Mountebank Blog

Michael Schrage of MIT Media Lab’s E-Markets Initiative is telling us, in the keynote at Baruch College’s Schwartz Symposium (IT Matters: Redefining Effective Communication), that really the major thing digital technologies are giving us is more opportunity for self-indulgence. His idea is that self-expression and self-indulgence are really equivalent and that what matters is not what a writer wants to say but what an audience needs to understand.

Now I’m all for audience awareness, and I’m all for his related point that a focus on editing is all too often missing (but if he thinks that the fact that students don’t want to edit means that we don’t want to teach editing, his experience with current composition instruction must be incredibly limited-and thanks to a commenter from Baruch for pointing this out).

But I keep being troubled at this symposium by an idea (I’ve mentioned it before) that practical training for success in business is the only appropriate purpose for higher education.

Another speaker earlier in the day proposed that what higher education needs is more input, more direct instruction, from business people, business leaders. When I suggested that this kind of input and interaction needs to go both ways, that we as academics had a lot to teach business, too, she heard that comment as saying that professors should come sit in the back of boardrooms and listen to how things work–not really what I was suggesting.

So there’s really many kinds of self-indulgence. If we as academics can be accused of isolation and elitism, there’s a very good case to be made that the exact same accusation can be levelled at the business world. What is practical and efficient has value, but what is abstract, multi-faceted, aesthetic and humane has at least as much value.

When business neglects this kind of value, privileging only its own needs, the self-indulgence…and the consequences!…are severe indeed.

My Innovate Live webcast has been archived, so it’s up and online and ready to be reviewed by anyone who might care to do so. It’s also a good example, or demonstration of how Macromedia’s Breeze product works in a real-life (or sort of real) setting. I got some good questions, and I’ve been getting scattered emails about the article, too. That’s a fun advantage of this publication…it really does get some attention, and it really makes it easy for people to send me questions and feedback. I like that!

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.

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.

Had a small meeting today to try to finally get (at least on a pilot basis) a tryout of our laptop carts (they’re similar to these, but not exactly the same–30 laptops in a huge, tank-like, rolling cabinet–to which we’ll be attaching a router, a projector, and–maybe–a printer).

We’re going to have a technician accompany the cart, to help with checking in and out (all laptops numbered, all checked out and returned in exchange for ID cards–no card, no laptop), and to troubleshoot any issues that may come up in class. I’m not sure that’s going to be a sustainable model in the long-term, but I hope so. It seems like it will help a lot with getting nervous faculty to give it a try, and (maybe) lessen the class time consumed by technical and logistical issues. I know it’s a system that is used successfully elsewhere.

Some other longterm questions…

What about maintenance on these machines as the use gets heavier? Especially as students start downloading malware, deleting vital system files, and so on. We don’t have the staff at this point (and probably won’t ever) to re-image each machine more often than maybe once per semester.

How well (if at all) is the wireless access going to work? And how secure (if at all) is it going to be?

From what I hear, the math department tried a similar scheme with calculators, and it worked for two or three years, and then the calculators started disappearing. Why was that? How can it be avoided? Nobody seems to know.

What if students want to (unlikely) bring their own laptops? That should be no problem–but letting them into the network may be tough.

Shall we have some kind of required training for faculty who want to use these carts? Even though we’re going to have a technician in the room?

There will probably be even more questions as we really get it moving, but I’m anxious to have it work. The equipment is already bought (of course, the questions should have been answered first, but that’s not the way things work!), and I don’t want to waste it. And I’ve had faculty asking me, already, “what if I want to use a lab, but only once in a while. They’re all reserved by people who use them every week!” This would solve that problem.