Dis Interested and Dat Interested

Some folks seem in a huff about the DIY U book, both the author Anya Kamenetz and Stephen Downes, whom Kamenetz takes to task because he is a not a journalist. Kamenetz goes on to call herself an intellectual. I think she's right about Downes, but for the wrong reason, and she's wrong about being an intellectual, which makes a lot of the rest of the discussion problematic.

The canonical situation where investigative journalism clearly is necessary begins with power which is entrusted to provide a public good. Then, either through its deliberated machinations or en passant through the normal business process, power becomes aware of some damaging information. Power prefers to conceal this information to reap the benefits of the office. However, the public has a right to know, after which power must suffer the consequences. Investigative journalism is there to satisfy this public need. It doesn't always work well - we were suckered for way too long on WMD - but everyone should be able to understand the function. Insiders to power putting out information are just not credible. Think of BP's response to the disaster in the Gulf.

The problem with using this argument is not that it is wrong, but it is irrelevant. Downes is not a mouthpiece for educational power. And online learning is so distributed that looking for a concentrated power with insider information is simply misplaced.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be investigative journalism about Higher Ed. There is a basis for that in the most recent post in the Tomorrow's Professor series. The author argues that, at least within Engineering, research and teaching compete with one another rather than complement each other as is typically portrayed in those promotional videos delivered during the halftime of basketball and football games. This in itself isn't a story. One needs to push it further and argue with investigative evidence that tuition dollars are reallocated to research in a way that does not complement student learning and that this is an act of commission by high level administrators. Then one has to produce the goods to show this claim is true and not a bunch of malarkey.

It's interesting - this sort of investigative journalism doesn't seem to be happening at all, maybe because it is so hard to make the case. (My campus and university was the object of investigative journalism, but that was about an admissions scandal, which to this observer was a small potatoes issue.)

There is a different sort of journalism. I'd call it cultural anthropology for the masses. Malcolm Gladwell typifies this sort of reporting. There is no issue of concealment of information. Rather, there is some phenomenon that readers are unaware about or an explanation for the phenomenon that is unknown. This sort of journalism popularizes one or both of these. I take it that DIY U is in this category, though I've not read the book.

There is a question with this second sort of journalism whether insiders can do it too? (I'm thinking particularly of the Michael Wesch Video A Vision of Students Today. That video went viral so on the popularizing front it did a good job.) Before getting to that let me point out that there is a potential problem the other way - the so called journalist doesn't have a clue in writing the piece. When I held my Assistant CIO position and the Student Newspaper would write a piece about the Campus Learning Management System, that was always a concern. All the senior management in the IT organization got coaching from our public affairs office on how to interact with the press, just for this reason. The real problem is that you are typically talking about a complex issue that people want to investigate in a fairly short time period. So the piece ends up being superficial or missing some salient points. Indeed, that there is only one piece rather than a lengthy series is evidence that the goal is producing a published story, not muckraking. The problem isn't unique to student newspapers. It happens with the commercial press too.

This is actually an argument for insiders writing. They know what they are talking about and they are persistent. So what's the problem? Insiders may lack perspective. They also may lack objectivity. I believe the same can be said for Fox News and MSNBC. Some people might call what those stations do journalism (even if they color it yellow). I don't. I also have this rather old fashioned idea that news should be separated from editorial and only the former entails journalism. Downes makes no effort to sort his information in this way. I'm not saying he should. I'm just saying he doesn't. So I wouldn't call what he does journalism. Of course, words do have have a tendency to change their meaning over time.

There's one more point to be made. Downes writes a fair amount about himself. That is no sin. I do the same. When talking about learning everyone is a learner so not talking about their own learning would be really odd. But this has to do a number on the objectivity/subjectivity thing. The choice seems to be either to write objectively but then miss the first hand perspective entirely or give up on objectivity.

Kamenetz gives us none of this. If she simply referred to herself as a reporter, that wouldn't bother me. But she says she's an intellectual too. That irks - too self-possessed for my taste. I will not read her book.

A New Path For Me

I've been letting folks know that I'll be retiring from my current position at the end of July. Thirty days hath September and thirty years have I at the U of I. The immediate reasons for retiring are the budget problems, the incentives in the separation program, and the unfortunate reality where it seems I can be most useful now to the University by not drawing a paycheck.

I'll get to the longer term reasons in a bit. First I want to note that I view this more as a change in job status than as a move to the life of leisure. I hope to teach, consult, and write - to do fruitful things and I hope continue to have a positive influence, on learning technology and elsewhere. I also hope to do a mixture of volunteer work and for pay activity. We'll see how that sorts itself out. I'm open to possibilities as they might play out, though I'll be staying in Champaign for the foreseeable future, so alternatives that require moving are not in the cards.

I wrote about the longer term reasons in this post, which has a brief review of Crazy Heart and ties themes from that movie to the more general notion that Baby Boomers are contemplating their own mortality. By coinky dink, last night I turned on the TV around 8PM and The Visitor was just starting. It's a surprisingly good film that is partially about the same theme, using that to get to the a completely different idea, that with warmth and understanding we can make deep connections across race and religion, even if the way the the world works is completely screwed up in this regard. The U.S. immigration system is depicted in this movie in a bureaucratic, uncompromising way. It is entirely blind to whether the individual is a decent person or not.

The film seemed like a personal message to me, not the least because the main character was an academic economist, who found lack of meaning in his university work. He wasn't looking for this particular issue, just wanting to find a spark of life in an otherwise going-through-the motions existence. I don't see immigration as my issue, but perhaps somehow I can work to address some of the inequities we find in education. That would be a good theme for me.

White Space

With the World Cup monopolizing attention, one might think my title is a nod to the rest of the news, perhaps the Elena Kagan hearings and the Waspish opening up of the Ivy League schools 50 years earlier, that presaged this outcome with no Protestants on the Supreme Court. Or the irony in that we seem to be deeply into counting the religion of each Justice as we conclude that it doesn't matter for deciding the cases presented to the Court.


Actually, the title refers to something I learned last week at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. (If you squint hard at the cap in the photo you can see the insignia there.) Among my lessons were that writing teachers like to draw a lot as a way to illustrate the dynamic in the construction of the writing and in the interplay between the writer and the reader. Another lesson was to take your printed-on-hard-copy-essay, arrange the pages on the floor, then stand on a chair so that none of the text is readable, but so that the pattern the text makes on the page emerges. One extreme is for the text to be very dense on the page. The other extremes is for - you guessed it - there to be a lot of white space.













The absence of text communicates.
















The idea is that while the writer is a guide, the reader has to do her fair share of the work. Good writing recognizes this role for the reader. The canonical example is the shower scene in Psycho. It is all the more frightening because Hitchcock left the really gory stuff to our own imaginations.












The question arises whether this requires a paper version of the essay or if it makes sense in a blog too. Would people read longer work online if there were suitable spacing to allow for the reader to give her contribution? And then, what stuff should the writer explicitly include and what should be left out, for the reader to fill in?
















I suspect this particular post will look awkward. But might others explore the idea to find a way it works well online? Once the reader is expected to scroll to read the piece there seems little cost in putting in the white space. What of the gain?

Everyone should become a personal librarian

Going through some old family photos, I found a folder of my childhood "accomplishments" and have scanned a couple of those. Below is a "report card" from summer day camp. I was 5 years old. The line of review that says I have the potential to become a "real camper" will live in Arvan family lore. Scanning means the next generation can take a look too if they so desire. I've not done much scanning before. Now I've got some desire to learn to do this reasonably well, whatever that means

Pumas, Bulldozers, and Trashy Entertainment

Apparently, male dominance has come to an end, and none too soon. It's been such a burden keeping up the pretense. I'm glad females are now taking their rightful place on the throne, though there seems to be some disagreement as to whether the new rule will be a partnership between the sexes or if the Y chromosome will abdicate, as if it hasn't done so already. Don't be fooled by the argument that it is actually all about class and race. Pushing that contention may get you brownie points with the lefties at the universities. But really, it's all about sex. It's always been about sex. You can blame just about everything on hormonal differences.

Over the years, researchers have sometimes exaggerated these differences and described the particular talents of women in crude gender stereotypes: women as more empathetic, as better consensus-seekers and better lateral thinkers; women as bringing a superior moral sensibility to bear on a cutthroat business world. In the '90s, this field of feminist business theory seemed to be forcing the point. But after the latest financial crisis, these ideas have more resonance. Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.

Yes, we fifty somethings are terribly emotional, even more so after having gone from alpha to omega. Of course, we've taken too much risk. We wanted to hit the big payday before we met the grim reaper – what a foolish concept. Now we're all sniveling whiners.

What is to become of us? No cougar will take us as her boy-toy. Will she simply plow us under, instead? Perish the thought. Maybe we can supply her with some other entertainment. Some gay repartee might do the trick. William Powell in The Thin Man to her Myrna Loy? Everyone loves a tippler. Or possibly the worldly philosophy of Groucho Marx, just to show it really was Margaret Dumont who pulled the strings? Or for pure silliness, what about Tommy Smothers?

Alas, we're not that funny. Looks like it's going to be mud wrestling.

Congruence of Incongruities

Of the Yiddishe Kop I am genetically disposed,
Though now we're told it's only an old wives tale,
Which makes it all the more likely I have one.

Saturday evening we rented Crazy Heart on Pay Per View. The younger son bailed on it after only a few minutes. The older one gave up a little while later. My wife fell asleep in the middle though she did wake up to see the end. Naturally, I was drawn in by it. I thought it was a great picture and surely will watch it again later this week. A fading country music star looks to find his own humanity on the way to hitting rock bottom. He is redeemed by his songwriting talent and the realization that his drinking is the root of his own evil, a narcissism that has made him quite sick and disgusted with himself.

Yesterday (Sunday) the New York Times had an odd piece on the homepage. Mickey Kaus, the blogger nee political columnist, is running for Senate in the California Democratic Primary. The seat is currently held by Barbara Boxer. Kaus' chance of winning the primary is little to none. His is a protest candidacy to raise the issues he deems important, which seemingly belong outside the Democratic Party. On immigration and unions he appears to be a Republican and those are his big issues.

Nowadays, we learn about ourselves listening to NPR, this review of Iron Man 2 a revelation. We Baby Boomers are getting older and contemplating our own mortality. The Media has figured this out and has decided there is profit in feeding us pieces that reflect ourselves and where we are in the life cycle. For the most part it is not fear of death that captures the Baby Boomer's attention. We're not yet old enough for that. Rather it is our relevance and whether what we do matters. Apparently, we feel we should matter more than we actually do, our talent and intelligence seemingly an entitlement that our work will be of consequence, yet only to find that mattering is outside our control. All that is within our grasp is our own efforts.

In the opening scene of Crazy Heart our protagonist is seen pouring a jar of liquid that might very well be urine onto the parking lot outside the bowling alley where he is to perform later that evening. The scene happens fairly quickly and might go entirely unnoticed but for a variety of later scenes in the movie where he is at least half lying down on a bed, perhaps with his guitar or a drink on his belly, and his belt is undone. Evidently, he is having bladder problems, an entirely unspoken theme of the film.

Life for the aging Boomer is full of indignities, some of the biological kind. We need to relieve this pain, either provide a distraction or find something that gives pleasure. Drink can do both, in moderation. Yet the decline feels like a full frontal assault. A moderate response is insufficient to counteract it. So we overindulge, creating a negative spiral. Once the fall is in full motion it can't stop till bottom is hit. The fall doesn't damage the talent. But it kills everything else that matters.

We're told that Kaus' blog had 40,000 readers. Apparently that wasn't enough for him. He needed to raise his visibility, in his own eyes. Mattering is a very odd concept. Mattering according to whom? What will happen to Kaus after the primary? Does he go back to being a blogger?

Why is self-expression not enough? Why do we need adoration too? Art can be found in the decline in man, much less so in his salvation.

A giant has passed

Stan had a strong influence on many of us, including me. I wrote about my relationship with Stan in the middle of this book chapter entitled, Homage to Jerry Uhl.

Stanley Smith | News-Gazette.com via kwout

Can Technology Let Us Return To The Childhood Joy Of Reading?

For learning to write criticism, Anthony Lewis makes for a very good role model, with his most recent piece in the New York review A Supreme Difference an excellent example. In that essay Lewis reviews two books, one a biography of current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the other a portrayal of outgoing Justice John Paul Stevens. Lewis, a liberal icon when he was a columnist for the New York Times, would seem to have a strong prior disposition against Scalia, who is noted as a strict conservative. How can Lewis render a fair verdict on Scalia, when their views on issues across the board are so distinct and everyone who reads this piece knows that to be the case? Lewis finds a way.

Lewis criticizes Scalia but also praises him for his prescience.

But Scalia remains the most interesting of the conservatives, the most provocative. He does not hesitate to be sarcastic, even contemptuous, about his colleagues when he disagrees with them. When Justice Sandra Day O'Connor disappointed him in 1989 by not providing the fifth vote to overrule the abortion decision Roe v. Wade, he wrote in dissent that her rationale "cannot be taken seriously."

When, a few months earlier, the Court upheld the post-Watergate statute allowing the appointment of independent counsels to investigate executive branch wrongdoing, Scalia was the lone dissenter. He saw the law as an infringement on the president's power to control the executive and said that it created a new branch of government, "a sort of junior-varsity Congress." His language seemed shrill, but Kenneth Starr's out-of-control impeachment investigation of President Clinton a decade later proved Scalia's doubts prophetic.

Lewis also covers Scalia strong points – his high intelligence, his charm with fellow judges outside the workings of the Court, even those with whom he disagrees vehemently, and his capability to make literary references as allusions to a high minded ethical view of the world while using that as a way to contrast with his own sense of the work of the lawyer, who must deal with the nitty-gritty and frequently ugly side of human interaction. Lewis does this for balance and fullness. The emphasis of Scalia's strong points also helps Lewis pose a puzzle. How can somebody with these strengths nevertheless remain an unrepentant ideologue, an adherent of Original Intent? Lewis implicitly argues that this adherence to ideology served to block an evolution of Scalia's views based on his experiences on the Court.

Having made these points, Lewis then continues with a critique of Scalia but only in contrast, by glowing about Stevens, a Ford appointee. (Scalia was a Reagan appointee.) Stevens is essentially non-ideological and hence inherently it has been much harder to see how Stevens would decide any one particular case. Stevens' core judicial precept seems to be a strong distrust of the concentration of power. His apparent movement to the left as he has gotten older is explained by Lewis as resistance to the power of the Court itself, and the apparent willingness of the right wing Justices (not just Scalia, indeed mainly Chief Justice Roberts) to pursue an aggressive political agenda. In Stevens, Lewis sees a Justice whose point of view has evolved and grown. Thus, while there are only two of the Justices really considered in this piece, Lewis makes the case that such evolution in view is fitting and natural. In praise of Stevens, Lewis raises his sternest criticism of Scalia.

While I'm no fan of original intent and balk at many of the conservative positions – The ruling that blocked the ban on political spending by corporations being the latest example – I wonder if Lewis is too harsh on Scalia. I have now finished all but the Diaries section of Between the Devil and the Dragon and have read the start of the Diaries as well. Hoffer was a philosopher with street smarts and lots of experiential knowledge of the ordinary man. I thought much of the book profound and would make for a great reading for anyone, but especially for college students. Yet at the start of the Diaries section Hoffer explains that he began the Diaries because he felt he was turning into a dullard and he was looking for a way to rekindle his imagination and get his juices flowing. Hoffer's idea was to write each day and thereby capture his fleeting thoughts, enabling the good ones to flourish.

This sense that as we mature we tend to become dull seems quite realistic to me, as I've been feeling the same sort of thing for quite a while. I wonder if most thoughtful minds experience a similar sensation, when caught in midstream between youth and senility. Adherence to ideology may then be a way to ensure intellectual productivity, once trust in personal creativity no longer seems warranted. If this is true then Stevens is indeed to be much admired, but then too he plays the role of exception. Further, as life expectancy continues to rise, it makes one wonder that much more about the wisdom of giving Justices unlimited terms.

What of the rest of us, who had no instinct to find ideology when we were younger and who likely would find an embrace of ideology in middle age too alien to seem a realistic possibility? Is there another alternative? For me, the "cure" seems to be an increased nostalgia and a redirection of efforts to discover again the intellectual joys of childhood, among which reading was paramount. I wonder if many of us would benefit from openly recalling our initial experiences with reading on without a parent present. Here are mine in a nutshell.

The basement was my place for reading. We had an overstuffed chair there that needed to be reupholstered. It was comfortable and sitting in it provided a sense of being securely encased. That sensation seems very important to me. This sort of reading is done away from others, not so much to keep them out but rather to keep me from entering their worlds. Snug as a bug lets the reader enter the world of the book unencumbered. My first experience this way must have been Charlotte's Web followed by Stuart Little. From there, my reading took flight. I probably did a fair amount of reading in the bedroom too. It was the natural activity before going to sleep. But I shared the bedroom with my brother. The little alcove I made for myself in the basement was mine alone.

The notion that reading is not just a solitary activity but that it is also an insulated one makes for an interesting dilemma. How, with the heightened interconnectivity in which we now live, do we create this sense of isolation? Posed this way the Nicholas Carr piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid, can be seen as an argument that we can't or that it is very hard to do, at least for those of us who are not luddites. But I think that Carr's argument is not quite right. There is technology that greatly assists with providing the requisite insulation. That technology is the earphone.

Music, particularly familiar music that now serves to comfort us rather than challenge us, provides a very good cocoon. I'm not talking about the music you occasionally hear blaring out of a car window, with the driver either oblivious to the impression he is making or, on the contrary, wanting to draw attention to himself, the raucous noise his form of self-expression. Instead I mean music of our own choice that while we might go to hear it performed live, in which case it will demand our complete attention, can also provide pleasure though listened to in a much more autonomous manner, where our focus is elsewhere, namely on our reading. It was this idea that motivated me to make a mockumentary (my first) called Kindle-iPod: Duel or Duet, a poor man's version of a Michael Wesch video. Alas, mine never came close to going viral, although it did serve to mark some earlier thinking about the ideas in this post, and in the process of making the video I learned enough that I could have students do something similar as class projects.

There is, however, a conceptual problem with the vision I articulated in that video. The duet quite likely will turn into a trio, with the various instruments not playing nice with each other. Unless you leave the smartphone behind, it has a tendency to take over, making for an unhappy trinity. This is why that on my PC at home, where I have the Kindle reader installed and iTunes too, I can't really achieve an immersive reading experience, once in a while perhaps, but not on a consistent basis. For this reason, the Kindle is most valuable to me when my Blackberry is out of sight. Not being a very disciplined sort of fellow, I let my compulsion to check email override the desire to get lost in the reading. In order to go back to childhood, I have to get past the consequences of that compulsion.

This is where I was till about 3 weeks ago, when I got my iPad. I've been testing it out and trying to get acclimated to it and I believe now I have enough experience with it to give my assessment. However, I'd like to avoid being redundant and just yesterday I read this review of the iPad by Sue Halpern. So here I'll content myself with discussing things she either glosses over or omits entirely.

Much of what I want to read these days are essays, those found mainly in the better magazines, though the Internet being what it is, interesting stuff can show up anywhere. A good bit of this is freely available stuff, and the browser therefore becomes the right tool as a reader. On that score Safari is reasonably good and especially that a quick double tap on the screen enlarges the font so even someone with bifocals like me can enjoy the reading experience. Scrolling is just as good as turning a page, maybe even better, and using your fingers to scroll is fun. It is visually appealing the way the iPad has done this where the text decelerates after the scrolling motion has been completed. I've been reading more magazine pieces online since I've gotten the iPad perhaps for this very reason.

There is the flip slide issue of this from the publisher's perspective. At the moment, though I'm not sure why, magazines that one can subscribe to on the Kindle cannot be exported to Kindle readers on other devices, such as the iPad. It is unclear to me whether that is an Amazon thing, a Publisher thing, or a mixture between the two. Some publishers will develop iPad specific apps. Currently the New York Times has a couple of those, though I would say they are wimpy. I can get the full paper through the browser, so why would I use the app? And with the fixed cost of developing such an app and the business risk that another platform (say by Google) might soon be the preferred vehicle and the development might not transfer at all to the next environment, wouldn't it be more prudent, especially for smaller publishers, to simply publish on the Web?

Once the browser is viewed as a legit candidate as a reader, the iPad starts to look quite different from the Kindle. When not downloading something from the Amazon store, I would turn off the network connectivity for the Kindle to increase the time between recharges. In contrast, the iPad is meant to be always connected. It is a network device, not just a reader. It is very slick in how it handles connectivity but as a consequence there is the very real issue of how long it will go without having to recharge it. This is the main area where the iPad is distinct from a laptop (and I believe what is driving the debate about Flash video). The iPad can go more than twice as long as a laptop between recharging. It's good for a full day of use. This is how it is most like a phone. And it is therefore intriguing whether it can be the sole portable device, with Skype perhaps in lieu of the phone.

Let me return to the question of whether the urge to check email interferes with immersion. It does, but so what? If you have the iPad with you sometimes you'll use it as a reader, other times as a phone. You'll do more reading that way, at least that's been my experience so far. So, I mostly like it a lot.

There can be a frustration with it however, especially if you think of it as a laptop substitute. One does other things with browsers than to use them as readers. The iPad version of Safari doesn't do pop-up windows. It doesn't do Java (which has gotten essentially no press while the Flash conflict has gotten a ton of press). So there are a bunch of apps that are off limits. And it doesn't do tabbed browsing either. The history function is not bad, but I'd still prefer to have several browser windows opened at once. There is also that as a voice input device (there is a decent microphone) it's non-trivial to get the audio elsewhere for re-use. I have to get it to my PC and then process it there before I can upload it for podcast. So as a production device, it is a bit clunky.

Here is one last point on the iPad as a reader. For the last year or two I've found myself at the end of the day preferring to watch TV than to read. My eyes get tired and for the most part there is less mental effort from watching the tube. So far I've watched only one TV show on the iPad. I downloaded the very first episode of 24, which was freely available in iTunes. The viewing experience was quite excellent. I downloaded it direct and it took quite a while to download. Also, I don't yet have the urge to use the iPad as a TV substitute. But that day may be coming soon. Reading may seem to be making a rebound with the big boost in demand for eReaders. But I'd be cautious on that one. Secretly many of us readers are also TV junkies. So if there is a new series that is as good as West Wing, watch out. Childhood was a great place for learning and personal growth. Yet there was also I Dream of Jeannie and Gilligan's Island. Sometimes one can be too nostalgic.

Are screen shots and voice recordings in the typical student's arsenal?

When you have a new toy you play with it. That's what I've been doing with my iPad. Yesterday I put on the Kindle software - very nice except the periodicals don't come through, only the books.

Amazon Kindle for iPad via kwout

Today I've tried Evernote. On the PC, I'd rather use Posterous, which does everything Evernote does and more. But on the iPad, getting the audio recordings out has proved a bit of a trick. Images are doable as email attachments but audio either is impossible or can be done but file size is limited or needs some special sync tool as in the case of iTalk. So Evernote seems like a cool alternative, though the voice quality is not quite as good.

Evernote Will ‘Support The Hell out of’ The iPad [iPad Apps] via kwout

Will students use these sort of apps in a rich way? It doesn't seem that they will do so of their own accord. Last fall when I had students blog it was a struggle just to get them to put in links into their posts. Yet when they did multimedia projects, they were quite expert with image use (at least most were) but in ordinary function they ignored images or only very rarely used them.

I wonder how many students know about Jing or about Audacity.

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?