Voyages of Discovery

Hi. I just read a short post by Clay Shirky, titled "The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age." You should read it. We should talk.  He's the fellow who consistently is able to point out how the Emperor got drunk and ripped off his clothes. How the collective Royal Highness of Higher Education forgot that he's a servant-leader and his responsibility is to the people, not a rich elite and privileged court. How his coffers have emptied while protecting the lifestyles of the royal classes. How there are rumblings amongst the poor and unwashed and if he isn't careful, his head will roll. 

Shirky reminds us that our public universities still look like 1940, where only 5% of the population - the very wealthy 5% - got college degrees. World War II and the GI Bill changed that, and now, when a college degree is one of the few options out of poverty, the end of the Golden Age is coming at us like a bullet train. “Of the twenty million or so students in the US, only about one in ten lives on a campus. The remaining eighteen million—the ones who don’t have the grades for Swarthmore, or tens of thousands of dollars in free cash flow, or four years free of adult responsibility—are relying on education after high school not as a voyage of self-discovery but as a way to acquire training and a certificate of hireability.”

Here's the thing to hold onto: acquiring training, learning skills of the mind, becoming educated for the digital age can still be a voyage of self-discovery. For those of us who never read Faulkner or Milt Friedman or Carl Sagan, the path to a degree leads us to new ideas, opinions, dreams. And yes, we want it mixed with relevance, technology, accountability so that we're prepared to demonstrate value for the painful debt taken on. The people have been patient, but it is a very very bad model when you ask the working class to pay a back-breaking surcharge so that the royal court can spend summer in the Galapagos studying the habits of starfish. 

An affordable, flexible, meaningful education doesn't mean the end of the Golden Age, it means the beginning of a new one. One for more than the 5%. 

That Moment the Milk Turns Sour

Happy new year, gentle reader. May all the mistakes and missed opportunities of 2013 be forgotten as we move forward into a brave new digital space. Well - wait -perhaps mistakes not forgotten, for those will surely be repeated, but accepted with a bit of grace. So let's take a quick look at the messy, crazy conflation of higher education, technology and social media that landed in our laps in the last few weeks and see if grace is anywhere to be found.

Dec 20: Rebecca Schuman (aka Pan Kisses Kafka), the beloved defender of adjuncts and all things post-privilege, writes a blog post,  "Naming and Shaming" a program that gave interview candidates 5 days to arrange trips to the MLA conference. In her forthright style, she gave the program hell for being so inconsiderate of cost and stress to applicants chosen so late and with so little chance of the interview making a difference. She was right, speaking truth to power, but it's very hard for good, privileged, last-gen people to hear that we are now an abusive, corrupt, dishonest institution feeding off adjunct labor and churning out new PhDs who mostly have not a chance in hell of ever finding professional work. 

So what happens when the Academy is called out to face our own demons in the new, digital world of blogs, commentary, social media, and shifting netiquette? Bad things. 

Dec 23: A well-respected, FEMINIST, pridefully-tenured professor (aka Tenured Radical/Claire Potter) who blogs at the Chronicle, posts the next day with Job Market Rage Redux, accusing Schuman of being a drama queen, of chronic rage, and of "on line hissy fits." Hissy fits? Let's ignore the fact she'd never make these sexist language charges against a man, and that she instantly lost years of work building up "digital street cred" as a radical thinker in higher education. Let's note here that a good person in a position of power used it not just to protect the status quo, but to attack a young voice defending the not-privileged. Let's note that Potter is not unique and the Academy has protected itself from criticism, change, and adaptation since the industrial age died. Radical no more, Tenured Radical spent days defending her attacks and responding to horrified comments from the community with attacks on them too. 

The whole topic of the need to CHANGE, long simmering in higher education, seemed to come to a boil in moments, centered around abuse, privilege and adjunctification. Maybe that's how it happens. The milk seems fine until that moment you open, sniff and gag. The topic took on a life of its own with many other blogs, tweets, comments and new bloggers hopping into the fray (see this from Dec 27, and this from FB Jan 1, and this from Jan 5, and this from Jan 5...).

My fave post, although she took much heat later for the analogy, was done by Karen Kelsky (aka The Professor Is In)  in her response "How the Tenured are to the Job Market as White People are to Racism" (Jan 1). Kelsky's analyis is reasoned, thoughtful, and distressing. It's all distressing. No one wants to be on what Schuman calls "a sinking ship," especially when your whole career was on that boat. 

So, dammit. I had a therapist once who told me that "We only change when the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same." Maybe the Academy is at that tipping point?

From now on our troubles will be out of sight

Or even better, exposed to the world in the brightest light?

I love Pinterest! Another tech example of some tiny webby idea that didn't have a "purpose" except the obvious: let people pin up web images - linked quickly and easily with simple search tagging. It's an online, social pin-up board. How simple and silly is that?

And then, something more than the sum of the parts emerged. Themes became gorgeous reflections of how we see the world (Sunset...), collections became shared commentaries on life (Is there anything more disconcerting and funny than #Nailed It?) and we began to collectively re-imagine the instantly meaningfully visual in a visual age. 

So I start with that odd wander through thoughts on Pinterest as a way to say "Happy Holiday Season" without having to say anything. Let's see it. Wander in and just let the collective vote your visually-aware self to recognition of the season's look and feel and meaning - the way we did with the 647 Repins and 100+ Likes of this link to Central Park in the snow. The Pinterest community hopes yours is as merry and bright as the way we imagine it should/could be. 

But I can't stop there. This is not my wish for you. I wish you quiet time away from the chaos of the roads and stores and expectations, and if you're one of my ID peeps,  I send you to this lovely Pinterest collection started by Tracy Parish on Instructional Design/eLearning Books. She asked the ID community to pin their fave books, and maybe even tell why. They did, and they did a great job. Some of my faves are there at the vote-getting top of the heap, and others are now on my list. 

Let us rest, let us read, and let us renew so that we can charge into 2014 with our troubles in or out of sight. Your choice. Feel free to pin it.

Shout out for multiple choice tests

Don't drop your jaw, your drink, or your keyboard but today's post is in praise of the multiple choice test. 

Readers know that I've pondered "best practice" with quiz agents in recent years, due to the surge of the LMS, and I've promoted the rich feature set in quiz options. 

So many options. Randomize questions, randomize answers, allow multiple attempts, accept highest attempt, and even the wide range of question types now available. It changes the game, certainly, but it's still a "multiple choice test" (said with disdain in my best teaching excellence voice) and I cautioned time-savings for us ("It grades itself!") vs meaningful learning. 

I was torn. I loved allowing multiple attempts as a self-assessment tool and loved the tie to research on value of in-situ, timely feedback. 

So, ambiguity in place, I was doing a workshop recently exploring the "flipped classroom." Participants who had tried flipping noted difficulty in motivating students to do the work before coming to class - a requirement in flipping. We talked about solutions and the best offered? Use of multiple choice, online exams that closed before start of class. A required pre-quiz gives students incentive to prepare, read, study before class. Participants offered the idea hesitantly, for it was recommending - yes, that inner voice again - multiple choice exams.

OK, here's the news for which my stories prime the pump: researchers recently publishing in Psychological Science (Little, Bjork, Bjork, & Angello, 2012) make a convincing case that, when constructed properly, multiple-choice tests can and do engage the productive retrieval process and do so effectively. More than that, the authors claim that multiple-choice can actually help with learning in a more effective way than cued-recall as multiple-choice questions aid in recall of information pertaining to incorrect alternatives, whereas cued-recall questions did not. 

Read it and weep, ancient souls still fighting the adoption of the LMS and online learning resources. Combining the deep feature set of online tests with the evidence for value of reinforcing retrieval and enhancing understanding of incorrect, common choices puts me firmly in the "I love Canvas, I love the LMS, I love self-assessment" camp. 

Thanks to ISPI for publicizing to the design community  and for those who can get through the firewall via your university library, here's the primary research. 

GREAT reads. Guilt relievers. Emotional support for new practice in time-saving teaching and deeper learning. 

Top 100 Learning Tools for 2013

Here it is, patient readers. Jane Hart's popular-vote list of tools you should be looking at if you're pondering digital life in teaching and learning. Regarding the Top Ten, I don't have much to say about them except "Well of course!"  - similar to past years and make perfect sense - but after that things start to look interesting.

Take a look at the top shifts:

• Skydrive shot up +55 positions
• Keynote shot up +40 positions
• iMovie shot up +32 positions
• Tumblr shot up +30 positions
• Symbaloo shot up +29 positions

Now, that's a movement of ideas and suggests some interesting and more visual approaches to learning and knowledge-sharing. Well, let's ignore Skydrive, which is just Microsoft pushing their cloud file storage into educational licensing. This brings it to #43, far behind Google Drive (#2) and distracts us from what we mean by a learning tool.

Some in the cognitive science world say that knowledge and learning have changed in the digital age and are no longer what we know/have memorized ("Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere...blah blah blah, Google the rest). Now, it's how we find and organize and make sense of what we need to know.

So, in an age of insane amounts of digital resources and sites and noise, you'll see organizational tools up near the top. That makes sense. AND you'll see new media resources - sharing/creating/publishing - finding new places near the top. Visit Jane's list, and if you see a top tool you don't know, create an account and check it out. It's sure to have value.

Until today, I was clueless to the existence of Symbaloo. My account is now up and it's my home page in three browsers. It's beautiful! And makes me feel efficient. Or at least not lost in sea of my own links, sites, obligations. As soon as I have a few moments, I'll install it on my Android phone. Isn't technology just the best fun?

Now, back to work!

Symbaloo tiles linked from tinyurl.com/symtiltes

2013 SAT Report on College Readiness

open etc.usf/clipart

"Reading the news and it sure looks bad", said Joni. 

I don't think she meant the just released 2013 SAT Report on College & Career Readiness, but I can't help humming the tune as I read. It says that only 43 percent of 2013 SAT exam takers will graduate high school academically prepared for the rigors of college-level course work. SAT exam takers are, of course, students who intend to go to college. Unprepared. Well, that...sure looks bad. Dig deeper and the news seems to get worse.

The people who administer the test, The College Board, compile data around their success benchmark - a score of 1550. Of the students who ARE prepared and met the benchmark, our best and brightest, the College Board's long-term studies show that only 54% of this population reaches a college degree within 4 years. The College Board thinks this is good news, because for those who do not reach the benchmark? Only 27% reach a college degree in 4 years. 

Then, things get goofy. College Board looks deeper at who succeeds, and surprise: wealthy kids going to elite schools do well. Who would have thought that when you hand someone deep pockets and huge safety nets, chances are good they'll finish college? Wow! Here, College Board stretches correlation like silly putty and offers help: 

"More than 50 percent of high-achieving low-income students attend less selective
schools where students are less likely to graduate and earn a degree. To date, the
College Board has produced and sent nearly 7,000 packets of customized college
information to high-achieving low-income students in the class of 2014. The goal of
this work is to ensure that these students have the necessary information to help them
more effectively find the colleges that best fit their academic performance. Over 20,000
additional students are set to receive packets in early October."

Yes, of course, why didn't we academics think of that? Let's create pamphlets that suggest more low-income students go to elite colleges! Not to our pesky, urban-serving, first-generation-focused, regional schools. Not to schools that are driving distance from their homes and social networks. Not to schools with small class sizes and instructors who understand and are committed to providing support. Not to schools addressing the problems of disadvantaged students daily. Let's send low-income students to the Ivies!

Oh it gets so lonely

When you're walking

And the streets are full of strangers

All the news of home you read
Just gives you the blues. Just gives you the blues.

We'll assume these students are too disadvantaged to choose what's best for them and we'll send them pamphlets about Harvard and Yale! Because students who struggle with 1000 issues that the College Board has never considered (financial issues, family issues, first-generation doubts, class issues, race isolation, connection, the $$ barriers that add up to high costs...) will do fine by some loose correlation of privilege and success. Proximity to the uber-privileged offspring of high-income parents should take care of low-income graduation rates. A nice and well-intended notion, but not backed by practice or fact. 

There were lots of pretty people there
Reading Rolling Stone reading Vogue
They said "How long can you hang around?"
I said a week maybe two
Just until my skin turns brown
Then I'm going home...

If wishing could make retention so I'd be blowing on dandelion puffs. If standing next to the elite rubbed off like the common cold, I'd be working to close the doors of our campus at University of Washington Tacoma where we work so hard to support and encourage persistence despite heart-breaking challenges. I would pass out fancy pamphlets that suggest our students just go sit next to trust-fund babies and prep school naifs. I'd send them on a bus to Seattle.

But everyone needs to do more than wish privilege. We, the not-Harvard, need to do better. There are things College Board is now getting right: SAT cost waivers and options for testing during class time is a start. Start with your own barriers and take them down.

There are things all of us not-Harvard could do better: create access, affordability, diverse learning options, shorter time to graduation, reduced seat time, expanded hours for support services, online and hybrid options, flipped classrooms, competency-based curriculum, and richer analytics to prevent conclusions like the above. We can be there for our learners when they fall. We can admit that students going to college now are not the ones of old. 

Oh will you take me as I am?
Will you take me as I am? 
Will you? Will you?

Will you take me as I am? 

More questions than answers in higher education today. 

Let's Talk about Teaching

With Fall quarter speeding at us like a runaway train, our talk will be short but like any difficult moment in a relationship, someone has to sit down and say "We need to talk..."  or vital parts of the relationship begin to die. Figlio, Shapiro, and Soter (2013) did some interesting exploration of the "need to talk" moment regarding the question "ARE TENURE TRACK PROFESSORS BETTER TEACHERS?"


The answer is no, they're not. They're worse. You need to read the study. It's impeccably done. They don't hypothesize on why, but I'll take a crack at that here. I have a not very complicated theory about focus: where we put our energy is where we see meaningful results.

Tenure-track colleagues are torn. Teaching, research, service. The interesting question is whether this vortex of tensions affects learning in measurable ways. Northwestern suggests it does, and in stronger ways for more struggling learners.

This confronts a theory of mine that students know what grade they will receive when they enter a course. I watch students choose a lower grade (not retaking multiple attempt quiz, not making requested changes to a draft paper, not turning in assignments, not doing optional assignments...the list is long). They choose their grade, based on a history I do not know. Sometimes this comforts me. Not my fault! Other times, I want to change their history.

The article suggests my hypothesis is only partly true: yes, the best prepared students aren’t affected by teacher. An A student will still get an A, perhaps the same with B students. I can choose what I teach them, but I can't make them learn. I can make it more engaging, I can choose my content, I can create meaningful assessment of learning but I will still watch self-selection of effort and grade happen.

Where it gets interesting is where Figlio, Shapiro and Soter (2013) suggest that teaching matters in much larger ways:  "While we find that the best prepared students at Northwestern appear to perform about the same regardless of whether their first class in the subject was taught by a non-tenure line or tenure track/tenured professor, the estimated positive effect of having a non-tenure line faculty member is present and strongly statistically significant for all other groups of students.” (p14)

The political and economic decisions being made in higher education regarding the balance of tenure-track and teaching-track, tenure and non-tenure, full-time and part-time? That's not my conversation. When it's evident that the decision affects student success, we should start talking. About teaching. Even if it's a hard conversation.