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Archive for March, 2009

A couple-three things about standardized reading assessments

Mar 31st, 09 / 3 Comments

If you follow education news, you may already have seen E.D. Hirsch, Jr.,’s March 22 Op-Ed column in the New York Times. The piece, “Reading Test Dummies,” makes exactly the kind of argument Hirsch’s fans are by now used to: That standardized tests assessing reading skills have merit, when used appropriately. “These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests,” Hirsch writes,

are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.

Fair enough so far, right? And Hirsch goes you one further by explaining that “[f]or a student with a basic ability to decode print, a reading-comprehension test is not chiefly a test of formal techniques but a test of background knowledge.” Not only that, but

Our current reading tests are especially unfair to disadvantaged students. The test passages may be random, but they aren’t knowledge-neutral. A child who knows about hiking in the Appalachians will have a better chance of getting the passage right; a child who doesn’t, won’t. Yet where outside of school is a disadvantaged student to pick up the implicit knowledge that is being probed on the reading tests?

If you know Hirsch, you know where this is going: Toward an argument for standardizing curriculum content, then aligning test materials to curriculum standards, because

[b]etter-defined standards in history, science, literature and the arts combined with knowledge-based reading tests would encourage the schools to conceive the whole course of study as a reading curriculum — exactly what a good knowledge-based curriculum should be. Schools would also begin to use classroom time more productively, which is important for all students and critically so for disadvantaged ones.

Hirsch ends with this zinger: “We do not need to abandon either the principle of accountability or the fill-in-the-bubble format. Rather we need to move from teaching to the test to tests that are worth teaching to.”

For the sake of expediency, let’s ignore for now the fact that “teaching to the test” and “tests that are worth teaching to” are in effect the same thing. (You can put lipstick, a bubble skirt, and high heels on a pig, but….) Let’s leave aside the deeper, more concerning question: Who gets to decide what those standards are, and what evidence is there that setting these standards across subject-areas would benefit disadvantaged students any more than any previous “curriculum reform” has?

In fact, no, let’s not leave that question aside–not for now, not ever. Hirsch argues for curriculum standards, presumably along the lines of the Core Knowledge he promotes in his nonprofit organization. (When I say “core knowledge,” you think “western canon.” Core: Western. Knowledge: Canon.) It is only in this way, he believes, that we can preserve the knowledge upon which our culture was built. In fact, this is where conservative educational thinkers show their rhetorical skill: Their arguments, as Michael Apple points out, are linked to a nostalgia for the past, for a time when the questions about what to teach and how to teach it were less thorny and easier to answer–when white men ruled and everyone else got in line or fell out. Apple points to conservatives like Hirsch, Dianne Ravitch, and William Bennett,

all of whom seem to believe that progressivism is now in the dominant position in educational policy and practice and has destroyed a valued past. All of them believe that only by tightening control over curriculum and teaching (and students, of course), restoring ‘our’ lost traditions, making education more disciplined and competitive as they are certain it was in the past—only then can we have effective schools. (p. 6)

The questions about what to teach and how to teach it get increasingly difficult as participatory technologies, and the social skills and cultural competencies linked to success at using these technologies, become increasingly valuable and valued. As culture shifts toward this participatory model, it becomes increasingly clear that memorizing a canon of information is less important than having the skills to know when and how tap into that canon. The entire body of world thought is, as always, distributed across a vast set of networks; but until very recently, it was difficult or impossible for people outside of academic institutions to access very much of those networks.

(For more responses to Hirsch’s op-ed, you can read letters to the editor at the New York Times Letters page.)

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Excuse me while I go all John Lennon on you

Mar 29th, 09 / 4 Comments

Over at Adbusters headquarters, the One Flag competition–a contest intended to present to the world a single flag for all–has resulted in a clear winner: This flag created by Marc Arroyo Ortiga from Berlin.

Adbusters, an organization that refers to itself as “culturejammer headquarters,” has invested its resources in the argument that things might have been otherwise (despite an almost unbelievable misstep in the One Flag contest, about which more below). The description of the One Flag competition presents a nice example of how Adbusters goes about the work of imagining that otherwise world:

Design is at war with itself. We are taught that design is about finding solutions. But the success of these solutions is judged so narrowly – Did it ooze desire? Did it shift units? – that we find ourselves implicated in problems far greater than the ones we solve. The time has come for a radical shift in priorities. We are now faced with some of the most daunting global challenges in human history.

These are real targets, worthy of our problem-solving skills, ripe for our intervention. Yet those who have the vision to rise above national and political boundaries still have no symbol to rally under. We invite you to create a flag – free from language and well-worn clichés – that embodies the idea of global citizenship. A symbol that triggers pride and cohesion, whether worn on a backpack, displayed on a door, or flown on a flagpole. A symbol for anyone to declare membership in a growing and vital human cooperative. We invite you to prove that design has a real role to play in the fate of our world.

(You can look at the entries of the 32 finalists here.)

Now, about that “things might have been otherwise” argument:

Julia Clarke, writing about Actor-Network Theory (or ANT), examines the question “where is anemia?” to illustrate the point that “whatever story is being told, we are reminded that ‘it might have been otherwise’.” As Clarke explains,

If there are plenty of iron tablets available, ‘anaemia’ is a good diagnosis. If there’s no iron, and no good food and no way to cure worms or malaria, then there is no point in using machines to measure haemoglobin levels. Anaemia is real, our bodies need iron; it is narrated, or discursively constructed in the context of different experiences and understandings; and it is social in the sense that what it means and what we do about it is something that is moved around in the fluid spaces of bodies and social relations.

The big work of ANT is to make a theoretical shift away from the assumption that humans are the source of all action and everything around them is just tools for action. Instead, Clarke explains it thus:

The most radical claim of actor-network theory is that all of social life consists of patterned networks of people, animals, machines, texts, buildings, plants – any material entity that is brought into a network. These entities have no inherent qualities but take their form and acquire their attributes through relationships in networks with other entities. This goes beyond the idea that humans behave differently or take on different roles in different social situations, or that plants wilt when the soil is too dry or that light bulbs need electricity…. It means recognising that machines, animals, micro-chips and people, as well as identities, categories, spaces and stories, all have politics and all are implicated in power relations.

In this view, the very humanity of human beings is an effect of the networks through which we derive ‘human’ attributes in relation to other human and non-human entities.

We say that humans are by nature territorial, and that notions like nations, borders, governments and flags emerged from that essentially human trait. But it might have been otherwise, as the Adbusters winning flag suggests. We can imagine a world in which a block of cloth tossed up a pole means not “this land is claimed for the American government and is subject to its government and laws” but “the swimming pool is now open” or “mitosis has occurred” or “a block of cloth has been tossed up a pole.”

It might have been otherwise, and in this case the flag whose very image is that which means to us the exact opposite of “territory”–sky, the very opposite to us of land–won the contest because it helps us to imagine how it might have been otherwise. In fact, we might say the winning flag is not just the flag itself but the image of that block of cloth against a matching sky.

People drifting and gathering like clouds across the bright sky. No term to describe the notions of “borders,” of “boundaries,” no country or continent, no power exerted by the notion of “patriotism” and therefore no jingoisms, no xenophobia, no need for the complex of feelings and intentions exerted by patriotism as it currently exists in our networks of existence.

“You can’t just pretend the notion of borders doesn’t exist,” said my British friend, talking about the expansion of the European Union. “When Poland joined the EU, immigrants flooded into the UK looking for jobs, and it’s been bad for us. You can’t just say, ‘Right, let’s get rid of the idea of countries and let everyone go where they want.’”

No, of course not. Not, anyway, in a culture where the notion of boundaries continues to exert its influence, regardless of shifts in law or approach. Not in a culture where there exists an us (the British) vs. them (the Polish, the Turks, the Greeks…). An us (America) vs. them (Mexicans, Canadians, the Middle East…).

No, of course not. But we can still try to imagine, as difficult as it is to do, how it might have been otherwise.

Ok, but here’s how Adbusters kinda screwed the pooch on this one
Apparently, all of the judges of the One Flag contest were white men. For the love of pete. For the love of PETE.

This is further proof, though, of how hard it is to try to imagine how it might have been otherwise. And how important it is to keep trying.

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NYTimes headline: When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking

Mar 28th, 09 / 2 Comments

I was feeling low and out of gas when I saw the above headline in the New York Times online. My hopes were high when I clicked on it. The actual article, about celebrities whose assistants manage their Twitter accounts for them, disappointed me deeply. Here’s how I wish the article had read.

When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May be Lurking

By JENNA MCWILLIAMS
Published: March 28, 2009

For centuries, stargazers have been fascinated by the sight of celestial bodies twinkling and sparkling in the night sky. At various points in scientific history, astronomers have attributed the random blinking of stars to weaknesses of human vision or the shivering movements or dimming and brightening of the stars themselves. Since the early 18th Century, however, scientists have agreed that this phenomenon is the result of earthly atmospheric gases momentarily obscuring visibility.

Now one researcher is taking issue with this stance, arguing that a definitive link has been established between the seemingly random blinkings of stars and a complicated communication system, the details of which are still being worked out.

Andreu Matthiessen, a Finnish scientist whose previous research has focused on establishing a link between astrology and string theory, mapping visible stars to projected geographical formations of the European Union, and theorizing about the possibility of building a literal stairway to heaven, has now turned his attention to twinkling stars, formally known as stellar scintillation. Isaac Newton is credited with uncovering the true cause of twinkling stars when he argued that atmospheric turbulence caused the phenomenon. In 1704, Newton wrote:

“If the Theory of making Telescopes could at length be fully brought into Practice, yet there would be certain Bounds beyond which Telescopes could not perform. For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in a perpetual Tremor; as may be seen by the tremulous Motion of Shadows cast from high Towers, and by the twinkling of the fix’d Stars.”

Yet Matthiessen, with funding from the International Federation of Astrologo-Astronomers, has spent the last two decades of his career taking issue with this widely accepted analysis. He and forty to fifty graduate students have been tracking scintillation by stationing themselves around the world and keeping at least three pairs of steady eyes on the night sky at all times. Now Matthiessen believes he has uncovered a pattern: One that indicates the stars themselves are attempting to communicate with us via short bursts of information.

“Much like in Twitter,” Matthiessen, 73, said as he printed his most recent data for a reporter. “Information always comes in no more than 150 characters.” (Twitter accounts are limited, in fact, to 140 characters at a time.)

Even Matthiessen admits that the data he has collected so far is largely unintelligible; he has been unable to make sense of the information streams that get sent to him from his worldwide research network. Yet he and his lead researcher, Andrea Figuero, are convinced that once they come upon the right permutation of number-letter decoding system, the reams of research will fall into place as a long communication. Asked to speculate on what the stars may be communicating to us, both Matthiessen and Figuero were eager to volunteer their opinions.

“I don’t believe in God,” said Figuero, an American who abandoned graduate work in astrophysics at MIT in 2003 to work with Matthiessen, “but I believe the planets, the stars, everything that’s out there, makes up a single uniform body with its own level of awareness.”

“It is not what you might imagine,” Matthiessen agreed. “It does not communicate like this God and does not want to.”

It doesn’t want to direct our actions or guide humans? Then why bother trying to communicate?

“It is human, like us,” Matthiessen answered.

“Not human,” Figuero interjected. “But a body of awareness…maybe…. Well, I said I don’t believe in God, but what if God did exist once and the stars are like the ghost of what God was?”

“Like a ghost,” Matthiessen affirmed. “And when we break this code, we will know what this God was saying to his people centuries ago.”

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POW! POW! POW! It’s official: I’m a Hoosier

Mar 26th, 09 / 8 Comments

I’ve just received official confirmation from Indiana University’s Learning Sciences Program that I have been accepted into the doctoral program beginning Fall 2009. Among other things, the letter indicates that:

For next year, you will be working with Dr. Daniel Hickey as a research assistant. You will probably be hearing from Dr. Hickey. Feel free, however, to contact him before you come to IU to learn more about the exciting research opportunities.

I wonder who this Dr. Hickey character is. I hope he’s okay to work with. And I do hope he contacts me soon. I have some questions about the field research we’ve been working on together for the last year and the blogposts we’ve been drafting together for the last month.

addendum:
Here’s how it feels to be me right now. I’m the kitten, in case you were wondering. Dan, that means you’re the bloodhound.

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Podcast: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Fluid Text: Versions of the Law

Mar 26th, 09 / 0 Comments

Recently, at my day job, I emceed a colloquium featuring textual scholar and Melville specialist John Bryant and intellectual property and First Amendment expert Wendy Seltzer. Over the course of the colloquium, these amazing scholars covered Moby-Dick, Edward Said, Shepard Fairey, fan fiction, Creative Commons, YouTomb, and how they talk about plagiarism and fair use with their students. This was a fun and fascinating conversation, and well worth the listen. I’m posting John’s and Wendy’s bios below.

To listen to the podcast, go to the link at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies page (http://cms.mit.edu/news/2009/03/podcast_authorship_appropriati.php).

Pictured above, left to right: Media scholar Henry Jenkins; Jenna McWilliams, blogger and Curriculum Specialist for Project New Media Literacies; textual scholar and Melville Specialist John Bryant; and Wendy Seltzer, attorney and intellectual property and First Amendment expert.

John Bryant teaches at Hofstra University. His work explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. He is a textual scholar and Melville specialist, whose works include The Fluid Text and Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee. He is the editor, with Associate editor Wyn Kelley, of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and of the Melville Electronic Library (MEL). He is a Co-editor of the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick and is currently working on a critical biography of Melville.

Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She has taught Internet Law, Copyright, and Information Privacy at Brooklyn Law School and was a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute. Previously, she was a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment issues. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.

Wendy serves as an advisor to the Citizen Media Law Project and on the Board of Directors of the Tor Project, supporting privacy and anonymity research and technology.

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why the Hewlett Foundation should toss some cash on over

Mar 25th, 09 / 1 Comment

A Modest Proposal: integrating Spreadable Educational Practices into Hewlett’s Open Educational Resources Initiative

Because of my interest in spreadable educational practices and in the open source movement, I’ve been drawn lately to the work of the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resource (OER) Initiative. The goal of this initiative is, as Hewlett puts it, “making high quality educational content and tools freely available on the Web.”

(Now you’re going to ask me why a foundation whose money is linked to Hewlett Packard, the largest technology company in the world, would fund an initiative that seems to run counter to its profit motives. Apparently, the Hewlett Foundation, though originally established by HP co-founder William Hewlett, is run completely independent of the company–which may explain why so much of its money goes to so many amazing projects.)

The Hewlett Foundation has invested a good deal of its resources into the OER initiative, funding research into three distinct categories of OER resources (these categories come from the OER movement in general, and not from Hewlett’s website, though they do apply to OER grantees):

Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

A 2007 report, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement” (Atkins, Daniel E.; Brown, John Seely; & Hammond, Allen L.), discusses multiple resources made available through the OER Initiative and presents a logic model for the initiative itself:

The report identifies key projects that have emerged out of Hewlett’s OER Initiative, including MIT’s OpenCourseWare project, the Connexions Project at Rice University, open content work at Utah State University Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, and Creative Commons and Internet Archives.

Significantly, while these and other resources discussed in the report point to a great deal of enthusiasm for the OER movement (which, by the way, extends far beyond the funding of this single initiative), the authors also point to challenges to the movement. Aaaand here those challenges are:

Sustainability
Curation and Preservation of Access
Object Granularity and Format Diversity
Intellectual Property Issues
Content Quality Assessment and Enhancement
Computing and Communication Infrastructure
Scale-up and Deepening Impact in Developing Countries

At the moment, I’m most interested in the first challenge, sustainability. As the report explains,

A challenge of any fixed-term, externally funded initiative is long-term sustainability by an entity other than the original investor, in this case the Hewlett Foundation. In the MIT project, bringing a course to the OCW costs approximately $25,000 per course plus maintenance and enhancement. The MIT OCW model involves professional staff taking course material in almost any form from faculty and bringing it into a uniform, professional format. This was appropriate for the rapid startup of a large-scale, pioneering project but it will not work for many other places.

May I suggest…a consideration of spreadable educational practices? While it’s true that the above challenges are significant, they are not insurmountable–insofar as the work of open education focuses on fostering and helping to spread effective educational practices instead of disseminating effective instructional routines. MIT’s OCW and the other Hewlett programs work from an assumption that porting, curating, and maintaining instructional materials to a central online resource is valuable. And don’t get me wrong, it IS valuable. It’s also quite expensive and, by the way, only partially hooked in to the general ethos of the open source movement. As I explained in a previous post, open source culture

is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.

Hewlett’s work links up with the “free sharing” and “general availability of copyrighted materials” aspects, but so far it seems to be missing the link to the spirit of open source: the free, voluntary, and creative exchange of ideas and work for the purpose of helping the community. While the resources funded by Hewlett are a valuable–perhaps even essential–beginning to the work of the open education movement, the resources matter only to the extent that the practices contained within these resources can spread.

It does appear that Hewlett is headed in this direction with its current emphasis on research and development of open participatory learning environments and on teacher training. As the OER Initiative homepage argues,

The ability of users and experts to give feedback online and modify open content enables the rapid improvement, development, and adaptation of material to fit different purposes, languages, and cultures. This aspect of openness helps equalize access to high-quality and useful materials and engages users in making content changes that create efficiencies and reduce costs. Further, when students and teachers transform materials, this itself is a creative, powerful act of learning. Together, the two broad dimensions of openness give us opportunities to rethink traditional notions of where, when, and how people teach and learn, so that we can explore alternative paths to meet educational demand.

Agreed, agreed, agreed.

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What open source can teach us about spreadability

Mar 23rd, 09 / 5 Comments

I’ve been working recently with my sensei, Dan Hickey, and my mentor and partner in crime, Michelle Honeyford, on a series of blogposts about “spreadable educational practices.” The concept draws from the work of Henry Jenkins (full disclosure: he’s my boss) in a white paper for the Convergence Culture Consortium entitled “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” This white paper, serialized and published on Henry’s blog, contrasts the notions of sticky media (think of sites that pull you in and keep you there, “Godfather”-style: Amazon, eBay) and spreadable media (media that you want to forward on to friends—think Kittens, Inspired by Kittens; think the T-Mobile Dance at Liverpool Train Station).

In taking up this idea and applying it to the field of education, we’ve considered what makes practices spread within a classroom and between teachers. We contrast what we call Spreadable Educational Practices (SEPs) with Disseminated Instructional Routines (DIRs)–material developed by institutions and delivered, intact, and intended to be unpacked and presented intact to a class. DIRs are intended to be “sticky” in the sense that the organizations that develop and disseminate them–often the same organizations that make the standardized tests mandated by legislation like the No Child Left Behind Act–intend to pull teachers in and hold on to them by making these instructional routines effectively mandatory for success on the Big Tests. Spreadable educational practices, on the other hand, are practices that lead to success in the classroom–and, by extension, on those silly mandated tests–and are designed to spread to other classrooms, given the mechanisms to allow this kind of spread. We argue that considering what makes a practice spreadable and the means by which it spreads will result in a shift in how we think about education. You can read more about why Jenkins et al. believe spreadability is a more useful notion than terms like “viral media” or memes here; you can read our first two posts taking up the notion of spreadability here and here. (And if you’re interested in a brief summary of the conversation between those blogs, you can read the summaries of these posts at sleeping alone and starting out early here and here.)

There’s lots to say about the difference between SEPs and the more traditional notion of “practices that travel”, and lots more to say about spreadability in general; I’ll leave it to Henry and to the posts Dan, Michelle, and I are generating over at Project New Media Literacies to get that done. In this post, I want to focus on a consideration of the similarities and differences between the spreadability model and the open source movement.

Though I’ve written some on this blog about the open source software movement, this is in fact only a small part of the open source movement writ large. As Wikipedia explains,

Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.

On the surface, this definition seems to align with the description of Jenkins et al. of the position of consumers in a participatory culture:

Consumers, both individually and collectively, exert agency in the spreadability model: they are not impregnated with media messages; they select material that matters to them from the much broader array of media content on offer. They do not simply pass along static content; they transform the content so that it better serves their own social and expressive needs. Content does not remain in fixed borders but rather it circulates in unpredicted and often unpredictible directions, not the product of top-down design but rather of a multitude of local decisions made by autonomous agents negotiating their way through diverse cultural spaces.

Consumers do not simply consume; they recommend content they like to their friends who recommend it to their friends who recommend it on down the line. They do not simply “buy” cultural goods; they “buy into” a cultural economy which respects and rewards their participation. Nothing spreads widely in the new digital economy unless it engages and serves the interests of both consumers and producers. Otherwise, the circulation gets blocked by one side or the other, either through corporations constructing road blocks (legal or technical) upon its spread or through consumers refusing to circulate content which fails to serve their interests. Nothing generates value in this new digital economy unless the transaction is seen as meaningful to all involved.

Importantly, the spreadability model emphasizes the tension between media consumers and media producers–a tension described by Jenkins et al. as the conflict between a commodity culture and a gift economy. Though you can read more about these notions in the C3 white paper, briefly: Gift economy is the phenomenon of building social structures and social capital around the giving and receiving of gifts, whereas commodity culture considers the cash value of all goods and services.

As Jenkins et al. rightly point out, in a culture where commodity culture and the gift economy collide (they give the example of the language of “file sharing” vs. “software piracy”),

[f]ocusing on…spreadability may thus offer us some tentative first steps towards renegotiating the social contract between media producers and consumers in a way which may be seen as legitimate and mutually rewarding to all involved.

In general, despite the relatively obvious conflicting interests of these two value systems, both define themselves in terms of “success”: A successful gift is one the giver values, and it therefore “buys” you cultural capital. A successful commodity is one the buyer wants, and is therefore willing to spend money on. The notion of “spreadability” relies on an assumption that content spreads when it is of value to a community–that is, when a person thinks other people like her will enjoy a certain link, commercial, song, product, and so on. Producers of content are hard at work analyzing that inscrutable kernel of a thing that makes it valuable.

This is a fantastic way of thinking through the issues tied to sticky and spreadable media, but not quite so applicable to the open source ethos where, as Clay Shirky explains, you get “failure for free.” Indeed, OSS is premised on the foundational need for failure in order to arrive at success. (For more on the “failure for free” model, you can either read Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody OR you can read a previous post on sleeping alone, “What open source can teach us about failure.”)

Additionally, in the OSS movement spreadability matters very little or not at all, because–and this is essential–there is no money to be made, and therefore no conflict between producers and consumers. In fact, as Shirky explains, the most successful OSS product of all time, Linux, succeeded precisely because its key developer, Linus Torvalds, made it clear from the beginning that he did not intend to make money off of the result.

Shirky writes:

What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial. For any given piece of software, the question, “Do the people who like it take care of each other?” turns out to be a better predictor of success than “What’s the business model?”

In the OSS model, there is effectively no distinction between producer and consumer: We are all always already both, at least potentially. It means, not to stick too closely to Shirky (but I will), that “the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.”

Okay, so what does this mean for education? My answer: I don’t know yet. But think about the possibilities: What if we could change the question from “Will this help our students succeed in school (read: help our students do well on the crazy standardized tests that stand at the gates of every school)?” to something like “Do the people (students, learners, researchers) involved in this learning environment help each other to participate in the practice of knowledge-building?”

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I hate Microsoft (but I kinda like its ad campaigns)

Mar 23rd, 09 / 2 Comments

I encountered this pure, shameless propaganda for a new Microsoft product funny commercial over at Talent imitates, genius steals.

The blog’s author, Faris Yakob, does a fantastic job of zeroing right in on what’s going on with this commercial. As he explains, “The cool thing about being this huge gray corporation is that every time you don’t act like it, it’s awesome.”

It’s true: If a company makes awesome commercials, we’ll overlook or forget that, for example, Microsoft’s abysmal environmental record secured its position at the second from the bottom in Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics Guide.

Microsoft appears to be banking on the “coolness” strategy to make us forget their unofficial corporate mantra: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And, in fact, to forget the host of criticisms leveled at Microsoft for unethical, unfair, or even outright criminal business practices.

In a previous post, I outed myself as a fan of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, a movement that appeals to my secret libertarian streak. The open source movement also happens to make neat commercial campaigns.

Now, here’s the issue that the OSS movement has yet to overcome: I am fully convinced, yet I continue to use Microsoft products in my daily life. It’s easier, after all, than figuring out the details of installing, say, Linux on my laptop. It’s easier to use Microsoft Word for my word processing needs, even though OpenOffice, as its homepage explains,

is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Easy, compatible, open source, free. Yet I’m not using it. The dangerous entropy of apathy, my friends, is the issue that the OSS movement has yet to overcome.

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OKAY already–I was WRONG

Mar 21st, 09 / 1 Comment

The recession will be hard on higher education. There, I said it.
I argued here that the recession might actually benefit academia and, specifically, scholarly research. I wrote:

[I]t’s possible a more “austere” academic environment will have a positive impact, if not on emerging academics, then on the pursuit of scholarly research and the progress of Big Ideas. Academics who want a secure place in the ivory tower will increasingly need to rely on their ability to network and, more importantly, collaborate with other researchers. They will need—and want—to provide regular evidence of valuable scholarly work, and they may work to present themselves as innovators and crafters of important work. It’s even possible that the days of the ivory tower are over, for good, for real this time.

That was February 10. On February 24, I wrote about the decision of my employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to half-secretly move toward layoffs across departments and across the institute.

On March 4, I tried to look on the bright side but basically admitted I’d changed my mind: That the recession would, in effect, “limit the contributions of the many and call instead for the contributions of the necessary.”

Bad for education, bad for research.

Now today I was forwarded this New York Times article that highlights the effects of the recession on state colleges—institution that rely on dwindling government funding. The article focuses in on the plight of Arizona State University, which has eliminated over 500 jobs, closed dozens of programs, capped enrollment and announced required unpaid furlough days for all employees. “While Arizona State’s economic problems have been particularly dramatic,” explains the article,

layoffs and salary freezes are becoming common at public universities across the nation; the University of Florida recently eliminated 430 faculty and staff positions, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, laid off about 100 employees, and the University of Vermont froze some administrative staff salaries, left open 22 faculty positions and laid off 16 workers.

Interestingly, while state colleges are feeling squeezed by the recession, the economic downturn has at the same time led to an increase in applications to these self-same state schools.

Okay, so applications to state schools are up while programs, faculty, and facilities are down. Here’s what’s going to happen:

Schools will be forced to reject otherwise fully qualified applicants, sending perfectly capable young thinkers and workers into a depressingly tiny job market.
Students who are accepted to state schools will, at the schools hit hardest by budget cuts, receive an education that will be considered substandard when measured against the criteria of even a year ago. They will have fewer course options and fewer career paths to choose from (though I imagine the opportunities for unpaid internships will skyrocket).
After years of work to break down the educational barrier between the Haves and the Have-nots, the expensive, elite private schools—the Harvards, the Yales, the Stanfords—will once again increasingly cater to the wealthy and the privileged–those whose families can continue to sponsor an elite education and the cultural capital that comes with it.

As Tevye would say, there is no other hand.