Anyone who reads this blog knows I have never written about politics in the conventional sense, but I must admit to being flummoxed by this one. I guess the strategy here is fairly obvious. The GOP wants to go after the disaffected Hillary voter, particularly women, who have regularly voted democrat. So they decide to nominate a woman for VP. OK, what other qualifications:
someone in the party
someone more socially conservative than McCain (b/c he's got problems on the right)
someone not associated with the current admin (sorry Condi)
and someone who can pass the vetting process
Mix together and stir. The result? Sarah Palin. Age 44. BA Univ of Idaho in Journalism. Former sports reporter. Former mayor of Wasilla. Of course you'll hear all this.
Now here's the thing I don't get. All the GOP ink spilled on Barak's experience. McCain would be the oldest person ever elected as president. He may be in perfect health right now. But honestly, you have to say there's a reasonable chance he could be seriously incapacitated or even die in office. This woman is ready to be president? What, did she take a class on being president at Idaho? Being Gov. of a population of 650,000 folks in Alaska for two years makes you ready? Can she name any of the leaders in China? Does she have a sense of who is likely to be the next president in Pakistan?
Just as point of comparison, the population of Alaska is roughly the same as that of the metropolitan area of Syracuse, NY. Our county executive, Joanie Mahoney, is a female republican. Why not nominate her for VP? She's about the same age as Palin and has a law degree from SU. She was a criminal prosecutor for a while. That's got to beat being a sports reporter in Anchorage.
But really this strategy does not make sense. Are HIllary voters really going to vote for someone who is pro-life? Are they going to vote for someone who supports the teaching of creationism in schools?
I could see if McCain had nominated a social moderate woman, someone closer to his own politics, that this might have worked. But I don't see how you attract HIllary voters and social conservatives with the same choice. I guess we'll see.
An email yesterday announced the town's creation of a new ordinance that creates additional fines and penalties surrounding parties. It's a law that clearly targets student behavior and culture.
So here's the thing. I lived in Cortland for three years. I didn't live near students, but I can understand the impulse here. I don't want my kids kept awake by late night parties. I don't want my yard trashed. I'd rather not walk down my block and see the detritus of parties (trash, various bodily excretions, etc.). I also recognize a different concern here about student drinking, safety, and health, to say nothing of their engagement with their studies in a serious way.
In other words, there are genuine issues to address here. We all also know of the long-standing clashes that occur between students and towns that go back to the Middle Ages and the formation of Cambridge (which occurred after a series of conflicts between Oxford students and townsfolk lead to the creation of the neighboring university).
Those are all old stories. Here's a slightly different angle. In Who's Your City? Richard Florida cites a survey of some 27,000 people across communities in America. 45% said their communities were either "bad" or "very bad" places for recent college graduates to live. As Florida notes, this is perplexing in a way, since, in our economy, recent college grads are a prime resource. If you have a community that is attractive to college culture, where recent grads would want to live, then you can have a well-educated workforce that might serve a creative-economy industry. Obviously there's more to it than that, but that would seem to be one element.
I hope to be getting back to blogging after a week of vacation followed by a series of annoying computing woes. First my router went down at home. Then I went to school to discover that the College has been messing with the email. Apparently on August 12th they decided to stop POP and IMAP from working the way it had in the past. I thought I was accessing my Cortland email through my gmail. As I was away most of that time and checking email on my iphone I just didn't notice that the Cortland stuff wasn't coming through. Missing those emails was a pain. One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall and asked if I was angry with her b/c I hadn't responded to her email. Plus there was a number of student emails I missed.
But the real pain is how I am going to move forward at this point. The college made this change for security purposes, specifically problems with phishing and spam. I understand that. I get 50-100 emails a day, sometimes more, but that's a good average. My gmail also catches around 50 spam messages a day (plus about another 100 more through kpraxis email, that thing is ridiculous!). But they all go into the spam filter. I never see them unless I want to. It's pretty rare for them to get through.
So anyway, I've got an idea about how to get rid of spam. We can just stop using the internet. Or at least email. Short of that, we can try to tie it down so much as to make it basically unusable anyway. The trick is to find the balance, I suppose.
So here is what Cortland has left me. I could access my account through webmail. But the webmail is horrible on a Mac. You can't search. You can't filter messages. It's just a big pile of messages. Worthless.
I could use VPN and Apple Mail. The thing is, I don't really care for Apple Mail. Plus having to get in through VPN is just an additional hassle.
Then there's the matter of access via my iPhone. You can set up VPN on your iphone, so maybe that's a possibility. Again though, this all just seems like an unnecessary hassle when I can choose from any number of free e-mail services like gmail.
What possible reason could there be for using my Cortland email?
So my solution is to just use Gmail. Maybe I'll set up a second Gmail account for personal use. That's not a problem. I've already informed my students and advisees of my gmail address. And I've changed my contact e-mail in the college's information system.
You have to want to write. And I understand that's not easy.
This summer I did a one-day presentation at a writing institute for teachers, talking about technology and education as I often do. At one point I was talking about Twitter and microblogging a live event. One of the teachers commented on how that would make her feel uncomfortable--that she wouldn't be able to experience the event and document it at the same time.
I understood her point, but to me it doesn't meant that you aren't experiencing the event; it means that you are experiencing the event in a new way, through a new lens. The photographer often sees the world as if s/he is looking through the lens, regardles of whether a camera is available or not. There is a kind of split there. Artists see the world differently, writers included. We see the crevices of perception and thought, of subjective experience, that we can write into; the ambiguity of language that creates possibilities and knowledge through composition; the habits of practice and genre that generate ideas (like a tendency to make lists of three).
It is a difficult thing to ask of students. Of course you can get away with just writing. It happens all the time and it's easy to see in students' writing... how they push away any danger of thinking, any possibility of cracking open the world like that. They get the job done and try to think about it as little as possible. They have all the mechanical tools they've been taught over the years being taught how to write by people who are not writers. They have the prophylactics that will allow one to produce text without any danger of being affected by the process.
But you'll never write anything interesting that way. You can complete assignments. You can be a functional communicator, I guess. And those things are fine. There's no sin in not wanting to be a writer. There's nothing wrong with not want to write.
Certainly according to Richard Florida's definition of the "creative class" it is, and I think most teachers would agree (though they might simultaneously remark on how their creativity is limited by standards, testing, budgetary constraints, bureaucracy, etc.). When we think of great teachers, when we see representations of great teachers in popular media, creativity is a common trait, along with a commitment to education that goes far beyond thinking of it as a "job." And perhaps there is a connection there: when we invest our creativity into an activity, our feelings about it change.
Despite that, we don't think of schools as being creative places overall. People like Sir Ken Robinson identify a crisis in creativity perpetuated by our educational system. Schools are places where creativity goes to die. Students get creativity taught out of them, time and again, in a systematic fashion.
And when we look at teachers overall, do we see creative people in the way we see creativity among writers, musicians, graphic designers, game designers? Or even if we think of creativity in a less "artsy" way as in the creativity of researchers, architects, software designers, engineers: do we think of teachers as a profession that reflects that kind of creativity?
I think most anyone who teaches college can tell you that majors will tend to reflect certain personality types (with exceptions of course). But you can tell the art students from the phys ed students from the engineers from the accountants from the English majors and so on. At Cortland (again.. 9th largest producer of teachers in the nation), there are qualities common to education majors. I would think you could ask any Cortland prof and they could tell you the same thing. Now Cortland is essentially a college of high school B students from non-urban areas of NY state. So they've got a fair amount in common to begin with. But I wouldn't be surprised if the common traits of our education majors were common traits for education majors nationally. What are they?
They are polite
Fairly studious
Well-organized
Well-intentioned
Socially conservative (relative to other college students)
Excellent at following specific directions
My experience is that if you give our education majors a specific assignment, they will do as they have been asked and complete the assignment on time. This is not the way I'd describe our professional writing majors. However, our education majors are not particularly strong creative thinkers. I'll set aside the question of developing their creativity, but it's just not their apparent strength as a cohort. On the flip side, our prof writing students are quite creative, and not just in the "creative writing" sense.
Now personally I'd be fairly surprised if most people who'd been through public education in the US would list many of their teachers among the creative people they'd encountered: maybe an art or music teacher; maybe that one special teacher.
Maybe education ought to be a creative profession, but in reality it tends to fall on the management side of the economy. Teachers are trained first and foremost to be classroom managers. Their personalities reflect managerial dispositions.
To a large extent, teachers have been mid-level managers. In addition they are child care and perhaps creative professionals. My guess is that the days of teachers as mid-level managers are short-lived. Mid-level management has long ago been squeezed out of most corporate cultures. I don't see why it can't be squeezed out of the education industry. That leaves child care, which is a necessary but deskilled function, and creative-professional activities.
You could argue that this is the central problem of the educational system. Yes you can point to testing and standards, and I agree with you. But hypothetically if you swept those away, what would our teachers do? Are they prepared to move forward as creative professionals? Testing and standards are constraints. There are many constraints. But creative professionals are always working within constraints; creativity is often defined by the constraints in which it transpires.
If teaching is a creative profession how do we develop the creativity of our future teachers? How do we attract students disposed to creativity to enter the field ? I think about this for my department's own programs preparing high school English teachers. When and where, if ever, do these students come to recognize themselves as creative professionals? How do we develop creativity?
I'm teaching our "advanced creative writing" course this semester. It's a new course that adds another layer onto our "creative writing" curriculum. As I've noted in the past, the majority of students come to our professional writing program with a primary interest in writing fiction or poetry or screenplays. There are many reasons for this. First, besides the academic writing they are required to do, these genres are the ones they encounter as writing. That is, they obviously encounter other writing, at least in textbooks, but no one makes mention of it as writing. So when they think of writers, they think of those genres. Second, they buy into the mainstream cultural romanticism of this writing. They wish to participate affectively and ideologically in that identity and experience.
I also wanted to write stories and poems when I was an undergrad. I was in a garage band writing music. Hell, I produced a collection of poetry for my MA thesis. So, I get it.
As a program, we want to encourage our students' creativity and support their writing practice. If they wish to pursue a life as a poet or novelist, we want to support that. We want them to know what that means, but in the end we see our program as benefiting students who choose that path. At the same time, we also want to introduce our students to a broad range of professional writing careers, and we want to help them understand how to translate their creativity into these other genres and writing situations.
There are two levels of challenge in doing so though. I think there continues in the humanities generally to be antipathy toward notions of commerce and the marketplace. We typically say that English is a great degree that can prepare you for any number of professions, but we never want to be specific about how. Talking about creativity as a marketable skill remains anathema for most, and our students pick up on that. it's like they have a kind of superstition about ruining their mojo if they turn toward the marketplace. And yet it seems hopelessly naive to imagine that our challenges with globalization, the environment, education, and so on will not be confronted in the context of the market. For example, do we really believe that even our relatively parochial concerns with teaching new media composition will be resolved through abstract, intellectual debate? Or will the outcome of that matter come about through larger market forces? Come on! But I digress...
My point is that we need creativity not only to devise solutions to these problems but to communicate those solutions to other people and create supportive communities to carry out solutions. We are entering an era where a facility for creative communication on a global scale will be highly prized. The humanities, English in particular, is a good place for students to move toward this, but only if we can give out our illusion that we are floating in the clouds.
The second challenge is no easier. It has to do with figuring out exactly how you might make this translation. How do you adapt your creativity as a poet to creativity in communicating a more purposeful or rhetorical message? Let's say you want to help a group of local, organic farmers by convincing local school boards to purchase local produce for school lunches. How do you take your creative skill with metaphor and image and produce a convincing letter or brochure or presentation?
In other words what does the use of the word creative in "creative writing" and "creative economy" share?
My first impulse is to turn to Richard Gabriel's notion of an MFA in Software where software design occurs in a workshop environment. That is, there could be some shared social-cultural practices. I think there may be some possible connections in terms of practices of invention, of moving beyond rational problem-solving strategies to techniques that involve tapping into the unconscious and affective (thinking here again about Ulmer's emer-agency). But I don't really have any answers. However I'm going to try to focus on some of these questions this semester in my courses.
So I've been catching up on some blogs and slowly plugging away at my article for On the Horizon on web 2.0 integration into education technology. Anyway, I caught up with this post on edumorphology on "education 3.0." Though Michael Staton, creator of the Courses Facebook app among other things, is certainly coming from a different perspective than I, I think we are seeing some similar things.
Basically my take on emerging media networks and higher education is the following:
Most faculty (and when I say most I mean 80-90%) don't have a clue.
Students may be getting increasingly familiar with this tech in a social context, but they are wholly inexperienced in using these tools to learn or engage in academic work.
As large, bureaucratic institutions, colleges and universities are not well-designed to take advantage of the possibilities of social media (as Shirky explains in his book).
Corporate interests in educational technology (e.g. Blackboard) operate on in an institutional marketplace, offering management solutions to institutions. In this context, the risk-taking involved in social media pedagogy with emerging media networks hardly makes sense. Besides, most faculty are uninterested.
Staton expands on this last perspective, picking up the theme of the semantic web I mentioned in the previous post. He envisions the collection of personal data about students and faculty that will be interoperable, that means passing along history, preferences, relationships, and so on from one application to another, thus making it easier for institutions and faculty to add new features.
Think of something like the iTunes App store for iPhone or even just software written for a particular OS. The college as an enterprise-level OS if you will that holds all the user data securely. Then you can have any number of developers who produce applications for use within that OS and even to communicate with the larger web, just as you might have a desktop app for Twitter, for example.
Sure, that sounds fine. You get access to variety and hopefully a wide range of innovative contributors. I suppose one question might be how open the system can be. So for example I might be able to choose between some different blogging and wiki applications to use in my class. The students would log in once for the system. I would be able to track them through the main system. We would then be able to make granular decisions about posts and wiki pages that we wanted to make public. Students would have their own accounts also with granular controls so that they could create public perspective, internal personal pages, and course-specific portfolios.
But here's your problem, and it's not really a technological problem, though the technology feeds into it. Traditionally we talk about how knowledge learned in one class builds into another, but we don't really mean it, at least not literally. And when we do mean it, we mean it in a very specific and controlled way. Social media invites users to learn in a different way. Now I suppose you could have a wiki where users are not allowed to contribute material without approval from an editor, but that undermines some of the specific advantage of the wiki. My point is that you need to combine social media with a pedagogy and epistemology. Otherwise it's just more of the same. Sure, it would be cool to have thorough metadata and tags to do faceted searches of lectures, presentations, and such, but it's still the banking pedagogy. That's the tough problem.
Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired, among other things) speaks here at the EG conference on the next 5,000 days of the Internet
One of the interesting remarks he makes here is about privacy. Kelly sees that over the next decade or so we will increasingly come to view the Internet as a single (albeit distributed/networked) device that we accessible through a variety of means. In order to make best use of that device, we will need to share a great deal of information with it. If you can imagine a world of ubiquitous computing where nearly everything is tagged, you are also looking at a world where the granular elements of your personal information are tagged and shared with the web.
Admittedly it seems a little creepy, right? And yet we need to recognize that our notions of privacy are cultural and historical. If you lived in a small rural town or area in the 18th century (or earlier), as nearly everyone did, your "world" was pretty small, and it's likely that everyone in your world knew your business. There's a kind of evolutionary thing here, I think, where we are social animals and our success comes from knowing things about our community. On the other hand, I think about my life today. I live in a home where my kids have private bedrooms. I have a separate room for my office. I have friendly but fairly distant relations with all my neighbors. They don't know my business. I have a private office at work.
I go online in search of communities. I write this blog to connect.
My point is that I believe the experience of privacy that might typify middle-class American life is an anomaly in general human experience. Sure this is the first period in human history where you could look into your webcam and make confessions to a billion people. Yes we are increasingly sharing our preferences, even our unconscious ones with the computing cloud. Picture tying together your buying habits (via online accounts and swipes of your shopper cards) with television viewing and search habits and data mined from your social networking sites. You'll share this "private" information for the same reason we watch commercials on television: putting up with the commercials means getting free/cheaper entertainment. In this case you get free online services. And I put "private" in scare quotes here b/c I think the notion of what is private is relative.
But there's more to it than that. Sharing information online will allow us to connect in more powerful and granular ways than we have in the past. This is the point that Kelly makes. In the past we shared pages, linking page to page, in the future we will link on a more semantic level, word to word, meme to meme. Of course there are privacy issues here! Who will be able to do what with your information? And I'd be more concerned about governments or corporations than shady individuals. These are issues that we'll have to deal with, and not resolve once and for all, but continually revisit. Nevertheless this would appear to the direction of the next 5,000 days.
So that brings me to pedagogy, specifically public, online pedagogy. I appreciate the concern faculty have with the idea of students learning and communciating in public spaces. There are legitimate concerns. I also know that faculty are very good at raising problems about practices that they don't want to do themselves. I do think that those who worry about what students write in an online class probably haven't spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos or reading Facebook. If Kelly is right, then we are headed toward a time when we will all have extensive networked identities. The parts of those identities that we actively compose will be our best, subjective opportunity to engage in that process.
I've written about crowdsourcing a few times here, but not in a while. Jeff Howe at crowdsourcing.typepad.com has written about it for Wired, was a lead figure in their Assignment Zero project, and now has a book coming out later this month. Here's a little video about it.
In the past when I wrote about crowdsourcing, the main response was how it was/is an exploitative labor practice. Essentially, what was once highly-paid, expert labor becomes deskilled work that is done either cheaply or for free. Howe often uses the example of iStockphoto. 10 years ago it was probably unthinkable that you could get good stock photography for a couple bucks. Few people had use for stock photography and many who might have (e.g. small business owners) couldn't afford it. Now I use iStockphoto for images in slide presentations. Recently Getty Images, who owns iStockphoto, made a deal to license Flickr images as well.
Is this bad news for professional photographers? Yes and no. It certainly changes the nature of their profession. You can get professional grade images using prosumer digital slr cameras and photo editing software, but you still need to know what you are doing to produce consistently.
It used to be, and probably still is, unthinkable that college curriculum could be crowdsourced. But look at something like Supercool School. Yeah sure it's not accredited or anything, but how do you think colleges got started? The earliest classes at my alma mater, Rutgers, were held in a tavern. That Facebook app is hardly a model for a college course but it does demonstrate the idea that users can propose courses, find a volunteer willing to teach the course, and deliver a curriculum.
Obviously there are important differences here. If you like a photo on iStockphoto is doesn't really matter who took it. It doesn't matter if it was a lucky shot and the only good pic that photographer will ever take. Teaching, however, requires expertise, mainly b/c as a student you are signing up for something that hasn't happened yet rather than buying an existing product. As a non-expert you probably aren't qualified to look at a syllabus and know for certain if the course is appropriate, and even then a syllabus only tells you so much. So you really need to go on reputation. Traditionally we've addressed reputation with qualifications and institutional review. A crowdsourced program though might try to address reputation through other social media means.
That said, I could envision creating a crowdsourcing site where prospective teachers sign up and maybe even pay a modest fee to have their bona fides checked. Then you set them free to propose and design any course they want. You can establish a pricing structure with different levels for those who want to audit and those who want significant feedback, evaluation, or perhaps even a grade. Teachers would get a cut of the collected tuition.
Now there's an obvious problem. Assuming you couldn't get accredited as a college doing this, you might say that you'd need to be able to make these courses transferable for credit at such an institution. Why? Because the only reason people take classes is to get credit in order to get a degree.
But maybe that isn't true.
Maybe people would take classes if they thought they were worthwhile for them professionally or personally, AND they didn't cost a ton of money AND they didn't require participating in the whole college culture business and time and psychic energy required of it.
Maybe they'd even take writing courses! Imagine that you're a thirty-something mid-level manager and your bosses are continually underwhelmed by your reports and your presentations. Maybe your corporation has recently started using a wiki or blogs and you just don't get it. Maybe your company is doing a lot of business with China, and you don't know a damn thing about China. Maybe you want to change careers. Maybe you've always wanted to write a novel or a memoir.
I realize that we think of higher education as something more "serious" than that. And I agree that for many traditional professions there are significant bodies of knowledge to be learned. I also look at many of the jobs out there in Central NY and I wonder why people go to college to do those jobs. What I mean is that it doesn't seem like there's a specific body of expert/disciplinary knowledge required to do some of these jobs.
There's another point here too. In higher education we expend a great deal of energy on underprepared students. We also spend a lot of time giving lectures and making sure students have read textbooks. Maybe there is a more cost-effective way to do these things through crowdsourcing.
I realize there's a lot of worry about the future of higher education and our profession. But the reality is that we aren't going to get anywhere trying to hold back the tide. As a professional photographer you can complain all you want about iStockphoto and such things. And maybe you have valid complaints! But that still won't change the fact that your industry has been transformed. Like the music industry has. Like cottage industries in the 18th century were. And so on and so forth.
However, just because an industry changes that doesn't mean that there won't be new opportunities, new markets, new practices and so on. Higher education is big business! There's plenty of money out there and careers for creative professionals. I think a quality education will always be valued, in the future more than ever as the cognitive demands placed on us are not likely to relent. And in simple economic terms, a quality and valuable education will be one that separates you from others. It won't be the one that you can get for free or on the cheap.
At Inside HigherEd the strategy is to turn trolls into staff writers and publish invective for the fun of it. Certainly that's the case with this recent article questioning the value of small classes and having full time professors teach classes. Yawn. Oh yes, that makes me so angry. Let me jump up.
I say that if you think an institution with giant lecture halls and a curriculum delivered by part-time faculty is so great then go ahead and make one. Is it really all about price point? Tuition and books for a year at Cortland is $6250 in-state. That turns out to be $25K for four years. Most people pay more for a car they'll drive for the same amount of time (a car which will be worth a few grand as a trade in). Meanwhile, the degree is worth a couple hundred grand in income over a lifetime.
So overall it seems like a decent investment. It's also about a quality of life. College degrees open doors to certain kinds of careers. Of course corporations could just go back to hiring HS grads and training them themselves. But we don't see that happening, do we? If anything, we see a tendency to more college, graduate school and so on.
The invective argument always seems to fall upon the notion of assessment, of "proving" that students learn and that the costs associated with small classes and/or tenure are worth it. The problem though is 1) measuring learning and 2) determining how the learning happened. Think of an analogy with weight loss. You can take diet pills or go on a fad diet or get lipo or exercise daily and eat healthfully. You might get faster results from the first three, but will they stick? Probably not. I'm not saying that this applies directly to different pedagogic approaches. I'm just saying that measuring students at the end of semester or even the end of a degree may not tell you much about what long-term impact their experience has had. And isn't it the long-term impact that we are concerned with?
Besides what are the learning goals of a college degree anyway? Can learning even be defined in terms of goals? For example, I took two Shakespeare survey classes as an undergrad. During those semesters I could identify significant speeches and tell you who said them and when. Obviously I can't do that now. I probably couldn't have passed the final in those courses six months down the road. So what did I learn?
As a matter of fact, I can barely tell you the names of the courses I took, let alone the texts we read or what was said about those texts. If the learning goals of college were to instill that knowledge in me, then it was worthless. But of course that's not the purpose. The purpose of college, as I see it, is to mature intellectually, to develop analytical and problem-solving skills, to grasp greater complexity and subtlety in the world around you, to learn to communicate more effectively, and to discover things about yourself.
I don't think you can put a number on such things. That said, they can be evaluated more holistically, and that's what we do as faculty. Or at least it's one of things we do.
The bottom line problem here is that folks who write this kind of invective don't trust faculty. There is a fundamental problem of professional ethos here. I believe the mistrust of faculty began forty years ago when professors explicitly politicized their profession during the Vietnam war. Honestly I'm not sure how many professors were that actively involved in those matters, but faculty remain largely liberal (though I recall blogging in the past about a study indicating that this has shifted generationally). Obviously conservatives view educational institutions as just another body of liberals to libel and undermine. Maybe you don't think this is a partisan issue but I would be interested in seeing a survey of Americans to see who is concerned about such matters. Obviously everyone with kids is concerned about the cost of education. I'm concerned about it. But as for articulating the issue in this particular way? I think that's a partisan ploy.
We already have Christian colleges where you can study creationism. Maybe we'll have conservative colleges where American history is about the greatness of our nation, poli sci is about how bad liberal policies are, and all the literary figures are white and male. They'll be taught in giant lecture halls by part time faculty reciting centrally-controlled curriculum that will be evaluated by standardized tests. Maybe this will be part of the "big sort" that Bill Bishop speaks of. Of course, college will still be expensive because it will be all market-driven and for-profit. And there will be little financial aid so you won't see any working-class people there.
