Metaphors for Learning

We've had a hot spell. A couple of nights ago it was very warm, hardly any wind at all. It was warmer still in the Assembly Hall, where they had the Centennial High School graduation; my older son was one of the not quite 400 graduates to be. My younger son, a member of the band, was part of the show. My wife and I attended, along with a few friends. We were there to mark the milestone that the ceremony represents and to let our son know we support his efforts. What we wanted was to hear his name read aloud, to see him shaking hands with the dignitaries, to watch him walking across the stage before getting ready for his picture to be taken.
In a practice I thought a bit odd, for each graduate they had a PowerPoint slide with the student's name displayed on two big screens, a photo (face only) if that was available, and the college the student would be attending in the fall or the place of work or military service that the student committed to. I didn't know that information was a matter of public record something all in attendance should see. Most of the students will be attending college within the state of Illinois. Many are going to Parkland, the local community college. There were a good chunk going to the U of I, and another dollop to Illinois State, Southern Illinois, and elsewhere such as Illinois Wesleyan and the Art Institute in Chicago. Then there were a bunch headed to neighboring states, Indiana mostly but also Iowa, Kentucky, and Missouri. I don't recall any headed to Wisconsin but some of the schools mentioned I hadn't heard of before so it is possible that I just missed it. There were several headed to Texas, a few to California, and a couple to the Ivy League. I believe the majority who were headed out of state were nonetheless going to public universities though, for example, there were several planning to attend Butler in Indianapolis.
Each student had a moment to be center stage. With so many graduates in total, it took quite a bit of time to get through the entire list of names, read in alphabetical order. Anticipating that it would take a while and owing to the temperature in Hall, one might have guessed that the preliminary part of the program would be abbreviated so as not to try the patience of the audience. That was not the case, however.
There were a variety of musical numbers, a couple with soloists who themselves were graduating seniors. And there were several speeches. The one given by the Senior Class President was charming, with insight into what it's like to mature as a high school student and quite a bit of down to earth humor. My son told us on the drive home that he too thought it well done and he should know since he's been on the speech team the last couple of years. It was a pleasant surprise since the speaker is a jock, a starter in boys' basketball, a team that won the state championship the year before and that did quite well in the tournament this season. The Principal spoke with tenderness about other milestones in the lives of parent and child – the first day the kid was dropped off at primary school, where both cried about the separation – and the one upcoming later in this summer when the kid gets dropped off at the college dorm, where likely it will only be the parent who cries.
Those talks captured the spirit of the moment and should have sufficed. Yet there was more. And here I should add that though this was a joyous event there was an undercurrent of racial tension, based on a history dating back to before the Consent Decree. Seemingly symbolizing the black-white division, there were presentations by both David Tomlinson, President of the School Board, and Arthur Culver, Superintendent of the Unit 4 Schools. Unit 4 consists of the public elementary, middle, and high schools in Champaign. Though their styles were quite different both embraced a paternalistic, advice-for-the- graduate approach in organizing their talks. It is not an approach I'm apt to appreciate in its own right – the kids should figure these things out for themselves – all the more so when I think the underlying points are not well taken.
My wife has been quite active in Band Boosters and the PTSA, an indirect way to show support for our kids and to learn more about the environment they operate in. I've kept my nose out of it, attending their performances but otherwise not involved with the affairs at school. I had never seen Culver talk before and I've seen Tomlinson talk only this spring – after the show Pajama Game and at the Awards Ceremony. His comments at graduation seemed more of the same. I'm not sure he meant it this way but his comments appeared targeted for the white part of the audience. He used movies as a reference point and talked specifically about the Lion King, the part where Rafiki boinked Simba on the head, in order to bring out the old bromide – leave your worries behind, a benign message. Tomlinson's entire talk was mercifully short.
Culver's presentation was edgier and longer. He seemed more than a little taken with himself and his delivery was like a sermon offered up in a church, the motif emphasized all the more because some in the audience sitting near us would should out "that's right" or "amen" after he would make a point. I got irritated during his presentation but it wasn't because of his style. He talked about being a "winner" in school and in life. I think that sports or military analogy is inappropriate for learning and is quite likely pernicious. I hate it when a college coach is interviewed on TV and talks, invariably, about his student-athletes competing in the classroom. Learning is mostly not a competition. Learning is about tinkering, trying out ideas, exploring via new experiences. The emphasis on winning via discipline conjures up the notion of learning as memorization. That is the wrong message to be sending to these students.
Much of Culver's message, as I understood it, was aimed to bolster the student's self-esteem. The goal is laudable. I don't quibble with that. But the approach Culver took is to me just plain wrong. The role model for excellence shouldn't be George Patton or Knute Rockne. It should instead be Abraham Maslow. Self-actualization should be the ideal students chase after. Culver wanted the students to deny their own weakness, overcome that through strength of character. But such denial either creates neuroses or forces the individual to numb himself to many of the sharper realities. Creativity is not found this way and the approach likely promotes unquestioned belief that leads to prejudice. Instead, creativity emerges via the tension between our weakness and the occasional self-loathing that weakness engenders with our inherent need and aspiration to self-actualize. We should give these kids a more mature view of what being an adult means where that tension comes into focus. With that sometimes kids need to give themselves a break rather than always look for the answer via more discipline. Our foibles can be a source of joy for themselves. Do winners have foibles?
I was no fan of No Child Left Behind, the narrowing of the curriculum that it indirectly encouraged as a result of the teach to the test mindset that came from thinking of school performance solely based on standardized test scores. And I'm no fan of the new Race to the Top either. But as I've written elsewhere (for example, this essay on personal learning agendas and this other one that is mainly about Joyce's story in Dubliners called Two Gallants) that the burden shouldn't be entirely on school. People need to be learners in and out of school. Out of school learning is for recreation as self-edification. If we do it well we broaden and deepen our understanding of things. We should be for that. I'm afraid that Culver's approach, perhaps unintentionally, will invariably narrow the student's perspective. If we must talk about winning then I make the following proclamation. Curiosity beats discipline. Let the students learn to satisfy their own curiosity.
* * * * *
I wasn't expecting to get onto a soapbox from attending my son's graduation but I suppose I was primed for it by earlier in the week watching all five of the videos on YouTube of the Edupunk Battle Royale. This is from a session where Gardner Campbell and Jim Groom face off on the term "edupunk" and Gerry Bayne, the moderator from Educause, steps in on occasion to steer the conversation with additional questions. This session was filmed more than a year ago so, not surprising for me, I'm quite a bit behind the times in trying to understand things.
My indirect path for coming to this viewing started with a post on Scott Leslie's blog that posed the question: What is the most "successful" "formal" "OER" project? After commenting on that post myself I thought I had selected to be notified about further comments, but apparently not. So when it occurred to me that I wasn't getting the updates I returned to the post anew a few days later to find quite a thread. Jim Groom's comment immediately followed mine and I found myself agreeing with much of what he said, particularly his instinctive dislike for formalized structures. A bit later Alan Levine chimes in. He and Scott seem to be part of a Jim Groom admiration society.
I've had some interaction with Gardner Campbell in the past, via our respective blogs, through Educause meetings, and within the Frye listserv. I knew Gardner and Jim were colleagues when Gardner was at the University of Mary Washington, though I don't know the details of the relationship they had with each other. And when a friend at Educause asked me to write a column for Educause Quarterly, which ultimately became a column called Framing Questions, I became aware that the solicitation was partially motivated to offer an alternative to edupunk, one that might appeal to administrative types who are Educause's core membership. I steered clear of doing that mostly because I didn't know enough about what edupunk was and also because I saw a different need emerging as we started in on early discussions about repositioning IT on campus, that goes under the banner IT@Illinois. Thinking other campuses were doing something similar, I could see a series of pieces that made sense to me on the topic. So I put any curiosity about edupunk to the side.
The comments on Scott's post rekindled that curiosity. I did a Google search on Gardner and Jim and the Battle Royale popped up on the first page. Now I have a better idea of what the issues are. Being unfair to both of them, I will summarize tersely as follows.
Jim's position is that creativity needs to be as unfettered as possible. Technology can help. In Jim's world Blackboard plays the role of Darth Vader while Wordpress is Luke Skywalker. Since the force is in all of us, just let it be. Cultural elements matter here to creativity since we all make connections with what we learn and the culture in which we are already immersed. Punk music must have been very important to Jim and perhaps still is. So the notion came easily to him.
Gardner and Jim are pretty much in a agreement on the creativity part, but Gardner doesn't like the punk metaphor because punk was ultimately non-generative. Gardner would like us to be more thoughtful about the entire path and not just have us live in the creative moment, oblivious to the long term consequences.
Each of these seem to have some justification but here is some pushback for which I hope somebody will scratch their head and come up with a response. Potentially generative alternatives might fail. If we're trying something new it might go places, then again it might fail. Assuring it is generative a priori is a very stern requirement, perhaps putting too much bias on the status quo, when it otherwise doesn't deserve the support. Let me again turn to race relations as an example because we now have the fullness of time to consider the issue with that example.
We now regard Martin Luther King Jr. as a martyr, perhaps even as a saint. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is now generally viewed as an extremely important struggle that helped the country heal and live up to its ideals. Yet we are clearly not all the way home. What if a more radical approach than King advocated had prevailed in the late 1960s. Black power ultimately was non-generative. But that needn't have been the case, especially if one views it as a way to set a bargaining position in an ongoing negotiation. Why must it be the courts that redress the racial injustice? Couldn't progress have been faster if cooler heads saw progress as the way out of an impasse? Read (or listen to) this speech by Stokely Carmichael on Black Power. I'm sure it was a frightening speech to many when it was delivered in 1966. But from the perspective of now it is quite reasonable. At least I found it so. Might all of us have benefitted from more Stokely, not less of him? I don't know the answer to that question, but I believe it is worth pondering. That is the question for Gardner.
The pushback at Jim is his making it too easy by identifying the external enemy, Blackboard. What happens if the enemy is closer to home, like his university, and it is imposing restrictions on his creativity, perhaps to respect Federal or State regulations or simply because some of the alumni are none too happy with some of Jim's work, what then? Or what if the enemy is even closer to home than that? It is really our inner demons with which we must continually wrestle. Do we self-filter our creative outbursts because we're aware of in the past regretting some of what we've produced, the harm greatly outweighing the benefit? And if that has happened in the past, should we nonetheless trust only internal filters or require others that are at an institutional level? By that line of thought, might Blackboard be resurrected as the embodiment of the institutional restrictions we need for our own protection? I don't know the answer to these questions either.
As I teacher who wishes to experiment with the technology and the pedagogy, I do feel incredibly encumbered by the restrictions that my institutions seems to want to respect. So I have this desire to go outside the institution with the tools I use to support learning. But I know that completely ignoring the restrictions is a mistake as well. I'd like to set a a different balance than what we have but I've got insufficient principles to guide me to how that balance should be attained.
I wonder if we'll make progress on this one.

Sometimes Innovation Isn't

At home, we are now loyal consumers of Peet's.

Starbucks plans to stir up coffee market - CNN.com via kwout

School Reform, Teacher Tenure, and Instructor Age Distribution

When I first started to get interested in labor economics, in the late 1980s, one of first papers I read was by Ed Lazaer, Why Is There Mandatory Retirement? The argument in the paper is pretty simple. To get incentives write for employees, it is efficient to rear load their compensation - pay them less than their productivity early an and more than their productivity later in their careers. This implicitly "bonds" the employee to the employer and thereby encourages the employee's vigorous participation while reducing the likelihood of the employee's turnover. That is all for the good. And if over the employment lifetime the wages paid equals the employee's productivity, then it all adds up.

However, all good things must come to an end. For most of the worker's tenure, the employee is bonded. However, once the employee is earning more than his productivity, the bond shrinks. As the employee continues to earn more than his productivity, eventually the bond hits zero. This is when Lazear says retirement should be and it should be agreed upon in advance so all parties understand that's the deal. Contracts that provide for employee tenure but that have a mandatory retirement date, say at age 65, then can fit the Lazear solution. However, indefinite tenure contracts that now exist because age discrimination laws have ruled out mandatory retirement create a problem. Under them you can have old farts in the system who have "negative bonds" - they keep drawing in pay more than their productivity. The employer wants to get rid of them, but can't because of the tenure.

I don't know the details of teacher compensation in public schools, so can't even make an eyeball guess as to when in schools that have seniority based compensation, as I take it that most public schools do, is it that the mandatory retirement date a la Lazear should be set. However, I was readily able to find these tables of the experience distribution of teachers on a state by state basis. While we know productivity varies from one teacher to the next (much of the point of the current debate) the Lazear type argument still largely holds. If efficient separation should happen after 30 or more years of experience, these tables suggest tenure is not that big an issue. There are probably less than 5 per cent in this category in most cases and one might hazard a guess that those long timers are actually pretty good teachers. If instead, however, efficient separation should happen at 20 or fewer years of experience, then tenure is a big deal as it would seem there might be 20 per cent or more of all teachers in some states in this category.

Suppose 20 years of teaching and then off to something else is efficient. What would that something else be? That's a thought to scratch your head about.

At present teaching jobs appear to be quite scarce. But ten years ago, when they were not, I believe I was told by a friend who was in the College of Ed here at the time, that the biggest issue with teaching was early burnout. Most teachers didn't last more than a couple of years on the job. If that's the problem you are trying to address with your compensation scheme, then a seniority based compensation is just the ticket. I have seen essentially no press on the issue of early burnout of teachers as of late. All of the press seems to be about those unproductive types who have tenure.

The thing is, if you are really thinking through lifetime compensation schemes, and if teaching is (or should be) a lifetime calling, you don't really want to vary the social contract in response to current labor market conditions, except perhaps at the entry level. However, you do want to vary the contract in response to what was a permanent change in the age discrimination laws, the change that got rid of mandatory retirement. In this case compensation needs to align with productivity for senior workers. Then folding it back earlier in the employee's tenure, compensation needs to align with productivity then, as well. Perhaps there can be a small amount of bonding early on, during a probationary phase. But that needs to be paid off quickly after which productivity and compensation should be equated.

The union leaders need to understand this logic, even while they have to defend the rights of their membership, most of whom cut their teeth on a seniority based model of compensation. There is something about changing the rules in midstream, especially for able if not outstanding teachers, that the reformer types seem to blithely ignore.

There is then the issue of the testing itself as a productivity measure. There is a lot to critique there. But maybe the critique needs to come from elsewhere than from the teacher unions. One variable that doesn't seem to get much discussion, but should in my opinion, is the anxiety level of students, particularly the high achievers. The testing mentality encourages these kids to stress out to the max. And it encourage a certification mindset in all learners that instead of getting into it because it's interesting in its own right, do it for the credential. We seem to be so myopic in our goal setting that we are blind to these sort of consequences, which are well beyond the usual teach to the test critique. Learning to deal with some pressure may be an important life lesson, but if the system itself is too highly cooked, that is a problem, one that doesn't seem to be getting much examination at all.

The Grid Question Type in Google Forms

Below is an example of the Grid Question type. In that the designer puts in column headings and row categories and then radio buttons are generated. The person completing the survey is asked to select one button per row. This is the way many paper surveys are designed, so I'm glad to see there is now a simple way to do it online.

Participant Perception Indicator via kwout

iPad play

I got a new iPad yesterday and have been playing with it. Nice screen and audio. I type with one finger but that is reasonably functional. I downloaded a tv show and that was awesome. It looks great for trips. I also had some of my own screen movies in iTunes and synched them with the iPad. They played fine. But from youtube it was a blur. This whole debate about flash might really come down to resolution and compression.

The biggest issue so far is with my left wrist it gets tired from holding the thing at an angle. I ordered a case but it hasn't arrived yet. More later as I get used to it.

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

You gotta love this one.

Man says Delta lost his dog - CNN.com via kwout

Inadvertent Intimidation

Sometimes even the seemingly most innocuous encounters provide revelation. Our new Business Instructional Facility lies between the building where I have my office and the lot where my car is parked. The design, I believe common to many business school buildings, features a huge common area, we call it The Atrium, with vertical space three stories tall from first floor all the way to the roof, with casual seating, a coffee shop on one end, and hallways at each corner extending to classrooms and offices. It's a hang out place and a great location for an informal meeting. I often walk through, to and from my office, surely so in inclement weather or when it is very cold outside, and other times too. On Monday afternoon I was headed to the Post Office to mail some personal letters (Campus Mail handles the work related stuff) and by chance I bump into one of our Assistant Deans for Undergraduate Affairs, a very nice guy who runs the college's Honors Program. He says,

"You economists sure make a simple game complicated."

You see, my dean is an economist and an avid baseball fan. He was an early enthusiast of Bill James, the baseball data guru. Many empirical economists – meaning their research involves the statistical manipulation and analysis of pre-collected numerical data, primarily to test economic hypotheses – who are sports fans as well like to take their work skills and apply them informally in their recreational pursuits. Major League Baseball, in particular, is an attractor because of all the data that is recorded in the normal play of the game. So he shares his hobby with other empirical economists, now scattered around the country, once former colleagues in the Econ department here. We get various emails from my dean, each about some tidbit of curiosity. I'm not an empirical guy. By training and scholarship I was a theorist before turning to learning technology. But I'm a buddy with the rest of them and because this is all pretty casual stuff I can and do chime in from time to time with my own surmisals. My Assistant Dean colleague is also on the list though not an economist. He is an avid baseball fan and a little older than the rest of us, so is capable of providing good anecdotes from when the rest of us were kids.

That morning we got an email from my dean about a table published in ESPN Insider. It had a screen grab of a table which plotted the batting averages for all at bats in Major League Baseball last year conditional on the number of balls and strikes in "the count." Mostly the table was unsurprising. Each additional strike lowered the batting average while each additional ball raised the batting average. There was one exception. The batting average was actually higher when the count was 3-1 than when the count was 3-0. How could that be? After scanning the table to see that mostly it produced what you'd expect for ordering the count by batting average, I puzzled over the anomaly for a few seconds, trying to come to an explanation for it in my mind. It really didn't take more than that.

As a baseball fan, I know that often on 3-0 counts the batter is under instructions to take the pitch, a walk is as good as a hit, or so the saying goes. A walk doesn't count in the batting average at all. When the player is given the "green light" to swing away at 3-0 the player might very well "go for the downs," meaning that he makes a swing hoping it will produce a home run. In more ordinary swings the player may instead focus primarily on making good contact with the ball, hoping to hit a line drive. My conjecture is that the go for the downs swing likely lowers the batting average, but it still can be worth it because a home run is much more valuable than a single. Batting average doesn't discriminate between the type of hits at all. So what I wrote in response to my dean's email:

"It would be great to have such a table with slugging percentage instead of batting average."

Thinking my meaning obvious, I didn't elaborate. I guess whether it is obvious or not depends a great deal on the audience.

None of this would have raised an eyebrow for me had I not been at an appreciation luncheon earlier in the day for faculty who reviewed applications for the Campus Honors Program. During the lunch we learned some facts from the program's director. Admission at the campus level is a bit down. Private schools have been expanding their waiting lists, apparently not knowing what their yields will be in these uncertain times. In those cases where we are the safety school, the student rationally keeps us on hold right till the deadline. The same thing seems to be the case for CHP. We were shown preliminary numbers. They were on the light side of their targets. Students have till this evening to have posted (by snail mail) an acceptance. So the numbers are apt to drift upward. The program has the ability to recruit students after they've arrived on Campus. So they can fill their cohort that way, if necessary. But due to budget cuts, they may want to keep their numbers lower, rather than dilute the quality of their offerings, simply make those offerings available to a smaller number of students.

There is a provider logic to that thinking. Yet there are many more students who are qualified for an honors program than the program can admit. So I found the thought of shrinking the program rather distressing. That thought bothered much of the rest of the day. I'm still bothered by it.

After the director's remarks we began a discussion of the teaching experiences some of the instructors were having this semester in their CHP classes. The first couple of faculty reports were glowing. The students are brilliant and they are doing all these wonderful things. Then the tone of the discussion took a marked turn. A history professor, I don't know him but he seems a decent guy and down to earth while some of the others in the room are a bit cantankerous, reported that his class didn't go very well at all. Some of the students hardly participated. They were very quiet. One normally thinks of disruption resulting from a loud outburst. It turns out that sustained silence by a significant number of students can disrupt a class, particularly when the instructor doesn't anticipate the behavior ahead of time.

I nodded my head in assent as the history professor told this story. I reported that my class in the fall had similar issues, as I wrote about in a post called Teaching Quiet Students. A math professor then elaborated the issues along two dimensions. Students drop his CHP course early, when their first impression is that they can't penetrate the material. The irony here is that CHP encourages students to take courses outside the student's comfort zone. This lack of faith in their own ability to make good progress in alien territory acts as an inhibitor in producing the CHP ideal. The other point the instructor made is that very good students in his class end up intimidating the other students, who must feel that they can't imitate the quality of performance the very good student produces as a matter of course. Some of the others who wouldn't be quiet otherwise are driven toward that behavior because they feel they can't measure up and they want to keep that fact to themselves. If we improve by practice, as indeed we do, the gap between the very good student and the rest only widens as a consequence. So this becomes a self-enforcing negative spiral.

Here I start to think that the elitism inherent in CHP is counterproductive. The quiet students need nurture. If that were suitably provided they might delight, as the instructor does, in the high level of performance of the very good student. With adequate protection that performance doesn't make for a threat and they can see it for its creativity and its contribution. Without the requisite protection, however, the other students are on the defensive, of necessity. Their own egos are on the line. Of course, this issue is not new at all. It's been with us certainly since when I was a student, probably since the concept of college came into being. But my sense is that the problem is becoming more aggravated recently and that discussions about quiet students will become more frequent and more pronounced over the next year or two.

* * * * *

I was cooking on these themes after returning to my office from the Post Office. While I had several work related tasks to do, I needed some distraction. Over the weekend I saw that Barbara Ganley started a new blogging venture. I took a quick look at the new site, Open View Gardens, over the weekend and vowed I'd read her first post for real in the next couple of days. So I take to read her post that Monday afternoon. Perhaps when you're cooking everything looks like it belongs in the stew. Quite likely nobody else seeing Barbara's site would recognize any similarity between her topics – natural foods, gardens, and building a community in conversation around these ideas – and my themes. Instinctively, however, I have a gut reaction. If you'll pardon the bad pun, they are two peas in a pod. And since I'm kind of upset with my themes, my initial reaction to her site is negative.

I don't intellectualize this all at once. Initially my thoughts are not of what transpired earlier in the day but rather of a different email my dean had sent a couple of weeks ago, about a new game for the Playstation 3 called MLB 10. It is an extraordinarily realistic game about Major League Baseball, but it is so complex and so difficult to learn for the uninitiated that it will discourage all but the diehard sports gamers. Indeed that is the thrust of the piece. The game is anti-democratic in its design. It's intended for users who have already logged hundreds if not thousands of hours playing similar sports games, implicitly signifying that novices are not welcome. It offers no pathway for novices to develop expertise. The author of the piece finds this off putting. Some of the big multiplayer games, such as World of Warcraft, do recognize the need to bring in new users all the time. It's part of their design. Why isn't it part of the baseball game? Is it just too hard to build in all the detail for those who want it and yet also have a simpler alternative for those who are just getting started?

While I don't explicitly think about this, I have in the back of my mind the piece, Watching TV Makes You Smarter. The core idea being that we humans are learning creatures and TV programming has to be helping viewers learn or they will lose interest. But to do that the programs have had to become more complex over time, so viewers have more to figure out in understanding a show. This move toward complexity appears inexorable. The makers of World of Warcraft can counter this move toward complexity by designing into their environment a path for newcomers. A business organization can make such a decision deliberately. I'm not sure an individual can make a likewise commitment if there is little or no learning for the individual in providing the path for newcomers. Barbara is just about the most democratic person I know and cares deeply about making learning accessible for others. But she cares about her own learning too. Can she, through geniality in character or force of will, keep herself out of this trap? I don't see it, so I'm not happy with her site.

On the other hand, the site is brand spanking new and it takes quite a bit of hubris on my part to make that sort of prediction based on the very little online evidence and no understanding of what is happening on the ground at all. I've been schooled that if you don't have something good to say… Yet when I first encountered Barbara online, it was by challenging her in something she had written. And she had requested comments on the new site. So, without an ideal solution, I did a part serious comment and a part punt – I wrote a little rhyme about my own tuning out.

Not surprisingly, in her response she asked what I really intended. I hadn't thought through the sequence of moves that would ensue from my comment. So that evening I reflected some more on her post and my themes. I thought about something I read not too long ago that different generations have quite different attitudes toward food and nutrition, with some young adults regarding questions of what to eat along ethical lines but baby boomers like me thinking of food as a necessity of life, nothing more. (I wish I could find this reference, which I thought was the New York Times Magazine, but I struck out in trying to pinpoint it.)

My belief is that we've erred in the education of young adults, with too much emphasis on choice and not enough on obligation. The example that sticks in my head is customization achievable at an espresso bar. Everyone can get their own individual choice. Each customer in that way becomes a designer of his or her own drink. In concept the designing function may be fine but in implementation it creates a sense of entitlement. Individual entitlement that is just for ourselves may be ok, but I believe further that thinking it will be just for ourselves creates a focus on the exception rather than the rule. Often one person's entitlement blocks or impedes another's.

Bright and open students should see it as their obligation to offer succor for their classmates. Quiet students should understand that functional groups have all participate. When they don't speak up they are reducing the effectiveness of the group as a whole. Obligation should trump here. But in a world of entitlement, it doesn't. Rightly or wrongly, I associate the ethical stance about which foods to eat with an entitlement approach about choice. In my reflection I see this linkage between what Barbara wants to do and my earlier themes.

Then events conspire to show I'm throwing stones in a glass house. This year we've been ordering the beans for our morning coffee from Peet's, two pounds delivered every two weeks. It's been like clockwork till this past Monday. We didn't get a delivery then. That evening I start to get a bit desperate about what we'll do Tuesday morning. We had some French Roast left though not enough for a pot of coffee and a half a bag of some old rot gut from a local supplier. We could tolerate one morning of mixing the two. But I really want good coffee in the morning. (Fortunately, the shipment was delivered yesterday.) Is it any more than splitting hairs to distinguish what we crave from what we feel we deserve? It serves me right for ignoring my own foibles.

Then I also note that I'm frequently none too sensitive to the novice's need that things won't accelerate beyond comprehension. I don't believe this lack of sensitivity is from deliberate boasting on my part. Rather I think it is that once I get into something, that's where I want to be. It takes a while to get focused and intense. Let the intensity subdue of its own accord. While engaged, however, much else is a blur.

Barbara, in contrast, is much more outgoing and willing to engage with others, seemingly at all times. One of her favorite ideas is the notion of "reciprocal apprenticeships" where all the participants learn together, helping each other as they go, sharing their insights and discoveries with one another.

Is Barbara's topic for her new blog broad enough that she can keep going back to the well for something new, different but not more complex, welcoming all while continuing to pique her own interest? I don't know. What seemed impossible on Monday evening looks like it might be do-able two days later. Thinking it through and identifying the pitfalls, surely there is a challenge here, but that doesn't mean the challenge is insurmountable.

It's funny, with this writing I've not done one whit to resolve the themes that were disturbing me so much on Monday. But I'm not quite as distressed after getting this post out of my system. Perhaps we can overcome those challenges as well.

Statistical anomaly or a new trend?

Once you know their politics, does the religious affiliation of a Supreme Court Justice matter? I do think it is probably a statistical fact that first or second generation immigrant children are more likely the over achievers in school. (Start with the over achievers, then look at their demographic makeup, not vice versa.)

The second half of this piece is about evangelicals. I wonder what fraction of Protestants would describe themselves as evangelical. The piece doesn't say. If one looked more broadly within the judiciary, not just the Supreme Court, would this demographic pattern continue to hold?

A Supreme Court without Protestants? - CNN.com via kwout

Dominos and Speck You Later

I recall that when I was a kid the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam was justified by the Domino Theory. We had to halt communism before it spread, or so the thinking (er, party line) went. That theory fell out of favor as the war became increasingly unpopular. Now, however, I think a different sort of domino theory is something quite real to worry about. The Greek crisis looks like the next in the chain. Might it destabilize the economies of other countries in Europe? That sure looks possible. And could China be one of the casualties down the road?

Europe Worried That Greek Crisis Is Poised to Spread - NYTimes.com via kwout

Reading Eric Hoffer

Today's Quote of the Day:

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)

Over the weekend I had been thinking about how one might teach students something about ethics in an economics course, one I might be teaching, and in a way that really would matter to the students. With ethical failures seemingly so much in the news as of late and with many of the students in the class likely to be Business majors, I wondered if it were possible to make any headway on this goal whatsoever, or if though it might be impossible to get students to articulate this way that their underlying cynicism, which they surely would prefer to keep concealed rather than bring out into the open, would block any attempts to reconsider their point of view.

I found some sites about teaching ethics with economics. This one looked promising. But the focus seem entirely on "outer world" issues that have an ethical dimension to them yet may seem merely to be academic matters to the students. As I wrote about a year ago, for students to make headway on the ethics they need to freely make decisions that matter to them and then observe the consequences on others with whom they interact. If they are dead to the impact on others, then I believe developing their sense of ethics is unattainable. If they do care but have been heretofore unaware of consequences of their actions, there is hope.

I was unsatisfied with the solution of economics readings and normally when in that state I just let it stew for a while. As it turns out, I saw the Eric Hoffer quote and that piqued my interest. I had read The True Believer in college in a seminar course on radical political groups. My memory of it was essentially nil except for the fact of one surprising conclusion - extremists need extremism rather than particular ideology, so one can switch from the far right to the far left without feeling the internal contradictions that caring about ideology would seem to suggest.

I found this page, which has references to articles written by Hoffer. He was prolific as a writer, with many contributions in popular outlets. I was surprised that none of the references were hyperlinked to the actual articles. Indeed, I couldn't find any of the articles openly available online. So I went to Illinois' Library Catalog and looked to see what digital resources I could find with articles by Hoffer. I found as a pdf How Natural Is Human Nature, published in the Saturday Evening Post 1962 and Beware The Intellectual, which the Hoffer Resource site says was published in Harpers, but the Library Catalog (and the last page of the pdf) says was from the National Review, 1979. I read both pieces eagerly. They drew me in.

Hoffer proposes a duality in human nature that I believe is readily accessible conceptually, even by undergraduate students. Humans are incomplete beings and in that way are unlike the rest of nature. Humans need their wits and especially their creativity to get beyond survival and live above nature. Creativity is strongest in the weak and disenfranchised because the spur, according to Hoffer, is self-loathing. The strong don't have as much of a need for creativity. The weak do and through their inventions they can overturn the strong. Indeed much human motivation is quite base, but from that can emerge caring and compassion. His arguments for compassion are what I want the students to learn about ethics.

I didn't have my fill of Hoffer and looked for more of his writing. Ultimately I found Between the Devil and the Dragon. The Library has a copy, which I checked out. The Dragon, we learn immediately, is the symbol of our struggle with nature, a concept that is earlier than the Devil, which he attributes to the Hebrews. They were the first group to see man as living above nature. God made nature, but God made man in his own image. Once living above nature is possible, a different battle commences, the one with our inner selves. The fall happened in the Garden of Eden, when innocence was lost. As we evolved from brutes, the devil emerged to do us ongoing battle. The devil was there with God, right at the outset. Compassion is the result when a battle with the devil is won.

Hoffer's book starts out with 15 or 16 pages of aphorisms. I haven't seen writing of this sort before and I found them compelling to read. This one, in particular, might challenge students:

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture, and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for attainment of the most marked solution.

Hoffer argues that there is an essential unpredictability about human behavior as it is applied to creative endeavor. The unpredictability results in enormous diversity among us. This idea in itself I find quite compelling. It helps us to understand there will be others unlike ourselves and yet like us too in pursuing their own struggles. Learning comes out of that struggle and it is learning that shows we are not making alibis. Hoffer, therefore, might be quite an interesting read for learning technologists. His name doesn't normally come up in the list of folks from whom to look for foundations - Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, Freire, and others. Hoffer's style is different, a consequence of his life experience rather than a scientific exploration, and his writing is direct. There are metaphorical allusions in his writing, to be sure, but they are accessible and treated in a matter of fact way.

Some of Hoffer's style might be off putting to the reader, particularly his repeated reference to the Occident. As I'd like to argue that much of what he has to say has a timeless appeal, I don't want to push too hard on the fact that most of what is in the book was produced more than 50 years ago and that the world was not nearly as flat as it seems today. If you can ignore these unattractive bits, or if not that then forgive him for the minor transgressions, you'll find a wealth of insight that might very well serve as a teaching foundation.

When I finish the book I'll write another post to see if I've reversed myself or maintain that conclusion.

The messiness that is Open Education

Via Stephen Downes' blog I found this Wesley Fryer post and from that I watched the David Wiley video. My visceral reaction to any preaching , and I take it that what David Wiley was doing was to preach on behalf of openness, is throw up a wall of skepticism to avoid being immediately infected and then look hard for flaws in what is being preached. My experience is that preachers want to paint a world of black and white in which choices are straightforward. They have no patience for shades of gray. In this case the Wiley message is pure and simple - instructors should be generous with their content which means they should share it openly - while reality is messy and complex. In the rest of the post, I will illustrate some of the issues.

In the movie The Firm, the John Grisham story of a Memphis Law Firm that really is a front for the mob, the hero Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) let's his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) know by whispering in her ear with the stereo playing loudly that their house is bugged. Mitch desperately wants to talk to Abby but needs to take the conversation outside, where others can't listen in. To be open with her he needs to wall off the rest of the world.

Going from fiction to reality, I taught a class last fall where I blogged as did the students (look at the left sidebar on the class blogg). We had some interesting interchanges that way and the students produced some good stuff. But my most heated exchanges with students happened one-on-one in my office or by email and some of the work they produced never found its way to their blogs or mine. These students wanted to treat their work as a private matter. They were ok discussing with me but not ok in sharing with their classmates. For my part, I tried to respect that. This meant not just keeping what they produced private. It meant keeping my reactions to their work private as well.

But that was a small seminar class. What about in a big lecture course? Surely in such a course one can separate out the content pushed to the students by the instructor, such as the the PowerPoints the instructors distribute, from the interactions the instructor has with the students, where the former are made openly available while the latter have some "closed door" aspect to ensure student privacy. That makes sense, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, what seems a clear distinction is in reality a blur. Consider the pedagogic approach known as Just In Time Teaching, were students are given some assessment prior to class. These JITT pre-flights are read by the instructor and scanned for common errors and interesting ways students communicate their current understanding of the subject matter. It is good teaching practice to incorporate some of these students responses directly into the instructor presentation. The instructor then modifies the lecture to address the student issues. By being responsive in this manner, the instructor shows concern for student learning and the students get the instructor to focus on their issues. All of that is for the good. But now, with the student submitted content, should the PowerPoint be out in the clear or behind password protection? If it is in the clear and the students know that, might it affect how the students respond to the JITT assessment? I don't know the answer to these questions. I suspect that good answers must be given on a case by case basis.

Student privacy is one issue and since there is FERPA the legality aspect confounds clear thinking on what we ought to do for the very best teaching and learning reasons. I mention this because there are privacy issues with the instructor as well and to my knowledge there is no comparable law to FERPA that protects instructor privacy. Again, this might be done for the best possible pedagogic reasons. Elsewhere I've argued to support the approach advocated by Nancy Chism, where faculty engage in a repeated cycle of which experimentation with the pedagogy is a part. Experiments can fail. Broadcasting those failures, the instructor may bear an undue burden from the bad outcome. Over time the experimental approach will likely create more effective instruction, but there is a risk in any one instance. An instructor might be more willing to try out new approaches if there is some shielding from the pernicious impact when the teaching experiment goes awry. Should the gains from openness trump these concerns? I don't know. As with the previous case, my belief is that the right solution will be highly idiosyncratic.

Let me shift away from privacy to a different issue. Recently I've become aware of a textbook for intermediate microeconomics that in early form was solo authored by Preston McAfee and in its new version is co-authored with Tracy Lewis. The book is freely available from FlatWorld Knowledge, where David Wiley is the guru. However, the book comes without ancillary material such as simulations to illustrate the content or online assessments that students might do to test their understanding. For example, consider this competitor text by Besanko and Braeutigam, where the first 8 chapters are available as pdfs, there are Excelets (authored by me), and self-tests for the students. I'm not trying to promote this book in any way, shape, or form. I simply want to observe that in the adoption decision over textbook that instructors make, these ancillaries (and the test bank the publisher provides) can matter a great deal.

Yet the provision of the textbook itself and the ancillaries happen under quite different circumstances. McAfee, a chaired professor at Cal Tech, and Tracy Lewis, a chaired professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke, are near to if not right at the top of the food chain in the economics profession. They can afford to be generous and share their work. It matters not what their motives are, whether a sense of noblesse oblige, the warm glow from giving (economists are not usually known for that), or a shrewd business sense where the benefits from giving away their intellectual property gets capitalized right back into their reputations, via speaking engagements, consulting fees, or salary enhancement. In the world in which they operate, textbook authoring is a sidebar but akin to scholarly journal writing, on which their reputations are based. For scholarly work, getting the work out there is the imperative. They don't need to make their livelihood off of royalties from the text, and seem to have enough incentive to author it without the royalties. So be it.

The ancillary and assessment content are authored by different individuals. In this case I'm an outlier. I wrote those Excelets without ever using the Besanko and Brauetigam text, just because I was interested in seeing whether the content has use value with the students (it does). I did this as a fee for service activity - no royalty whatsoever. That part may be typical. But my motive was anything but. I'm a well paid administrator and would have produced the content freely had their been a credible way to distribute the content to test its effectiveness.

Many of the authors of the ancillary and assessment content are adjuncts or less well known tenure-track faculty. They need a different sort of incentive to create and update the content than do the textbook authors. The money matters to them. Further, if one were to imagine a different regime where that content were also open, where it was the employer university rather than the textbook market that provided the incentive for these authors, so that content could be provided in the open then, unfortunately some perverse additional incentives come into play. These instructors start looking expensive to the departments relative to potential substitute instructors. Once the content is produced, the departments would have incentive to let these instructors go and hire replacements. Such is life in the world of the adjunct.

So one might hope to separate out the textbook from the assessment content, the former provided in an open way as Wiley advocates, the latter provided in a market. Seven or eight years ago, this is what I hoped would be the solution.

We've had experience since then which makes me wary of that. On the one hand, students do not seem to be reading textbooks much these days. Textbook purchase, even of used books, has been going down for quite a while. On the other hand, there was a very interesting experiment with Aplia, a company founded by the economist Paul Romer, who believed it was the homework problems that were the key and the regular market for textbooks wasn't doing a good job of providing that. (He was right on these points.) Let's instead have a market just dedicated to online homework. In my heart, I wanted that experiment to work.

A couple of years ago Aplia was bought out by the publisher, Cengage. The publishers have figured out that they have to bundle the textbooks with the assessments and sell the two jointly. It's like buying a car and getting the sun roof even if you don't want that. A lot of instructors want the assessments only. The publishers are saying to do that, students must buy the book too.

The situation appears to me unstable, but I have no sense what will replace where we are right now. It should be noted that there are some open communities for assessment based on the quiz engine LON-CAPA. I believe there are fairly vibrant communities for the Life and Chemical Sciences as well as for Physics. But to join such a community an individual instructor would need some commitment from the instructor's campus. It is therefore unlike adopting a textbook, which requires no such campus commitment.

It would be good to hear David Wiley talk about these other, messier issues. They are hard and lack simple solutions. There is in the profession, it's not just Wiley who does it, a tendency to advocate hard for what is a partial solution and ignore the rest of the concerns. I'd like to see somebody draw a circle large enough so that all the issues are on inside. Then pose a solution to the whole kit and kaboodle. If openness solves the whole thing, I'm a monkey's uncle. More likely, there is the Clay Shirky point. The technologies are disruptive. There may be nothing that solves the whole thing. We may have to grapple with various half-loaves for quite a while till the problem morphs in such a way that something stable emerges.

Why can't our rhetoric embrace this complexity?

Feed Not Working Rhyme

I'm in distress,
Cause my RSS is a mess.
My Facebook Wall is stuck,
My readers there out of luck.

It's more than five days late,
For my feed from Blogger to update.
Though it's really a Feedburner feed,
Which elsewhere updates with good speed.

My instinct is to troubleshoot,
More or less like a machine reboot.
I'd delete my feed from Facebook News,
Then after a fashion, the feed I would re-choose.

The hope is that through this action,
On updating the feed I'd gain some traction.
Yet for this experiment I lack the verve,
For bearing the risk of deleting readers' comments, I have no nerve.

So another solution I do seek,
One with little downside, so to speak.
This really is my question.
Does anyone have a good suggestion?

If so please post in a comment here.
The next time I see you I'll buy the beer.
In the meantime let's all reflect,
In relying so much on Web 2.0 technology, perhaps there is human defect.

Should certain stories never be made into films?

Authors have great intentionality when crafting their works. In the HBO Miniseries John Adams, based on the book by David McCullough, there is a scene where Adams, along with Franklin and Jefferson, are reviewing the draft of the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson has inked. The author has a pained expression on his face for although both Adams and Franklin give great praise for the tone of the work and the overall sentiment, a casting of the break with the mother country as assertion of the rights of man, both do take issue with particular aspects of the document. Adams for his part is troubled by how slavery is or isn't treated in the document. He and Jefferson are in agreement on the abomination that is slavery. But they differ on how much of that should appear in the Declaration. Franklin, for his part, doesn't want to see the document as a religious testament. Where possible, he wants to purge the text of religious references. In what I take to be ahistorical, but fitting with the characterization of Franklin as possessing more street smarts and sensibility than the other two, he comes up with the line, "We hold these truths self-evident…" to substitute for different text that Jefferson had written. Jefferson tolerates the ordeal because he understands the necessity of getting the Congress to approve the document. Yet he goes out of his way to relate to both Adams and Franklin that every word and sentence were specifically selected for the purpose he had in mind. Jefferson could barely stand to see his creation so altered. While submitting to the necessity for the edits, he couldn't endure his pain in silence.

I've learned to endure, even to appreciate copy editors. Their allegiance is to the readers and because they are true to that I've found that I can have a fruitful negotiation with them when producing pieces where I'm the author. The published piece is almost certainly an improvement on my initial draft. I can't say the same for people who perform the copy editor function but don't do it as a full time job. During the time I was part of the Campus IT organization, there were a variety of cases where other people in the organization were tasked to edit things I had written. I wasn't the only one producing content so there was an internal editing process that performed a requisite function. But I was quite different from the other authors regarding the pride I take in my writing and my background in producing written works. The process couldn't be designed to be sensitive to those considerations. So I endured it because life goes on and work has to get done. Yet it pained me to see my work altered in a way where I felt the final product was not as good as my early draft.

Readers make their own meaning of works in the process of reading them. The reader's experience connects to the stream of thought evoked by the printed page. Mental imagery is conjured up. The moral to the story may readily appear. Other information the reader has gathered, for example biographical information about the author, intrudes on the making of meaning. The reader may find he is solving a puzzle in deciding on the meaning of what he has read. If this is what the author intended, what was his motive for delivering that message? Perhaps, when the reader's interpretation seems novel, relative to what he garners from the impressions other readers have articulated, the reader may feel certain ownership in his interpretation, similar to if not identical with the feeling of having authored the piece himself. He may then not want to see that interpretation be changed by others for fear that will lessen the impact of the story.

Of course, it is a truism with many movies that some of the viewers will say after having seen the film, "Not bad, but the book was better," or something else to the same effect. I've been that viewer on more than one occasion. In some cases the film seems rather a large departure from the book, not simply an adaptation. One example, is A Beautiful Mind, where Ron Howard's movie is an attempt to bring to the viewer what schizophrenia is like, while the book by Sylvia Nasar is a much more complete biography of John Nash, most of which is entirely omitted in the film. Is it ok in this case to have the film, as its own departure?

Presumably the author of the book should have first say. Publishing is a business. When there are apt to be substantial royalties to the author from the film release as well as a feedback effect on the demand for the next work the author will craft, there is a strong business reason for the author to accede in having his work made into a "major motion picture." There is also the possibility of an altruistic motive. Films are more democratic than books. More people have watched Howard's movie, imperfect though it might be, than have read Nasar's portrayal of Nash. Films often have mass appeal while books find their niche. An author may appreciate having the best of both.

What happens, however, when the author is deceased and the film itself is intended for a niche audience? Is this just a matter of purchasing the rights to the written material for film production? Or is there some further artistic obligation, to stay true to the author's intent in crafting the story. And what, especially, can be done in film when much of the action in the written story happens in the mind of the main character, where there is a fierce internal dialog, but no words are uttered and even the facial expression hardly reflects the inner drama that unfolds. How can film portray this and be true to the story? Doesn't the artistic obligation then require the film never gets made?

Let me return to those questions momentarily and remark about something different. Recently I have been having the experience of thinking through something on my own, writing up those ideas, and then discovering that somebody else has previously published on essentially the same thing. Many others have written on the topic and most of the other authors don't bring up the points I find essential. But one does and the person is somebody well known in the area. This gives some reassurance to me in my formative thinking – I find my way. Even when somewhat lost, that eventually rights itself. The path I'm on is not a bad one to follow. So keep at it. Finding these other writings is also a little disconcerting. I stumble upon them, looking for something else. Must I do that much more fact checking before making a conjecture in my blog? I don't do systematic research in advance at all. That's not the way I learn. It's all happenstance. Taking that away would kill much of the joy in my own learning.

The story in question is by James Joyce. It's from his book of short stories Dubliners, The Dead, the last story in the collection and considered to be one of the greatest short stories ever written. We've discussed it in our Motley Read where Alan gave his critique and, both in the commentary to that post and in a subsequent post of my own, I gave my idiosyncratic interpretation of the story. While I won't repeat that analysis here, let me affirm that the central part of the interpretation is not the epiphany that happens at the very end of the story, but rather the fall from grace that precedes it, driven by an insurmountable lust that the protagonist feels for his wife, which he falsely conjectures is reciprocated by her. It is this prior state of intense feeling coupled with wrong belief that is the key to the story.

The story was written in 1907. Joyce had extreme difficulty getting his work into print. The book ultimately was published in 1914. The movie adaptation is from 1987, directed by John Huston, featuring his daughter Angelica as Gretta, the wife, with the screenplay written by his son Tony. It was Huston's last movie. He died soon thereafter. I watched the movie over the weekend.

I asked my wife to order the movie from NetFlix a few weeks ago, while I was reading the story, which I didn't do in one sitting, a start and a stop before getting it all. Several of us in the Motley Read felt it a struggle to get through the stories though a reward for having read them. There is a cascading effect in doing a group read. One wants to contribute to the discussion and add to it. With limits to our own sensibilities, one looks for other fodder upon which to make a contribution. I found out about the movie for that reason. That it seemingly got good reviews made it seem like something to watch.

But I am also protective of my own sensibilities. When the disc came in the mail, I started to watch it. A few minutes in, I stopped. It seemed such a literal rendering of the story. Yet I had developed my own mental image of the story and I didn't want to find it in conflict with the film version. So I put it aside and waited a couple of weeks to view, until my sense of the story had dulled a bit, as all my memories seem to do. It wasn't quite like watching the film without having read the story at all, in which case I suspect I'd have liked the film very much and then would have reacted to it much like Vincent Canby did in this review or like Siskel and Ebert did in this At The Movies clip.

Infected with my prior reading, however, I was prone to fixate on my interpretation. So in some sense I was fortunate to have my attention focus on something different. The actor who played Gabriel Conroy, the husband in the story, is named Donal McCann. He seemed familiar to me and much of the movie I tried to place where I knew him from. I never figured that out, though his speaking voice sounded to me remarkably close to Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot and I tried to imagine whether visually they were similar as well. Then too, I thought McCann was a little old for the part, seemingly too self-assured in his demeanor, encouraging the confidence of others. As with Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence, I believe that Joyce had every little piece of the story calibrated perfectly in his mind. Gabriel is nervous about giving his speech in the story. But McCann appeared as if he shouldn't be. That bit matters because, perhaps though unconsciously, Gabriel has given himself to the purpose of pleasing others, his spinster aunts in particular. He is humanly invested in the activity. This obligation would not be a burden for a more mature man, who would take it in stride. Whey else the nervousness but that he cares and that there is still some novelty in that?

Other than this little inconsistency, however, McCann is the right man for the part. The issue is not McCann's portrayal, which I thought was quite good. Read this review by Ebert, written only a few years ago, well after he did that clip with Siskel. Ebert seems to have had a change of heart here, almost perfectly in line with my own thinking about the movie. In particular he says

When I first saw "The Dead," I thought it brave and deeply felt but "an impossible film," and I wrote: "There is no way in the world any filmmaker can reproduce the thoughts inside Gabriel's head…."

Ebert recants from this position, focusing on the epiphany Gabriel comes to at the conclusion of the movie, delivered as a soliloquy with Gabriel's voice produced by a reading off screen, the camera not on him but on the countryside covered in snow. The effect works there quite well. And Ebert is right about how faithful most of the production is to Joyce's story. But on the matter of Gabriel's lust for Gretta in the cab ride to the hotel, there is no soliloquy. There can't be a soliloquy at that juncture because events are still to unfold and it is not yet time for reflection. As a result, the movie simply doesn't convey the depth of his emotion. There is a deep crescendo in Joyce's story at this point. Yet there is no parallel in the film. Ebert was right before he recanted. The film was impossible. It shouldn't have been made.

A miss is as good as a mile.

Didn't get the story quite right

With respect to my earlier post about the Tea Party making room for moderate Republicans, the underlying theory seems to fit but another implicit assumption I made, at least in the case of the Florida Senate race, was wrong. I assumed the Tea Party candidate would lose the primary. In fact, the polls have Governor Crist running behind the Tea Party candidate. It might be Governor Crist who runs as an independent.

Florida Governor Splits With G.O.P. on Teacher Pay - NYTimes.com via kwout

Another Jared Original

Got this yesterday. Apparently its been 3 weeks in the delivery. Eerily reminiscent of Dubliners.

And the flip side.

Might the Tea Party End Up Making Room for Moderate Republicans

As an undergrad I read An Economic Theory of Democracy, by Anthony Downs, which gives a nice explanation of the Median Voter Model and it's main thesis that campaigns with two candidates are a race to the middle. Put in a third candidate who is extreme right, who will siphon off some votes of voters with preference near to that extreme, and that alters the Downs prediction in that the location of the other two candidates is no longer the median of the entire population but rather the median of those who continue to vote for the two original candidates. That point will be more leftward than the original median. Reality is not that simple, of course, but it is an intriguing thought.

Candidates who are well known and have historically developed positions on issues may not be quite as flexible in their positions as the Downs model indicates. In this case in an election where the traditional Republican candidate is to the right of the Democratic candidate, the Downs logic would suggest that the the presence of a Tea Party Candidate would hurt the traditional Republican but not the Democratic candidate. One can quite reasonably argue that the voters have multi-dimensional preferences so are unlike what Downs models. And one might also argue that the process is sequential, primary first, then election. So there is no direct three-way competition. But if Tea Party candidates run in the Republican primary and lose there and then decide to run in the general election anyway as a third party candidate, you should get something like the prediction above.

This seems like something worth betting on.

Tea Party names its heroes and targets - CNN.com via kwout

Draft of latest book chapter now available

The essay A Mature View of Uncertainty is now available. It is chapter 10 in my book, Guessing Games. (A pdf version is also there, accessible in the sidebar.) Here's a warning to the reader. It is very long. I'm not sure whether it works for the reader in this form, but it did make sense to me writing it that way. As with the previous chapters as well, I'd appreciate the getting the reactions from anyone who slugs through it.

Writer's Cramp or Arthritis

What does it mean when in the area just below the knuckles on your left hand it starts to hurt like a son of a gone as you are in the middle of producing a transcript for a video? Psychosomatic, no doubt. I will refrain from taking it as an omen. In any event, I'm now done with captions I mentioned in my previous post.

Making Open Accessible Content - Some Observations

Starting in January, I've been building a simulation in Excel about the Edgeworth Box, something we torture students with in intermediate microeconomics. Along with the simulation I've made some short screen capture movies with voice over to describe what's going on, using Jing Pro to make the captures. I'm to the point of liking it more than the full fledged Camtasia. Both because we are very conscious of making video accessible on my Campus and because I'm quite enthusiastic about what YouTube has been doing with captions, I committed myself to caption each of these videos. The first video I made the transcript manually. (YouTube puts in the timings if you input the transcript.) That was a pain and probably explains why I was slow to make the next video. Ultimately I figured out how to rip the audio out of the video. I am using the free version of AoA Audio Extractor, which works quite well for my purposes. It produces a very clean MP3 file. I then run that through Dragon Naturally Speaking, which produces a transcript. This I have to edit. It is still a pain but less so. You can see the end of the tunnel when you start the task. And I've gotten better at the editing over time.

I'm now almost done. (The last video still needs to be captioned. I hope to finish that by the end of the day.) You can see the results for yourself and make your own assessment about this approach as a modality for delivering mini-lectures. Before getting to my lessons learned from the experience I do want to mention some of my other motivations for going through this exercise. There has been a lot of mention recently of the Khan Academy and the large volume of mini-lectures to be found on that site. The quantity is quite impressive. However, pedagogically I thought the approach flawed. If one goes so far with the technology to make all that content availabe, why not go a few steps further in producing the content in a way students can better digest it? My experience from when I used to teach with chalk and a blackboard is that a well done lecture was not nearly sufficient for a good number of students to process the content. So the Excel simulations are there for that reason. Whether they achieve that end, I don't know. I do think they help in making the content more penetrable.

Another reason relates to the current fascination with lecture capture. As with many technologies we try to employ for learning, my thinking about the technology has evolved over time. I am much less enthusiastic about lecture capture than I was a few years ago because it is an added expense with an unclear benefit. We seem to be doing it because we can rather than because we should. Lecture capture does economize on faculty time, no doubt. But the product is not so compelling and for an ongoing class probably will be used little expect for exam review or by non-native speakers of English. The mini lectures of which my creations are an example, by being short and to the point, with the captioning and with more activity on the screen, makes for better viewing, I believe. Also, with such mini-lectures in use in-class time can be purposed for activities better done face to face, collaboration and dialog, which is where we should be headed. In a blended learning approach, especially when the instructor teaches multiple sections of the same class or teaches the class on a repeated basis, the mini-lectures can economize on faculty time, but they certainly take substantial effort to produce the first time around the block. That is probably the reason they aren't spreading more on their own.

Also, I may be teaching an online version of intermediate microeconomics in the not too distant future. I've been thinking of a variety of activities I'd have for the students. For each of these my approach is to give it a try ahead of time and then based on the experiment make a determination of whether it will be useful for the students and if I can keep up doing the activity when it would have to scale to the entire syllabus, not just a particular topic area. I'm still not sure on that last one, though I fear it would be the boredom in editing transcripts rather than the lack of time that would be the real constraint in deploying these mini-lectures.

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I suspect that most people who found themselves talking to the computer screen rather than to somebody else on the phone, would feel self-conscious and the discomfort from that might prevent them from continuing with the activity. I've done enough of this sort of thing as to not feel particularly disturbed by recording my own voice, even by listening to it being played back. Any recommendation I make in the rest of this posts assumes that the instructor has gotten past the self-conscious point. The only way I know to get past that point is to do it sufficiently.

It is an eye opener to transcribe your own speaking - particular the way the spoken descriptions depart from how you would describe matters in writing. One reason for this divergence is that with the screen movies you can point to places in the diagram you are talking about and the pointing allows you to be much more colloquial, while in writing there would be a tendency to be more formal, as the diagram is more of an impersonal object. There is another part that the language choice in giving descriptions really is idiosyncratic to me when I speak. A different economist explaining the same stuff would use different language to convey the ideas. In writing, there is a tendency for the language to homogenize. So on this each lecturer gives his own version of the course, but were we to write textbooks, those wouldn't be so different. There is a question how important the idiosyncrasy is to the student's learning and what role the idiosyncrasy plays. I am not sure but I suspect it helps the students to be able to inject some of the instructor's personality into the subject matter.

One of the things that happens when you edit the transcript is that you play short segments of the the audio, then stop, look to see if the printed text corresponds, but then also listen for whether you fully understood what was said in the audio. Often there would be a mumble, or a phrase that could have been different words and still give sensible meaning to the overall. If I, the deliverer of the mini-lecture, am unsure of particular phrases, what must the students feel? Would students listen to the audio to gain meaning from it in the same way, playing short clips over and over again? Were I a student, I wouldn't do that. My approach has always been to try to take it all in and make sense of it in a big picture way. An idle phrase would have little or no effect and would likely be filtered out entirely. But perhaps students would be unlike me in this respect.

The media, therefore, enables a different sort of listening, one that can emphasize the particular as well as the big picture. If a student is stuck understanding then they can start and stop the audio at the relevant juncture, think about what is going on and do other activities to process through their misunderstandings. One of the reasons I embedded an audio only track in addition to the video is that the former takes up a lot less screen real estate, so I thought students could fiddle with the Excel simulation more easily if only using the audio, though perhaps they'd rather have that downloaded to the desktop than embedded. I've got the audio for download at archive.org. It is a separate Web page for each file, which is a little inconvenient, but I hope not too bad.

I had thought ahead of time about farming out the editing of the transcripts to students in the class. Each would volunteer (via my coercion if necessary) to do their fair share in exchange for me not requiring a textbook, a reasonable quid pro quo in my estimation. I came to conclude this wouldn't work well. The students, even if well intentioned, wouldn't produce high caliber edits, because they wouldn't have a prior view of what the resulting transcript should say. Apart from some rather obscure jargon I'm prone to use, my "ums" (plentiful) and "ahs" (not too bad on that score) need to be excised from the document. The real problem is where I choose to pause when I'm speaking. Mostly I pause in the middle of a sentence, a momentary gathering of my wits but not the conclusion of the thought. I actually speed up as I come to the end of a sentence, something I'd never have known about my speaking without going through this exercise, as if to assert through the force of my voice that the previous idea is connected to the next one. I can punctuate the mess that is produced, although too many sentences end up starting with "So" or "And." For students, having to put in such punctuation would be a nightmare.

I've also got a few thoughts on repositories based on this experience. Winning factors include convenience and that the service was free. When I started playing with hosting at archive.org, I didn't yet know that Google Docs was allowing any file type. But my guess is that Google doesn't want to have Google Docs used as an mp3 download site. This is why they have a fairly modest quota - 1 Gig. Beyond that you have to pay. A one time payment wouldn't be so bad. An annual payment though is not good - simply the remembering to keep up the account is not good.

YouTube, as I said, is great for captioning from transcripts so unless my Campus offered a caption service (can't afford it in the foreseeable future) and since my videos are under 5 minutes each, YouTube wins. That YouTube does this is also a reason I'm liking Jing more. Camtasia was pretty good on captions, but really didn't help much producing the transcript. I do think that if I were to use this stuff in a course then the Campus might want to be able to brand that site, but why there should be a repository for the content that the Campus controls, I don't really get. These other external hosts are convenient and very functional. If I were making videos with material copyrighted by others, that would be a different matter. For my own stuff, external hosting of the content seems best.

There is a problem with making too much video content in advance of student use. There is no way to gauge student reaction to it and thus the design might occur with many false assumptions in place.

I've given a fair consideration to the content I'd teach if doing this course online. It's a non-trivial consideration. The type of videos featured at the link above are for analytical content. Fifteen years ago, that would have been the bulk of the course. Now I think it would be no more than a third. For narrative content, I'd like the students to do a fair amount of reflective writing. But I've no sense of how that would work with larger enrollments. (My recent teaching has been seminar classes.) One can do automated assessment of the analytic content to determine at least rudimentary comprehension. So a thought is to push on the videos and automated assessment as far as possible, to free up instructor time for the narrative stuff. But if one is pre-recorded and the other is live, doesn't that send a message to the students about what is important?

I'm still thinking through a lot of this stuff.