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We’re number 6! Or 3!

This week’s Chronicle reports on 2-year colleges working to recruit international students (the link probably only works if you’re a Chronicle subscriber). But a sidebar with statistics reveals that BMCC, where I work, has absolutely no need for that. Without any extra recruiting at all, we’re already number 6 in the whole nation in terms of total number of international students. And if you look at proportions, we’re number 3! (Behind only our sister CUNY school, Queensborough Community College, and Santa Monica College). 10.6% of our enrollment is international students.

Of course, that’s no surprise whatsoever to those of us who teach at BMCC. I hear different estimates all the time of the number of languages spoken at BMCC. Sometimes it’s 17, sometimes 45. Basically, the number doesn’t matter much. We’re an incredibly diverse, international college. That fact brings some challenges, but it also makes the place incredibly rich, and incredibly rewarding, for teaching and learning.

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Disagreeing with Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is one of my favorites, and I’m really enjoying his latest book The Ancestor’s Tale, but he does have a very big problem in an introductory chapter. The point is not at all central to his argument, and it’s really contained just in an analogy, but it’s a problem that I encounter far too often, and I would have hoped he’d be beyond this.

Frustratingly, oral tradition peters out almost immediately, unless hallowed in bardic recitations like those that were eventually written down by Homer, and even then the history is far from accurate. It decays into nonsense and falsehood after amazingly few generations. Historical facts about real heroes, villains, animals and volcanoes rapidly degenerate (or blossom, depending upon your taste) into myths about demi-gods, devils, centaurs and fire-breathing dragons.

What he’s missing here is that oral tradition (and “factual” “historical” writing, too, for that matter), is an intentional, creative, discourse. It’s literature–with a purpose and aesthetics that often have nothing to do with “accuracy.” People don’t just tell stories (or write them) about centaurs and dragons because the stories have somehow “degenerated” from the “real” events. They tell those stories because they like them.

Of course, Dawkins finishes that paragraph by saying that “oral traditions and their imperfections needn’t detain us because, in any case, they have no equivalent in evolutionary history.” And that is true. But I’m a little disappointed in him that he insists on seeing these features of oral tradition as “imperfections.” This may be a problem that’s particularly hard for scientists to overcome. It’s an unfortunate blind spot.

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Postcards from Buster

Buster and his DadI’m a big fan of the PBS Kids show Arthur. My daughter’s been watching it for years, so I’m very familiar with all the stories and all the personalities. Buster, Arthur, Francine, Binky, and DW are well-known characters in this house. The show is consistently educational, consistently fun, and consistently interesting.

So the new spinoff, Postcards from Buster, is also a big hit around here. Buster Baxter (a bunny) travels around the country, meeting different kids in different kinds of families. The stories aren’t quite as compelling as in Arthur, but it’s still a fun show, and works well as a kind of travelogue.

But in one of the shows (which we haven’t seen yet), Buster is going to meet a family with two moms. So what? So the Bush administration and its Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, finds this unacceptable. In the ever-vigilant quest to make the country safe for homophobia (I’m quoting Richard Goldstein), she has decreed, and PBS has cowardly agreed (so much for that much-vaunted “liberal bias” at PBS–they folded like a house of cards), that kids shouldn’t see that gay parents and their families are normal, natural, and part of our country–or even that they exist at all.

The New York Times today presents a very necessary humanizing picture of the poor kid, Emma, who is being told, by the US Government, that there is something wrong with her and her family. That she should not be seen.

It’s outrageous. My own 9-year-old, in hearing about this case, says “that’s stupid. Buster sees all kinds of families. People who live in trailer parks, his own dad’s a pilot and he works for a rock band and he’s divorced. There’s lots of different kinds of families, that’s the whole point!”

Kids get it, and they get it easily. A girl from another episode of the show was interviewed for the Times article.

Farah Siddique also knows what it means to feel marginalized, and she is grateful to “Postcards From Buster” for helping her feel less so. Farah, 12, lives in a Chicago suburb with Pakistani and Filipino parents who are Muslim. In a telephone interview, she explained why she was happy to appear on “Postcards From Buster,” wearing her hijab (a head covering) and studying the Koran.

“It was important to tell people about my religion and everything,” she said. “Some people think we’re bad because of 9/11 or something, and I’m telling them we are not bad, we’re not trying to hurt anyone or do anything wrong.”

Asked what she thought about PBS’s decision not to distribute the “Buster” episode about the children with two mothers, she said: “We don’t believe in that stuff. My opinion is that it is bad or wrong. My sister is 7, and she watches PBS Kids shows. I wouldn’t want her to watch that kind of thing.”

What if people said they wouldn’t want to watch the episode about her because they don’t like Muslims?

Without hesitation Farah replied: “Wow, I hadn’t thought about it like that. Can I change what I said? If people were judging me because of my religion I would get really sad. Now I think maybe they should show it.”

Spellings’ attitude–the idea that kids should somehow be “protected” from knowing about homosexuality–is a way of making sure that it’s safe and easy for their parents (and the policies of those who their parents elect) to be homophobic. Her idea that parents should get to “decide” whether or not they want to teach their kids that homosexuality is OK is just as stupid and dangerous as letting parents “decide” whether or not child abuse, or racism, or anti-semitism are OK.

If only Margaret Spellings, her boss, and the Dobsons and Dobson-followers et al. who agree with this narrow-minded, regressive thinking could watch Buster, feel empathy like Farah does…maybe they too could “change what they said.” But it’s probably too late for them. Their fears and insecurities about their own sexuality are too, too powerful.

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The loss of a great one

Sad news today of the death (at age 100) of Ernst Mayr. His must-read What Evolution Is will always have a vital place in my library. It’s one of the major classics of biology–or science writing in general.

As an ornithologist, Mayr classified many birds, most notably risking the hostile terrain of New Guinea to catalogue the region’s birds of paradise. But he will arguably be best remembered for formulating the concept of species that students still use today.

It was Mayr who defined a species as a group of individuals that are capable of breeding with one another, but not with others outside the group. This led to the idea that new species can arise when an existing species becomes separated into two populations that gradually become too distinct to interbreed; it was an answer to a biological conundrum that had eluded Charles Darwin.

[snip]

We may never again see someone so influential, in this era of large research groups and even larger databases, [Walter] Bock [Columbia University evolutionary biologist] adds. “Things have changed,” he says. “You can’t look at single people any more.”

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Googlebombing for Choice

My blogroll now includes links to help with the project of Googlebombing (the accepted usage is two words, I think–but I prefer it as one) the terms “Roe v. Wade” and “Abortion Clinics.”

The idea comes from Rad Geek People’s Daily–with this explanation:

While doing a bit of Googling for a citation of the decision in Roe v. Wade, I was reminded of a rather unpleasant fact: anti-abortion nuts have, up to this point, done a pretty good job at getting their agitprop ranked above factual information about Roe v. Wade and abortion in web searches…As of 1 February 2005, the top search result for “Roe v. Wade” on Google (the one you’ll get from “I Feel Lucky”) is not the text of the case; it’s an anti-choice advocacy site called RoevWade-dot-org (I won’t link it here, lest it throw off the Google Bombing)–a one-stop shop for anti-abortion myths such as Post-Abortion Syndrome, the abortion-breast cancer link, and more, along with a heaping helping of wit and wisdom from everyone from Feminists for Life to Dr. James Dobson. You can find similar wingnut sites at the top of many other abortion-related Google searches.

So the Googlebombing project means as many people as possible put these links on their sites–so that the first Google results will at least have a chance of being what they should be .

Thanks to Scribbling Woman for bringing this to my attention. As she points out, the effectiveness of Googlebombing may be questionable–but it can at least start discussion.

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February/March Innovate

InnovateThe February/March issue of Innovate Journal of Online Education just came out, and if you look carefully, you’ll see a fascinating article by…me!

You do have to subscribe to read it, but it’s completely free, and (in my opinion) well worth it. Not just for my article, either. I’m very proud to be there among the other contributors. Some excellent work, and I’m glad to be in such distinguished company.

Watch for an announcement of the live interactive sessions, too!

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Laptop Carts Fiasco

Unfortunately, even though I had so many great questions for the future about the laptop carts, we didn’t even get that far. In a total (and typical) fiasco, the wireless setup (linksys router/WAP connected to the network, all the laptops connecting to that router) that had worked fine on Friday, worked not at all on Monday morning.

Why? Nobody (not the Media Center director, the technician sent to help out, or the quartet of much-abused network techs) had any real answer at all. The only thing we’ve actually come up with is…finger-pointing, disclaimers of responsibility, and mystified shrugs.

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Close one door and another opens

Just when I was feeling so proud that by using a captcha I had eliminated any bit of comment spam, I got hit with a new one….trackback spam.

And I’ve never even had a real trackback! 🙁

So for now, I’ve just turned off trackbacks. Who needs them.

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Education as Industry

I’ve been thinking lately about the model that sees education as an industry, with students as the product. Or , really, educated students as the product. Or that model’s cousin, which sees education as a business with students as the customers or consumers. It’s not a new model, by any means. It’s one that’s always been popular among conservative critics of education (naturally enough, since it’s a completely capitalist, and completely anti-liberal model).

It’s a model that I find fundamentally in opposition to any liberal philosophy of education (including my own). If we see education in a constructivist (or connectivist) light, if we are interested in a process for students of growth and deeper understanding, then a focus on “delivery” of a “product” is a focus aimed in totally the wrong direction.

But what’s been bringing this to my attention lately is the (to me) startling prevalence of this model in discussions of educational technology. Even sources like Sloan-C, which is (I think) generally faculty-driven, and which really should know better, embed right there in their (careful, this is a pdf link) “five pillars” (“learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, access, student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction”) ideas which, while important, don’t seem to me to be have kind of organic, creative, developmental emphasis which I consider so essential in my own teaching, and in any good teaching I remember experiencing or witnessing.

However.

These pillars (and all the different phrasing of similar ideas) are, certainly important. And it is, maybe, important to break things down for purposes of measurement, analysis, and even assessment. But I worry about, always, and part of me rebels against, always, the idea of breaking down too much.

I think often about the comment of someone at one of our Visible Knowledge Project presentations.

I don’t want everything to be ‘visible.’ Some of what teaching really is, at its best, is necessarily invisible. It’s not all science. Some of it is art, and you can’t just take away the art.

It’s a challenge to keep hold of that “invisible” stuff, while still trying to look rigorously and critically–to make teaching and learning (especially with technology) a subject of serious scholarly inquiry.

And I think it’s a mistake, in working with that challenge, to fall too deeply into a “business” or “corporate” model. We’re not doing the same thing, in a liberal education, as job training.

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Connectivism

Thanks to Professor Harris for an excellent pointer to George Siemens’ article at elearnspace, “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age”.

Somewhat of a very important replacement (addition?) for behaviorism, constructivism, and cognitivism. Siemens posits connectivism as combining chaos, networks, complexity and self-organization–all elements of learning which are changed, or emphasized, or enabled, by technology.

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