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.

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.

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.

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.

a pedagogy of planned emergence

Below Steven Johnson talks about emergence at TED in a presentation made in 2003 but made available on the TED site this month. His discussion touches on a number of things that were quite new in 2003--Technorati, the long tail--but are now familiar stuff. What's particularly interesting to me, however, is his approach toward emergence that looks at what might be termed a kind of human-scale feedback loop in emergent information systems.

What do I mean by that? Well Johnson starts by talking about city neighborhoods and asks, rhetorically, who plans a neighborhood? Traditionally the answer is that no one does, that neighborhoods emerge organically, and that attempts to simulate neighborhoods through planning often end up quite comic, as disneyfied versions of themselves. The organization of the web is likewise an organic process. For the most part, Google search ranks and the long tail linking/popularity pattern are not planned. Johnson ends his talk discussing Dave Sifry's efforts to shift the system somewhat and since then we have seen any number of attempts to game these search algorithms for monetary or political purposes.

twittering and live blogging the classroom

I picked on this article in TechDirt from academhack. It's another one of those situations where there's some conflict over the issue of twittering and blogging the classroom. The article and the comment discussion really points out two separate questions.

1. Is the professor within hir rights to forbid students from twittering or blogging in the classroom? But perhaps more germane, why would you do this and what would be the basis for such a policy?
2. Is there an intellectual property, copyright or privacy issue here in relation to twittering or blogging, as opposed to audio or video recording?

#2 is real simple. Is it a violation for me to go to a movie and then come back here and tell you the plot and/or tell you my favorite lines from the movie? Of course not! So how could it be illegal to talk about a class you are taking. And exactly why would we want to stop our students from discussing the things they hear in class? Honestly, I don't get the professor who would want students to keep the matters of the classroom secret. It isn't group therapy. It's not an AA meeting. No one is signing a non-disclosure agreement. As to the issue of A/V recording, while I'm not a lawyer, I think this varies from state to state. I can understand why one wouldn't want to be taped, especially without foreknowledge.

From a general ethical perspective, as a professor, I would think of my presentation as my property. That means you aren't allowed to record or distribute the audio or video without my permission. Additionally, the documents I write for a class are copyrighted. Now generally speaking, my choice is to give this material away under a creative commons license (attribute/non-commercial). But that's an individual choice.

However you are entirely free to write about my class. You are entitled to dislike my class. You're entitled to say anything short of slander, though I am assuming that if you were to have such a low opinion of me you wouldn't be coming by my office to ask for a recommendation letter. The point being that you have a right to free speech but that doesn't absolve you of the consequences of what you write.

#1 is more complicated.

imagining institutional futures

Who really knows what's going on economically or what the solution is. What does seem clear to me is that our existing institutional business practices don't seem to work in our changing, global, technological economy. I certainly don't have a grand theory for making things better, but I do realize that in our own corner of this economy in higher education, things will likely have to be done differently. Some of the arguments being made about necessary changes in the business world might well apply to us. Here I want to pick up from Umair Haque I read via Collin. Haque writes

understanding that next-generation businesses are built on new DNA, or new ways to organize and manage economic activities. Think that sounds like science fiction? Think again. Here are just a few of the most radical new organizational and management techniques today's revolutionaries are already utilizing: open-source production, peer production, viral distribution, radical experimentation, connected consumption, and co-creation.

Of course this connects back with arguments made by Shirky and others. What does Haque say this next-gen business needs to accomplish?

We need no less than better corporate governance, a working shareholder democracy, a recognition of what capital really is (and isn't), radically more enduring incentives - aligned with outcomes that actually matter to people - the capacity to trust and be trusted, more accurate and timely reporting, strategy that creates authentic value instead of just shifts numbers around, and business models that can yield sustainable growth.

Mark Bauerlein and digital imperialism

So I have discussed Mark Bauerlein's contributions to the Chronicle of Higher Education here before. Here's a new article entitled "Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind." The argument is one that is likely familiar. Bauerlein suggests that reading online does not improve print literacy and likely even detracts from it. He cites multiple studies and projects where the use of computers in the classroom has not resulted in improved test scores in reading, math, and so on.

Here is his most interesting point:

Educators envision a whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to extend long-established postures toward the screen. If digitized classrooms did pose strong, novel intellectual challenges to students, we should see some pushback on their part, but few of them complain about having to learn in new ways.

In other words, students have a great deal of experience interacting with screens outside learning environments. For Bauerlein this is a problem because they bring their bad social habits to the classroom. I especially like this part about how if students found digital classrooms to present intellectual challenges that they would likely complain about having to be there. It's so cynical that I almost feel like I wrote it myself!

fun searching the mla job list.

What should the MLA job list tell us about our discipline? Not really sure, but it's a little fun to speculate. So if you do a search for Shakespeare, you'll get 16 hits. That's 16 jobs out of more than 450 current positions. Two of those positions are for non-Shakespeare Renaissance Lit, but let's assume that Shakespeare is still pretty relevant there. In that context, there appear to be about two dozen Renaissance positions. If you do a search for "new media," on the other hand, you get 31 hits. But that's a little misleading as the MlA database apparently can't search for phrases, so it picks up "new" and "media." However there appear to be more "new media" jobs in the MLA list right now than there are Shakespeare jobs. Plus, you have to account that there is not yet a set way to define "new media." If you searh for "digital" a different set of jobs appear, another 30 hits, with some overlaps. Most are rhet/comp but not all.

So what's my point?

Obviously the convention is that Shakespeare is at the center of English Studies. Historically this has been the case. What does it mean that there are more jobs out there for people with a strength in new media than for people in Shakespeare? I don't know. You'd have to look at the jobs more closely than I want to right now. I think it means that institutions are looking to build new strengths in the area of new media or digital humanities either as a primary or secondary area in their new hires. And maybe it means that Shakesperean positions are being collapsed at some places with other historically-separate literary specialities, like non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama.

I wonder if it might not also signal that a major in English ought to include some understanding of new media and/or digital humanities.

ya think?