ten truths about learning assessment

10 truths about learning assessment, courtesy of 13 truths about social media measurement. The parallels are striking.

1. Measurement is not the goal
   

   Neither is third-party validation or accountability. Systematic improvement of teaching and learning is the goal.
   

2. Measuring activity isn’t as important as measuring results
   

   This one I think we've pretty much taken to heart. Outputs not inputs.

3. Metrics are determined by goals

   Determine what you measure based on what you want to accomplish. Some data are more useful for accountability, others for improvement. Consider how actionable and to what ends you can expect it to be before you decide on a measure.

4. Cause and Correlation are different
   

   Correlations are easy to find. Causes aren't.

5. Analysis is at least as hard as the measurement itself
   

   Understanding what the data mean and what to do about it is not only the end goal, it's also the hard part.

6. Standardization has marked limitations
   

   Authentic data useful for improving teaching & learning does not lend itself to accountability or inter-institutional comparisons. Peter Ewell is right: accountability is incongruent with improvement.
   

7. Reporting is not an outcome
   

   Doing something about what you report is.

8. Measurement is in constant evolution
   

   We don't yet have the measurement of learning figured out by any stretch. We are making this up as we go along and probably will for some time yet.
   

9. Measurement is cultural as well as operational
   

   If your culture is such that failure is feared and avoided at all costs, you are going to have problems that flawless execution will not preclude.

10. “Learning isn’t measurable” is an excuse
    

    It really means:
    • I don't know how to operationalize / measure / analyze / interpret
      
    • I don't want to have to / can't afford to spend the time and effort needed
      
    • I’m afraid of what measuring will actually tell me about the effectiveness of my work

Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology

I was excited to read what I hope will be a levelheaded and open-minded account of education in the digital age. I'm more hopeful still seeing a forward (perfunctory, alas, but nevertheless) from John Seely Brown and a blurb from Don Norman. Chapters like "What May be Lost and what May be Gained" seem promising as well.

But I couldn't make it through the preface before getting skeptical again:

"If educators cannot successfully integrate new technologies into what it means to be a school, then the long identification of schooling with education...will dissolve into a world where students with the means and ability will pursue their learning outside of public school."

Students of means and ability will always and forever supplement their learning outside of public school, of course, and I hardly think anyone would see that as problematic, except that a student's means should be much less an issue than it is currently. And indeed, technology is making it easier, more interesting, more social and less expensive to pursue learning informally and independently. I'm right beside the authors in celebrating that fact. What an age we live in when it comes to opportunities to learn, truly.

But if the authors mean to imply that a failure to integrate new technologies somehow threatens to preclude formal schooling from being a meaningful source of education, well, both my FUD and my bullshit detector start going off. I'm barely past the preface, so maybe they don't, but boy, rarely a day goes by that someone doesn't make that facile claim: if higher ed doesn't embrace web 2.0 it will cease to be relevant, to exist in our lifetime. Clotted nonsense. More to come on Rethinking.

The downside of grading rubrics

Students deserve to know and benefit from knowing in explicit detail exactly what is expected of them and what is important. A grading rubric can do exactly that. Unfortunately, a grading rubric can also turn grading into a hollow, unreflective checklist, and assignment preparation into a mechanical compliance effort. Instead of focusing on insight or creativity, one must focus on covering one's bases vis-a-vis the rubric. And -- a key point -- often one needn't worry about anything but covering one's bases. You needn't do anything particularly well, you needn't shed much by way of insight -- just give them what the rubric asked for.

Awarding 100 percent on an essay is preposterous on its face, but I'd wager it's quite common in an orthodox rubric-driven grading regime: 'What do you want me to do, he satisfied all of the items on the rubric?'

I'm moved to note this as i finish a final paper for an instructor who grades by a rigorous rubric. As I wrote, I found myself wishing I could focus on writing a good paper, a paper that was interesting and maybe even insightful, that moved me to take my knowledge of the subject further. Instead, as a rational, satisficing sort would, I instead worked to make sure I would get credit for each item on the rubric checklist. Easier, no question, but dispiritingly hollow too.

Apple's iPad: More than just poorly named / bright & shiny?

So Apple's 'iPad' tablet device, as anyone with a pulse and a computer is well aware at this point, was officially released yesterday to enormous anticipation and fanfare, even for Apple. There's no question that this iPhone-on-steroids is a Bright Shiny Object (BSO) of the highest order, that the cool factor is high, and that the urge to fondle one when you see those introductory videos is high, but after the oohs and aahs recede, is there really any there there?

The new screen is impressive on first glance - big and bright - and some of the software enhancements look impressive, like the email client for example, but when I ask myself what's transformative and awesome about the iPhone for me personally, I come p with the following: an all-in-one, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink device with fantastic usability and that great multi-touch interface that I can slip in my pocket and thus have with me whenever, wherever.

And what's the iPad? (Other than really, really badly named, that is -- couldn't the Apple gang anticipate the off-color YouTube parodies?) Exactly the same thing only in a form factor that WON'T fit in your pocket and thus isn't likely to be with you whenever, wherever. Cool - yes, but useful? I'm not convinced.

Now, you might agree but counter that it's certain to be an Amazon Kindle killer at a minimum. I mean, it's gorgeous, has that nice color screen and is reasonably priced (at least compared to the preposterously expensive Kindle), right? Good hypothesis, but not so fast. The iPad uses a simple LED-backlit Liquid Crystal Diode display, which is great for general use but isn't likely to cut it as an e-reader. Bright sunlight is still a killer and eyestrain is still a factor. Kindle may not be as sexy but if you need to read War & Peace on either a Kindle or an iPad, trust me, go with the Kindle. An don't take my word for it. The IEEE gives the real lowdown: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/the-ipad-is-not-a-kindle-killer-blame-the-display and trust me, they know of what they speak when it comes to display hardware.

Bottom line: iPad's cool, it's fun and if you get one I'm definitely going to be jealous, but don't expect it to transform the world of computing or e-reading.

Best data visualizations I believe I've ever seen

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?)

No frills? We grew up in the no frills industry: Pennsylvania's Proposal for a Stripped-down 4 year College

So PA's State Board of Education has suggested creating a "no-frills" four-year college - no dorms, no sports, gyms or other amenities. A no-brainer in a state where it's exceedingly expensive to earn a college degree (and student indebtedness is sky high, and post-baccalaureate salaries are proportionately low), or even in general for that matter and it appears the proposal has been well received. I applaud the model. I damn well should, what with my having been living and working it for the past three years at Peirce. I am amazed at the extent to which preliminary description resembles nothing so much as Peirce: accelerated, year-round, no-frills, low cost four-year programs. At around $1400 per 3-credit class at the time of writing, maybe Peirce fails to count as low cost in terms of cost to the student. (We surely are not competing with the ~$100 per credit hour community college territory.) But the cost from a fully loaded public finance perspective, given that Peirce receives essentially no public support beyond the financial aid its students receives and had what I believe is a very modest default rate, is a regular steal relative to the alternatives, I 'd wager to guess.

Why not just let community colleges offer four-year degrees like Florida does? Well, that may well have to do with the fact that community colleges have a pretty bad track record in terms of many relevant outcomes - persistence, retention, graduation, baccalaureate completion, etc. Seeing how a no-frills four year system is unlikely to be a bastion of the best and brightest, such a system seems likely to draw from more or less the same candidate pool as community colleges and to run up against the same struggles and disappointments as well. Maybe PAs community colleges are collectively sufficiently flawed as to be unfit to form the basis for a no-frill four-year system, I don't know. (They are insufficiently geographically diffuse to serve as well as we should expect, either in their current capacity or that proposed. That much is clear).

What is crystal clear is that this no-frills, four-year (or as I've come to call it, NiFFY, because it makes me think of the jackknife niffy that haunts the children's book classic The Ice Cream Cone Coot) spells increased competition for Peirce. The tuition point at which a state-supported NiFFY is likely to emerge is going to be tough to beat, but its likely to bring all the community college baggage, and while it'll be cheap to students, its full cost to all constituencies may not be such a bargain, frills or no.

"Withitness" and a Renewed Sense of Classroom Possibility

I spent some time in Max's kindergarten classroom this morning. Fun, inspiring and impressive stuff. I could feel it coming together for many of the kids as it happened: 7+7=14, 7+6=13, 7+5=12, the power of doubles. The sound of things clicking was all but audible.

Ms. Silver has mad skillz: eyes in the back of her head, ability to seamlessly redirect, iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove command of the room. I really don't like Malcolm Gladwell (trite, I'd rather be interesting than right) and I especially didn't like his article in the New Yorker about teaching and quarterbacking, but watching Ms. Silver was like a live demonstration of the "withitness" he cites.

All the usual activities were in play too: group activity (doing their daily "survey" - very scientific [and cute]) precipitates individual work; representatives identified to share their individual solutions; representatives in turn get to sit on the big chair, show & discuss their solutions, and call on students who have questions about it (and there were questions from the audience, and they all raised their respective hands, and the share-ers all called on the students in a very teacher-like way ["yes, Rachel?"]). The rank enthusiasm and the undivided attention were jaw-dropping. My own sense of possibility for my classroom have been nicely recalibrated. Thanks for that, Ms. Silver!

I was useless as a volunteer but I had a ball. The low point of my visit: before we started some of the kids were giving me a guided tour of the self portraits they'd done that were recently hung in the classroom. Next to each was an inventory of attributes (eyes- brown, etc.) as well as a feature that "makes me special". Max noted (yikes!) that his "light skin makes him special". In his defense, he is pale as a ghost and it is noteworthy, but boy did I cringe when I read that.

Stanley Fish, the "Last Professor" and the Overprofessor

[www.toothpastefordinner.com]
Why would one argue that inutility is an essential feature of authentic education? After reading Stanley Fish's The Last Professor, which premises itself on just such an argument, I must confess that I still have no idea.

You'll pardon me if Stanley Fish's talk of the Last Professor gives me a chuckle by bringing to mind Nietzsche's Zarathustra. I for one welcome the rise of OverProfessor. ProfessorMan is something which ought to be overcome:

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome [professor]man? What is the ape to [professor]man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And [professor]man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…

Fish maintains that true higher education is "distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world". To the extent that he uses this principle as the basis for railing against proselytizing from the podium (which he surely and rightly does) I'm all in favor, but on its face it surely seems difficult to be enthusiastic about educational inutility. If for Bateson information is the difference that makes a difference, Fish's higher ed is apparently the difference that makes none. Swell. Sign me up (Heck, I'm already on board against my will: I often feel my teaching is the difference that makes none anyway, in spite of my practical subject matter and best efforts to the contrary).

What Fish suggests is doing deontology one better. If education is consequence free, it must be awfully hard to do a bad job (or even to know that you've done so). OK, I'm sparring a straw man, I know. On to meatier matters.

Other Fish premises:

1. The Humanities face inevitable marginalization (can't even call it a crisis, as this implies the possibility of remedy)
   
2. Much of this marginalization has already transpired: "Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past.
3. The corporatization of higher ed is to blame

Regarding 1 & 2: Is Amherst's, Middlebury's, Swarthmore's stock really falling? Do we have reason to expect it will? (I don't know - I'm asking, but I'm also skeptical.)

Regarding 3: Is corporatization really changing the humanities' historical bastions or, rather, is it changing and broadening higher education largely at its margins? Again, asking, but also skeptical on the former.

I was surprised and delighted to see Fish (by way of Frank Donoghue) indict my own institution, little ol' Peirce College, as the locus of the beginning of the end:

How has this happened? According to Donoghue, it’s been happening for a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce (sic) College of Business for being “ fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.”

So yeah, shorthand and typewriting fail to inspire in 2K9, but what if we replace them with, say, computer networking and accounting?

I'll complain further about Fish's Last Professor, in particular his false dichotomies, in part 2.

My Teaching-related Screencasts

I Stand Before You Today to Apologize: Nauseatingly Excellent Kaplan Ad

Saw the following (during SNL I think) and just about
fell out of my chair:



Maybe I made my nightcap stiffer than usual but this ad quite made me want to leap up and enroll at Kaplan University. Of course it occurs now that the ad is not so much a compelling argument for Kaplan University (whatever the hell that is, although the Washington Post is now more Kaplan than it is Washington Post, I know) as it is a compelling potshot at higher education generally.

The system does fail far too many. In particular the traditional system almost unswervingly fails to help the marginal students appearing in growing numbers in its classrooms. I''m increasingly concerned that students who would in fact find surer, less costly paths to economic well being through, say, the trades are increasingly coming to see a bachelor's degree as the only legitimate means to success. And while we need now more than ever before anyone capable of getting a bachelor's degree and putting it to productive use to do so, we're setting both growing numbers of degree seekers and the system itself up for failure by taking all comers and by holding a bachelor's degree up as the one and only path to socioeconomic well being.

Some quotes of note:
"It's time to learn how you learn so we can teach you better." Hear hear, although if we've not yet learned how students learn, it's surely not for a lack of lots and lots of brilliant folks' tirelessness to that end, and it's surely no trivial matter to learn.

"It's time a university adapted to you rather than you adapting to it." This makes me a bit queasy. First, in my experience this is just as likely as anything to mean that Kaplan has lowered its expectation about preparedness down to where its students find themselves rather than expecting its students to exhibit any given level of preparation. Singling Kaplan out here is unfair - its happening all around. And the problem is not an absence of admissions standards (I'm all for open enrollment), it's the pressure that open enrollment, especially together with the profit motive, puts on the expectations of admitted students. I fear the Kaplans are not only taking on the unready/unwilling/unable, they and those they admit are oblivious to the fact.

Community colleges are in crisis because in keeping with their missions they take all comers, and they do an astonishingly poor job graduating their students. Kaplan and the rest of the for-profits are on the whole offering much better retention and graduation rates. My great fear and strong suspicion, though, is that for-profits like Kaplan are solving this problem by lowering their expectations of student accomplishment until most students can manage to graduate. Expecting less ==> graduating more. It needn't be willful.

This one is good too, although the pandering is more covert and cloying:



"What if you could get your degree -- to develop your talent -- no matter who you are or where you are." This just infuriates me. I know I've squandered some (all?) of my bleeding heart educator cred on this issue, but the college that gets you your degree no matter who you are or, implicitly, what measure of wherewithal you present, gets you nothing. Say it with me: ability matters; ability varies widely; ability is largely determined before birth. I'm no more pleased about it than you, but I'm certain that to made headway in education we must come to terms with this unjust reality.

Let's educate everyone who is capable of benefiting. Let's educate them whether they yet know they want to be educated or not. Let's educate them whether they can afford it, let's educate them whether they've used drugs or been in prison, irrespective of track records and errant pasts. And if some accident of their birth - where or to whom they were born, their lot in life - stands to inhibit then let's work tirelessly to overcome. But lets once and for all stop pretending, for our sakes and for those wronged in so doing, that everyone is capable of benefiting from a college education.

Mobile Computing's Marginalization of the Here and Now

I'm a fan of mobile computing generally. The convenience of SMS' unobtrusive pseudo-synchronousness is fantastic. Albeit slowly, I'm beginning to awaken to the potential of micro-blogging to connect and convey. Ambient findability is exciting. Our ability to connect and collaborate is undergoing incredible transformation right before us. All that, really.

And yet there is, of course, cause to be troubled. Cell phone fueled rudeness is only the most obvious (and least interesting) example. The notion that one's phone conversation is at least as pressing as the coffee purchasing transaction in which one is presently engaged is not just inconsiderate, it is incorrect in a profound but subtle way. Single-minded, willful awareness of and participation in one's present circumstances is central not only to civility, it just may be the secret to living well. Being glued to / distracted by one's computicator is a major impediment to such mindfulness, and that cost, no matter how easily ignored, is very real.

We might just as well be walking, shopping, and -- quelle horreur! -- drinking in our own little isolated virtual library carrels, walled off from one another, transparently isolated. Driving while on the phone is of course dangerous to the physical well being of those around you (and sorry but that's the case hands-free or not). Walking while texting/talking /browsing/blogging makes one not only annoyingly unaware of those with whom one shares the sidewalk, it frays, when done en masse, subtly but insidiously, civility's precondition: acknowledgment of one another's existence, to ourselves and to one another.

One often hears it said that many homeless, willfully ignored by most passersby as they are, want as much as anything to be acknowledged (I think I'd favor a warm safe place to sleep myself, but nevertheless). Just schlepping to work I sometime feel the same yearning. Casual, fleeting eye contact is some days impossible to come by. Sometimes I willfully fail to yield way to an oblivious text-er just so the collision will force our mutual acknowledgement, however surly, of one another's existence (does that make me weird?). I try to smile at any rare passerby who actually meets my gaze. It's a trifle by itself I guess but I do worry that civility is fragile and threatened. Online pseudo-anonymity gave us /b/ and its ilk (god help us); what harm will come of its real world analog (sic)?

When folks are immersed in their smartphone's 320x480 universe at the bar, computing truly has become horrifyingly ubiquitous. Here was a recent lineup: end of the bar; guy, head bent, texting obliviously; me; guy noodling his iPhone obliviously; woman talking loudly and angrily into cellphone re, from what I gather against my will, a recent breakup. Struck me as sad. Bowling Alone - the fact that in the US we're bowling in record numbers but that bowling together in organized leagues is all but a relic from a bygone era - troubled Robert Putnam, and it troubled me as well after I read that title in all its excruciatingly well researched glory, although I think Putnam underestimates technology's power to build social capital (after all, those folks sitting in the bar isolated by their iPhones are connecting all right, just not with those with whom they are colocated). Bowling alone (together) is small potatoes compared to drinking alone (together) for my money. "De-localization" is bad enough; de-localization at the watering hole seems a tragedy of sorts.

Awareness is what's at stake, and the well-being that comes with it. I am loathe to come across as all new age-y or anything like that (truly, a man less spiritual than I is tough to come by) but mindfulness in all its many layers and manefestations is vital. And it is especially fleeting in our heavily technology-mediated times.

Take a gander at Jon Kabat Zinn's talk at Google here if you don't already know what I'm driving at:

Reflections on My Experiences with Using Alice to Teaching Introductory Programming

I redeveloped and took ownership of BIS 112, Programming Concepts, over the summer of 2007, somewhat reluctantly given that the vision for the course and the work to redesign it had been started by a colleague who fell seriously ill and went out on leave. I thought that the idea to use Alice was sound and I endorsed it as the department chair, but at the outset I was not a true believer, so to speak. I came to love Alice, though, as well as the challenge of teaching introductory programming in an open enrollment context.

I taught my first section of the redeveloped, Alice-based class in September. I was struck at the outset by the potential of the Alice approach. A blank page and a blinking cursor can be intimidating, and it precludes the sort of exploratory messing around and “intelligent muddling” that can be so powerful, as a learning technique generally, but especially for learning software. (In fact, in a course on interface design and usability I hold out to the students that the extent to which a design supports intelligent muddling often works well as a sort of usability gauge for sufficiently complex software systems.)

From something as simple as one of the students, working on our first in-class lab asking “Ummm..what’s recursion?” because he’d inadvertently created a recursive function, it was evident that a direct manipulation interface affords serendipity in a way that an IDE just can’t, and having that conversation about recursion, even though it came too early in the course to be easy to address, and even though the class doesn’t really cover recursion in much depth at all, this sort of authentic inquiry can make a huge impact I think.

Better still was the student who, in the midst of an open-ended in-class assignment, called me over because he had a Halloween scene with a half dozen or so zombies and he was looking for a way to make them move one after the next; he was tiring of instructing them individually one after the next and suspected there was an easier way. Of course it was a wonderful opportunity to talk about lists and arrays. I’ve no confidence that he left that day with a particularly robust understanding of arrays, but eventually he did, and it’s great thing to see that genuine interest in accomplishing a task coupled with an earnest interest in doing it more efficiently. Having an authentic interest in accomplishing some particular task is a fantastic learning opportunity. They claim that a lazy programmer is a good programmer. The claim that a lazy programming student is a good programming student is pretty preposterous, I know, yet with authentic problems that students actually desire to work on, one can leverage that whole lazy = good business because students will seek easier ways to accomplish things and will learn them in the process. Yeah team! Without Alice that sort of “hey, here’s what I’d like to do and it’s taking a while is there an easier way to do it?” is much, much less likely on the first day of class, that’s for sure.

Just as in real software engineering, however, there are accidental and essential complexities in teaching programming too, and Alice was no panacea (no silver bullet, if you will) of course. I had heartache soon enough that no programming environment could redress when, on our second meeting, it came time to perform some resoundingly basic arithmetic manipulations. My request of the students in class was to make a world that asked the user how old he or she was in years and to tell them how old they will be in days at their next birthday. Having temporary trouble is reasonable enough but the stark difficulty several of the students had with flat out basic arithmetic took me aback. I asked one student - OK, do we need to make the number the user gives us bigger or smaller? He was uncertain. Abstraction of any sort can be tough: I asked him how old in days someone who was 10 years would be and he answered immediately and correctly. I’ve still not quite come to terms with the consequences of open enrollment, nor have my teaching approaches evolved as much as they need to. Such a wide preparedness disparity is an inordinate teaching challenge, and one with which I continue to struggle.

Essential complexity is irreducible. That which is genuinely challenging will remain genuinely challenging. Nevertheless my initial experiences are that Alice is a real time on task enhancer, and that is no small thing. The final projects in the class *way* outstripped the minimum requirements I had assigned for them. Students made way bigger, more involved and more creative projects than they needed to. This doesn’t mean that they learned programming any better necessarily, but it surely doesn’t hurt. I’m greatly encouraged.

Favored Quadrants

...Just don't be *too* deviant.

Plagiarism & the Culture of Customer Service

Every case of plagiarism is devastating. I'm crushed by the squandered opportunity of it all, the betrayal, the death of the sense of working together to a common end. And in many cases -- the one that moved me to write today included -- my intelligence is insulted, 'How could you possibly think this would fool me' style.

This term one of my students, and a fairly good one to that point to boot, turned in as his own one of the example programs that comes with the Alice programming environment / IDE. Not only did this example program have nothing to do with the requirements specified for the final project, it was wildly more elaborate than the final project needed to be (not to mention the fact that I recognized the moment I saw it as one among the sample programs provided with Alice).

This is an online class (did I mention how spectacularly difficult i find teaching programming online?) and I returned the assignment electronically with a note calling the bluff and emphasizing how disappointed I was. About 12 hours afterwards I get the following terse little single-sentence email from the student at issue:

Please call me at [phone number].

I know, I know - at least he said please, right? Didn't address me at all, didn't sign, didn't express an interest in straightening out a terrible misunderstanding, just "call me." Ach du liebe!

It's troubling not only for the extent to which the approach is so profoundly misguided but also for the disrespect of it all. Haranguing about the commercialization of higher education is tired and boring, I know. Nevertheless, if we didn't operate in a culture that encourages students at every turn to think of themselves as customers, I'm doubtful such an email would ever have graced my inbox. And if we didn't operate in a culture that encourages students to think of themselves as customers we'd have fewer cases of plagiarism in the first place.

Now comes the claim that there must have been some sort of technical error, that he never uploaded any such file, that, while no easy explanation for how what happened came to transpire avails, this was all just, y'know, a glitch. Such clotted nonsense. In for a penny, in for a pound - I suppose it's human nature.

Normally this job is great, inspiring fun. Other times, alas, it is not.

Opting-Out of the "Rewind Revolution": legitimizing the transmission model with automatic classroom capture

I received the following notice from Drexel, where I am an adjunct:

All on-campus classes starting this upcoming winter term that are able to be captured using Apresso/Echo 360 will be, and materials will be made available to students via a Blackboard course shell. Please include in your syllabus the following sentence - “Lectures may be recorded and/or streamed and rebroadcast for educational purposes only.” If you do not want your course made available to students using this technology, you need to request an exemption by 12/22/08.

I've no immediate personal interest. (Indeed - I should be so lucky as to get a classroom sufficiently functional as to have Echo 360 in it! I'd be happy for a !#@%ing data projector and a median room temperature under 85.) Still I'm troubled.

I've no doubt that there are some introductory, knowledge-driven, lecture-centric classes where these recordings will undoubtedly be very convenient for students and may even enhance learning. Nevertheless, I'm troubled. This default recording and rebroadcasting of class time marks the apotheosis of the transmission model of learning. Class is not a learning experience brought into existence by the active participation of all, it's an artifact facilitating the transmission of knowledge from one head to the next. You can consume the class live as it transpires if the mood strikes, or you can do at your leisure. Whichever suits you.

This is of course a horrific mindset and one I have struggled over the years to resist. Students don't consume the learning, they create the learning and they do so in the moment. Save 40 or so minutes out of 150, my classes would be largely pointless to watch after the fact, I'm proud to say. What happens there is not a performance; it is not intended to be consumed ex post facto (or at all, for that matter).

Fortunately, an instructor may seek to opt-out of the auto-recording if it "does not advance the educational goals of the course". Call me judgmental, but my inclination is to say shame on you if you fancy it does advance the educational goals of your course.

The opt-out nature of this arrangement gives me the creeps. Isn't it de facto surveillance? Perhaps the professors can opt out, but can the students? No, it would seem, and once again I find that troubling. Apparently the single sentence we were instructed to add to our syllabi -- "Lectures may be recorded and/or streamed and rebroadcast for educational purposes only." is supposed to take care of that, which strikes me as grossly inadequate.

The chilling effect of such recording not only on the spontaneity of the learning environment but on the free exchange of ideas worries me too. Will an instructor be less inclined to take up controversial or difficult issues and follow boldly wherever they might lead knowing that the proceedings will be going down on the permanent record? I fear I might be.

IP questions abound as well, although it would seem Drexel's policy to my non-lawerly eyes seems to make no ownership claim to classroom materials.

Lecture capture technology does not really excite me that much. There are authentic uses and ones I'm interested in myself (providing online classes with a window into classroom-based analogues running in parallel could be very useful, although I'd favor doing it is real time with Connect or WebEx). Whatever other controversies remain, it's exceptionally difficult to argue that classroom capture should be opt-out.

Reproduction

"Poor children grow into poor adults because they are never able, either at home or at school, to acquire the abilities and resources they need to compete in a high-tech service-driven economy -- and Heckman emphasizes that those necessary skills are both cognitive (the ability to read and compute) and noncognitive (the ability to stick to a schedule, to delay gratification and to shake off disappointments)."

Paternalistic yet True?