You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2010.
In Chapter 5, Kamenetz addresses a scenario in which technology is disruptive to current higher ed models. She borrows from Wiley’s guild model, addressing “monks” (open learning advocates) and “merchants” (technology driven education startups and the VC’s who love them). Over many pages, Kamenetz reiterates the idea that one doesn’t need school to learn. I want to be polite, but all I can think to reply is , “Duh.”
OK, so that wasn’t polite, but I have now gotten far enough that I can’t escape the following conclusion: Kamenetz has missed a very important point. Yes, the Internet has made it much easier for people to learn outside formal structures, but that possibility has always been there for the motivated. Most of the examples Kamenetz cites in chapter 5 (College Unbound, Grand Canyon U, Straighterline) tie back to a traditionally accredited college or university. Colleges and universities are among the institutions least willing to change their modus operandi. For transformation to take place , something bigger has to happen.
I’ll now state an educational heresy. Colleges and universities are not important to our society first and foremost because of the learning which occurs there. If universities were just about learning, they’d still be at the edge of society as they were in 1250. They became important because others (institutions and eventually employers) began to accept the degrees they conferred as evidence of learning and skills, which gave the sheepskin value outside the college gates. Kamenetz acknowledges this back in Chapter 2 (college as sorting device) . Transformative change in higher ed will require radical reshaping of the degree or its replacement. Can this happen? I think so.
For a shining example , look at IT. Companies like Google are legendary for not caring whether applicants have degrees, much less where they’re from. Many IT positions list industry standard certifications (MSC*, A+, etc.) rather than degrees as requirements. It doesn’t matter to the certification testing entity whether you completed a degree, read books, or learned at the knee of a guru. What matters is whether you have the skills.
A number of other fields have chosen a hybrid approach, where one must both complete a degree and pass an exam to be professionally credentialed. For example, would be paramedics must take NREMT exams for licensure, while aspiring K-12 teachers have to pass one or more Praxis exams. Jobs for which there is a professional licensure requirement are much more likely to develop certification tests distinct from the university, since in other fields there’s a chicken and egg problem. No one will complete the certification until employers care, and employers won’t care until enough people take the certification to validate it as a screening device. It happened in IT, why couldn’t it happen in all sorts of other fields?
If it happens, then open education will really take off, as credentialing and learning separate. Universities, rather than being where everyone has to go to get a credential that matters, could become one of several paths learners use to prepare for external certifications (as happens in IT now). Kamenetz references Brian Lamb’s vision of Google as credentialer. (133) Could something like CloudCourse be a first step in this direction?
If it happens, it might kill off the liberal arts as we know them. Would an employer outside the arts require a certification in theatre appreciation if such a thing existed? I doubt it. I realize I’m going off on a tangent here, since serious questioning of the liberal arts model of general education is older than the Internet. Nevertheless, I think that colleges and universities have worked hard to defend traditional ideas of what being educated means and thus kept things like foreign languages and philosophy in their degree programs that few students would take on their own. I suspect that the existence of a meaningful alternative to traditional degrees would cause learning without short term economic benefit to plummet in societal importance. I’m enough of a “humanities person” to think this is a bad thing, but sometimes feel like I’m fighting a holding action in this regard.
In chapter four (“Computer Science”) and Chapter five (“Independent Study”) Kamenetz presents two views of how technology might change higher ed. Chapter 4 is the “evolutionary” scenario, in which technology doesn’t dismantle the university as we know it, instead becoming a new (and presumably better) means to the traditional end of a degree.
Several analogies are made between education and the music industry, starting with a nod to Bowen and Baumol’s 1966 book Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma in the opening paragraphs of the chapter. Since I was a music major once upon a time, I’ll stay in that frame. Kamenetz points out how the ease of digital distribution has made more music available to more people at lower cost. She acknowledges that the analogy with education isn’t perfect, indirectly quoting Candace Thille of Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative – “It’s not just about content delivery,….If it had been, open courseware efforts like MIT’s would have solved the problem.”(90).
However, if you extend the analogy, things get more complicated for Kamenetz. One of the key trends she identifies in the introduction is the idea of unbundling, the idea that services that the present day university provides together (instruction, library, credentialing, networking) will “unbundle”. However, in discussing the music industry, she passes by another big trend without noting it. Kamenetz writes, ” Contemporary composers can record an entire symphony from their bedrooms.” What she doesn’t mention is that what those bedroom musicians can do is less about unbundling than vertical integration.
The aspiring garage band of the pre-digital era could make lots of music. What they couldn’t do is record it, market it, and distribute it. The march of technology meant that the members of the band can also now be the recording engineer, design the album art, duplicate the CD’s and build the website that markets it all. This allowed small entities to compete head to head with the large conglomerates.
How far does this analogy extend to educational resources? Kamenetz mentions a CMU developed tutoring technology (91) There’s no footnote, but I think she might be referring to the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools. At the moment, these tools use either an Adobe Flash or Netbeans (Java) IDE. While perhaps many CMU faculty members know enough Java or Actionscript to use them, I don’t think that’s true of of most instructors I know. The same can be said, to some degree, of developing video segments for a course. Most instructors don’t have a background in video production.
At least given the present state of instructional technology, the demand for technology enriched course materials is most likely to be met by the CMU’s, MIT’s, and other institutions that can bring a staff of technologists and designers to bear on the challenge of producing instructional materials. I wonder if technology in its current state is pushing curriculum design the opposite direction it pushed the music industry. Instead of every instructor creating his or her own course, will expectations of high tech interactive tools push everyone into choosing from the same set of course materials provided either openly by big institutions with open courseware initiatives or less openly by publishers, as the various skill sets required for content production get bundled together at fewer and fewer institutions with the resources to support them? It seems as if they might.
Kamenetz also mentions the National Center for Academic Transformation and its efforts in course redesign. I’ve had the opportunity to attend a couple of NCAT workshops, and the statement that always seemed to raise the most faculty eyebrows is the assertion that, to be economically efficient, one must redesign not just a section, but an entire course. To an instructor used to making his or her own curricular decisions, this often comes across as an attempt to create a one size fits all solution
Kamenetz does finally tackle a possible future for verifying student learning when she looks at Western Governors’ University, which separates assessment of learning from instruction. It is perhaps the strongest real world example of unbundling Kamenetz has yet shown us. My own sense is that this is a big first step in allowing those who don’t need instruction to have their learning and skills acknowledged. That said, there are many people for whom it won’t work well, but in some sense, the entire chapter is a look at how the lecture model dominant for hundreds of years might be gradually replaced by a number of routes to a degree.
Everyone is talking about Facebook. Well, not actually everyone is talking about it, unless everyone means privacy advocates, techno-libertarians and other geeks. But it made Time magazine , so that’s some sort of marker of broader societal awareness.
Danah Boyd is ranting, Leo Laporte is leaving, and Venessa Miemis is concerned about monetizing our conversations. All of them have good points, but there’s an important one they’re missing. To illustrate it , cue the blur effects and the flashback music.
It’s 2000, and you want to share something via the Internet. You have two options. If you want to share something privately, you can attach it to an email (if it’s not too big). If you want that something to be out for the world to see, you put it on a web server. The Internet has done private and public well for a long time.
So, why does anyone use Facebook, which Eben Moglen has described as “free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time.” The key PHP doodad is the one that allows you, without being a programmer, to share your content with some people but not all. That’s what all social networks are about, from a publishing standpoint — defining a group that’s allowed to “see your stuff”.
RSS and Atom do the aggregation side (keeping track of everyone else’s stuff in one place) easily, so those who read Facebook but don’t post have never needed Facebook. If the only point of Facebook is to control who can see your stuff, to the extent that Facebook makes everything public, they undermine their very raison d’être. If my photos are going to be public, I might as well put them on Flickr. If my status are to public, why not have them on StatusNet or Twitter or why not blog? If Facebook doesn’t give its users good privacy controls it’s giving them nothing unique and all Facebook has left is the friction created by it being difficult to migrate away. It won’t be the first time that a company has turned the difficulty of escaping into a pile of money, but it’s hard to imagine it being a good model for the long term.
I’ll be too busy this weekend to do much so I’m trying to get a step ahead on the #DiYUread project.
This chapter could have been titled “Why does college cost so much?”, since that’s the question Kamenetz is essentially trying to answer. She puts forward a few theories (straight supply/demand, the expense of building amenities and competing for students, cost shifting, government dependence) , saying “Each explanation has its validity, each appeals to a different constituency, and each calls for a different approach to a solution.”(51) I see it more as an instance of convergent cost evolution.
Just as species not closely related may develop similar adaptations to compete in similar environments, different classes of institution have done the same thing (raise tuition) to respond to different pressures. Public institutions have dealt with cost shifting. Many institutions have tried to climb what Kevin Carey calls the “status ladder” (57). Heaven help the public institutions who have been trying to climb the status ladder. Different colleges have had different reasons for raising tuition, but they’ve all raised tuition. The notion of subsidy as inflationary pressure seems to me the only one that is broadly applicable, since I can’t think of a college that doesn’t take federal money.
I don’t know what public institutions can do about cost shifting, particularly the ones that aren’t building climbing walls, apartment style student housing and the like. I do wonder if cost shifting is part of a larger shift in how society views education — away from a public good and toward an individual investment. I think you see this in the growth of loans. Students are told it’s OK to go into debt and pay for it later out of the increased earnings you have as a degreed person. Kamenetz points out that that logic only works in certain disciplines (not including the liberal arts – see my post on chapter 2). This works to some degree in the graduate school world through the subsidy/earnings tradeoff. Those who go to professional school (law or medicine for example) pay nearly full price but can expect high salaries when they get out. Those doing graduate degrees in the humanities (where one will likely as not end up cobbling together a living out of adjunct positions) are much more likely to be subsidized while in school with assistantships. We can see some of this in the model of providing student loan forgiveness for those who enter public service positions after school (teaching, etc.)
It’s easy to say that institutions should just step off the treadmill, but much harder to actually do, even though it may be an important way to control costs. Not only is belief in growth a key part of the American mindset, but any single institution trying to turn against the herd will likely get stampeded. The community college sector provides as close to a low frills option as we have. Could you deliver 4 year degrees in the same model, or is becoming a Baccalaureate granting institution inevitably stepping on to the status ladder?
Although this chapter is titled “Sociology”, it seems to me that Kamenetz is examining the cost/benefit of the individual decision to attend college, rather than group behavior. This is a key question when considering reform. Whatever one may say about the system as a whole, real change won’t happen until individuals make different choices for themselves and their children. Kamenetz quotes Dr. Anthony Carnevale, “…we asked people: Do you think everybody needs to go to college? Seventy to eighty percent said no. But what we…asked a few years later, was, Should your kid go to college? Eighty five percent said yes.” (37)
D’Arcy Norman questioned the long held belief that education will improve the overall quality of life for society, pointing out that perpetual improvement in aggregate standards of living is impossible. He’s likely right, but people will continue to go to college (and send their children there) and accumulate debt, as long as they think the experience puts them ahead in the contest for good jobs, even if they recognize the problems with the big picture of higher ed.
I found that the comments about the signaling hypothesis resonated with me. Carnevale again, “In the American system, employers use post-secondary training as a sorting device for hiring.” (37) Beyond the question of setting a BA or MA as a minimum qualification, there’s also the matter of institutional prestige. If one is faced with a stack of sixty, eighty, or a hundred applications for a position, it is very likely that the screener will use not just degree attainment, but where the degree comes from to decide which 20 application packets they will take the time to read carefully. All other things being equal enough so as to be virtually indistinguishable, let’s interview the Harvard graduate.
Should it be this way? Probably not. Are employers likely to expand their HR staffs enough so as to make the what-degree- from-where shortcut unnecessary? Probably not.
There are a couple of statements Kamenetz makes with which I take real issue. She writes, “Trying to educate the majority of citizens now for the ‘jobs of the future’ may or may not be feasible.” (32) Balderdash.
This is exactly what the liberal arts (all those majors, like foreign languages and music, that don’t pay well) are for. I was a liberal arts major. I am now doing a job (instructional technology and elearning) that didn’t really exist when I finished my undergraduate degree and was just starting to exist when I finished my graduate degrees.
There’s a wonderful moment in Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Anathem . The novel imagines a world where scientists, mathematicians, and other rationalist types (as opposed to the religious) end up in cloistered communities. An existential crisis ensues which finds several of these previously cloistered folk in the thick of dealing with it. When one of them asks, why am I here, rather than the military or the government? , he is told it is because he is educable. His experience has made him into the kind of person who can learn quickly, adapt, and figure stuff out. Those sorts of people will be well prepared for the ‘jobs of the future’, even though we, and they, don’t know what those jobs are yet.
Kamenetz makes one more nod to the idealistic view of higher education on page 35.”…, higher education still retains some irreducible value, a pearl inside the oyster. It may be difficult to define, but its power over individuals and populations is too real to be ignored.” If that value is as important as Kamenetz says it is, isn’t it worth the time to try to define it and make it part of the discussion of how higher ed ought to change and not change? But Kamenetz doesn’t seem willing to take on that challenge and is instead satisfied to talk about higher ed and reform almost solely in terms of quantitative measures.
I had begun to read Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U for another project when I started to notice #DiYUread tags in my Twitter stream. It turns out that a spontaneous “book club like” reading was happening online. I have finally gotten going, spurred on by the need to to fall too far behind D’Arcy Norman. (and no, I haven’t read the post I just linked to yet. I’ll wait until I get my own reflections into the ether) I had originally thought to do a quick once through and then close read chapter by chapter, and I may still, but if I take that approach now, the whole collective project may be done by the time I finish the book.
I think the most important thing I noticed ,and I’m sure this will come back later, is Kamenetz’s willingness to measure the value of education in dollars. You get something like College value= (difference in lifetime earnings degreed v. non degreed) – (cost of college) . Almost none of the educators I know are educators because they want to increase student’s lifetime earnings. If that’s really how you are going to measure the value of education, the current way of doing higher ed is inevitably going to be found wanting.
Yesterday George Siemens said something to the effect that the role of the university had changed from producing educated citizens to producing economic value (Sorry for the lack of an exact quote, George). The more cynical might modify that statement to “…changed from producing educated citizens to producing skilled workers.” Dismantling the present system is likely if you measure against a standard (teaching employable skills at the lowest cost) that it wasn’t designed to meet.
I hadn’t really thought about the correlation between age and prestige. When you mentally stack institutions into tiers, almost inevitably the oldest institutions (Ivys) are at the top and the newest (community colleges) are at the bottom. Kamenetz reminds us that an Ivy League education has not always met modern standards of excellence, so one can’t say that the reputation of the Ivys is deserved because they have always been excellent.
Now for an important disclaimer. Although I did not attend one, I have spend almost all my working career in community colleges. Kamentz writes, “The biggest knock on community colleges has historically been that they offer low quality, low standards, education” (14) but a page later, she says “The best proxies for prestige are spending per student and selectivity,…” (15). Community colleges are , by design, non selective and inexpensive. When college ranking entities like U. S. News employ a formula that applies 45% of an institution’s score to selectivity and resources (plus another 25% for reputation) , it creates a powerful incentive to evaluate all institutions based on these criteria, even though US News doesn’t rank two year colleges.
Kamenetz mentions the GI Bill as a sea change in higher education history in the US. It strikes me how much, despite all the good things that came of it, the GI Bill perhaps wasn’t about education. After all, the US economy didn’t change overnight. The skills that would have made WWII veterans employable in 1940 were enough to make them employable (in the sense of having appropriate workplace skills) in 1946. I wonder to what extent the entire enterprise was an effort to keep returning veterans out of the workforce until the economy had reconverted sufficiently to absorb them and thus prevent an unemployment bubble. Roosevelt’s 1939 statement “Just because a boy wants to go to college is no reason we should finance it” (13) lends some credence in my mind to this view. Sending all those veterans to college meant you would need more educators, but the lecture model is very scalable. You can assign one instructor to a class of 200 as easily as you can to a class of 20.
Now I’ll go read D’Arcy and realize the shallowness of my thoughts 🙂
ConnectedEd - A blog about learning and technology 