digital digs

humanities (in)decision-making

In The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman continues the discussion about the relative wisdom of entering graduate school in the humanities. In my mind, it comes down to this: getting a phd in the humanities (9.3 years on average) takes so damn long that it is almost impossible to measure the cost and benefit of it. I could give you my personal story, but as Rothman points out, personal stories aren't worth much in trying to make these decisions. All I'll say is that I didn't have a good reason to go to grad school, but once I was in, I became very strategic in relation to the job market. In our department, it seems like many people finish in 7 years, but they may have come from an MA that took them 1.5 years to finish, which would put us around the national average of 8.9 years from the start of grad school. The average age of a Phd recepient in English is 33.7, which happens to be about the time that I learned I had been tenured (which only points to the limited value of personal stories).

The challenge of making a purposive decision in entering a humanities doctoral program and the near-decade it takes to get the degree are symptomatic of a general decision-making problem across the disciplines. The problem is that doctoral education pretends to be about professionalization, but never really gets there. Instead, the humanities confuse hyper-specialization with professionalization. I've written about the woes of hyper-specialization before many times here. If we could avoid hyper-specialization, I think it would be conceivable to finish in five years rather than nearly nine. What that would mean is that those first three years of coursework and qualifying exam preparation would need to be much more purposeful in terms of the dissertation to be written. One would be introduced to the research methods and theories that would be taken up in the dissertating phase, and one would get a clear sense of the field. Most importantly, one would need to be taught how to write a dissertation (it isn't magic). In an English phd program, one would probably read the equivalent of 150 books in those 3 years and about half of those during preparation for exams that should be specifically tailored to one's research project. After having spent 3 years reading, discussing, and writing about this large corpus of texts, you then have two years to write that dissertation. Now the danger is that after having done all that work, one is tempted to embark on an entirely new project that requires reading another 100 books (or so). I think this temptation stems from the fact that people enter the humanities because they are interested in reading and research but not in communicating or composing knowledge.

There is also some strange notion at work about what knowledge is and how it is made. In my view, it is a perfectly acceptable heurstic to say, "I have read 150 books. Now I am going to write my dissertation based on the 3 years of research I have done. As such, I am going to limit my works cited to those books, plus a maximum of 25 more." Then one goes about organizing chapters based around those texts.  The sense of cohesion and mastery that a book or dissertation displays is always a rhetorical trick. It seems to me that this is what I learned when writing my dissertation: to take things I'd already written and make them appear as though they went together. And of course they did go together, in the way that a line can be drawn between any two points. I guess it was a trick I had learned on a smaller scale writing seminar papers, where I would take a few quotes from the course texts and stitch them together with my own writing.

But somehow it doesn't happen that way for most dissertation writers and I'm not entirely sure why, except to say that I think it has something to do with the general purposelessness of the humanities. Without a purpose, research can continue interminably. There is always more to read, other questions to ask, and so on. It is as though one becomes beguiled by one's own rhetorical trick into believing that there is something more, some deep hidden secret, some inspired master idea, that drives the text. Sure, we feel these things from time to time, those flashes of insight when everything seems to come together in our minds. But that's just a trick of the light; the mind doing what the mind does. I mean, I trust those intuitions inasmuch as I find they are reliable in predicting my ability to put certain ideas together, to compose knowledge, but I don't believe they are in the text. It makes more sense to say that knowledge is composed rather than discovered.

I think that if one approaches these matters purposively and pragmatically they remain a fair amount of hard work but they cease to be these quixotic journeys. So why don't we do it that way? Why does it take years rather than months to write a dissertation? I would guess it has to do with the value placed upon experience rather than results. This is what Rothman is expressing: one cannot get a good handle on the value of a humanities doctoral degree because one can't get a handle on the experience. I think that's completely the wrong way to look at it though, it does explain why it takes people so long. There's no ineffable expereince in writing a disseration; what you're feeling is the product of sensory deprivation as a result of not seeing the sun for weeks on end. The problem is, I fear, that graduate programs are structured to reinforce this notion rather than to dispel it.

composing snow globes (and dissertations)

From the Chronicle, William Germano writes on the staid nature of monographs, particularly first books.

The academic book—especially that first academic book—is often conceived of as a snow globe. It's carefully constructed to be a perfect little world, its main purpose to be admired. There's a glass wall that separates the contents from the reader. That construction is not accident.

Within the realm of the snow globe, every authority on the subject has been cited or pacified. Look inside and find a perfect, tidy, improbable world where no questions are asked, or invited. Scholarly books, especially first ones, are a paranoid genre—their structure assumes that someone is always watching, eager to find fault. And they take every precaution against criticism.

Germano proposes the book as machine: "The book-as-machine should trouble or excite or inspire or even confuse. (Sowing confusion is, within a limited compass, a reasonable goal for a writer, just as long as it isn't the only goal.) The book-as-machine requires that the scholarly writer imagine a problem or concern that will engage the reader, making the investment of reading time worthwhile."

While Germano doesn't really raise dissertations in this context, in my view the problem begins there. Certainly one could say the problem lies with the conservative nature of the humanities. Or with the uncomfortable fact Ian Bogost observes in Alien Phenomenology: academics, on the whole, aren't good writers. Writing that doesn't follow the pedantic plodding of convention is treated as suspect (unless, of course, one is speaking about French theorists who are permitted to be wholly inscrutable). Graduate students acquire this view early on in their careers. In some ways I think it insulates academics from the expectation that their writing really have an audience. It is as if academic freedom should protect one from the requirement that others find one's work valuable. 

But here's the most interesting thing to me about Germano's comparison: snow globes. 

 

This is probably the most famous snow globe scene. 1941, the year of Citizen Kane, was around the time when snow globes (an invention of the 19th century) were reaching their height of popularity. Certainly by the late sixties interest in snow globes had waned and now they are really only of interest to the collector. Perhaps they are much like monographs in that respect: a curiosity from another time. In other words, the snow globe is not just an overwrought confection; they are an antiquated one as well.

I like Germano's idea of the book-as-machine, though I might want to take that more literally than he and imagine a different kind of technology than the print book. But in this post, I'm going to set aside the technology question and point to the preparation of academics to publish their research. The insanity of this whole business, as everyone knows, is that graduate students, on average, take more than 9 years to get doctorates in the humanities. This means they are spending more than five years writing dissertations: book-length texts that are, almost by definition, unpublishable. And if we follow Germano, after writing that unpublishable dissertation, we follow that with an unreadable monograph, which clearly one would only be prepared to write after spending five years writing unpublishable prose. After all, one doesn't learn to produce unreadable prose over night. 

So how about a dissertation project that can be completed in less time and results in a text that at least attempts to be readable and publishable, that looks to excite or inspire readers. Why should book length texts be written for narrow audiences of specialists, a maximum of a couple hundred readers? We don't have to jump to a "general readership." We can find plenty of middle ground there: the thousands in one's general field or the tens of thousands in one's discipline. Sure that's a challenge, but at least it's one worth taking up, a challenge that, if met, would mean having some impact. Maybe one doesn't pull this off in a dissertation, but the attempt lays the groundwork for moving forward in this vein. By the way, this task doesn't need to take five years either.

 

MOOCs and the general education economy

Steve Krause writes that the recent EDC-MOOC (in which we both participated) was "meh." I agree. But you know what else was meh for me? School. K-12. Undergrad. Grad. meh. meh. meh. I was never very good at playing the role of the student. Obviously my grades were fine, so I could play the game well enough, but I never found coursework particulary interesting or relevant. I could offer you a litany of the mediocre experiences of my undergraduate education, but I doubt that would be of much interest. However, I will say that if a MOOC amounts to a curated list of readings, some lectures, a largely unsupervised discussion among students, and a testing mechanism, then this isn't really any different from what I had in most of my courses as an undergraduate. The only real difference would be that my unsupervised discussion happened FTF with friends I was taking the course with rather than 1000s of people online. I learned that I could get decent grades with a very minimal amount of investment. I didn't value school and hence it wasn't valuable to me. I can see that. But I can also see that I put my investment into other places, other kinds of environments. I learned a great deal working in a small business in the computer industry, composing music and building a recording studio, and writing independently of school.

So from my perspective, so what if MOOCs are meh? The whole enterprise is meh. There's no doubt that there are plenty of students who have been so heavily institutionalized that they can't succeed in a MOOC. They are like those lifers in prison who find themselves paroled and don't know how to live on the outside. And we know there's an economic element to this as kids from poor school districts get the most regimented, institutionalized education and are typically the most at-risk for success in college (and even moreso online or in a MOOC). The students who will be most successful in MOOCs are ones for whom school was only ever one learning site among many. They will be able to jump through the inane MOOC hoops and get on with their lives, confident that what one learns today in a MOOC doesn't really matter anyway. It's just a tiny part of a much vaster learning ecosystem. Of course that's hardly a ringing endorsement for MOOCs, but they don't have to be great. They're free. I have a daughter in high school now. Do I really want to pay for her to sit in general education courses for two or three semesters? Not really. I'll draw up a reading list and she can read it over the summer. If she has questions, she can find the answers online. And she'll learn much more on her own than she would sitting through some lectures and taking some bubble test. Maybe she can even take a MOOC. 

Clearly though, universities depend on general education courses to make their economic model go. Either they cram 100s of students into a room or they pay adjuncts minimal pay to teach the course. Or, like in English, they float their grad programs with TA-ships. None of those strategies are ringing endorsements from my perspective as the one paying the tuition dollars. And that's not to say that those adjuncts might not be better teachers than some of the professors. Few of these folks have ever received any pedagogical training. It's just to point out that universities seem to look the low costs of general education courses to balance out the high costs of other kinds of courses that are smaller in size, more technology intensive perhaps, and are taught by faculty earning more money, especially in the professional schools.  It's even more crucial from the perspective of the humanities. Without general education, humanities departments are tiny and lose the means to offer graduate students TAships, which means tiny grad programs as well. 

So it's not that MOOCs are great. Better-designed MOOCs might be on the horizon, but the ones we have already shine an uncomfortable light on general education. The basic premises of general education are that 1) every college student should have some baseline introductory knowledge that stretches from science and math to social science and humanities, and 2) a gen ed curriculum is the best way to deliver that knowledge. I don't know if either of those premises still works. Certainly #2 does not. Today it seems more relevant to teach the students how to fish rather than to give them the fish in a 50 minute lecture, especially since the 50-minute lecture is free online anyway.

The upshot of this is that the humanities need to start developing a new economic model, one that will not depend on 1000s of undergraduates taking composition or western civ or whatever. Could we create a better version of general education? Sure. I've talked about that before. But I'm not sure that even that will make a difference. The crucial thing we need to do is reinvent ourselves to connect with the values and concerns of our students and our culture. The MOOC, meh or not, means we can't imagine that we can just plod along as we always have.

NCTE's 21st century curriculum #edcmooc

Surprisingly, English teachers from K-12 through higher education are not a particularly forward-thinking bunch. Shocking right? While schoolmarm grammarian is uncharitable, it's probably closer to the mark than future-oriented innovator. So when the National Council of Teachers of English publishes a framework for 21st century literacy curriculum that is entirely focused on digital matters, one could almost say this means that one no longer needs to be forward-thinking to recognize digital literacy as a primary site of English education.

I want to combine this with a generally more future-oriented institutional document, the New Media Consortium's Horizon report. The full report isn't out yet but they have identified the 6 technological trends:

Technology to Watch	Time-to-Adoption Horizon
Massively Open Online Courses Tablet Computing	One Year or Less
Big Data and Learning Analytics Game-Based Learning	Two to Three Years
3D Printing Wearable Technology	Four to Five Year

I think the MOOC and the tablet are fairly obvious, which they should be given the time-to-adoption horizon. They been reporting some version of game-based learning and 3-d printing for some time, so I'm not sure about how those will come about, how broad their impact will be, or what the time frame will be. However I think big data and wearable technology are good bets.

I don't know if the particular brand of MOOCs we see with Coursera will be around in 5 years, but I'd be willing to bet that there will be millions of "students" taking open, online courses in 2020. I put students in scare quotes because students suggests, for some, college credits, and I'm not sure what the relationship will be between open courses and credits. What I do know is that these massive, networked environments will alter the way we learn (and work and socialize). I know this because they already have but that trend is only going to intensify.

What NCTE recognizes is that English should be the means by which such literacy is acquired (at least in the US, which is the nation in "National Council"). To that I say, "good luck." Good luck providing this professional development for existing teachers, who are not prepared to do this. Good luck finding university English departments with faculty to provide this literacy to the general population of college students, let alone educate preservice K-12 teachers or graduate students who will become university faculty. Good luck finding English departments who even remotely view digital literacy as a subject that even marginally concerns them, let alone one that would be central to their curriculum in the way that print literacy is now. As I suggested above, I think you'd have better luck selling the average college English department on becoming grammar-centric than you would on becoming digital-centric. 

Now if you think I'm just trolling on my own website, well, you might be right. But the truth is that if this was 2003 and a department recognized that digital literacy was going to become the issue that might make or break their disciplinary future, then by now they might have four or five digital scholars hired and a couple tenured. Maybe they'd be in a position to deliver this content today. But few departments did that. This means the transition is likely to be rocky. 

Here's my point of comparison. In the mid-19th century, English departments studied oratory and philology: two things contemporary English faculty no little about. Why did English split itself off from speech? Speech still survives, in a way. Most universities have some public speaking course, and speech departments evolved into communication studies. Without wanting to sound techno-determinist, the second industrial revolution had a significant hand in that transformation. I look upon print-centric literary and rhetorical studies in the same way. In hindsight we might say that the 19th century transition took 3 or 4 decades. Things move a little faster now, but the truth is that 2020 will be 25 years after the rise of the modern Internet. 

the double bind of open education #edcmooc

For week two of the eLearning and Digital Culture MOOC, one of the assignments is watching Gardner Campbell speak at Open Ed 12 from last October. Here's the video:

One of Gardner's key points of reference is Gregory Bateson, specifically Ecologies of the Mind. Having been up and down the cybernetics business, Bateson is familiar to me from that angle, but my first encounter was through Deleuze and Guattari, right at the start of A Thousand Plateaus, where they write: "A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end."

This is perhaps not so far off from what Gardner is seeking in his use of Bateson: open education as a "continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities." However, there's a problem, as we all know. And it is a problem that Gardner, through Bateson, terms the double-bind. The double-bind is when one is giving two conflicting messages or goals to follow. My favorite example from the talk is the description of a blogging requirement and rubric from a syllabus. There's a long description of rules and procedures to follow and an extensive description of requirements... followed by the injunction to "be creative" and foster a community. This isn't meant to poke fun at the anonymous professor, because we are all in this double-bind. Bateson suggests that the responses to the double-bind take the form of paranoia (this is a trick), hebephrenia (screw it, let's get drunk), and catatonia (what?). Certainly these are the typical faculty responses I have seen to the double-bind of a university strategic plan (or online education) for that matter. So it's not just students. But what are we to do? If we have a syllabus, don't we need to have requirements and grade criteria? 

The central double-bind for digital literacy education--whether it is FTF, traditionally online, or open and online--is between the demand to reinvent/be creative and the expectation of meeting traditional standards. Gardner relates a story of one academic who responds to the idea of open online education by saying "it may be learning, but it's not academics." If that is true, it's because academics is tied to certification, and certification is tied to reaching specific, predetermined goals. I don't think anyone wants to do away with the practice of certification, especially for certain professions. In fact, the badges movement looks to expand the micro-certifications of academics (e.g. the course credit) into extra-institutional learning experiences. My inclination would be that we need to move in the opposite direction, distancing learning from certifying. But I don't see us doing that, in part because higher education is a research and certifying machine far more that it is a teaching and learning one. However just as importantly our student-customers want certification more than they want learning. They want jobs not an education. Are jobs and education mutually exclusive? No, but they overlap in rather impoverished ways, at least in the eyes of our students. As WPA I read through 1000s of FYC course evals each year. There is a running theme in those responses that no one should find surprising: students don't believe that a writing course is relevant to the education they are pursuing. Likely many of these comments come from prospective STEM majors, but also business, which makes up 1/5 of our student population.

I don't wish to romanticize open online education as Deleuzian plateau. However the idea of openness might imply eschewing the definition of specific culmination points or external ends: a problem for institutions (and students) who are more interested in external ends than self-vibrating intensities. When it comes down to it, I don't think faculty are all that interested in opennes either. Faculty are interested in replicating the closed systems that award them with expertise.

So, for example, a writing or digital composing MOOC is easy to imagine. DS106 digital storytelling is one. A writing MOOC with 40000 students could work without problem... as long as no certification is required, as long as the particular writing and the particular ends are not important. As long as it doesn't even matter if the students write or don't write, learn or don't learn. Of course the trick of good design would be to invite participation. But is this what the many students these MOOC's hope to attract want? Do they want "open education" or do they want "free certification"? (preferably with a minimum of work or learning).

This is the great double bind of open education: to reorient prospective students toward an open-ended education and away from the symbolic capital promised by higher ed. It's an interesting project but I wonder how it works for any of the people who are involved?

the monastic academy #edcmooc

We often see studies of technology adoption by college students, such as those done by Pew. We know from our own classrooms and walking the campus that Pew's statistics that 96% of undergrads have cell phone and 88% have laptops, that 92% of students have wireless connection on some device, are reflected in our own observations. The general adult population is 82%, 52%, and 57% respectively. I wonder what the stats would be for humanities faculty? Lower than undergrads I suspect, but I wonder if it would be lower than the average adult. I don't think anyone would be surprised to discover that humanities professors spend more time with traditional cultural/media activities than the average adult or student: reading print books; going to museums, public lectures, and libraries; listing to classical music, etc. And obviously one should be able to live one's life as one chooses, including in terms of online connection.

Given the nature of our profession however, particularly our professional freedoms, these personal choices then become professional ones. To a certain degree, all faculty have needed to come online in one way or another: library databases, email, online grading and student information, and to a lesser though still significant extent, course management systems. Clearly all faculty have internet access at least through their workplaces. But to what extent have we collectively embraced networked culture? Certainly not to the extent that we have embraced the modern culture that we continue to celebrate through our curriculum. 

Why is this an issue? Let's say, for example, that I didn't really care for reading books. I would assign books for my courses because that was expected, but I didn't live a life where books were personally valued. How successful do you think I would be teaching print literacy? Teaching with digital networks requires a kind of literacy derived from a significant level of immersion. This is, I think, a real stumbling block for our profession in facing up to this challenge. And it's not just one decision that is crucial here, and I would agree that one can become overly and unproductively immersed in the digital world, but here are a few examples:

• Not wanting a smartphone or other mobile device because one wishes to be disconnected
• Not wanting to be involved in social media of any kind because they are trivial
• Not taking seriously conversations that take place primarily via the web, because that's not where serious conversations happen
• Viewing digital cultural activities from gaming to YouTube to any kind of user-generated content as crass commercialism not worthy of serious attention, as a kind of anti-literate, anti-intellectual space
• Viewing connectivity as an intrusion of valuable cultural activity, in the classroom or elsewhere. 

Again, there are valid points of concern here and these are all acceptable individual decisions. I have no problem with someone living their life this way, but if one puts this all together then I think one ends up with a faculty member who is not well-suited to meet the challenges of preparing students to live in a world that the faculty member has renounced. 

In the eLearning MOOC we've been talking about this in terms of Prensky's digital immigrants and digital natives. In my view this is an unproductive and even damaging perspective. Again, as with the utopian/dystopian discourse, perhaps the concept is to move people away from these positions. Reading the course discussion, there are certainly people who have arrived familiar with these terms and unhappy with them. (I would imagine anyone who knows something about these matters knows this is not a productive kind of thinking. It's akin to starting a composition class with grammar instruction because that's what the students expect, even though as an instructor you know that's not the right direction.)

The immigrant/native business sets up a false dichotomy and reinforces an unnecessary conflict. If you identify the faculty as immigrants, then you are really taking a hostile position toward them. But more dangerously you are setting this up as a generational problem wherein the immigrant faculty can just say let the younger generation, the natives, do this work. But that's not what happens because this isn't about generations. It's about disciplinary culture. I have encountered plenty of mid-20s English doctoral students. Yes, many have cell phones and laptops and such, as you would expect. But very few see digital literacy or practices as part of their teaching or disciplinary work. Instead, they are adopting the cultural practices and values of their discipline, which is print-based. 

English departments have always claimed that they are place where people go to become better writers. I have never believed that. I think English attracts students who are already good writers, and I think a literary and print-based curriculum can teach students to read particular genres in particular ways and write literary criticism with its specific discourse. Increasingly though, what is taught is a kind of monastic practice, one that clearly prides itself on its removal from the discourses of the marketplace and the larger culture. There is nothing wrong with monasticism.... for monks. However it doesn't have broad appeal, though there will always be some students who want that experience. We can't expect that there will be a generational shift that will lead to some eventual change in this situation. "Generations" are broad enough and the academic job needs are small enough, that there will always be potential hires and grad students to replicate these disciplinary values, just as there will always be people willing to live lives as monks. 

And of course it's not just English departments. It's all of the humanities and perhaps beyond. That's just the corner of academia where I live. Ultimately, I think meeting the challenges of digita literacy will require university strategies for hiring and supporting faculty that work outside the disciplinary/departmental will to repetition. 

university futures

Probably not a commodity you want to invest in, right? Nevertheless, UB with a new provost and president is engaged in the familiar process of developing its strategic plan. It's difficult to imagine this as anything other than a cynical process: politicians and corporations want a skilled labor pool, univ admins want institutional prominence as determined by familiar metrics, students want credentials for jobs, and faculty want support for their individual research and their local disciplinary interests (e.g. support for their department, program, center, etc.). The strategic plan then becomes a language game where everyone tries to get terminology into it that will fund them down the road. 

And maybe that's all a strategic plan can be or should be. So when the university asks what should we be doing, it's a strange question. How do you answer in something that isn't really a version of "more of the same"?  Or worse something like "those people over there should be defunded and you should give me their money"?

I'm less interested here in the particular vagaries of UB's mission than I am with the rhetorical practice of institutional strategy building. How would you go about it? A couple things strike me.

• Most obviously one is not starting from scratch. So if you're making a 5- or 10-year plan, how much does one really imagine will change?
• Is there a kairotic moment for change? Sure, it's hard to find a department that believes it is well-funded. Everyone wants more so that they can keep doing what they're doing but bigger and better. But is there really a collective sense that we need to act differently?
• Pragmatically (or cynically) is a strategic plan a negotation among stakeholders? If so, what's strategic about it? Getting buy-in from faculty, admin, and staff for a few years?
• Is a strategic plan really a decision-making document or is it more like a PR strategy for how we will talk about ourselves?

To set aside all the skepticism of a universtiy strategic plan, I would say that one thing that it absolutely needs is a comprehensive plan for meeting the challenges of entering a digital age. In teaching, we need to figure out how to teach well online, build physical spaces that facilitate in-class learning with digital media, figure out how to teach in those spaces too, help our students develop digital literacies, and construct a network that will support all that. In research we similarly need to support faculty in transitioning to digital publication, determine how to evaluate new scholarly practices, and create digital infrastructure to support these activites. Perhaps more importantly we need to develop smart administrative practices that can make good decisions out of student data. This last one seems to me to be the real black swan for higher education. We think we know what student information systems should look like because we've been using them for years, but I really don't think we are prepared for the level of data that will become available.

Obviously these digital matters are just one potential part of a university's strategic plan, the part with which I am most familiar. I also recognize that it is an issue that many of my humanities colleagues find troubling. Does it make sense of the humanities to refuse responsiblity for teaching and researching digital literacy? That would seem like a dangerous gambit and yet taking responsibility would be difficult for many current faculty. This month on the Writing Program Admin list, faculty are hemming and hawing over handling laptops in the classroom. Put briefly, even the most experienced writing teachers are uncertain about addressing one of the basic features of contemporary life: we are online. And these are faculty who think seriously and often about teaching, who take up pedagogy as a site of research. What's the chance that other faculty are better off? How will such faculty be able to develop a strategic response to this challenge? Or do they imagine that 10 years from now they will still be sitting in the same classrooms, teaching the same courses, and asking students to "turn off" the same devices?

competencies and the learning experience

At this point I have no doubt that there is a whirlwind of conversation about MOOCs. Here are some of the more recent ones I've been reading: Clay Skirky, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Ian Bogost, and Alex Halavais. There's no doubt that MOOCs are making some strange bedfellows, such as linking the efforts of edupunkers with large scale edTech companies. In part this is misleading because there are many different possible MOOCs out there, but it is also partly accurate in a shared rejection of some of the traditional values and practices of higher education. It's also clear to me that MOOCs will be intertwined with badges in this shared venture to rethink learning.

As I see, disagreements over MOOCs begin in an older debate about what constitutes education. Put simply, am I "educated" if I can demonstrate mastery of certain knowledge and/or expertise in particular skills or activities? Or am I educated if I can certify that I have had specific experiences? Typically we might say that education is a mixture of all of this, which only begs the question of what kind of mixture? A college education (really all traditional education) is heavy on experience. One needs 120 credits for a BA. One must meet certain general education and degree requirements. Yes, a certain level of demonstration is necessary, which becomes the grade and the GPA. But I think there are not many students who manage to show up for all the courses, do the readings, and complete assignments in some fashion that do not end up getting a degree. My sense is that when students don't graduate it's usually because of extenuating circumstances (sometimes beyond their power to control) that prevent them from getting the full experience. Maybe you graduate with a 2.0, but you get the certificate. 

In the MOOC/badge world, its not that you don't need to have experiences, but the nature of the experiences are less controlled and more varied. What instead you need to demonstrate are competencies. So, for example, if I wanted a "web design" badge, I could take a college course or demonstrate that I've been working as a web designer or show some portfolio of my work or maybe take a MOOC. As long as I can demonstrate the requisite abilities and knowledge, then I'm fine. As I've written before, this represents a commodification of knowledge that is troubling.. in part because I think it represents a fairly superficial concept of what knowing is. Of course, one could level the same complaint against traditional education: that it represents a very narrow view of how learning might happen. Choosing between narrow and superficial doesn't seem like much of a choice.

In any case, the MOOC/competency model is a real challenge for the humanities, starting with writing instruction. To make it work I think you'd have to completely decouple oneself from the course-credit model. That is, I would be unwilling to establish an expected competency for a composition-student writer, but I think I could establish a writing competency for a professional writing BA or more generically for an English major. We could also imagine some mastery test (like a subject GRE) that students could take. Unfortunately, that's not really what the degree is about. Sure, English majors spend a relatively large amount of time writing and they do learn about literary periods, interpretive methods, and so on, but the whole concept is based around having the experience of developing those competencies in certain ways: having class discussions, meeting with faculty, getting feedback on writing, participating in the culture of the department, and so on. As an English/History undergrad major, I can't say I developed any worthwhile competency that one could measure. However I had many valuable experiences.

I can see a certain kind of education that is defined by competencies and there is good reason to explore such programs. Maybe some portion of the students who now attend college (and others would attend if they could) will find such competency-driven learning to satisfy their needs.. and this might mostly be the case because their needs are being determined externally by the job market. However, I think there is a reason why the experiential based model of education is hard to acquire, because the learning it offers, whether online or face-to-face, takes time and effort. That is, it is not arbitrarily hard. There may be some attendant factors, such as cost, that make access unnecessarily difficult and there may be certain practices that can be improved (I'm sure there are), but fundamentally, a college education represents a kind of learning that takes time to experience and will never be something that can be captured in a model of measurable competencies. 

Now is it the case that what one gets from the experience model vs. the competency model is worth the time, effort, and cost that former requires? That may be an individual decision. Will these diferences create new educational class hierarchies? Maybe. But I find it hard to believe that the challenging competencies of becoming an Electrical Engineer, for example, will be any easier to attain than they are now at a university, just as it would be difficult to replicate the kinds of experiences liberal arts majors receive without having those students closely involved in a scholarly, intellectual community similar to the one that is currently found in colleges of arts and sciences. 

I suppose where this gets me is that to be successful, MOOCs will likely need to tie back into the intellectual communities that make them possibile in the first place. A MOOC in World Music or Poetry or Science Fiction makes little sense without the humanities departments that underlie them. And such courses are probably most valuable for people who are already participants in such communities.

 

what percentage of English doctoral students ever write a scholarly monograph?

I don't know why my morning started out with this somewhat idle question. I suppose I was headed into some department meetings to discuss the assessment of our graduate programs and that started me thinking about this issue. I posted the question to Twitter and got some interesting feedback. Thanks to @noctambulate, @briancroxall, @joncgoodwin, @jtheibault and others who helped me out. 

Here are some things I can tell you. According to the National Center for Education Stats, 1332 phds in English were awarded in 09-10, and according to the National Council of Graduate Schools, 51.9% of English doctoral students complete their degrees within 10 years. I'm guessing that means around 2500 students are admitted into doctoral programs each year. So how many of these 2500 ever end up writing that monograph? 

But first, a digression: why ask this question? I suppose my answer is that so much of doctoral education is focused on preparing students to write a monograph with the dissertation as some kind of proto-monograph. In part, too, the question carries with it the realization that academic presses are in crisis and that the traditional monograph is increasingly a troubled genre: from an economic/market perspective, from a technological perspective, and perhaps, slowly, from an intellectual one as well. I would imaginge that a significant majority of those doctoral students who do not complete their degrees stall out at the ABD level. Those that do finish, tend to spend, on average, 4-5 years writing their dissertations. In other words, more than half the time in graduate school is spent specifically on the dissertation project. It is obviously the most important project in a doctoral program. 

Returning to my question. The best way to look at this would be to figure out how many authors publish their first scholarly monograph in English Studies each year. I had some conversations on Twitter about this, but I don't think I have a good answer about this. Here's a different way to look at this though. MLA job statistics indicate around 700 tenure-line assist prof jobs each year over the last 8 years. Some percentage of these jobs are book-for-tenure jobs. Others might require a book to get to full. At this point though I am starting to estimate. And, of course, some folks will right a book even though it isn't required (and some won't get tenured because they don't get the book done). 

Apparently there are 297 research/doctoral universities in the Carnegie Classification system. I would guess these are all book-for-tenure type institutions for English. These institutions represent 6.3% of all colleges. There are another 730 masters granting institutions, comprising another 15% or so of all post-secondary schools. I was on the tenure line at two such institutions before coming the UB. At neither was a book required for tenure, but some of these might. There are another 800 or so four-year schools (and the rest of speciality or 2-year schools). Dealing with these 1800 or so institutions, I'm going to guess no more than 1/3 are book for tenure schools. These can't tell us how many people actually publish monographs but it might tell us that of the 700 assistant professor jobs, only some fraction will be at institutions that require a book. So let's say 250 jobs are book-for-tenure. If that were the case, though we couldn't tell how many doctoral students will write a book, of the 2500 entering programs each year, only 10% will need to write a book to get tenure. Obviously don't quote me on that! That's purely hypothetical. 

The real interesting question about this would operate on the institutional/department level. On that level it doesn't matter much what happens as a national average. What one needs to know is how many of one's own graduate students go to jobs that are book-for-tenure type jobs. Let's say hypothetically (and let me be clear these numbers are in no way reflective of my own department) that one admitted 100 students over a decade: 50 completed the program, 20 got tenure-track jobs, and 3 got jobs that require a book for tenure. So maybe 5 of your grads go on to publish a book and maybe publishes multiple books. If a program had numbers like that, would that suggest anything about building a doctoral program around the premise of preparing students to produce book-length research projects? Looking back at my alma mater, which lists dissertations and current employment for the last decade, my estimation is less than 10% of those folks are in book-for-tenure jobs. I imagine that many, many non-Ivy phd programs would be similarly situated. Now, again, that's not to say those other people don't go on to publish books. I didn't need a book for tenure, but I published one anyway. 

I don't really know what I am suggesting here. Maybe nothing. I just think it is a little strange to put so much effort into a task that is not really that essential to the work so many of our students will do.

college reform, the universal instrument, and incorporeal transformations

Time magazine has college reform as its cover page story (again). The magazine polls a few experts about the problem, specifically the rising cost of higher education, but the issues are familiar by now:

• the importance of public funds for public universities
• the national, commerical and social value of university research
• the ROI for students who want degrees to mean better salaries
• the possibility of reducing costs through online learning.

The lead article focuses on undergraduate education comparing the MOOC experience of physics with physics classes at Georgetown and the University of DC. Diplomatically, each was seen as having its value. Georgetown is great (a "science spa"), for those who can afford to go. The Udacity physics course was innovative, and the DC course provided the attention those students needed. As the author, Amanda Ripley, writes of the professor, "he was helping them with many skills beyond physics. He was cultivating discipline and focus, rebuilding confidence and nuturing motivation." 

What interests me most however is the instrumental view we have of higher education. In a way this is hardly new but this economic ROI lens is a new twist on the general premise that an education can prepare you for a career. As I see it, there are two kinds of entry-level careers: those that require specific professional-technical knowledge and those that don't. In the former category we typically think of STEM careers but there are really many jobs like this from arts management to technical editing. However tehre are also many jobs that are fairly generic in terms of the skills/knowledge they require. These are your basic entry-level office work jobs in corporate and government spaces. However, I think for many of these jobs, even in STEM, the time we spend on specific skil-training is fairly low. We are mostly providing a baseline knowledge and creating a common profesional culture. This is the universal instrumentality of higher education. It is also a kind of incorporeal transformation. When the degree is conferred, a person is transformed, much in the same way as a couple is declared married in a wedding ceremony. In the university though, the incorporeal transformation occurs through multiple steps, with each grade and each credit. The student becomes a different person, employable as an entry-level professional, in part because s/he has acquired specific knowledge but mostly because they have been transformed into a certain kind of subject appropriate for such employment.

So this is the fundamental disconnect in this conversation. In a Time survey, 40% of the general population said the main reason to go to college as to learn career skills. We can't really give you those. In a few careers we can, such a nursing, accounting, or teaching where there are certificates we can award. Even in disciplines like engineering or computer science what we have is more of an articulation between curriculum and job, facilitated by internships. That's why internships are so important in those fields (and others). A college education can be applicable to a career and there are some specific skills that one can acquire in college but not nearly enough to amount to a degree. On the flip side, 36% of "college leaders" in the same survey said "critical thinking" was the most important thing. I am loathe to go down this path again, but when college leaders say critical thinking, I don't think they mean specifically the courses offered in a philosophy department but rather some generic kind of cognitive capacity that is accessible in any major one might pursue. I would argue that critical thinking in this context is another term for this incorporeal transformation. 

It is hard to speak in an open way about this subjective, incorporeal transformation, even though nearly everyone who has a 4-yr degree has experienced it. In part it is just growing up, but it is growing up in a particular way. This is part of why MOOCs are nowhere near serving the purpose of college. As Ripley noted in her article, the physics professor is dealing with more than physics. What she doesn't note, but should be apparent, is that Georgetown's "science spa" is doing the same thing: creating a different culture that transforms student-subjects. So yes, higher education is instrumental, but not in the way we typically think. If one imagines college as a series of bureaucratic hoops and discrete skills then one is seeing only a tiny part of the picture. The instrumentality of college is really about becoming immersed in and transformed by college as a form of life. 

I am sure that some would object to the picture of college I am describing as elitist. Working parents, non-traditional students, and many others are really looking for a credential to get a better-paying, more secure job; they should have a way to do that without being obligated to this immersion in college life (though it should be available to them if they want it). I agree, and I would agree that college is elitist, if by elitist we can mean something that 30% of the population acquire. I do think it means we need two clearly different paths. Maybe that would help to address the problem of students not finishing college. Right now that non-college path is dominated by for-profit institutions. 

On the other hand, if we want more people to undergo this subjective transformation, then I think we need to be more transparent about what we are doing. A significant part of our problem in the US is that we don't really value this subjective transformation. We want to see skills and career as separate from how we think and feel about the world. For someone who has been through an extensive educational process (like myself0, it is impossible to imagine that my training as a professor has not fundamentally altered the way I think and feel about the world, my political views, my social interactions, my ethics, and so on. I wouldn't say that the process is deterministic (i.e. it isn't "get this degree and think this way") but there is a feedback loop so that as one is affected in certain ways by education one makes further choices that reinforce those changes. As such, engineers end up being different from educators as cultural groups. 

This speaks to college reform in a few ways. 1) There is a significant problem with students not completing their degrees. Part of this is students running out of money for various reasons but I also think many students just get lost because they don't really understand what college is about. They think it is job skills when it is something else. We need to make this more clear and to make the connection between academic and professional cultures more apparent. 2) Governments and the private sector maybe also misunderstand what we do and so they fund and measure us in the wrong ways. If we want to take on this incorporeal transformation as a grand socio-economic project and strategy then we need to recognize that the students will need greater incentive and support, much as they do to get through K-12. 3) We need to recognize that ongoing research is an integral part of this culture. It may or may not be instrumental in its specific application, but it is instrumental in the creation of the academic culture that enacts the incorporeal transformation we desire.