Plato, and about the specter and promise of online learning, as it seemed then and as it appears now. These memories where stirred up in me from a publisher advisory board meeting I attended last week in Salem Massachusetts, an interesting place to hold such a meeting given the history of the locale, and also that I know some of these Board members from prior episodes in learning technology: the CIC learning technology group (when it was group sponsored by the various Provosts and gave out grant funding for inter institutional projects), the Pew Program in Course Redesign, and the WebCT Vista Product Advisory Board (prior to the buyout by Blackboard).

On the way home from this meeting, partly inspired by the locale, I read Thoreau’s essay, Civil Disobedience, instead of reading the Management Textbook I was supposed to read as I might use it in an upcoming course. (The Kindle has a bunch of downloads for $.99 of works that are now in the public domain and that have been converted to Kindle format. This was the first of these works I have read from beginning to end on the Kindle.) Thoreau’s essay, written at the time of the Mexican-American war, a military engagement that Thoreau viewed as unwise and unjust, is all about conscience, when to succumb to will the of the majority, and when to act against its strictures by not paying taxes that are government imposed or by deliberately breaking the law. Much of these historic issues with learning technology I now view as matters of conscience and I will write the rest of this piece in that tone, perhaps scolding too harshly; but really I don’t see a better alternative.

Let me start with pedagogy, a loaded term if there ever was one, a term where the rhetoric and jargon have limited our thinking, I’m afraid. Plato started a tradition of “computer assisted instruction” where the computer was a tutor for the student and the emphasis was on student-computer interaction. This notion survives but where when I started this was viewed as wondrous and the the wave of the future, Web delivery seemed to promise a Plato-like educational experience for any and all who were interested, now it seems dated and limited, relegated to the confines of training and the high enrollment introductory course. Real learning is student centric, driven by the student’s own inquiry, based on notions from Constructivism, and then extended to online learning and social networks. Computer assisted instruction has no place in that universe. It is too spoon-fed and prescriptive.

There is a tension that has been there since I started with learning technology. As Carol Twigg likes to point out:

Undergraduate enrollments in the United States are concentrated heavily in large-enrollment introductory courses. In fact, just 25 courses generate about half of all student enrollments in community colleges and about a third of enrollments in four-year institutions. The topics of these courses are not surprising and include introductory studies in such disciplines as English, mathematics, psychology, sociology, economics, accounting, biology, and chemistry. In addition to suffering from a high rate of academic failure, these courses affect literally every student who goes to college.

But a campus like mine has a huge number of undergraduate courses, in excess of 1500. The vast majority of the faculty are teaching these other courses; the student/faculty ratio is much higher in those 25 and in that sense they subsidize the rest of the operation. In a nutshell, the tension is about whether innovation with learning technology should happen where the students are, in those 25 large courses, or if it should happen in the other classes, where most of the faculty are. With Plato, and then later with Mallard and CyberProf, we were getting one sort of answer. With Web 2.0 and student centric approaches to learning we’re getting a different sort of answer. And never the twain shall meet.

This is unfortunate. While there are some other efforts in the spirit of supporting those large classes such as LON CAPA, which dates back to the CyberProf and Mallard days, and the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon, a more recent development in the same spirit, it remains true that the there is far too little creative effort going into these sort of environments than there should be and the constructivists in the crowd look askance at those efforts that do manifest – clearly they must be misguided since they don’t start off with the right view of the learner. To which my response is: look closer; you’re wrong in lumping all this into one box. There can be excellence in computer assisted instruction and it is informative to understand what this sort of excellence looks like.

Further, there is a rather serious problem in that excellence in this area is the exception. The rule is a perpetuation of a very traditional approach, moved online. The rule needs a critique, but a critique from within so it can be replaced with something better that is still do-able. Instead we’re getting a critique from without, a critique that says “abandon ship” but a critique that likely will have little impact because students do need foundational knowledge. This sort of knowledge likely won’t be produced by individuals in pursuit of their own inquiry, at least not purely in that manner. (And in the large class setting nobody knows how to guide such pursuit.) Let me illustrate.

The traditional textbook, I’ll use my own discipline Economics to exemplify the issues, has each chapter organized by presentatios of theory first, then worked through examples to illustrate the theory, then end of chapter problems to test students understanding and to see if they can transfer what they know to specific contexts. This is the paradigm for much of what we do in teaching at the College level – presentation of theory first, illustration second, and then assessment to follow up. In electronic format, we now have eTextbooks to handle the first two and electronic and automatically graded homework to handle the third. The paradigm hasn’t changed much if at all, but now the delivery is online. Publishers are struggling selling eTextbooks as stand-alone products. The students aren’t buying. The electronic homework they buy (and then work on) because their grade depends on it. The publishers understand that their future lies in development of good electronic homework environments.

But the paradigm itself is faulty. If we consider, as an alternative to the textbook, an extended conversation between a student and an instructor and that the conversation might occur both orally and in writing over a period of time, then it is evident that the conversation has presentation, illustration, and assessment throughout with little bits of each going back and forth. The conversation is not nearly as linear as the traditional textbook paradigm would suggest. And the conversation ends up being much richer because the student contributes and the instructor can tailor the conversation based on the student responses. There is learning throughout and a conversation that is engaging is so precisely because the learning is ongoing. In contrast, when students are given assessments in the traditional textbook paradigm, the assessments are designed to test what the students already know. Assessment in this case is about performance only, not about learning. The learning happens sometime prior to assessment (if it happens at all).

The question emerges then why, in moving to electronic delivery, don’t we abandon the traditional textbook model and try to embrace the conversational approach done online? (The traditional model itself was never quite as simple as I’ve presented it above. What’s missing is the study group time where the end of chapter problems are discussed as well as the student preparation time in getting ready for the study group meeting. There may very well be a gateway function into the subject that is via the textbook or the lecture, but there is a conversation aspect in the middle that makes the entire thing work.) The thought, in particular is that in the preparation time students can use help in the form of conversation and that electronic delivery should be able to provide this.

Several years ago when my friend Steve Acker was an editor for a column in Campus Technology Magazine, he asked me to write a piece and ultimately the outcome was this column on Dialogic Learning Objects. At around the same time, I produced some of the sort of things I had in mind. These are updated versions of two lessons (a Plato term) constructed in Excel and covering the core theory of microeconomics. The first is on the Elements of Supply and Demand. The second explains Opportunity Cost, the demand side equivalent which is called Reservation Price, and how these change as a result of exogenous changes, which in turn causes Shifts in Demand and Supply. They are working examples of dialogic learning objects. They are unlike textbook presentations, as I’ll explain briefly below, and though I’m clearly biased in coming to this determination, I believe they are better than the textbook in providing an understanding of what is going on for the student, because they are at once simple and thus easy to approach but also deep in the concepts they address.

Let me talk about the technical elements first. Unlike most Web assessment tools, but like Plato, feedback is given in the same screen as where the students do their work. Feedback is instantaneous. And students are free to go back and make changes. In both lessons there are places where the students perform experiments. They can try things and evaluate, get feedback and try again. Experimentation is part of the process. The feedback itself is done via conditional response and conditional formatting. So the hard part, since there is no template for the authoring, is designing for that. With some experience doing it, it becomes faster. But it is still not easy. Authoring this way is hard because the writing is itself a set of iterations on what to ask, how to respond, and how to represent the economics.

The economics is different than what is typically taught because discrete choice behavior (buy one unit or not, sell one unit or not) is presented at the outset to motivate supply and demand and in that discrete choice framework a simplifying assumption is made that there is a single continuous good (money) with utility linear in that. This reduces the generality of the presentation but it remarkably sharpens the results and really helps aid the student intuition. Further, the math is embedded in the formulas in the cells of the spreadsheet. Students can get to those if they want to hack the spreadsheets, but what they see at first pass are numbers – easy to manipulate and non-threatening. This simply can’t be done in a text presentation. It is a snap with Excel. The technology is doing something here beyond simply moving the text content online. It is helping the students visualize.

The question is why can’t we get content like this as the norm? The Economics Principles market has about 1 million students per year. That would seem to be a big enough market to generate the type of high quality content I’d like to see, and ditto for the other large courses on Carol Twigg’s list. If this type of content were to emerge, it would defeat the eTextbooks and other online approaches that merely recycle the traditional paradigm. But largely we’re not getting that yet. I don’t blame the publishers for this. The publishers are producing back to us what they’ve heard from us we want. So the real question is: why don’t we articulate a demand for this type of dialogic content, written from scratch to be delivered online?

We know from other sources that students want this sort of thing. In a provocative presentation at the 2007 ELI conference, Julie Evans talked about what she and her group are learning about K-12 students. They undeniably feel alienated from their current form of education and want to see technology integrated in – particularly in math. It is a mystery to me why those wishes are not being addressed. Most schools now offer online grade books so parents can track the grades their children are receiving, but the technology is not used at all for the teaching and learning. And in K-12 the argument, especially in math, that there is foundational knowledge to learn, where teachers don’t have enough time in the day to provide meaningful assessment of student work, would seem to provide the grounding for the computer assisted instruction approach. But so far, there’s not much to show in this arena.

We’re caught in a vicious cycle. Nobody seems to have time to develop the right sort of content, so we work with what we have. We take assessments originally designed for paper testing and now use them for online homework. Although, as a colleague pointed out at the publisher meeting, the students go for the assessment content immediately and then only approach the presentation content on an as needed basis to learn how to complete the assessments, the students do learn to succeed on the assessment but don’t get a a deeper understanding of the material because they don’t have a far ranging discussion about it. And the process is alienating because the students are well aware that they are performing and being judged on that while many are not learning deeply.

That’s actually the good scenario. The bad scenario is that the technology is used to enforce rote learning. It’s drill and then more drill. That’s the critique of the constructivists and why they don’t want to have anything to do with computer assisted instruction. Drill is fine for spelling, the multiplication tables, maybe even some hard vocabulary words, particularly in a second language. But that’s elementary school or middle school stuff. Is it right for college level work? What happens to College students when there courses are repeated drill and the assessments they go through require performance but without learning?

Who are the Tarriers? They’re the students.

The Deflationary Spiral and Higher Ed

I use iGoogle as my homepage and I’ve got so much junk on it that I often don’t look at the stuff I’ve got to scroll down for.  One of those things is a Stock Market gadget, with the up-to-date (15 minute lag) listings of various leading indices. Today’s another one where at the close all the indices are red; the Dow was off more than 200 points.  I didn’t look till day’s end but keeping that gadget out of view is not enough.  Sure as shooting, the news is going to be bad. 

“You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows.”
Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

As the house of cards that is the global economy continues to tumble down, I can take some solace in wearing my professional hat – the Dismal Science is living up to its name.  Just look at this story from Friday about massive layoffs in the IT industry because sales have declined precipitously, or this piece today about another round of layoffs at Citigroup, or even this attempt at humor by Michael Kinsley, the usually pointed and witty writer who seems to have his spirits down because that’s what lack of consumer confidence does to people.  Personally, I’ve got the feeling of walking on a sponge, one that may or may not have a floor under it.  We seem to be reading about massive layoffs at one company after another, as if there is no end in sight. 

But the economist in me takes this misery as an intellectual playpen, and with that I want to bring up a bit of a puzzle that to my knowledge hasn’t been raised by other commentators and pundits.  We don’t seem to be reading about how retained employees are getting wage cuts.  Those getting the pink slips are losers, clearly.  But why not share the pain more broadly by also dinging the people who get to keep their jobs?  That doesn’t seem to be happening.  Why not?

Standard economic theory suggests that reductions in demand for final products and services (the prime cause of the deflation) will cause a reduction in the derived demand for labor.  In turn, that reduced labor demand will lessen employment and lower the wage, as the new equilibrium is found by moving down the labor supply curve.  We’re getting the first effect, but so far not the second.    (More sophisticated models of labor supply that suggest much of the wage is a rent for incentive purposes or a gift to encourage in kind gifts to be offered back by the employees, would also not predict wages to stay steady in this instance, because clearly there is now a possibility of further layoffs in the future so the same size incentive or gift can be had at a lower wage.)

In this piece I want to argue that we in Higher Ed should act differently from the commercial sector of the economy, and try to manage at least some of the labor demand reduction via lower wages to faculty and staff (the rest being accommodated by not filling job vacancies when they are created or through layoffs if absolutely necessary).  This likely will be an unpopular position with friends and colleagues, who are apt to feel that they are among the more productive parts of the their Campus and before the Campus goes about trimming away some serious muscle and cutting into bone, it should make sure it trims all the fat first.  I’ll argue why I think that is the wrong way to go about doing this. 

But first I want to note the following – obvious to an economist but perhaps not to everyone else.  All this would be much easier to do if the weakening economy were accompanied by a moderate to high rate of inflation.  Labor demand is said to depend on the real wage, which goes down under inflation if the nominal wage remains unchanged.  So a manager can get the necessary accommodation to the demand reduction in inflationary times by keeping nominal wages entirely flat or having nominal wages rise but at a slower rate than the rate of inflation.  But look what is happening to the price of gas, where prices are less than than 50% of their peak achieved early in the summer.   Focusing on gasoline prices may overstate the extent of the deflation broadly conceived, but here I care less about measuring the rate precisely than simply about making the point that as long as the there is some deflation, real wages rise as long as nominal wages remain unchanged.  So labor supply should be that much more, which makes it strange and punitive to only utilize layoffs as the way to bring costs in line with (shrunken) revenues.

Nominal wage reductions are not a trivial matter and it may be that the situation is somewhat different for faculty than for staff.  I’ve heard some argue (we discussed this sort of thing on Campus during the recession under Reagan in the early 1980’s) that an implication of tenure is downward nominal wage rigidity – meaning the university can’t cut the salary for a tenured faculty member.  And on an individual basis, I believe that is correct.  But across the board, I don’t see how it could be considered an assault on tenure, especially inasmuch as the aim of doing so would be to preserve employment, not the reverse.  Unionized employees (at my campus there is no faculty union but there are unions that represent a sizeable number of employees) would obviously need to have their representatives negotiate wage reductions on their behalf, but they might very well be willing to do so as a fair way to address the underlying problem. 

The other point, institutionally, is that faculty and academic professional staff operate under a Notification of Appointment that is a yearly contract stipulating terms and salary.  The Academic year goes from mid August to mid August.  It is probably not possible contractually to change salary within the Academic year.  So if salary reductions were to occur by contract, there would be some time lag of necessity, until the new Academic year begins. 

Armed with those caveats, let me make the argument for wage reduction and then follow that with some discussion of steps to take to achieve the outcome.  My main assumption for supporting my point of view is that the slump will be both deep and long.  If, in contrast, it is of relatively brief duration, a year to 18 months at max, then it would be right for any individual to resist salary cuts, to preserve his/her personal standard of living.   But if the recession is long and hard – 3 years or more of a significantly worse economy with high unemployment rates and economic pessimism the norm – then the process of adjusting to this new environment will be ongoing.  We’ll get there in stages taking one step at a time.  In this case it will be much easier to take additional steps past the first one if people cooperate with one another.   If they’re kicking and screaming we’ll simply be out of place and never attain a suitable adjustment.   Across the board wage reductions early on is a way to secure that cooperative attitude, because it’ll show we’re in it together. 

Such wage reductions obviously come at a cost, especially if peer institutions don’t do likewise.  Some faculty and staff will find better opportunities elsewhere.  The wage reductions will encourage turnover, both among those who find employment elsewhere and among those who opt to retire.  There is certainly that.  My argument is that if one does the full cost benefit analysis, at least under my assumptions, this is still the better alternative to having more layoffs because nominal wages haven’t been reduced.  The latter fails on the fairness dimension. 

A first step, to signify the importance of the approach, would be for higher ups in the Campus Administration (Chancellor, Provost, Deans, Director of the Athletic Association, Football and Basketball coaches, etc.) to voluntarily reduce their own salaries.  I don’t know if there is a formal way to take less than one’s fully salary, but one could give unrestricted gifts back to the Campus or the Campus could create a special fund for such give backs the proceeds from which would be used to address operational shortfalls.   Indeed, maybe an across the board voluntary give back of this sort might suffice.  But I’m inclined to think it wouldn’t work, people would give if they thought it fair and that, in turn, would depend on what other people are giving.  Making the give backs mandatory is a way to solve this chicken and egg problem. 

Immediately after a voluntary give back program among highly visible campus leaders has been instituted, the body where faculty governance occurs (on my Campus that is Academic Senate) would have to take up the issue of whether faculty salary reductions are possible and, if so, under what circumstance.  I really couldn’t predict how such a debate would go, but it seems to me that in the current climate resisting a salary give back plan would be politically unpopular with people outside the University.  Further, it is quite conceivable that there will be arguments for tuition reduction for new students on the grounds that our mission is to provide access and we’re closer to our mission in reducing tuition than we’d be in keeping tuition where it is but lowering admission standards as the way to keep enrollments up.  (This piece delineates the issues well.)   If tuition reductions are in the cards, then doesn’t it seem that faculty and staff salary give backs would become part of the equation?

Such a debate might rage for some time; faculty governance is a deliberative process.  If during that time the economy starts to rebound, then we may have voluntary give backs and nothing more.  If the economy remains in a slump, the mandatory form of give back is more likely. 

We need to see in all this pain a path to a better tomorrow.  The age structure of faculty on campus is out of wack, heavily skewed toward the more senior end.  It’s both that the older faculty are holding on rather than retiring and that when they do retire they’re teaching load is apt to be filled by adjuncts rather than by tenure track faculty.   We’ve not addressed this problem well at all.  A good alternative model (tenure track teaching faculty instead of adjuncts???) needs to be thought through.  There is the related issue of the hyperinflation in college tuition (increases at a greater rate than the general rate of inflation) over the last 30 or 40 years.  The adjustments I’m suggesting would give at least a temporary respite on both of these fronts.  The rat race might continue anew thereafter.  But maybe, particularly if a sense of shared sacrifice really does emerge, that better path will be found.  In the mean time, while we’re worrying about just how bad the economy will get, let’s close on the hopeful note that if we try seriously to address the current problems, they won’t seem so bad and we’ll have the satisfaction of noting we’re doing something to help ourselves.

Das Urteil*

*The Judgment

Last night, still weary from being on the road, I watched Judgment at Nuremberg, one of those classic movies that I somehow missed when I was in College. I was surfing through the things we had Tivo'd and it was there. Sometimes I record films on TMC and then forget about them. This must have been one of those because I was surprised to find it there. I didn't know whether I could sit through it; my attention span is limited now. But it was enthralling, because of the cast - Spencer Tracy as the Judge, Maximilian Schell as the attorney for the Defense (he won an academy award for this role, Burt Lancaster as the German jurist Dr. Enrst Janning, the most interesting character ethically because of his seeming impeccable credentials, Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland, both in roles that were compelling but for me out of character, Werner Klemperer and Howard Caine from Hogan's Heroes, and many other familiar faces - but also because of the story line. Are judges who followed the law - the law the Nazis put into force in 1933 - guilty because the law itself was cruel and inhuman or are they innocent because they couldn't really anticipate the cruelty that would ensue under the Nazi regime? The film came out in 1961 and it holds up still, a powerful film, something well worth watching.

For about 3/4 of the movie I was thinking in the back of my head about the current financial crisis and that those responsible are somewhat in the same position as those judges (who were ultimately found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment only to be released a few years later because the U.S. needed the German people to side with them and against the U.S.S.R. lest all of Europe fall to the Communists.) And that it would be good to try these people, to get at the truth, and hold them to account, though I don't know whether Laws have been broken in a way making such parallel hearings feasible. (This Wikipedia entry suggests there is at least a Common Law breach that these people have committed.) In my limited metaphor way of thinking, Obama's election is like VE Day. The Nuremberg Trials came later, an idea generated by Colonel Murray Bernays for Secretary of War Henry Stimson in response to FDR, in response to a plan advocated by Henry Morgenthau, that called for hanging the War Criminals and having a weak Germany emerge from the ashes. I think we need an analogous set of hearings for the Financial markets, something akin to the Watergate Hearings.

Coincidentally in today's paper there was a long story about the irresponsible practices at Merrill Lynch. Reading this, I got infuriated, this paragraph especially:

Merrill’s board also ousted Mr. O’Neal. On top of the $70 million in compensation he was awarded during his four-year tenure as chief executive, Mr. O’Neal departed with an exit package worth $161 million.

This is not justice. For whatever reason, I felt compelled to watch Alan Greenspan's recent testimony in front of the Waxman committee. Greenspan did not seem repentant to me. He did not peddle the bad securities, but he chose to ignore warnings that something serious was amiss. We need a process that will get the folks who are responsible to show they have made a serious harm.

Apologies on the previous post

The previous post was published with the links not working right and erroneous characters inserted. I apologize to anyone who tried to read it in that format. I took it offline to edit and it's up again. I hope it is more readable now.

Competing Visions

I'm at Educause in Orlando now. It's the first full day of the conference, but it's my third full day down here having attended a full day Frye Returnees event on Monday and a pre-conference workshop on the Virtual Computing Lab on Tuesday. I normally don't spend even one full day in a conference sessions before needing a change in the scenery. And this is a particularly unusual trip for me since the Sloan-C conference is next week, also in Orlando, so it didn't make sense to fly back home in between. Instead, I'm going to stay down here and see family in South Florida once Educause concludes, then return to Orlando for Sloan-C. That's a long time to be on the road and I'm consciously trying to pace myself so as to be feel refreshed at the start of each day. I did go to the opening plenary session by V.S. Ramachandran that I thought quite good and from which I took some solace about what he said near the end of the talk regarding higher brain function being about making metaphor and abstract connections between different ideas. I believe I embrace that both in my teaching and in educating my children (I prize having them make puns). But afterwards I played hookie from the remaining Wednesday sessions, bumping into friends and former colleagues and spending much of the time in conversation with them.

Our President-Elect-to-be has a reputation for being able to entertain disparate and often contradictory points of view on issues, being able to make the case for each in a way that sounds credible to its adherents, and hence demonstrating in a contentious situation that he is listening to all sides of the argument. It's this ability that belies his claim of being able to move the nation beyond politics as usual and towards a different politics of consent and universal participation. This, in turn, fundamentally is the reason for hope in spite of the terrifying economic crisis and social malaise. I have no illusions of being as capable as Barack Obama in this regard, but in this post I will try, because as I reflect so far about what I've heard at Educause, overall there have been several issues where alternative views have been articulated and I want to try to work through some of those.

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It's now about a week later. I've been with my mom for a few days. She's in her own private world. She doesn't know me and she hardly speaks, and then only to ask for a cold drink or to complain about pain. Now I'm back in Orlando for Sloan-C. Obama won the election a couple of nights ago. I hope it is a turning point for us. In any event, I've been holding this post in abeyance the last several days. I'm returning to it now
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One of these fundamental issues is whether we should teach to the students where they are, as defined by their technology use. Tuesday night at Educause I attended a dinner where the theme was mobile computing. Students have a preferred device and it's not the computer, not even a laptop. It's the cell phone, but it's not voice communication we're talking about. Texting rules. The kids are all thumbs. If Colleges want to stay connected to their students, they have to find a way to insert themselves into these conversations. A first step is getting their messages in a format so they can be received on a mobile device of the student's choosing.

Thursday morning I attended a presentation by Intellagirl (Sarah Robins-Bell) that was even stronger on these themes by framing the argument as a warning – Higher Ed must either get with the program and embrace Web 2.0 or risk losing the students altogether as they pursue their own self-directed alternatives on their own. Apparently student-centric and technology-centric approaches are tied at the hip. And the technologies we're talking about here are not the ones the institutions have already adopted, but the next wave, Web x.y (I learned from Intellagirl's presentation that we have to put numbers after things to signal their importance) that the students are already playing with on their own.

The operative word here is "play" and learning that comes out of play, people networks that emerge from play in groups, and then the technology that enables that. Play teaches us many things, some of which we fail to remark on. Because play encourages persistence, play breeds a sense of competence. Reasonably intelligent people (the vast majority of us and our students) will get good at doing things if we practice. With play the practice is part of it – embedded practice if you will. Group play also exerts motivation, subtle and otherwise. There are intensely strong feedback loops from personal success at play to raising one's own level and with the success of others also stimulating the desire for additional practice. The conversations the kids have revolve around their play experiences. Those conversations are an additional prod.
The play itself is technology mediated - video games, computer games, games on portable devices, etc. So that some of the communication should also be technology mediated seems natural. There is an entire world created, a world outside of school, a world that is full of learning, and in essence this is a world of play. This is the world where the students are. The argument is that College must enter this world, in order to reach its students.

A counter argument was voiced, by Bob Herbert in a column talking about how our children avoid the tough subjects (science and math) and citing Bill Gates that China and India will clean our clock because they are doing a better job of educating their youth, especially in the STEM areas. (This notion that we're behind also is present with the first argument, particularly with respect to mobile technology, where South Korea is the acknowledged leader.) Henry Schaffer of North Carolina State raised essentially the same point in the Q&A part of Intellagirl's talk. He talked about his genetics course, how students have to slug through many quite arduous problems to gain an understanding of the subject, and more generally how learning of this material is work, not play. And the work is arduous, which means both that it is time consuming and that it is intellectually difficult.

During Educause I read and commented on a recent blog post by Barbara Ganley where she talked about "slow blogging," linking to a related post by Chris Lott who suggests slow blogging is making a comeback. My original reaction was that slow blogging is of the same cloth as the critique by Herbert and Schaffer, since it requires patience in the writing and aims at depth of understanding of the topic. But since I am a slow blogger (I prefer to call the act "weaving" or "layering" because that is my conscious thought in expressing my ideas in these posts) and I think of it neither as work nor as play but still something else, I now want to offer it up as a middle ground, perhaps a synthesis for making some progress since my sense at the end of Intellagirl's session is that we're talking at each other and don't yet have a path we can all agree on traversing.

I so believe in Maslow's notion of self-actualization and that learning, the deep kind we want for our students, is captured well by Maslow's ideal. The notion of work, in contrast, is fundamentally instrumental. We do work to achieve an end. With the end accomplished there is nothing more for the process to add. Writing these posts is not work in this sense. It is a way to explore the ideas. Much of the time is spent before sitting at the keyboard, trying to produce a coherent story in my head, making a narrative that makes sense and, I hope, makes progress beyond what others are saying, or gives them a different way to see what they are already engaged in. The process is for me. I'd be doing it even if there were no post. The actual writing does provide encouragement to push the ideas a little further. And the occasional acknowledgement by readers offers a greater push.

Barbara is very strong on having a sense of place, to kindle within us a feeling of community and a sense of obligation for others that emerges from that. Let me give a different vantage for why this is important. The argument that China and India will overtake the U.S. as the main economic power may put fear in my generation, but lead to quite a different reaction from current College students. In essence, the argument is that we're still in the rat race that my parents were in, theirs a rat race begat by the Great Depression. They had to run it to survive. Survival is not the prime imperative for our children; even now with the current economic malaise; they're sufficiently secure to be able to voice other concerns. Their world of play is a world not threatened by survival. Quality of life is the main concern. If competition with China and India is a rat race, it's a fair question to ask: why run it? Why not opt out, instead, if the opt out path offers a better quality of life.

Last night on CNN, some of the pundits talking about what an Obama Presidency would do, discussed the massive participation the Campaign encouraged and that this notion of service would carry over to when Obama takes office. This ethos is likely to spread. Community realization may serve as serious alternative to self-actualization as both motivation and as a way to shape what students should engage in. When caught up in the larger purpose the effort individuals put in seems less instrumental and more simply being part of the whole. A way toward fulfilling the JFK ideal.

Does this get us all the way home? Will students take the hard courses and put in the requisite intellectual energy if the courses themselves are part of the path toward community realization? I don't know. The students I talk with seem bi-modal, strongly career oriented and viewing their education as means toward that end, but also idealistic and looking for a larger sense of purpose. At this point school seems to separate these two and also to separate itself from the world of play. Perhaps that sense of separation should be diminished and the new technologies viewed as devices for encouraging that blurring.

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I want to switch gears and talk about another arena entirely where I've heard about competing views. On Tuesday I attended a pre-conference workshop on the Virtual Computer Lab, a very interesting project that has been getting some good press lately. The VCL is an effort in "Cloud Computing" to deliver both high performance computing applications and applications typically delivered in student computer labs. The argument for VCL is to better leverage the existing Campus computing resources since the VCL enables multiple profiles and hence allows the users based on their needs to determine which profiles get employed via the VCL and when that should happen. In particular, while traditional labs typically close at night, the VCL can remain open online and students can access applications they need in the wee hours of the morning. Indeed, regular lab machines can add to the VCL capacity when they are not in use by students sitting at the computer.

During the early afternoon of the VCL session Sarah Stein, one of the presenters and a strong advocate for VCL, made the point that all of us on our respective campuses should embrace cloud computing and not cede the space to Google, for surely if we let them lock us in they will ultimately hold us up and we will end up paying much more for services in the future and that will far outstrip the savings we can get now by outsourcing the currently "free" service offerings from Google.

The lock-in argument is certainly not new to us in Higher Ed, but to date I'm aware of the argument applying mostly to license, service contract, and custom development supported software. I have not heard the argument being made for ad-supported software, such as the Google offerings.

Indeed much of the talk at Educause was centered around the general economic malaise, how travel budgets have already been cut and how IT budgets are going to follow in that. In this climate, especially, the outsourcing of IT services, especially "free" IT services, seems attractive, with email services leading the way.

The view that IT services should be shed follows logically from the prior argument by Nicholas Carr that IT services are no longer strategic definers. If the services are commodity like, let the market provide them. The market is good for commodity-like services. But there are network externalities. They are the source of natural monopoly. It's better for users that all the Office applications can talk with each other. The natural monopoly begats market power and it's the market power that gets exploited in the holdup of locked in users. So perhaps Sarah Stein's point of view is the more sophisticated, the one we should embrace if we're thinking long term.

But let me keep pushing the metaphor because I'm not sure the argument holds. Higher Ed is just one vertical that consumes cloud computing services. The corporate world is a different vertical, one that's much larger, one that will be a larger consumer of cloud computing. They understand market power in the corporate world. If some in the corporate world were to underwrite a cloud competitor to Google so to avoid lock in of their own, would they do so by investing in cloud computing efforts on the campuses? The VCL effort is being undertaken with the help of IBM. Is that a sufficient counterforce? Will it begat other like efforts? How will the network externalities be exploted in this case?

There is the further issue – the free rider problem. If there is a suitable counterforce to Google, those of us who want to capture current cost savings with outsource can do so feeling less guilty about it. Let the good citizens fight the good fight and worry about the long term. The rest of us are just trying to keep our heads above water – now. How can we invest in cloud computing when we have to shed IT costs? And so the debate rages.

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The next issue is about the relationship between the IT organization and the Library and how they might interact better. The argument goes that increasingly the domains of the two organizations overlap and hence it would be better for them collaborate and perhaps integrate rather than to pursue their own separate agendas.

In a session at Frye@Educause 2008 a panel of attendees, each of whom had overseen a merger of the two organizations on their respective campuses, discussed the benefits and issues from an after the fact perspective. In general, the merger concept got a thumbs up from the panelists.

My friend Lisa Hinchliffe, who attended Frye with me back in 2003 when she represented the Library and I the Academic Computing organization at Illinois, questions whether a merger could work on our campus, because of scaling issues. It would be difficult, no doubt. But Lisa also wondered whether even on the smaller campuses if these mergers engendered an embrace of a common culture for the new merged organization or if the consequence was more like two separate divisions within a larger corporate hierarchy, in which case the merger perhaps economizes on upper level management staff but otherwise does very little to change from the path prior to the merger. This was Lisa's first Educause and I believe the cultural issues were pressing on her as she understands well the Library view but the IT perspective on issues she cares about is still somewhat alien to her. (Lisa has a new blog that is interesting because there she is trying to work through these issues.)

I come at these questions of organization structure now from a somewhat different perspective given my job in the College of Business where I negotiate with Campus IT, the Library, the Center for Teaching Excellence, elsewhere on Campus, as well as local provision of services within my own College. There is a set of ongoing issues where each has some unique aspect but all are similar in the sense that there is a collective "underlap" of service. The questions then are: how should the issue be addressed, where does responsibility lie, and what credit is received for filling in the gaps? There is the further issue whether older services should be cannibalized and if so what are the criteria for determining which services should get the axe? The "customers" can point fingers at existing services that they view are underutilized. But they typically don't monitor the entire use and may observe only the valleys and not see the peaks.

Since from my perspective, the org structure question gets filtered through the managing underlap/defending turf lens, I'm not sure of the better answer to it. But I do know from having served on Library committees that I approach things unlike Librarians. The culture question is a big one and I'm less sure it can be overcome so readily.

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I like to hear competing views. I'm happier watching the tension play out and seeing the competing arguments sharpen than to see one side win out quickly, before the weaknesses in that perspective have come out. The profession needs to be big enough to welcome the diversity of perspective. There were sessions at the conference designed for attendees to witness competing perspectives, but those sessions were pitched as helping us to make the case, where we need to be aware of counter arguments to make a convincing presentation ourselves. We have to go even further than that. We need to debate these issues among ourselves. We need to understand the weaknesses in the positions we advocate. It's a big part of our profession maturing. We should welcome it.