digital digs

Is there an education market bubble?

This is somewhat a follow-up to my previous meandering post about Declining by Degrees, the PBS documentary about higher education. At the end of that post I wrote myself into this question, and not being an economist, it's a genuine question.

To reiterate briefly, one of the important points made in the documentary was that in the 80s we began to say that getting a college degree would mean earning $1 million more over a lifetime. In adopting this perspective we began to move from thinking of higher education as a general social good (to be supported largely by the state) to a private good, an investment in one's personal human capital. Much like a house, you invest and borrow money with the idea that you are making an investment that will pay off. Not long ago this was especially true, and we all know the end of that story.

But here's the thing I wonder. When 25% of adult Americans had four-year degrees, maybe on average they earned $25K more per year than the other 75% (though you'd also wonder what the median was). But what happens if 35-40% of Americans have four-year degrees, are they still going to out earn the other 60-65% by the same margin? And if they do, will it make as much of a difference?

Then factor into that all the people getting undergraduate degrees in China and India now.

We should all know this. 100 years ago, it was unusual to have a HS diploma. It was a degree that had value. It still does have some value, but not much. I don't know if a undergrad degree will ever become the equivalent of a HS diploma, but a two-year degree might. And a four-year degree will be worth relatively less and an increasing number of people will be headed to grad school, which in turn will devalue that degree. When every public school teacher in NYS has a masters degree, what does that do to the value of the degree?

My point is that you need more education just to stay in place. You can't invest $20K in college and borrow another $20K with the idea that a college education is going to buy you a step up into the next economic class. Yes, it may be the case that our new economy will require a better-educated workforce. It used to be the case that you could be a middle-class factory worker without tertiary education. That's disappearing. Now you need the college degree to afford the exact same house that factory worker lived in. Except now you also have massive student debt.

So can we really continue to say that a college education is a private gain? Or do we have to recognize that it is increasingly a social necessity, a cornerstone to our national economic security? Once upon a time we made K-12 education compulsory. I don't think we can/should do that for tertiary education but I think we need to consider funding higher education in a way that doesn't begin with the premise that its an investment that is going to pay off on a personal level. There is a big payoff but it is in strengthening the overall education of our workforce, not in the relative strengthening of one individual's earning power as compared to her neighbors.

You aren't going to be able to flip your degree the way people used to flip houses.

declining by degrees

Watching this PBS documentary, Declining by Degrees. The college has been showing it on campus, but I haven't had a chance to get to it, so I got it through Netflix. It tells a story about higher education that I think is familiar to faculty. There is a growing sense that higher education is struggling to meet the needs of students. As we know the problems are multiple and complex. I can't get into all of it in a blog post, but I wanted to talk about it from the specific perspective of the faculty's role.

So the familiar criticisms of faculty are:

• We aren't especially interested in teaching. We are primarily tenured, promoted, and otherwise rewarded for our research. So perhaps it is understandable we put our efforts there.
• We aren't particularly trained as teachers. Not so true for rhet/comp folks, but certainly there are disciplines where pedagogy is not part of a graduate education. See the point above. We are trained and hired for research. Maybe that should change but I don't know that faculty can change it.
• We don't hold students to a high enough standard. There is perhaps an unspoken contract that says if I don't bother you then you don't bother me. That's a problem. And that's the one I want to talk about here b/c I was really thinking about this while watching the video.

So here's the thing. Anyone can create a standard by which virtually every student gets an A. Alternately, anyone can create a standard by which virtually every student fails. I can set a standard for what I think should be 200-level work or 400-level work and so on. Having taught at several institutions, I can tell you that those standards are different from one institution to another.

Why? Obviously it has something to do with the level of preparation/ability of the students coming into the class. For example, Gregory Ulmer has this great textbook called Internet Invention. It is marketed as a first-year composition text. One year I used it in a 300-level class at Cortland, the students found it so challenging that they cursed me out over the text in their written comments on the course evaluation form. It was a rough semester.

Could I teach them this text? Of course. Well, part of it maybe. We would have to move quite slowly. It would probably be a rather frustrating experience for the students as well, being continually confronted with a text they are unable to read. And I don't mean to pick on Ulmer here. I think it's a great text. And there are plenty of other texts I could name.

As a teacher, you realize you have to meet the students where they are. Certainly every class has students at a variety of levels but you have to design a course that hopefully is accessible to any reasonably determined student while providing opportunities for challenging the best students.

online learning, writing, and student engagement

A new report was issued this week from the National Survey of Student Engagement. You can read the full report at http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2008_Results/.  Part of the report deals with online learning, where the survey concludes

Controlling for student and institutional characteristics, the percent of first year courses primarily delivered online was positively related to active and collaborative learning. Though this result seems counterintuitive, the online setting may offer more opportunities for collaboration and faculty who teach online courses may be more intentional about fostering active learning experiences, such as asking questions or participating in discussions. For both first-year students and seniors, the percent of courses delivered primarily online was significantly related to level of academic challenge. Online courses seem to stimulate more intellectual challenge and educational gains. This suggests that integrating technology-enhanced courses into the curriculum for all students might have some salutary benefits. On the other hand, it is also possible that faculty who are incorporating new technologies are inherently more inclined to provide engaging experiences for their students, regardless of how content is delivered.

I'm not sure why this is "counterintuitive." Actually, I suppose I do know where that comes from--the idea that students and teachers cannot make real connections without face-to-face contact. I do think it is interesting how the report notes two possible reasons for this outcome:

• Online courses seem to stimulate more intellectual challenge and educational gains

or

• faculty who are incorporating new technologies are inherently more inclined to provide engaging experiences for their students, regardless of how content is delivered.

It's an interesting interpretive problem. I would suggest that both could be true. That is, (some) faculty who are inclined to provide engaging experiences for students turn to online environments because those environments offer affordances that stimulate intellectual challenge and educational gain. Now asking a room of faculty if they don't want to provide engaging experiences for their students is somewhat like asking a room of people to raise their hands if they are racist. Instead, it's one of those things we always suspect of the "other guy." Still, this would seem to indicate that we can still do more--institutionally and as professions--to reach out to faculty about the possibilities of engaging students and the potential of the online option, at least as a component in classes.

In my view, this connects with another important finding in this report on writing.

what first-year writing can do for you...

The meta-conversation of the WPA listserv is disciplinary identity. It is not surprising that the expanding field of rhetoric/composition-cum-writing studies (or whatever) struggles with identity. 30 years ago or more, it was maybe understandable that rhet/comp functioned as analogous to other specializations in English (e.g. Victorian literature), even if was maybe not as well-regarded. Today, one might either view rhet/comp as a field separate from English (which would now be literary studies) or as a general field of study with its own specializations (comparable to the field of American literature or British literature). I won't get into that today, but either way, this changes the relationship of the first-year writing course to the broader field.

On the one had, you could look at first-year composition and say that it is the cornerstone of our discipline. FYC programs are what give many of us jobs. It is by far the most commonly taught writing course in higher education. It is argubaly where we came from (unless you want to say we came from Aristotle or something as rhetoricians).

On the other hand, you could say FYC is the weakest link in our discipline. It is the course/problem that was handed to us, predefined. If you look at the growing number of professional or technical undergraduate majors or masters programs or at doctoral programs in our field, I think you get a far better sense of how our discipline understands its paradigms, its methods, and its objects of study. One thing that is immediately implicit in all these programs is the obvious fact that one cannot learn "to write" by completing an FYC program. And yet, that's what FYC was constructed to do in the 19th-century: to teach students to write. And that's the continual complaint we get from colleagues, adminstrators, and the rest: students who have taken FYC still don't know how to write.

But that doesn't mean that FYC should be abolished! It means that appropriate expectations need to be established. Think of it this way...

scenes from America's fourth republic classroom

On Salon, Michael Lind offers a historical perspective on the dawning of America's fourth republic.The first goes from Washington to the Civil War. The second then up to the Depression. And the third until 2004 (read the article, he explains). Basically they are all about 70 odd years long. Lind suggests each period begins with the centralization of government power and ends with a swing back partially in the other direction. Think of the difference of FDR-Johnson vs. Nixon-Bush. Lind offers an industrial-economic pattern behind these shifts that is fairly recognizable. The shift to steam power and railroads in the mid-19th century. The shift to electricity and internal combustion in the 1930s. And now? A green economy? Maybe.

Lind writes:

It remains to be seen what energy sources -- nuclear? Solar? Clean coal? -- and what technologies -- nanotechnology? Photonics? Biotech-- will be the basis of the next American economy. (Note: I'm talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory "information economy" beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

Not surprisingly I am less derisive of the "information economy" than Lind. I don't know how Lind imagines that the nanotechnologies industry will operate outside of an information economy. Yes. Somewhere there will need to be nanotechnology factories. But that's not going to work like the automobile industry. If energy prices rise this may create some advantage for local/national production because of the costs of transporation on a global scale, but I wouldn't really count on that, b/c the raw materials for automobiles, for example, will still need to be transported globally anyway. On the other hand, one advantage of the green economy is that it requires a necessary local element. The windmills need to be where the wind is.

Blogging teleology

Some conversation around with Collin, Derek, and Jenny about what to do with this blog thing. Clearly there are many more options for user-generated content than there were when I started this 578 posts ago. There's the minimalist microblog and status update. Video. The various social networks. Some are more time intensive, others less.

I was talking FTF with Derek about this a couple days ago and we both said presented with the question of whether we imagined we'd be blogging in 10 or 20 years that the answer was "of course not." One of the things Sifry's 2008 State of the Blogosphere reports on is the changing nature of what blogging is. So even if we were doing something that we still called "blogging," it wouldn't be this.

So where is all this leading? Whatever this is.  I suppose I started blogging to investigate this question. But in some ways it is a broader question. Why write? It doesn't surprise me that the vast, vast majority of blogs are started but quickly go silent or are rarely updated with no sense of rhythm or exigency. Writing is hard. Yes the blog gives the average person the technical ability to compose and publish texts. My sneakers give me the techncial ability to run a marathon too. And though I jog on a near daily basis, I'm not running any marathons.

Blogging is an endurance event as well. It's not about the individual post. It's about doing it on a regular basis and getting back to it when your habit fails. Actually for me it is a little more like meditation than jogging in this respect. I'm always getting back to meditation and getting back to blogging.

That might suggest that there is some objective, or if not an objective at least a trajectory carved out through the practice of regular blogging. I imagine one can be interpreted from this blog or any other. However, not surprisngly, I don't see this as about telos. I'm not trying to get anywhere (sorry). Instead it is the regular practice of writing that interests me--in all of its myriad components: an engagement with rhetoric and composition that can only come through writing itself.

So "blogging" may change and I may stop blogging someday. I am sure I will. But I will always be doing this.

rhetoric of a new America

Certainly much talk about the historic election results. On CNN, one of the Republican commentators referred to his own party as a "Southern party," so much talk about they need to do. Also conversation about whether the Dem landslide means the nation has moved leftward. Predictably all the right-wingers who were decrying Obama as the "most liberal" member of the senate, even socialist, are now saying that he won b/c he adopted traditionally Republican values: tax cuts, etc. Also similar talk that Dems winning in Congress are also more centrist, though certainly that was not what was being said about them a week ago!

Who can believe any of this self-serving analysis?

This is what I see that's interesting, though predictable, in CNN's exit polls. Nationally, whites voted 55-43 for McCain, so non-whites won this election for Obama. Even more specifically, whites over 30 voted approx. 57-41 for McCain, while whites under 30 voted 54-44 for Obama. Some how I doubt that there's ever been a presidential election where the clear choice of whites over 30 was not elected. And not only was not elected but lost by a significant margin.

The exit polls reproduce the divides of the elections of recent memory remain intact. White, less educated, Christian, older, rural men and women make the vast majority of Republican voters. Of these, education is probably the least determining fact. That is if a voter has all the other characteristics, s/he's voting republican for the most part, regardless of education (though those with postgrad education vote Dem). On the flipside, urban, non-white, less religious or non-Christian, younger voters are the Dems. it would seem that the primary difference is that there are now more of these kinds of voters in a larger number of states (like VA, NC, FL, CO). But that doesn't explain everything. It doesn't explain Iowa, for example.

The big question now might be whether or not this election means that we have moved to the left as a nation. Were the right-wing pundits correct last week when they were saying how liberal the Dems are or are they correct today when they are saying that the Dems won by masquerading as or turning into Reps?

Or maybe, in our most pollyanna moment, we imagine moving beyond binary politics.

As I've written earlier, I don't believe that democray is a rational process. Politics are affective. Trying to deduce a rational interpretation that says what an election "means," to assume that a rational message is sent from voters, is misleading. And this is not in anyway a slam against American voters. It is instead a position on what human behavior is like, especially on such a scale. I include myself in this. I cannot imagine any realistic conditions under which I would vote differently. Is it rational of me to say there is absolutely nothing one candidate could have done or said to persuade me? I don't think so.

But rationality is over-rated. It's a good faith but ultimately insufficient attempt to explain agency. And the left-right binary is just another part of that Cartesian mapping of political consciousness. Not that such matters are likely to drift into the mainstream any time soon, but I think that if you want to understand the new America, you'll have to move to a post-Cartesian, post-rational mapping of the political subject.

hacking education

I was turned on to this post by venture capitalist Fred Wilson on hacking education. It's interesting to me to hear the views of smart people who are largely outside the education bubble. Wilson's role as a venture capitalist has me thinking of my recent post on David Puttnam's talk. Puttnam emphasized the importance of working with technology companies in working out how to address the challenges of networked media for education. I agree. This is not the kind of challenge that can be addressed by individual teachers in individual classrooms. That's not to say that individuals can't come up with great ideas and put them to work. Instead, it is a recognition that the scale of this problem requires the application of resources that go beyond individual teachers. Just like we don't ask faculty to write all the texts they use in their classes, we can't expect them to develop their own technological solutions.

I can agree with a lot of what Wilson says, but I do think he is seeing only part of the issue. He makes three main points as I can see. First is that we ought to be using social media "to start participating and engaging in educating each other." I fully support that idea. But when you are talking about your average college student, I think we need to recognize that we can't expect those students to put together their own curriculum. If you don't know what you need to know then it is hard to figure out how to educate yourself. Clearly there is a fair amount of disagreement over what should constitute a higher education. These disagreements occur between higher education and the general culture, across campuses, within disciplines, and so on. Indeed the disagreements are part of what students probably need to learn about. Arguably our task as educators at the undergraduate level is to help students get in a position where they have enough cultural-disciplinary-professional context and critical-analytic skills to be able to participate in the kind of open source education Wilson is describing. It will be necessary for them as they face the demands of ongoing education throughout their careers.

Wilson does recognize this to some degree. He notes that "You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers." Wilson reflects on some of the great teachers he's had. Those are common stories. However his idea is to get these star teachers out to a larger number of students through video lectures. Some students, like Wilson, do respond well to lectures, but I don't think that's the pedagogic direction we need to follow. In a sense, doing this would contradict his own position by making lectures into a kind of commodity. A video lecture is functionally much like a textbook, so I think you could certainly make use of such material. Obviously many of us already do.

spread the wealth; build the wealth

Two interesting reports, both of which I came to through the Creative Class blog, that connect well with our current political discourse. Of course both candidates are promising everyone in America above-average incomes, b/c they believe, quite rightly, that Americans can't handle the truth and are quite happy to slay the messenger. But I digress.

A new UN Report (reported here in the Vancouver Sun) indicates that "Major U.S. cities including New York, Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans have levels of economic inequality that rival cities in Africa." No, the poor in the US obviously aren't as poor as the poor in Africa. But the difference between the poor and the wealthy is as wide. That jives with this OCED report (from AP) that also reports on inequality. This report notes that social mobility is lowest in countries with high inequality such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy. Richard Florida has noted that this kind of inequality seems common in US cities where the creative economy is taking off.

creativity, education, and catastrophe

In this keynote at Handheld Learning 2008 in London, David Puttnam addresses some of the institutional-structural challenges that face technology and education.

Puttnam's big picture is useful, even if somewhat familiar to those of us already in the choir. Recently, there was a thread on the Writing Program Admins list about what it would mean to envision FYC as a "born-digital" enterprise. That is, what would FYC look like if we thought of it as digital?

Clearly FYC is not and cannot be born-digital; it will have to be an immigrant. That said, I think the question must go beyond the traditional mechanism of what the individual instructor does in his/her classroom. What Puttnam points out is that the kind of shift we are looking at requires collaboration between business and education. We can build whole new technologies and applications to pursue digital composition, but we can't do that on an individual level. Despite that, this also may not function best through a top-down, institutional strategy. Large-scale collaboration of teachers, researchers, programmers, designers, students and others is also necessary. But I don't think that we can continue to foreground the atavism of the traditional classroom. We need to recognize what is truly valuable about FTF and integrate it into wherever we are going.

Puttnam also moves into a discussion of Ken Robinson and the issue of creativity. This is key as well. Because technological-educational reform isn't really about getting technology to help us better achieve the goals we have established. Instead it's about gaining a better understanding of creativity (including, but also beyond traditional artistic notions), understanding the role of emerging technology in how creativity will be developed and communicated, and building pedagogy from there.