Re-Branding the Arts and Humanities

Posted on by

This whole rambling train of though started with a Willliam Pannapacker tweet this morning:

His notion of building projects points out that , at the moment, there is little demand for those with graduate degrees in the arts and humanities outside the academy. So why would anyone build the kind of projects to which he refers?  I suggested that, in order for those sorts of projects to be built, we need to re-brand the arts and humanities.  Pannapacker  quite sensibly then asked :

At this point I must confess to being stuck for a good answer.The crux of the problem lies I think in perceived utility, or lack thereof.  Natural sciences are accepted as valuable because natural science research sometime leads to useful techne.  Research in the social sciences contributes to the improvement of societal systems to solve problems.  I don’t see a similar utilitarian endpoint for the arts and humanities.  Instead, we are left with secondary justifications like “exposure to the arts improves mathematical reasoning.”  It is then pointed out that if you want to improve mathematical reasoning and have limited resources, shouldn’t you just focus on math.

The value of the arts and humanities is reliant ,to a great extent, on accepting the premise that knowledge and understanding have intrinsic value.  Pannapacker pointed out that such an idea has long been held suspect here in the USA, reminding me of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  I will confess to not having read the book, in part because I worry I’ll find it quite depressing. (Disclaimer:  I have undergraduate and graduate degrees in music and French, so I take take pronouncements of the uselessness of the arts and humanities as an implicit questioning of how I spend more than a decade of my life)

I can’t escape the sense that re-branding the arts and humanities almost compels one to make them into a means to some end. If you do that is art still art, or is it instruction or something else in the form of art, akin to a Venus de Milo jello mold?

 

 

You can be dismayed, but don’t be surprised

Posted on by

Lisa Lane referred to a Chronicle news item detailing a bill now being considered by the California State Assembly , which would create the “New University of California”, a state entity to award credit and degrees by exam. Lisa ascribes this to (summarizing very broadly) a plutocratic design to keep people uneducated.  I fear she’s right but hope she’s wrong.

Instead, I think that the root of this problem is quite deep and that some of the blame lies with the educational system itself.  Even though we aimed to bring more education to more people in order that we might prepare people for citizenship and membership in society, education was “sold” largely as an economic launch pad.  We did such a good job spreading the message that education is a path to a better job, more pay, and a higher standard of living, that for too many people, including business leaders and legislators, that became all education was about.

If a degree is first and foremost an employment qualification, then it makes sense, from a human capital point of view, that the time and money required to gain that qualification should be minimized.  Especially as the economic benefits of higher ed seem  to diminish relative to its cost, employers, students, and government all embraced the notion that college should happen faster and cost less.

Had existing institutions embraced that notion and things like prior learning assessment and competency based degrees that go with it, they could have ensured that the qualifications at the end of these processes included traditional understandings of what constitutes a well educated person.  Except for a few pioneers, most institutions approached the issue with the caution typical of the academy, and some now see the traditional college/university as part of the problem.

Here is the real danger.  Credential paths separated from the traditions of faculty control over curriculum (the Chronicle headline describes the proposed NUC as “Faculty-Free”) may extend the current focus on employability and earning potential (note the College Scorecard‘s inclusion of graduate salaries, for example).  Isn’t the logical next step to decide that (arts, foreign languages, natural sciences, history, etc.) are needless wastes of time and money? If the credential is only ,or even mostly, about employment, why not let employers decide what’s in it?

My sense is that the entire planet faces challenges that are only increasing in complexity, and that the more people we have who are equipped to think both broadly and deeply about them, the better off we are.  I worry that that is not necessarily a goal of those who now direct higher education policy and priorities.

 

 

 

Teacher Direction v Learner Direction

Posted on by

I came across Judith Boettcher’s ten core principles for designing effective learning environments this week.  Number 3, “Faculty Mentors are the Directors of the Learning Experience,”  has me pondering.

I’ll stipulate that there’s wide variance among any group of learners in the extent to which a given learner can function auto-didactically.  That said, given society’s rate of change, there will be times that you will need to learn something for which the textbook/course syllabus has not yet been written. Constraints such as cost can also limit the availability of highly structured learning experiences when those do exist. Therefore, how much of the formal learning process should involve preparing/practicing for those kind of situations, what Dave Cormier calls “learning for uncertainty?”  (I realize now I’m echoing my last post, I guess I have a theme this week.)

At the very least, adults need enough metacognitive awareness so they can accurately assess which things they can learn independently, and which things, for them, require a more structured approach (___________ for Dummies or perhaps even signing up for a class)  I would go so far as to suggest that this knowledge of what learning methods, materials and approaches work best for you is the distinguishing characteristic of the archetypical ‘educated person’. If you learn that skill, you are well prepared to learn anything else you need to know. Stephen Downes puts it more eloquently here.

So, if faculty mentors are the directors, how do we make sure that students are also in “directing class” as they learn whatever it is, and how is directing one person’s learning experience — their own, different from the kind of collective direction we provide in a class?  Does online learning blur that distinction?

Everything Old is New Again

Posted on by

Mike Caulfield reminds us this week that many concepts we associate with the latest and greatest trends in technology-supported learning have in fact been around for a long time.  He linked to a B.F. Skinner film on teaching machines to support his point and asked the important question, “Why will this work this time around?”

Several interesting things have come up in the comment thread and I’ll put in my 2 cents (not Canadian, however) here.

Mike refers to the importance of learning structure and the comparative ineffectiveness of discovery learning.  My concern is that discovery learning is in and of itself a real-world skill.  There are times when you find yourself in a situation where there isn’t much structure and you must, with little guidance, figure stuff out.  Is that a skill that can be taught in a highly structured way, or does it need to be practiced?

I liked Skinner’s analogy of programmer to textbook author/teacher (“It is the author of the program, not the machines, who teaches.”)  Perhaps where we went wrong was in not making learning design and programming an essential part , or perhaps even the core, of education curricula.

Mike refers to the importance of presence.  Hasn’t telepresence come a very long way in the last decade? The existence of tools like Google Hangouts has begun to break a constraint which restricted learning for thousands of years, the limitation that one had to be studying the same things as those physically near them.  Ben Rimes has begun an interesting experiment in this direction with Book Club 106, a distributed book discussion group operating via Google Hangout.

Finally, Mike talks about the balance between individualization and shared experience.  I think Ben’s experiment is a good example of how , with some help from networks, groups of people learning together can develop, if not spontaneously, at least with fairly low overhead.  To be fair to Mike, this doesn’t address the role of common experience in building a society, that is to say, what common experiences and knowledge ought I share with my neighbors down the block?

As is usual , I’ve ask more questions than I’ve answered, but my one or two regular readers know that’s pretty typical.

The “cure” for Baumol’s cost disease and what it might mean for education and MOOCs

Posted on by

Many discussions of education reform make reference to Baumol’s Cost Disease, an economic theory which seeks to explain why costs rise in industries, like health care and education, which are resistant to efficiency gains. Essentially it argues that costs will rise rapidly in sectors that are labor intensive because wages must rise to attract workers in a competitive labor market, but the labor intensive nature of the enterprise keeps productivity from keeping up with gains in other sectors that are more amenable to automation.

Baumol did his original research on the performing arts. pointing out in the 1960′s that it takes the same number of people the same number of person-hours to perform a string quartet as it did a century ago.  While that’s true, the actual cost to hear music is much lower than it was.  Why?…recordings.

While most people accept that listening to a recording is not the equal of the live concert experience, most people listen to more recorded music than live music.  The combination of lower cost (buy MP3′s of a string quartet once for $4 and listen as many times as you want) and convenience (even in the largest of cities there isn’t a live performance of the piece you want to hear whenever you want to hear it.)  mean that recorded music is, for most people, good enough. (See also Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“)

Here is a parallel to education. Most would accept the premise that a small class with lots of interactions is better than a class of hundreds in which most assignments are graded by computer.  The latter model, in particular, does not lend itself to higher level thinking skills without very careful design.  The proponents of what Lisa Lane would call Network based MOOCs Would likely counter that network effects and opportunities for learner autonomy create an environment that is in some ways preferable to a traditionally structured class, even if that class is small and interactive. However, the network based MOOC is not driven by measurable outcomes, and it’s unclear how this might fit in to a credential. When early network based MOOCs were offered for credit, there was a cohort within the class.  for that cohort, which was small, more traditional assessment methods were used (journals, projects, etc.)

Any kind of redesign of education which would significantly increase the productivity of teachers will likely involve significant automation of content delivery and, more importantly, assessment.  The key question is, will learners accept a course where most assignment feedback is machine generated as good enough?  I think this will most likely depend on whether a credential earned via low cost, massive, machine graded courses is perceived to have economic and employability benefits comparable to the traditional labor intensive approach.

Interestingly, Baumol apparently argues in a new book (I haven’t read it) that the “disease” is not , in fact, a big problem, because decreases in the cost of other things will offset the inevitable cost increases in education, health care, and other labor intensive sectors. I’m skeptical. I guess we will all see in a decade or so.

 

 

An information repository of my own

Posted on by

It started with a blog, as such things often do. Then not wanting to pay extra for media functionality convinced me to self host the blog.  Having access to a Plesk panel and MySQL databases on a public webserver then opened up other possibilities.

I’m a regular Twitter user, and had for a while wanted to run ThinkUp , for archiving and analytics.  Now that I was on the public web , I could do that.  I started with a one click install at PHPFog, made to appear seamless with a subdomain redirect.  When I got an announcement a couple of weeks ago that PHPFog is to disappear at the end of the month and an invitation to migrate to another product line from the same company, I figured I might as well migrate to a fully self hosted instance, So off I went to create a database, change the subdomain settings, and download the code.  Migrating the content didn’t work well, because shared hosting doesn’t allow the database permissions that would enable one to export user data from within the app, (Believe me. I tried) so I just rebuilt the data store from scratch.

A bit later, I was writing a blog post, and remembered a wonderful tweet that was relevant. Unfortunately neither my ThinkUp install nor Googling could find it.  It occurred to me that this was the kind of thing delicious or diigo were for.  I have accounts both places and can never remember which item I bookmark where.  Time for another self-hosted solution.

It seems that Scuttle is the most feature complete, open source, self-hostable web app of the kind available at the moment.  Although Scuttle hasn’t been been updated in over a year, it had forked- and SemanticScuttle looked to be under active development, as well as allowing nested tags. I’ll detail the install and import in a forthcoming post.

So now here I am with two WordPress installs, a bookmark manager, and a Twitter analytics app sitting on my hosting space. Why did I do this again?

  • To see if I could.
  • Because , after the delicious almost shutdown and the moving targets that are the terms of service at third party providers like Facebook and Twitter, I no longer trust big corporate entities to have my interests at heart. I am much better equipped now to walk away from Delicious and Twitter (at least) should that prove the right choice at some point.
  • Now that my data sits in my databases, my abaility to query it is limited by my ability to write code and SQL queries.

Finally, thanks to Lisa Lane, who’s reply to a tweet about this whole adventure prodded me to start documenting it.

The Limits of the Learner-Centered Course : A Response (sort of) to Alan Levine

Posted on by

Alan Levine recently commented on some of the challenges of MOOC design, particularly noting what he called “MOOC ramming speed“, the tendency of MOOCs to rapidly move from one topic to the next.  All courses do that. When was the last time you were in a course that didn’t divide its schedule by the week?  Alan asks “Why a course?”

To extend the analogy, you have to move fast if you’re in a race.  At least in American education, speed is the new mantra.  In higher ed completion initiatives, it’s all about getting students from point A (where they are now) to point B as quickly, and therefore inexpensively, as possible . While point B may differ from student to student and institution to institution, from a national or state policy standpoint, it is invariably the possession of a skill set that makes the learner hireable.

This raises some other questions.  In order that learning systems be held accountable and assessed as to their effectiveness, we insist that learning have measurable objectives.  We also want everyone to be lifelong learners, Ergo, everyone should leave college able to create learning outcomes?

Sometimes self-directed learning has a clear outcome.  Last week, thanks to YouTube, I learned how to replace snare drum heads and snares, because I needed to do that, and someone in my PLN clued me in to the existence of Hot-Rods, a quieter drum stick alternative, because I needed a quieter stick for the novice drummer in the house.  Other times, learning isn’t about needing to know X or be able to do Y by date Z. Two years ago, Alan described it this way:

What is going to motivate the large swath of a society to become educated or to learn something in a self-directed fashion? It’s one thing to be facing a need that I need to to know first hand– how to fix a bike dérailleur, how to stop a leaking toilet, how to bake a lemon meringue pie how to add a widget to a web page– these are all places DIY shines, when I know that I don’t know something and want to fill that gap. It is clear when I don;t[sic] know something I want to know. Lots of people do this.

But what is going to drive people to learn what they don’t think they need to learn? What they don’t know is worth learning? In a DIY world with people tooling up for a better job, are they going to DIY their way into poetry? French literature? Is the limits of education the things we need to know how to perform/get a job?

In that respect the fleet analogy he uses would be hard to fit into the modern college or university, as is a real notion of learner-centeredness.  Learner-centered is another mantra of higher ed, but doesn’t real learner-centeredness mean that the learners decide what to learn, when to learn, and how to learn?  Even in the most learner-centered classrooms, the what and when are decided in advance by the instructor.  How do we reconcile the ideas of measurable objectives and time to completion with learning as “,,,being in the same space as people who care [about something],,,”? (Alan again) That kind of learning doesn’t have a defined endpoint.

These two visions of learning seem to part ways on whether the value of learning is extrinsic or intrinsic.  Education policy tends to focus on the former since it’s easier to measure. (Louis Menard examined higher education’s purpose brilliantly in a New Yorker essay last year. I wish it were required reading in every first-year seminar.)  Despite much searching I can’t find a citation, but someone has said that school is not learner centered because education, by its nature, is centered on society’s need to pass knowledge to future generations.What if he/she is right?