The Education Cycle

Let's look at a typical business proeject cycle. It looks something like this:

There are more complicated models, but this one is nice and simple and covers its bases.

Now let's look at a comparable education cycle. It might look something like this:

It is a problematic model. One might even argue that it is not a cycle at all:

Now it is easy enough to argue that these three images paint a very unrealistic picture of how education works. And the argument would be right. Much planning and work takes place outside the classroom. The instructor has to plan and develop courses, assess themselves and their courses as to what could be done better, and then bring the implementation part of the cycle to the classroom.

In this model, the classroom operates more like the shop floor, tackling one task at a time according to a plan handed down by management. But that is exactly the problem.

The classroom is not the shop floor of learning. It needs to be an active and collaborative process of managing the education of all participants. But, unless we turn the entire process of education over to the students (which, like an anarchist state, is a great idea on paper but not all that practical in actual implementation) we can't just grab a traditional business project cycle as our model for how to develop effective educational systems.

That is not to say business models can't help us think about education. It is just to say that like a good business, we need to be looking at 21st Century high-tech models, not early 20th Century industrial models.

The way we do that is by bringing both development and implementation into the classroom. Which is to say, we plan and develop courses and academic resources that can dynamically adapt to the needs of that particular classroom. Then we build on that. In other words, we need a much more agile approach to education.

The Comfort Zone

One compliant I hear, and have made myself, is how hard it is to get students out of their comfort zone. They will work right up to the edge of what they know and then stop. Our challenge then, as instructors is to pull them out of that comfort zone to spur them on to learn new things and to do better.

The problem is that we so often fail to teach by example.

Much teaching looks like this:

We work hard to pull students into our own comfort zone without ever stepping out of it ourselves.

This is in part down to the somewhat balkanized nature of education, where each topic is treated as a thing in isolation assigned to different departments with different instructors and different agendas. It is also in part because we are usually hired to teach what we know, we are expected to focus on our area of expertise.

But that doesn't, or at least shouldn't, prevent us from stepping out of our own comfort zones. The way to get students out of their zones is to meet them halfway, not to pull them toward us.

By doing so, both instructors and students grow and expand their comfort zones to include more skills and talents and knowledge.

To put it another way, education needs to be about a conversation between educators and students, where each course becomes a practice of finding common ground to move beyond our respective comfort zones so that we can learn and grow as a group and as a community. But it is the educators who half to take that first step out of the bubble of the familiar, not the students.

The Vise of Education

Yes, there is a intentional pun there (in fact, I even spelled it wrong the first time because of that), but what I really mean is this:

Which to the typical student probably feels more like this.

Which is where I would like to begin an extended discussion of the problems of education today and what we can do to work toward a solution. This is the first step in a first draft, expect it to be revised an awful lot. I mean, I've already figured out that I needed to rename the first slide.

The vice of education is important and problematic because it crushes students between two very strong unidirectional channels, while only giving them a single much smaller channel with which to add their own voices to the classroom. This is, of course, discussion, which usually takes the form of student asks a question (or professor elicits a response) which the professor than responds to at length.

In this model, the assignments handed in are not effective channels of communication for largely the same reason that forced confessions are often not admissible in court. From the student's perspective, the work done feels coerced, squeezed out of them for the purposes of the course they are taking.

Of course, not all education is like this, and not all educators teach this way. But this is the model they are saddled with as they try to develop their own innovative solutions and workarounds.

The problem, perhaps, is that for all our talk of addressing student's needs, we really spend far too much time addressing educator's needs (or at least their belief systems). Which is to say, we spend far too much time talking abut teaching, and not enough time talking about learning.

Most new educational resources and technologies still reflect this. They are built on the model of teaching, of imparting knowledge, rather than being built on the model of exploration and experience. For all the talk, those seeking to learn are not allowed to run wherever they want in the museum, they have to follow the path and the narration of the docent. This doesn't facilitate learning, it hinders it, by creating bored students who are not allowed to go in directions that interest them.

Which really sums up the point I want to consider. How do we develop conceptualize educational technologies that are learning technologies instead of teaching technologies? Monolithic data warehouses storing the wisdom of those who came before to be fed to students (aka, any course management software package out there) who will mystically become enlightened by this fodder is definitely not the answer.

NYS Government Adopts Internet Memes

New York State Government adopts Internet memes as the politics of the future. If only they hadn't started with goatse.

Though it would probably help too if they used something other than their own heads to stretch it like that.

I want to know is what are they on, so I can avoid ever trying any of it.

No, really.

They could be doing good, but it is far more important that they argue like spoiled brats whose turn it is to serve the ball. Perhaps it is time they all went back to kindergarten and learned how to share.

New Careers

After the gold digger, comes the gold farmer. A new career for the 21st century.

One thing the article does fail to address is that the companies that manage these MMORPGs consider gold farming to be a criminal (or at least less than honorable) act, because a. ) it may cause them to be liable for taxes on in-game monetary transactions under various national tax laws, and b.) most probably because they don't get a cut.

Though certainly there are many people trying to make a go of making a living off of Second Life.

I confess to being torn between condemning those who obsessively turn something meant for pleasure into a tool for profiting from others and applauding their initiative and pluck.

Although, in World of Warcraft, the problem is lazy players who want the fastest route to power and thus will pay others to play for them, so they can just run-around with a powerful character and whomp things. I have at least one friend who sold their account for about as much as I make in a month to someone who couldn't be bothered to level up their own characters. If this is the attitude they take with them to the workplace, they are in for disappointment. Or perhaps I am just jealous because I refuse to stoop to that kind of laziness. Easier to just write "I pwned this game!" on the cover and never even bother to install it. Cheaper too.

While in Second Life the problem is those who go beyond industriousness to plain greed. For instance, thinking they can sell small plots of land for more than it costs to by an entire in-game region directly form linden Labs. It is one thing to make something wonderful (or even something mediocre) and sell it, it is another to think you can corner the real estate market in hypothetically infinitely expandable game world. (By the way, for those who haven't figured this out yet, when real estate prices go to high from speculators trying to corner the market, Linden Labs builds more land, until the speculators go broke paying rent on the land they are trying to hoard and sell for prices nobody is willing to pay.)

So I suppose the two really are worlds apart in terms of their relations to people trying to profit of them in real life. Though in both cases, I guess I laud those who earn money or succeed through effort and don't have much respect for those who think they can get money or power easily with some seed capital and no real effort on their part.

Hyperbolic

Running around screaming "Aaaah!!! Some of us may be mildly inconvenienced!" does not make good copy and doesn't sway all that many interested parties.

'Nuff said.

Would be funny though.

Student Works

From the comments in a post on Deezen regarding the posting of a student project.

eeeh..Why are third year students around the world doing the exact same thing? No context, no meaning, no function, scaleless…. it could be anything, it could be a toy or a villa or a museum. No thought of the art. No, it has to be enough now!

There there are many things in the long litany of complaints that I must agree with:

• Student works should be shared and commented on in public forums like this.
• Students should be allowed to experiment.
• It is easy to claim something is derivative because it looks sort of like it falls into one camp or another that critics have typed famous architects into or that architects have claimed as their own. Also note that such claims of derivation seem to be a name dropping game. How many times can we drop the name Zaha Hadid? Perhaps the student was actually inspired by some lesser known work of Jungermann. Or perhaps Hadid is as influenced by her tools as these students are.
• However, the point of such encouragement is to allow for a broader base of critique.

So ...

• Buildings have context. Most student projects that get shown off like this are entirely lacking in context. For instance, in the article linked to above, where in Queens could you even put such a thing, and what sort of dialog would it establish with the surrounding architecture? Would it become nothing but a larger version of the Golden Turd?
• Buildings have function. Judging from the interior shots of this structure, the only function the building serves is to create space. As someone asked already, where would you hang the art?
• Buildings, certainly public buildings, need to relate to people.
• Overlooking these factors is not intellectual experimentation, it is intellectual laziness. On the other hand, learning where your weaknesses are and overcoming them is a critical part of learning.

Education is Dead

At least higher education is.

At least higher education in America is.

Just don't tell the marketing department, they'll see it as some new sort of gimmick.

The names have been changed, well, obliterated, to protect the guilty.

Hi,

I'm the editor for __________'s text, and __________ has been forwarding your emails to me. Thanks for contacting him with your question about references in __________'s book. The answer is that we do not include a bibliography with __________'s text, either in the printed or online versions. We only include citations where necessary, which includes the __________ boxes and other examples. We consciously decided against including citations from research as this is an introductory book for undergraduate, non-majors, and we wanted the material to be as immediate and appealing to them as possible.

One of our other introductory texts, __________, has an extensive bibliography for every chapter. This book is designed for a more advanced student, and we thought it appropriate to include references. We can send you a copy of the latest edition of __________ if you'd like to consider using it.

If I'm missing something or did not answer your question fully, I'd like to continue the conversation. Don't hesitate to contact me directly with any additional questions or concerns.

If you don't understand why I'm appalled, you probably don't want to be anywhere near me right now.

Since they have stopped talking to me, I am not sure if they have gotten sick of me, or just figured out it wasn't a research bibliography I was complaining about the absence of.

Tonight

Today I shall buy a large bottle of champagne.

If Obama wins I shall drink it all and regret it tomorrow. Though the giggle fits will be well worth the headache.

If McCain wins I shall bash myself upside the head with it until I reach a mental state appropriate to surviving the next four years, assuming I can maintain consciousness that long.

Either way it is going to be a very interesting next four years. Here's hoping for an administration that causes the editorial cartoonists to all die of boredom.

Politics

As this ever so critical election day arrives in the United States, I am possessed of family members sending me mailings toeing some right wing party line that Obama can't even be President because he isn't a citizen. So I thought I would share some of my responses.

I apologize for not including what I am replying to here, but suffice to say it was mostly brief as defensive as they slowly realized they had stepped on a land mine and attempted to step away from someone who doesn't back down all that easily. Yeah, I get worked up. Though I am always willing to debate the points with someone who proves that have thought about them before opening their mouth. Especially if our disagreements mean we have alot to talk about.

---

Amazing what a little research will get you in the face of a desperate effort by republican pundits (of the bad, extremist, if not fundamentalist kind, as opposed to the more sensible and merely fiscally and socially conservative kind) to delegitimize and smear the democratic contender. Finding Obama's place of birth took me 5 seconds.

And amazing that you are working on the assumption that the attempt at defamation by a politically motivated party must carry more weight than and thus cast in to doubt a simple biographical note from a reliable and vetted online source. Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_obama

The nice thing about Wikipedia at a time like this is that all pages that could be used for political purposes are in lock down and require so many layers of approval for posting as valid and correct that it isn't even funny. It is a response to a few elections ago where opposing sides would deface each others Wikipedia pages in order to spread straight out lies and slanders.

Or are you perhaps looking for a reason to be against Obama? Your last response certainly seems to indicate that you don't want to accept his legitimacy and would rather question the record than the accuser. There are many more perfectly valid reasons based on actively disagreeing with his platform, as opposed to trying to discredit him by subterfuge.

But to answer your question ... simple expedience. To prevent every single quack who stands against them, politicians and political teams do not go providing their personal records upon the request of everyone who asks for them. Otherwise they would face people mounting campaigns to drown them in paperwork requests. Having working in state offices, I have seen this tactic used to harass agencies and politicians. (The best part is when you finally cave, they crow triumph, and then find the supposed closet full of skeletons to be quite clean and in order, just like you told them it was all along.) And note that the request is not for a birth certificate, but a very large collection of records. The point of the demand is not to force him to produce these records, but to make people doubt whether he can even legitimately run for office, thus causing those who doubt to be less likely to vote for him.

Come to think of it, I don't go providing that information to everyone who requests it either. And I have less at stake. And don't forget George W's stance on the topic of sharing information with the public.

Though in good news it is not a storm. Well, it is, but it is taking place in a tea pot, which means the rest of the world is simply ignoring it. Though we are looking kind of funny at the people actively rocking their own boat back and forth while they scream about high high the waves are.

Too many people would rather accept the misinformation being fed them than find the information themselves, would rather blindly accept rather than question and learn, would rather accept messages based on fear and divisiveness rather than those based on a unity that would force them to stand as equals with those they don't want to acknowledge as such. This is why you have people at rallies for McCain and Palin actively calling for the lynching of Barack Obama for being a everything from a communist to a muslim to (though they will never admit to this ... black). Hmmm, actually, I shouldn't say never. Certainly, the two teenagers who were arrested while planning on going on a killing spree murdering black school children while wearing pristine white tuxedos (to better show off the blood one supposes) to fight back against Obama running for office were pretty clear on why they were against him.

It is infuriating and makes me embarrassed to be an American. On the other hand, it is a country where I can freely say they are idiots, so no complaints there. Every place has its trade offs.

The point is that almost the entire campaign against Obama has been based on trying to malign and discredit him, as well as actively deceive and misinform voters. We have had people informed by official looking mailings that the day for democrats to vote has been moved to Wednesday, that college students attempting to register to vote in the towns they are attending school in will be arrested and charged with voter fraud, and a whole slew of other exciting goings on by people who think the end always justifies the means as long as their candidate win.

It is in no way, shape, or form a pretty election. And to their credit, both Obama and Biden are doing an amazing job of just shrugging it off. We currently have a campaign that is about what the democrats are going to do (on one side) and why the democrats are evil boogiemen that shouldn't be voted for (on the other). Admittedly, we have had this for a while, the difference this time is that the Rovian tactics are imploding on themselves and accomplishing nothing. They worked well for the past few presidential elections, but they have pushed too far and youth especially are not buying their message of hating those who are different.

The most positive thing I have seen on the republican side recently is Palin pointing out that campaign clothes are stage props not personal property. Tearing down the facade and pointing out that it is pageantry, not reality. Closest thing to calling it like it is I have heard all election. From either side.

Which all in all is a pity. I want to know who it was that forced McCain to toe the party line instead of just letting go and being himself. McCain was an excellent candidate and politician, at least early on, but what his campaign team has turned him into is not the person we were introduced at the beginning of the debacle. And if he can be that easily manipulated by his handlers do we really want him running the country anyway?

So if you want to buy into the half truths designed to sow discord, be my guest, but if you share them with me I will, simply put, throw them in your face. I don't do misdirection and misinformation (except jokes, then I'm all over it). However, if you want to discuss actual politics instead of cc'ing me on the the chicaneries people attempting to slander the opposition candidates, then there would be something to talk about.

---

Well, from a purely legal standpoint, if it were true, both candidates are statutory citizens, not natural born ones, and thus, if you want to pick nits over words, neither is eligible, which means third most popular candidate, Ralph Nader, gets the office, at least according to the government's own readings of its laws on the topic of citizenship and overseas birth. But a statutory citizen is one who is treated as a natural born citizen even though they technically are not. Thus the word play is obfuscation and not at all useful.

Interestingly the invalidation of the plaintiff's legal claim to those records, or to contest the right for Obama to run, as put forward by his legal staff, is apparently derived from a similar case against McCain, Hollander v. McCain, 2008WL2853250 (D.N.H. 2008), which stated that private citizens do not have standing to challenge the eligibility of candidates to appear on a presidential election ballot. Which, is, of course, it's own can of worms since it implies that the major parties can simply declare their candidate to be a citizen, certainly a boost for Arnie.

But here is the word from factcheck.org, including images of all the documents that are claimed to not exist except when they are being declared to be fakes and forgeries: http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

Of course, the best part is that if you read the Constitution literally, only people who were natural-born citizens "at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution" can hold the office, which means everyone eligible to be President is long dead and we have a problem. The issue in the reading has to do with the placement of the commas, a reading which has perhaps changed over time, but definitely implies something very interesting about that ruling.

However, the people trying to push the issue are muckraking in an attempt to discredit a candidate, not finesse a legal point, and passing their word on without critical commentary discussing the nature of the citation is an excellent way to expand the cloud of doubt, indecision, and uncertainty they are trying to sow. Of course, there are people who have tried to do the same to McCain, but they were also refused. The difference here is that the people behind the purported important question are pushing it in an active attempt to discredit the democratic candidate. Perhaps as a covert way of attacking his genetic heritage of a nice healthy tan? Who can say. They are, however, decidedly not doing it in an idle exercise in legal debate. Claiming that there was no political motivation in your passing it on rings hollow, since it seems you would be aware of the attendant baggage that comes with it. Perhaps not. But then why would you think it a storm? Storms require passion, not something to be found in picking over finer legal points in polite debate.

While exploring this point, I found an interesting bit from a blog that essentially said, if he never took a naturalization oath that he cannot be a citizen, ever (the "ever" bit was important) and every politician who ever supported him, worked with him, or even failed to point this out, should be impeached for treason. From that perspective, and this is the perspective of those trying to make a storm out of this issue, the legal interestingness of the question takes a very deep back seat to the political motivations of those asking the question.

---

Funny how my mom is the only one who can ever seem to remember to discuss politics gently with me because I have opinions and I am not afraid to express them.

The Audacity to Build

BLDGBlog recently ran an article entitled Offshoring Audacity about a conference panel coming up next week of the same name.

Here is the theme:

The specific goal, then, is to discuss the idea that the West has begun "offshoring audacity" – urban and architectural audacity – to places like Dubai, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Beijing, and South Korea.

With some key questions:

The question becomes: How can we discuss all of this without resorting either to chest-puffing nationalism (it's not true, the West is the best) or to a kind of knee-jerk Spenglerian resignation (it's true, the West is over)?

Put another way: Is there really any purpose in celebrating the newest mile-high tower or solar-powered private golf community, as every architecture blog in the world seems to think we need to do right now – or, conversely, is cynicism in the face of mile-high towers really the most interesting or appropriate response?

Note the nature of the discourse, which in spite of the questions still assumes that Western civilization is a dominant force around which the rest of the world still revolves in their attempt to worship and emulate us.

Perhaps the reason there is an increase in audacious architecture around the world is that many people are simply realizing that there is a rest of the world.

One of my pet peeves is history of architecture books that run on for hundreds of pages and umpteen chapters, and have one chapter at the end devoted to absolutely everything non-Western, all lumped together in a mush, including many things that have been subsumed into the Western tradition through extensive contact and interaction. The wording of the essay indicates that not much has changed.

The other countries are apparently just passive receptors to our audacity and brilliance.

One could almost believe that everyone lived in holes in the ground until the Greeks showed up and thought of the idea of the building.

Old hubris leads to more hubris ...

Though here is a nice response from Architecture and Morality. It takes a little wind out of the sails and takes a much more pragmatic stance toward the entire thing. I don't always agree with what they say there either, but I always respect it.

Copy of the Sent 3

I admit, I am sort of posting these in reverse order, as I sort through old e-mail. I think this is the one that started it all. At least I can't find anything earlier, though I know there was. I think the original was just a sentence or two complaining about poorly timed discoveries of policy changes whose nature didn't help anything really.

The problem here is a conflation between intellectual property rights and usage rights. (Somebody find the legal advisor for the faculty union and kick them in the kneecaps for that one ... I mean, just what the school needs: structured balkanization spelled out in the faculty contract.)

By creating content for the school on the school's payroll for the teaching of these courses, the faculty are giving a certain measure of license to the school, which in order to protect copyright should of course be limited to usage rights. But to forbid even usage rights without explicit permission in each specific instance makes it much more difficult to maintain consistency between courses and thus will most probably wreak havoc with accreditation next time it comes around.

Not to mention the issue of something like [course number], where by not being able to copy shells over you are in effect saying I don't have the right to my own content because someone else has been teaching it in the interim.

The to avoid this I would ask the faculty at the next faculty meeting if they would be willing to sign voluntary waivers allowing all faculty to share information with each other in the department openly to ensure course consistency between sections. Furthermore, I would also ensure that there is always an active copy of a version as developed by the faculty of record for that course with documentation on file that the shell can be copied as needed so that new faculty and adjuncts can acquire a working shell when picking up new courses.

Copy of the Sent 2

Yep, continuing saga.

Here I make some assertions of what happened and why. I did not pull these out of the air to justify my reasoning. I was there for the arguments before the policy change was implemented (I was away while it was implemented), and those were the points people were making.

And yes, I did have my knickers in a twist while writing these. Whether appropriate or not. No one likes to be told one week before the beginning of a semester: oh, we don't share course content between faculty anymore, you're on your own for course development.

Since when have I not ruffled feathers? Though I have found it is hard to ruffle feathers of people who are secure in the knowledge they have made a wise decision (even, in fact, if that security is entirely delusional ... it is a matter of comfort, not correctness).

What happened is this.

The school, in order to promote people creating online course content make a rather draconian rule on intellectual property. This was done because the school is severely balkanized and many faculty are firmly convinced that were they to put their content online the school would immediately claim it as their own. (Which in fact, the school could not do unless the faculty specifically signed a contract stating they were signing away their rights.)

The reason for this was that this approach, even though it fosters increased paranoia and creates increased friction between faculty, especially full-time faculty and adjuncts, is because it is much easier to do this than it is for a system so entrenched in its own animosity toward itself to work on effective community building. As such, it was meant as a politically expeditious ruling (a bribe as it were) to get people to sign on, rather than taking the time to work with them to address the underlying issues creating such mutual distrust.

The key problem in the approach is that it conflates usage rights with ownership rights to the detriment of communication, serving the student population, and general effective pedagogy by reducing the amount of contact and sharing of knowledge between faculty.

Being an instructor is not about "mine, mine, mine" but about service to the student population. The same is true of being in school administration.

In other words, from the perspective of placating those who function from a stance of distrust of the intent of the administration and of fellow faculty members, it makes perfect sense, but that doesn't make it good policy. Rather it is a necessary evil because people don't seem to want to do what it takes to establish a sense of community and the corresponding effective communications.

In order to institute such a policy sensibly, it is important that a clearly defined and centralized process be in place to deal with the distribution and sharing of information for the purpose of ensuring content equity and consistency between sections of the same class. This must not rely on faculty scrambling at the last second to contact prior instructors for the right to borrow materials from their shells. Especially since it will most likely occur at times in the year when faculty are not regularly checking their e-mail.

To set the policy with no structured way of navigating through it means we are tossing academic integrity out the window in favor of pandering to paranoia, self-interest, and learning to distrust each other because every faculty member is just a criminal waiting to happen. Which is exactly the sort of thing people should get their feathers ruffled about.

For instance, a simple Excel spreadsheet listing by course of who has developed content for what that is only used to indicate when faculty specifically do not want to share their content, and a simple process (like e-mail reminders once a semester for change requests) to keep them up to date. There should also be standard shells from the faculty of record which other instructors are allowed to diverge from but are encouraged to start with.

If you are the only person teaching course X, then yes, you can jealously guard it all you want, but when there are four full time faculty and six adjuncts all teaching sections of the same course, then such an approach becomes more than slightly problematic.

[A snipped section of discussing just how few people I complained about this to, all listed by name.]

So yeah, it is poorly thought out approach beyond serving its tangential goals and as such I will complain about it. Doesn't mean I don't understand it, just don't agree with it.

Copy of the Sent 1

The continuing saga of what happens when, after being tenured, you forget that adjunct faculty don't have freedom of speech.

I thought I would post some of my original e-mails, so people can see what got me canned. And names have been changed to protect the innocent. This was in reply to another faculty member who sounded a little annoyed (and definitely patronizing) that I would ask for a copy of their shell. I should point out that the course is question, though I never taught it, is one I was responsible for developing and pushing through curriculum committee. So yeah, I was a little indignant myself.

You can tell I go into academic-speak when annoyed.

Moot point. The section was canceled again only about two days after it was opened.

But in fact, I don't think I should be developing my own work. Nor should you. Nor should anyone else. Either people should be working collaborative to develop the course materials, or a faculty of record should take the lead in developing the course materials and other faculty should be expected to toe the line to some degree. I prefer the former, though the latter is bureaucratically easier.

Otherwise accreditation issues involving consistency across sections becomes a nightmare as there is no effective way to ensure consistency of academic quality across sections. Consistency needs to happen in the process of development, not be evaluated after the fact. Such a gap is a grave disservice to the students.

Not to mention, why would any of us volunteer to increase our workload like that, with all of us duplicating each other's work?

In any event, I changed my mind on asking for shell copies from other faculty so that I might instead put my shells out there under clearly indicated Creative Comments Attribution - Share Alike licenses. Which means that a.) anyone else can use my work for their classes without having to ask for my permission (it is implicit in the license), and b.) must do so under the same license.

Because I simply refuse to fear my fellow faculty and treat them as potential thieves before even getting out of the starting gate. The idea of "mine, mine, mine" has no place in a robust educational structure. By hoarding our own works we are compromising a quality education in favor of simple greed and/or paranoia. I just don't buy this individually-tailored balkanization stuff.

And by structuring it this way, the school know has a valid argument on why to never compensate anyone for course development. This is, of course, ignoring the fact that even the meager adjunct rate is roughly 3 times the hourly rate when compared to classroom hours, which is to say or 1/3 for class, 1/3 for grading, 1/3 for development ... check the math yourself if you doubt me ... hourly rate is around $20 for emergency substitution in a class, adjunct compensation rate is around $60 for classroom hour). So yes, you are in fact getting compensated for developing the course as part of the payment for the course. This is also why the credit-free courses often pay different rates based on the expected amount of development required.

Copy to the People

Okay, another chapter on the politics of academe and what I said to lose me an adjunct position at a school where I had previously held tenure for a period of time.

As a recap:
4 -- Copy to the Check
3 -- Open Source College Textbooks
2 -- Copy to the Door
1 -- Copy to the Left, Copy to the Right

I want to make a bold pronouncement here.

Intellectual property rights are bad for education.

Now, let me be the first one to say they are important, and even necessary. They certainly benefit the owners of the intellectual property.

The problem is that they can negatively impact the quality of education.

So let's start at first principles ... what is education? Well, it is the system of educating others, for helping to grow and develop and to give them the knowledge they need to function in some context or another. From the general context of a well-rounded public education to the specific contexts that one finds in Ph.D. programs and technology training programs. (Okay, I can't believe I just put those two on an equal footing in the same sentence either.)

So it is the sharing of knowledge. The knowledge, at least in the dumbed-down super-simplistic model, flows from the instructor to the students. This means that, by definition, education is about the sharing of knowledge so that others can take it and make use of it.

Intellectual property is, on the other hand, about the protection of knowledge, preventing others from using it without express permission of the author / originator. And already you begin to see the problem. Even if, by teaching a class, the instructor has implicitly agreed to allow students to use the knowledge they have chosen to structure in a particular way in its presentation, there is already a slippery slope where students have to worry about what portions of what they have learned they are and are not allowed to use beyond the confines of the originating classroom.

Fortunately, that can be resolved with the original research concept, where students are supposed to go beyond their instructors and further the realm of knowledge, either through day to day application or through the creation of new intellectual properties. It may still be a minefield of legal pitfalls, but at least it comes with a map and a clearly marked exit. (This is only a problem when different instructors give you contradictory maps and insist you use theirs to the exclusion of all others.)

But really, instructors assume students are going to make use of what they are taught, so that is a pretty weak opposition to intellectual property. The problem is that it is only the tip of the iceberg. It is what we see, and what we think of as education. But as with the iceberg, most of what education is exists below the waterline, beyond the classroom.

In order to educate, instructors must educate themselves. They must then document what they have learned in order to educate others. That process of documentation is the point at which new intellectual property is generated.

There are two ways in which instructors can educate themselves. One is by locking themselves away with the works of others and hunting for answers. The other is communicating with other instructors and sharing ideas and works to build something that works.

This is where intellectual property law throws a wrench in the machine.

Although many instructors, at least at the university level, are happy to collaborate on research, they seem significantly less happy to collaborate of pedagogy. Thus you hear endless horror stories from college adjuncts having opportunities to teach a class only to find all three full-time faculty have entirely different syllabi, outlines, and expectations from the course and none of them are willing to share any of the actual course materials unless they are teaching canned courses purchased by the school. This can inspire many an adjunct aspiring to be a tenured faculty member some day to go into private industry instead. Especially the competent ones.

This is a problem.

What it means is there is no quality assurance between sections of the class, no collaboration between faculty to find weaknesses and strengths in each other's work, and large quantities of duplicated effort (every second of which is agonizingly complained about) as each faculty member strives to reinvent the wheel. Practical upshot: Two students taking the same course at the same institution with two different instructors have no guarantee of having the opportunity to learn the same material at the same levels of depth and breadth.

Moreover, with each faculty member striving to reinvent the wheel we find many faculty end up opting for lowest-common-denominator education because there just isn't enough time to do that really good job they all secretly want to do. (Academics are rabid perfectionists, otherwise they wouldn't put up with what they put up with to do what they do.) It also creates dismay among faculty who would like to be spending more time doing research and less time doing course prep. Admittedly, more an issue for junior faculty not teaching things they have taught for 20 years, but those are also the ones trying to establish a publications record, be a good institutional citizen, and get tenure.

So, and I wish I could say this is purely hypothetical, intellectual property rights in the academic setting leads to inconsistent and mediocre educational quality. The places that avoid this are the ones that actively encourage (if not mandate) sharing between faculty.

In order for education to be truly successful, instructors need to actively and freely share their course materials and ideas with one another to ensure consistency across courses and sections. This would reduce their work loads, provide initial support networks for adjuncts and new faculty, and strengthen pedagogy through simple peer review.

Sharing is critical to education. There is no room for "mine, mine, mine" in the pedagogical frame. It needs to be about "we" and "us" and, most importantly, about students. It is not about egos. Okay, the problem is that it is about egos, and it shouldn't be.

The current trends in attitudes toward intellectual property are giving us educators who feel that the resources they have created for learning are tools from them to profit from and not tools to help others to learn. I am not entirely sure the two are commensurable.

This needs to change.

This doesn't mean that faculty members need to do the same with all their research, just with their course materials. Independent research, as well as being a tool to further knowledge, is rather openly a tool for personal gain on the part of the researcher. Otherwise why give up having a life in order to spend all that time on a topic maybe 1% of the world has any interest in, if you're lucky. That works better through collaboration too, but what I am talking about with course materials is open and unfettered sharing, not unlike MIT does with its course materials.

Okay, in my next rant on the topic, I will take a stab at how it can change and some if the ideas we need to think about in order to make sharing palatable for the greedy and the paranoid (alas, a common breed among underpaid, overworked, entirely stressed out academics).

Copy to the Check

Okay, I said I was going to write about my being summarily dismissed for speaking my mind, if a little adamantly, and have been dragging my feet.

Perhaps, in part, because I just lost my steam. Perhaps, in part, because I think getting fired for speaking my mind is a feather in my cap. Perhaps, in part, because there are so many other interesting things in this world. But I suppose that what I want to say is important, and I need to say it.

So allow me to start with an easy one (in terms of not going on a tirade for the next few hours) and make a truly controversial statement regarding education:

Most faculty who say they are not compensated for developing course content on their own time are, to put it simply, lying.

I know, an amazing thing for a professor to profess. But it is, alas, true.

Are they knowingly lying? Probably not. They probably firmly believe this to be true. But firmly believing something to be true doesn't make it so. More commonly it means one is deceived, deluded, or lying to one's self. To put it more gently, it is a self serving argument with no foundation in reality.

Here is how people's mind's work on this topic:

I am getting paid $nn thousand dollars a year to teach. However, this is a salary and is not earmarked out between class time, grading time, and development time. Since this is not being spelled out, and there is nothing elsewhere in my contract specifically saying that part of my compensation relates to developing course content for course, I am therefore not getting compensated for my course development work.

Does anyone see the problem with this line of reasoning?

I hope so.

If you don't, let me give a concrete example. Note that the numbers are intentionally altered to protect the innocent, but they are close enough for rock and roll.

Let's take a woefully underpaid adjunct faculty member, like I almost was.

Let's say I earn $875 per credit hour for each course I teach. That is 15 weeks of a one hour class commitment, but the external supporting work. A meager sum for the amount of work involved, which is usually at least two hours of desk work for every hour of class time, or a minimum of 45 hours divided into 850, means it is under $20 an hour. Not a terrible salary, but certainly low for a professional field inhabited by people whose student loans debts are second only to doctors.

Now, at the same school, as a full-time faculty member, if I am asked to sit in on a class for another faculty member, I will get $25 for that hour, on top of my normal salary. Now, if we multiply that by the same 15 hours, we get $375. So that is $375 for 15 hours of class time, versus $875 for, ummm, 15 hours of class time. So what is that other $500 for again? Said it above, work outside of class, including course development and grading. And that is for lowly adjuncts. The faculty earn anywhere from a little more to significantly more than that.

Undercompensated perhaps, but not uncompensated. A critical difference. It is the difference between doing something for less than you think it is worth versus doing something for free. Being undercompensated may make us feel like we are uncompensated, but that doesn't make it so.

Why is this relevant? Well, when I asked if I could borrow course materials from another faculty member, they lectured me on how I should be doing my own work because they weren't getting paid for developing the course materials, so why should they share them?

Well, ignoring the fact that the course was originally mine before I left said school ...

In any event, all schools should always require as terms of their faculty being hired that

• course development is part of the work they are expected to do and is included in the determination of their salary, and
• while acknowledging that faculty own the content they create, in paying them to create it, the school has the right to chose to share it with other faculty to ensure course consistency between sections.

Though some schools do exactly this already, those are, almost unbelievably, heretical assertions for many faculty at schools that don't. But there is a very good reason for them, and I don't mean because that way the school covers its legal butt. To put it simply, sharing is important to education, in fact it is critical. Hiding your work under a rock and hoarding it to yourself is not an effective way to educate, to learn, or to grow. We will start to address that next time, because, well, that is the entire point of this.

Life Imitates Life

Ouch! Had a knock-down, drag out fight on Second Life that fortunately ended sort-of well last night.

Got invited to a friend's rez-day (birthday) party and things were going really well until the manager got bent out of shape and accused me of having an underage avie in the club.

I should point out at this point that I am one of those weird people in Second Life who has made an avie that is a proportional, normal sized human. Which may seem like an odd statement except when Linden Labs created the system, for some reason they set the default high on avatars to 2 meters, or roughly 6'3". Since there is about 50 centimers of give in either direction that means avatars can range from roughly 4'8" to 8'6" or so. Playing a little more with torso length and leg length and you can get that up to over 9 feet tall. Most of SL is probably at least 3 standard deviations from the mean in terms of avatar height versus normal human height. This, along with the default camera position, causes interesting problems with trying to build anything to scale.

Many people who come on to Second Life, perhaps feeling some odd insecurity about their height, I have no idea, like to crank the height of their avatars. This means that as a properly proportioned 5 foot tall avie, well ... let's just say I don't even have to bend over let alone get on my knees. (Don't get your hopes up, it is meant as a visual, not an offer.) I am actually interested in what makes people want to be giants though.

So, in the face of that, why be so small? Well, there are a fair number of us who really take pride in the fact that we have worked really hard to build an avatar this is humanly proportional and could pretty much walk into the real world as is and nobody would bat an eyelash, or look at them funny (except maybe to wonder why their hair looked all clumpy like that). Many of us have built avies that look very much like our real selves (not me, I confess, my avie looks like one of my college roomieswith a touch of Asian spin added, because, well, she's cuter than I am ... and at 40 she has not gotten any taller, or showed even a fraction of sag *grumble*).

Get me on a tirade and I'll say it's because we don't like looking like freaks. Though more to the point, most of the really tall female avies in the game look sort of like Mattel had decided to do an Amazon line of Barbies. Not a characture of woman-hood I have any interest in subjecting myself too. My avie is 5 feet tall, a B-cup, and I am proud of her. And as with many people in such a position, I don't go changing the appearance of my avatar on a whim.

Anyway, I get an IM from the manager of the club telling me that there are no child avies in the club. And I say that is just fine because I am not a child avie.

Usually at this point the manager says "oh, okay, sorry to bother you then," but not this person. She insists I am clearly too short to be an adult avie and I have to grow a few inches or leave. Well, first off, I am not entirely clear how this is different from being told I have to lose some weight, or change my skin color, or leave. Anyone can not only look at me and tell it is a mature avie, but if it became some big legal issue they could even request that Linden Labs review my entire inventory. I don't even have any child avatar shapes or skins in it.

So I did the expedient thing, which is I moved the discussion over from IM to general chat. Where a.) I quickly found that she was also harassing my best SL friend, who is also short, b.) I got reprimanded by the manager for making the discussion public, when, in fact, the (successful) intent was to get the support of all my friends at the party, who will all attest to the fact that I do not play child avies (it's all about having witnesses), and c.) was reminded how many of my friends are drama queens (sorry, you all, but it's true). I didn't even have time to apologize for creating a row before the birthday girls and the person who had organized the party had teleported out and were sending us all invites to come over to a different club.

Then, apparently, a few people flooded the owner of the previous club with complaints about the manager. Who apparently got fired. Not for hassling me, mind you, but for calling the owner an idiot for disagreeing with her on this. I go off easily when I'm annoyed and even I know better than that.

In the meantime we had a wonderful party somewhere else.

Which may seem like a happy ending, but I do feel a little guilty. I really didn't want to be vindictive and get someone fired. I just wanted them to acknowledge that height does not determine age in the game, any more than how much weight we have on our hips, how big our breasts are, or even our skin color. (Of course, that might explain why people are so long lived in so many Asian cultures ... they never get tall enough to get old.) SL is a virtual world where people get to be who they want. If people want to be normal height they should be allowed, and not have to style themselves to be a freak of nature just to fit in.

I find it kind of disturbing that so many people want to be giant Barbie dolls, but I don't go around forcing them to change just because they are not what I expect avatars to be. Playing by the rules and having someone still tell you that you are not allowed to be who you are is downright insulting.

Copy to the Door

You know, after having been a tenured professor for a period, and then, after some time away returning as adjunct faculty, I overlooked an important point.

Just because adjuncts are accorded intellectual property rights does not mean they are also accorded civil rights. Especially that one involving speech.

The probably didn't like the bit about how hoarding intellectual property instead of developing it collaboratively and sharing it with everyone in the school is inimical to effective pedagogy. All it does is duplicate everyones work load and breed inconsistencies between course sections.

I would be downright enraged if it weren't for the fact that the most energetic response I could muster was "Well, that's going to be inconvenient." Perhaps because it was not only a paycheck, but a meager paycheck that would bring in just enough to allow be to avoid hunting for a real job, or even better starting a new career path.

Yep, yep, you all probably guessed by now that I was canned for speaking my mind about a policy I had issues with. I mean, ignoring the fact that I probably just plain have issues, and my e-mails can be most flame-ridden. Still, no discussion, no counter-arguments, just shut up. Policy should not be questioned and therefore there is nothing to discuss apparently.

I will still be posting my arguments on the topic. After all, I have time to give them even more thought now.

So if anyone needs a firebrand (in the proper geeky sense of effective communication through sniping, harping, bickering, and flaming) who is a social theorist and annoyingly intuitive programmer (don't ask me what I just did, I don't know, it just sort of happened, but it works), you know where to reach me. Looks like my real-life alter ego will be hitting the job boards this week. Well ... next week. I am still wrapping up some summer work this week.

P.S. -- On the intuitive programming. I mean that. I can write code I can no longer understand seconds after I've put it to pixel. It just sort of flows out, like automatic writing. It is usually preceded by my complaining about how finding and easy and elegant solution to the problem, or any solution at all, will be impossible. A little freaky at times. But I only worry when I start to dream as code ... no, not of code, or in code, but as code. Ummm, it's sort of like being an airplane ticket. Not that that probably helps any.

Copy to the Left, Copy to the Right

Had a most interesting if rather galling experience recently.

I had the opportunity to pick up some distance learning courses at a school where I used to teach to offset a little underemployment. All courses I have taught before, one of which I wrote myself from scratch.

So I went into the online course shells and found them blank.

So I did what I did every semester I had been teaching there and asked about having the master shell from a prior semester copied over (usually just an active shell from a faculty of record, though they were getting master shells set up). I was told they couldn't do that without the express permission of the person who created that course, even though one of them was my own course and most probably still quite derivative thereof. This was new. Annoying, but new.

So I complained to the few key people about the apparent poor implementation of a rule, the conflation of ownership and usage right, and the need for departments to clarify and track who does and does not want to share so that no one has to scramble to track down owners (especially if resigned, deceased, or otherwise indisposed). I also sent out e-mails asking everyone who had taught the course last semester or was teaching it this semester if I might have a copy of the course materials for the online shell. My hopes were not high because it was two weeks before the beginning of the semester. How many full-time faculty are answering their e-mail at that time?

The responses to date, though few in number, have been most stunning. A few faculty have actually become offended that I would have the temerity to ask to use the materials *they* had developed for *their* classes. One replied with a bit of jovial condescension that reeks of that academic arrogance that will some day drive me out of academe. And more importantly, my department chair got an angry call from the administration for my having the gall to question the academic integrity of this rule which was not set by the administration, but by the Faculty Association itself. To their defense, I was probably overreacting a little, when it is now one week out and I suddenly discover I have to create three courses from scratch.

My former office mate (old classrooms split into faculty cubicles), who has also taught the course I developed did offer me his copy, but we couldn't find a version of it in the online archives, and others have taught it since then.

This is a large school and the courses are entry level. One of the courses has ten different faculty members teaching sections this Fall. So it is not an issue of one person controlling the course and being jealous of a section farmed out to an adjunct. Moreover, as I noted above, one of the courses I have been refused a copy of is one I created myself and openly shared with any faculty who were teaching it. I would even mirror it on a public Web site so that the information was not locked away in proprietary course management software. It is this last element that really got me miffed.

I should point out that to date no one has replied with any counter arguments to my arguments beyond the administration telling my chair to shut me up, which does not, so far as I recall, qualify as a reasoned response.

So, rather than going on a tirade here, I am going to itemize my arguments over a series of postings. Suffice to say for now it revolves around conflating ownership rights and usage rights and the problem of faculty failing to communicate and share resources in order to ensure academic integrity and continuity between course sections. It seems the school has everyone jealously doing and hoarding their own work, thus increasing the workload of all faculty due to duplication of effort, and selling it to them as a benefit for them, at the cost of both the growth that comes from the interaction of ideas and minds and of the potential quality of education being provided to the students.

Hope that threat is enough to egg you on to read through the rest of the series. It is goign to be mixed with other things. I still have over a week of stuff queued up to post. I've had to step up to twice a day to get through it all.

For my own part, I have stopped asking for copies of the online materials from anyone and am rewriting the courses from scratch (Did I mention I was underemployed this Fall? Okay, and I found an archived copy of my old course that still uses the same texts, complete with all support materials ... which is good because I had to fight tooth and nail to get the publisher to provide me with a Mac-compatible version thereof.) with a specifically stated Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license on all materials. That means my permission to copy the course materials into new sections is inscribed right in the documents, and it means that permission to copy course materials and any derivatives thereof remains with any copies made. May ruffle a few feathers, but it is an approach that has just recently survived its day in court, so I intend to stick with it.

Last time I checked, being and educator is about sharing knowledge. I know a bunch of people who are getting copies of Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten this Christmas. Or maybe The Missing Piece.

Mootly's Taxonomy

Maybe the problem with Blooms is just that it is a list of words. Which then means that the words have to be standardized to have specific and exacting definitions that don't necessarily match the vernacular usage of those words, let alone across fields of study and levels of cognitive function.

I think the killer was the word "apply" which is considered a low-level operations. But think about the following:

• Apply the varnish in long, even strokes.
• You've got to apply yourself to this task.
• I would like to apply for this position.
• Apply the basic principles of sociology to discuss the following scenario ...
• Apply defusing techniques to talk down an armed and distraught husband.
• Apply the current readings on Marcuse to critique Schiller's analysis of the importance of aesthetic and play.

I hope you get the point. Each version requires a different level of function, and different skill sets.

Words in the English language do not always just serve one purpose. To force given words to each mean one thing in defining education only creates an artificial model of meaning that limits and delimits what can be talked about and what qualifies as education.

Neither one is beneficial, and neither one promotes educational advancement.

By the way, in my model, these would be P1/K1, simple encouragement, P1, F2/C2, P2/C2, C2/3. And I'll leave you to read my last post to find out what that all means.