instructional technology makes strange bedfellows: hacking education or flash frying it

Technology can be used to 'hack' education -- to make it better and more authentic -- or, just as easily, to fast-food-ify it -- to make it cheaper, more convenient, more profitable and much less healthy. Let's be clear about these opposing objectives.

Saw this by way of the always interesting Alex Reid:



There seem to be two camps when it comes to enthusiasm for educational technology. Those who get excited (whether they admit it per se or not, and it seems they rarely do) by technology's Taylorizing potential for productivity, efficiency, scale, precision, and those whose enthusiasm stems from entirely different and maybe contradictory places: the potential for better, more authentic, socially constructed, learner-centric learning.

It's interesting that the two camps are coming from entirely different places and have what I suspect are to a large extent never-the-twain-shall-meet mutually exclusive aims. The ed.-tech-in-the-large camp (those concerned with productivity and the like) does not typically embrace the same causes or travel in the same circles as the ed.-tech-in-the-small gang. They do not typically see eye-to-eye. Yet somehow when it comes to web-facilitated education, the objectives of the two camps are often conflated. Administrators and policy makers concerned with costs, those inclined to decry education as "the last cottage industry" delight in the potential to leverage technology to "transmit" education more efficiently and manage it more "scientifically". Drexel's President Papadakis explains it with characteristic unabashedness:

For Dr. Papadakis, the full-timer issue poses a dilemma, since one of his bedrock ideas is to encourage the use of Internet-based courses that can be taught by inexpensive part-time or non-tenure-track teachers. As he envisions it, experienced Drexel professors will create digital courses containing computerized coursework accessible via the Internet. They’ll be offered on campus but can also be used to teach “distance learning” students who don’t take part in face-to-face instruction in Philadelphia. For the most part, these courses can be taught by junior or part-time faculty.

“Technicians can teach them” at lower cost, says Dr. Papadakis, quickly adding that he is exaggerating when he uses the word “technicians.” (Whole article is available here)

This teachers replaced by technicians nightmare scenario is *surely* not the perspective of the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning folks or the constructivists, or lord knows the EduPunks (although they at least know full well that their interests are not coincident with those of the in-the-large gang) or anyone, I wouldn't think, inspired by the educational potential of Web 2.0.

And the conflation is clear too in the video above. They start out with the in-the-large premise that education is in need of disruption because it's getting more and more expensive at a annual rate of 8-10% or so. Fair enough (and scary enough). Then we launch into Open Education / OCWC boosterism, and while I love the open education movement and its potential to transform informal learning, I'm sorry, but open education is entirely orthogonal to the issue of skyrocketing college costs (making informal education rich, robust, easy and free isn't going to change the cost structure of formal education, even in the medium term; credentialling matters, the social life of information matters). Then we get into the in-the-small pleasing issues of peer-to-peer learning and collaborative note taking and the idea of providing a structure for educational market making, for matching teacher to learner, all of which is exciting and inspiring, none of which is going to make college any cheaper.

Higher ed administrators, faculty and technologists alike need to recognize, acknowledge and talk about these dual objectives and seek to unify them to whatever extent possible or at least approach their mutual exclusivity as a problem of constrained optimization. And while we're at it, let's think harder and better about the future of and relationship between formal and informal education. (I'm looking in your direction, open education people.)

signs of the impending gynarchy: the growing college gender gap

Anticipating a coming gynarchy may be a bit premature (and naive, I know, as there are structural impediments - producing way more female PhDs hasn't led to a female-majority tenured professoriate by any means). I for one welcome our distaff overlords (overladies?); the world would likely be a better place.

Nevertheless the following stats reported in my Current Issues in Education class at Temple are cause for real concern:
Women are going to college at starkly higher rates than men and the disparity continues to grow. The question put to the class was whether we should care, and the consensus, unsurprisingly but disappointingly, was no. Issues of equality are admittedly prickly; we surely should not seek to right this circumstance in justice's name. But the issue is stark in both human capital and "civic capital" terms. In this the information age, as should be particularly clear in such bleak economic times, we owe it to ourselves and our children to maximize our collective stock of knowledge and skills. It's the sole path to modern prosperity. In the small and in the short run, there are alternatives, and I've argued that many folks are pushed in the baccalaureate degree's direction who'd be better served by different pursuits. Those arguments notwithstanding, in total and in the long run, we need as many folks as can stand to benefit to study and to get degrees. And if men as a class appear to be losing interest in college, we are obliged to understand why and to remedy to the extent possible. I know men are a minority, but it's a really substantial minority. Irrespective of your particular naughty bits, we need you to be studying if you are able to benefit from doing so.

And for those who are unmoved by the human capital argument (you know who you are, and I don't like you particularly, by the way), how about the fact that education and civic participation are strongly correlated as well. If prosperity's not your thing, perhaps participative democracy is.

One caveat: With regard to civic participation and to a lesser extent even human capital, not all of the abovementioned correlation is causation: The better educated are more likely to vote not strictly as a result of their education. Undoubtedly to some extent those most likely to seek education are also those ex ante most likely to vote. Still, there's absolutely GOT to be some causation in that correlation, and we need, in unprecedented ways, to wring it out.

Won't Someone Please Think of the Children!

You can have my silent cam phone when you pry it from my cold, dead, pervy hand.

File under: how do we in good conscience let politicians make our laws.

ABC reports that Rep. Peter King of NY wants to ban cell phones that can noiselessly snap photos. Seems pervy sorts can snap upskirt shots of our nation's daughters and do so with impunity because they can do so silently.

Fast forward to the noisy-phoned utopia King envisions:

[Loud Click]
Excuse me, did you just take a picture of my daughter with than noisy phone cam of yours?
Um...no?
....

And then what, exactly? Citizens arrest? Phone confiscation? Violent confrontation?

Way to grandstand, Peter King.

Sweet Programs, Sour Times: Rendell puts his Schools of Excellence on the chopping block

Governor Rendell's proposed PA budget is 100 or so line items leaner in an effort to close a $2.3 billion budget gap. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that, but (putting on my unapologetic 'Not In My BackYard' hat of naked self interest), you can't axe the Governor's Schools of Excellence! It's a body of programs that are just too special, successful, too damned eponymously excellent. In my six years as director of the PA Governor's School for Information Technology I saw firsthand how the program can touch the lives of its participants, to hasten and strengthen the emergence of their will to lead and to transform.

Admittedly, the students who pass through the programs' doors were already advantaged by their academic and intellectual skills. They don't typically need a leg up in any traditional sense (troublingly, the students' ranks were, at the time of my departure at least, growing ever richer, whiter and more uniformly suburban, in spite of our best effort to the contrary). They need, however, at least as much help realizing their potential, though. Enabling people to become a more perfect version of themselves is a pretty compelling goal for education generally. Far be it from me to get all Randian (Atlas Shrugged was easily the most leaden, tritest, most sophomoric, uppity-preachy and unoriginal tripe I've ever had the misfortune to read) but those most rife with potential are also those for whom that process of enabling is both most difficult and most critical for our collective prosperity and wellbeing.

Further, to the extent that PGSE students stay in the Commonwealth (an empirical question, but one I have no sense of) programs like PGSE can make very sound policy sense in the medium and long term. I can't help but suspect (again, data-lessly) that PGSE alum disproportionately return to PA. PA needs to stem its brain drain. Study, excel, graduate, depart, repeat as needed is not a recipe for success. We need our most capable and driven to be all they can and to stick around to do so here in PA. PGSE makes a huge contribution to this end. Check out the outpouring on the Save the Govies Facebook group if you need convincing.

At the same time, it's increasingly clear that an inability to recognize that challenging times require genuine sacrifice threatens to mire us longer and more painfully in the economic muck in which we currently find ourselves. For example, I love libraries as much as anyone this side of the profession of librarianship, and my family rarely has fewer than ten books check out from our Walnut Street West branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia (heck, I even dragged infant David and toddler Max to the beautiful but harrowingly located Kingsessing branch, although in retrospect I question my own judgment there). As a kid I went straight from my junior high school right to the public library and if I hadn't I'd have gotten into much more trouble and learned much less.

At the same time, when fire and police are being curtailed, when weekly trash collection is on the chopping block, it's perfectly reasonable for library cutbacks to be on the table as well. The needed cuts are going to hurt - valuable, sensible services are going to fall by the wayside. It's a shame, certainly, but the bigger shame is to pretend as though it 'tweren't so only to be faced with fewer options and direr circumstances down the line.

Yes, we rightminded folks know libraries are valuable, that their absence may leave already disadvantaged children optionless and at risk. But forgoing weekly trash pickups would be a rat bonanza - a far bigger issue for those already living in poverty as well. Let's stop stamping our feet for pet causes and self interest and realize that no cut can be dismissed out of hand. Let's do as we were asked and set aside childish things and seek rational dialogue in the name of making the cuts we need while minimizing the pain we must endure.

Tough times shorten our time horizon. There is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, thank goodness that they might, and that recessions historically come in under the two year mark. In the short term it's just impossible to deny, however reluctantly, that Governor's Schools' and public libraries have a rightful place on the chopping block short list. The far more legitimate concern is that while the recession will be temporary, the cuts are sure to be permanent. Entirely legitimate it is to be cranked up by that.

(P.S. In spite of the above, can you do me a solid Governor Rendell and please don't eliminate PGSE? What will I have to look forward to this summer if there is no PGSIST? Whose skills and knoweldge will I marvel at if not those of the PGSIST kids? Where will I find my fun? At the Jersey Shore?)