The Paracosm of Higher Education

David Brooks may not be everyone's favorite op-ed columnist, especially when he takes on higher education, but this week he's writing about the tremendous power of the particular. He speaks to politicians wishing to be everyman - or every voter's man - and makes the claim that it doesn't work.  Look to the particular, even if it means losing a few votes. At least the ones who relate to the choices you make will be there for you.

Brooks talks about the pull of paracosms. I had to look it up, and found it's "a fantasy world invented by children; can have a definite geography and language and history; fairyland, fantasy world, phantasy." Brooks plays with the definition in talking about the New Jersey that Bruce Springstein created in his music. A world now more real to us fans than anything we'd recognize as the "real" New Jersey.

People love their paracosms, whether they be Hogwarts or Thunder Road. My colleagues in higher education, they love the lovely, mythical, magical place we invented and share in our minds and conversations. The quiet, reflective, slow, thoughtful places where a few, privileged students sit at the feet of the wise and tweedy and listen in rapture. I love that paracosm. I'm old enough to remember that place. I believe it still exists, not just in our minds, but at places like Harvard and even at University of Washington Seattle, where the wealthy and very smart are educated.

If you're not wealthy or very smart, you may cling to the paracosm but you can't live there. It's a fantasy. The reality is much duller, tougher, more expensive (from your perspective and income bracket) and not very flexible to your work schedule. But, and here's the crux of this post, even if we can't live in a fantasy world, we CAN shape the real world to be a place where we are happy and our needs are met. It would just mean that the reality of our learners come closer to matching the desperately held paracosm held in the minds and hearts of higher education. 

Tegrity on the march

Across higher education, my colleagues are telling me that their campuses are embracing site licenses for Tegrity, the lecture capture software. What could be more valuable in maintaining a status quo when all around us is changing than lecture capture? Students beg us to stop lecturing, start embracing the digital age and we twist their words into weapons. Use technology to ward off change and keep our "sage on the stage" culture alive for another 400 years. It won't work, but it doesn't stop us from trying.

Here at University of Washington, we just purchased a site license for all faculty to use Tegrity to record their lectures. Prepare for an onslaught of talking at students. But don't blame Tegrity. Technology does not define use or pedagogy, pace Donald Norman and his brilliant work on the ways use is embedded in design. We do NOT have to record our lectures in an age when all evidence suggests that being talked at is not how the majority of students learn best.

What if we used the license not to lecture, but to engage and encourage participation. Well, Tegrity put on a users' conference in Seattle recently - local, allowing a number of creative instructors and academic technology staff and designers from UW to attend - and guess what? There were some great ideas on re-imagining the use cases for internet-posted event delivery and recording. 

Take a look: Tegrity User Conference recordings (Seattle, April 2012). 
And just imagine: office hours that students can attend from anywhere, Khan Academy-like bits of micro-explanations. Thoughtful reflections, summaries, new practices. Check it out and imagine!


Colleen
PS: As always, the UW Bothell folks are thinking about use cases, research, possibility. Check out their Tegrity page too. 

Happy, adventurous Towel Day!

Towel Day. 

To all my friends and colleagues in higher education who are adventuring into eLearning, new literacies, personal learning environments, flipped lectures, new ways of knowing and assessing and producing knowledges -- here's just a snippet of why we're wearing towels:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” 

--Doug Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

With many more compiled at Goodreads but you're missing much if you haven't read EVERY book on the list. So, Happy Happy May 25, Towel Day, when we honor the incredible, adventurous, technology-loving and science-gone-mad work of Doug Adams. Where fans and admirers around the world wear a towel and pledge to honor Doug's most important contribution and meme for the digital age: "Don't panic!"


Indeed,  Don't panic! Don't get distracted by villains and evil-doers.  And bring a towel. 

Light Summer Reading?

Hope and fear are running rampant on campus this week as we hurtle toward finals, commencement, the end of another academic year. Faculty aren't quite ready to think about anything except the finish line, but I thought I'd get this quick post up regarding an excellent list at EDTECH regarding their choices for 50 Must-Read Higher Education Technology Blogs. 

Granted some are geeky, and filled with excitement regarding topics that only a network architect could love, but those are few as HE becomes increasingly more focused on what society reminds us is a core mission: learning, relevancy, and evidence of value. 


So, you'll find some great, innovative, challenging, leading/bleeding-edge topics in EDTECH's list of 50. Plus, their list is nicely annotated to weed out the geeky and point you in the right direction for the kinds of topics of interest to you. I found a few new ideas, as well as some thoughtful work on topics now being given serious thought in my corner and keeping me awake at night space: access, evidence, retention and graduation rates, digital and visual literacies, emerging technologies and their affordance in reinventing education  for a rapidly changing world. 


Great reading throughout the 50. Grab your favorite mobile device when you're at the shore, cabin or a lounge chair, couch or quiet spot in the shade this summer. 

Increasing Student Retention in Online Courses

Just passing on a very nice post on retention and new pedagogy inherent in online learning. It's written by a woman with a lovely name: Jennifer Golightly. She blogs at Pearson and backs up her ideas with research. 

I guess that I agree with 99% of her post, but here's a thought: perhaps it misses an important mark in suggesting that new pedagogy will look much like the traditional classroom experience if/when rich in discussion, peer interaction and feedback. OK, true enough, according to the research, but online interaction can be so much more. 

Yes, student-student interaction and student-teacher contact creates better engagement. But so does the learner's interaction with the ever-smarter (and patient) machine, as well as with an institutional support structure largely ignored in current online course design.
The movement in learning analytics demonstrates that the machine can be watching, looking for patterns, looking for key moments for feedback and interaction. If retention matters more than tradition in higher education, we're going to see external support structures incorporated into these moments.

For instance, The University of Washington Tacoma is now in a pilot collaboration with Persistence Plus  to see if online math students can benefit from behavioral interventions and support, delivered via their chosen devices and mobile platforms, integrated with course performance and whole-student support. Golightly is on target in stating that retention efforts rest in the course AND at the institutional level. For online students, what those efforts should look like is still to be determined. 

We Should Talk

We should talk. My ex would start to sweat when he heard those words.  He knew I was adverse to confrontation, argument, discord...and thus it takes a lot for me to confront hostility. Now, this may surprise some who know me, but that's because there's a difference between healthy disagreement and discord. I love a good argument, and it's probably why I chose a lifetime in the Academy. I love it when someone is willing to change my mind. People here are willing to argue, passionately and with great civility, about anything. 

How many angels dance on the head of a pin, the kind of bug Samsa became in the Metamorphosis, how assessment is different than evaluation. Sometimes, the civil piece can give way to the passion, and nowhere is this more painfully felt than when we are asking the Academy to make a change. 

“When someone is trying to do something new and innovative in higher education, 

often it’s met with a ‘Deny-Decry-Delay’  energy.”

-Jeff Young, Tech Therapy at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Working in eLearning, my coping strategy in the face of discord ("OK, I'm going into my room and shutting the door. Let's talk about it when we're both calmer.") has served me well. I slide off into the online environment and quietly keep doing what I'm doing while some stand on the outside, pound on the door and insist I come out to be beaten about the head. I turn off the lights and work by the glow of my monitor.  

If spoken softly,  I'll happily take on the fighting words mired in old values held sacred: culture-discussion-lecture-worries over plagiarism and cheating-fear of being replaced by the machine-death of the soul in the modern age. Sure, let's talk about it. Let me show you soul and joy and engagement online. But get crazy, or disparage online learners, and I'm out of the room quicker than you can say administrative-plot--about-the-money--hallowed-halls--tradition.

We should talk. There is a train a'coming, and it WILL bring eLearning in one of the cars. And it WILL bring assessment and accountability and access and learning-centered technologies. And it WILL bring an awareness of big data (see Carmean & Mizzi, 2010 for our Nudge Analytics case approach). And it WILL bring analytics innovation, no matter how excellent the credentials of those who argue for the beauty and the sanctity of the classroom.  (Listen to Gardner Campbell's passionate counter-argument here, along with Jeff Young's above observation.)

I do love passionate, smart, thoughtful counter-arguments to my approach. It makes me smarter and more passionate and it tempers and changes me. But it never deflects me off my course. And when the old, wealthy, well-educated members of the Academy ‘Deny-Decry-Delay’ education for other than the students who look like them, I think of Sidney Poitier lovingly speaking to his father in that moment from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner:

CC: Non-Commercial Columbia Tristar

"You don't know how I feel, what I think. And if I tried to explain it the rest of your life you will never understand. You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it's got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs! You understand, you've got to get off my back!"

Of course, the time is not far off when someone will say these words to me as I attempt to protect what I now hold dear. Change is inevitable, but my time to do the right thing for the right reasons is now. We should talk. 

Fair Use Stays Fair

Just a quick post, in case you haven't heard, regarding the litigation brought by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications -- with backing from the publishing industry (shame on them all) -- against Georgia State University and their e-reserves. The federal courts rejected 94 of the 99 instances cited by the publishers as copyright violations and basically told them to go take a hike.
Fair Use in academics is just that, and the money being made by specialized scholarly and textbook publishers fighting Fair Use in the digital age is scandalous. So when instructors hold the line, honor Fair Use, find and make scholarly material for their courses available? It's great that GSU backs them up, goes to court, and wins.
Another good day for the good guys. Read more at Inside Higher Ed.