EdX finds a way around SJSU Philosophy Department's Principled Stand

From Community College Spotlight, which asks a question that we've all asked more than once around the blogosphere: "Is Online Learning for Steerage?"

Apparently the SJSU Philosophy Department's principled stand on EdX's course doesn't matter because--surprise!--EdX found a way around it:

Provost Ellen Junn said nobody had told the philosophy department to use the Sandel course, however several professors said they felt pressured to offer it. Peter J. Hadreas, who chairs the department, “said that administrators had now arranged to offer it through the English department, reinforcing his concerns that it would be taught by professors who are not trained in philosophy and would be especially reliant on the edX materials.”

Nice to know that disciplinary content doesn't matter to some administrators when free and shiny courses are involved.

In K-12 news, students in Louisiana were surprised at being signed up without their knowledge for the for-profit courses (called Course Choice) offered by the private company FastPath Learning.  FastPath offers a free tablet for signing up, and you don't even have to pass the course or turn in the tablet at the end.

Pop quiz, since we are being MOOC-like today: Where does the money for FastPath Learning courses come from?
a) the already limited funding for classroom teachers
b) administrative savings
c) all the high-tech bigwigs promoting it

Bonus question: In all likelihood, the EdX philosophy course will be "facilitated" or whatever glorified tutoring option is available by
a) tenured faculty who have already said "oh, hell no"
b) part-time faculty who fear losing their jobs if they say no

In the MOOC tradition, you can score these answers yourself.

Short blogging break and some MOOC articles

Travel and a research trip, about which I'll write later, but for now, a couple of thoughtful posts on MOOCs:

An article on the MOOC business model by CUCFA President Robert Meister:
http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php

Sample: The educational Commons you propose is one in which the private owners of instructional platforms like Coursera will appropriate without exchange profitable information that can eventually be used to determine how much rent can be charged for access to the “Common” based on our personal, demographic, academic, and income profiles. (For this purpose you could correlate our unique user identity and online performance with other databases in existence or yet to be developed.) The free educational “Common” that Coursera’s business model promises is already programmed to be enclosed as private property. Your eventual entry fee can be dynamically priced (like airline tickets) to reflect the changing levels of student optimism or desperation about the future on which your long-term marketing strategy relies.

"Is College Moving Online?" by Nathan Heller at The New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_heller

Sample: “I was surprised at the outcome,” David W. Wills, a professor of religious history at Amherst, told me. “It seemed to come down the road as something that was going to happen.” Wills started out being open to moocs, he said. But the more he heard the more his concerns grew, and none of edX’s representatives seemed able to address them. “One of the edX people said, ‘This is being sponsored by Harvard and M.I.T. They wouldn’t do anything to harm higher education!’ What came to my mind was some cautious financial analysts saying, about some of the financial instruments that were being rolled out in the late nineties or early two-thousands, ‘This is risky stuff, isn’t it?’ And being told, ‘Goldman Sachs is doing it; Lehman Brothers is doing it.’ ” The language he heard from edX, he said, was the rhetoric of tech innovation—seemingly to the exclusion of anything else—and he worried about academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star professors. “It’s like higher education has discovered the megachurch,” he told me.

He and others worried about what this might do to smaller preachers. “I have to say, it turned my stomach to think that we were going to be making decisions about other people’s jobs in a discussion to which they were not party,” Adam Sitze, a member of the department of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst, told me. “Some very brilliant people are at institutions that are not wealthy.” In a meeting, one of Sitze’s colleagues, the political theorist Thomas L. Dumm, described the conveyance of moocs to weaker universities as “eating our seed corn.”

And from earlier in the article:

“I could easily see a great institution like Harvard having a dynamic archive where, even after I’m gone—not just retired but let’s say really gone, I meandead—aspects of the course could interlock with later generations of teachers and researchers,” Nagy told me. “Achilles himself says it in Rhapsody 9, Line 413: ‘I’m going to die, but this story will be like a beautiful flower that will never wilt.’ ”

Comment: There's a thin line between immortality as a beautiful flower and immortality as an undead zombie that eats the brains of the living.   

MOOC 'n' Bake

I recently listened to Jane Maas's Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond. One of the entertaining stories she tells (and they're all good) is about what happened when the people who invented Shake 'n Bake in the 1960s tried to introduce another product. (Apologies to Ms. Maas if I get the details wrong here.)

Shake 'n' Bake was wildly popular. What's not to love about seasoned crumbs that you can put in a bag, shake up with chicken, bake, and eat? It was not pretending to be fried chicken, but it was easy (and in the 1960s, cooking for most families was all about easy) and kids would eat it.

In other words, it was what it was: easy to fix and tasty. The results could be replicated in any kitchen. It was a hit.

But then someone thought, "Hey, why don't we make a product with batter so that it can be like real fried chicken? Wouldn't that be even better?" They tested this extensively, selling packets that would become batter if you added water, and debuting the finished product in focus groups. It tasted great, so they went ahead.

Then they rolled it out into test markets, where it sank like a stone. Why? The focus kitchen product tasted great. People liked it. Why wouldn't housewives buy it?

Turns out there were several reasons. First of all, who wants to knead raw chicken in a bag of goopy batter and watch said batter slide off the chicken parts? Second, if you didn't fry it in the right temperature of oil, it was a soggy mess. Third, it had an unfortunate tendency--well known to any of you who've added wet anything to hot oil--to whoosh into a fireball. The fireball thing kind of put the kibosh on the product, which was quietly deep-sixed.

In other words, only under the exact right conditions could this superior product be created. It could not be repeated en masse or by just anyone. It was a failure.

I think there's a lesson here.  There was hype, and enthusiasm, and a limited report of success that depended on a lot of conditions that couldn't be replicated in ordinary circumstances. If MOOCs are Shake 'n' Bake--and that can be good, and MOOCs can be good, for particular purposes--why are others trying to make them be fried chicken, when that requires more expertise and special preparation?

I thought of this when reading WaPo (h/t, as seemingly always, to Jonathan Rees) with this line from Eric S. Lander: "But MOOCs such as his might offer some professors elsewhere a chance to spend less time preparing and delivering lectures and more time working hands-on with students."

My question for the day: would the MOOC superprofessors be willing to reverse the roles? Would Eric S. Lander be willing to spend all HIS time "working hands-on with students" after having having the creative portion of his class outsourced to a MOOC? What if he's doing the tutoring instead of the lecturing? What if he has to spend time listening to someone else's lecture and referring to it when he goes into class to work with students? 

If there's a true commitment to MOOC principles, shouldn't there be turnabout in who's driving and who's riding shotgun? 

NY Times Q: "Is Cursive Dead?" (A. It's very sick!)

The New York Times has weighed in with one of my minor obsessions, cursive handwriting and poses (not, for the love of God, begs) this question: "Is Cursive Dead?"

Answer: Well, yes, kinda, sorta.

• There's an education expert who uses "impact" as a verb and says he personally doesn't use it, so it sure is dead.  
• An archivist who doesn't want it to disappear. 
• An occupational therapist that says brain science (true!) shows that it helps develop portions of the brain. 
• A handwriting expert that says a hybrid works just as well. 

My take?

• Pro: It helps with brain development, and it reaps a more useful benefit than Baby Einstein videos. 
• Con: On the other hand, teachers have enough to do. I'm not in the K-12 trenches, so I'm not sure that I get a vote.
• Pro: As far as cursive becomes elective in the schools, it'll become a status marker, like languages or other such "useless" knowledge. The ruling class will know it, and by those markers will know each other. The grimy proles like the rest of us will not. If we are working on increasing class stratification in this country by educational methods as well as by redistributing wealth to the top 1%, this is just another step in the process. 
• Addendum: I am still befuddled by how hard this culture says it works to develop everyone's brainpower and potential yet how loudly it howls whenever anyone is asked to do anything but the bare minimum of learning, saying that people are learning "frills." Since when can learning anything not about the Kardashians be considered a frill? 
• Con: The argument "we haz the shiny things now and we type instead of write" doesn't cut much  ice if you need to handwrite something, but that can be taken care of by printing, mostly. 

Conclusion: I like cursive handwriting aesthetically and intellectually, but I can't make a case that everyone needs to know it or teach it. They do need to know how to read it, though, which one of the experts says can be done in one hour with no followup. 

Your thoughts? 

NY Times: MOOC Press Release or Reporting? You decide.

At the New York Times, we learn more about "the future of education." Hint: It's not live instructors in live classrooms.

And on Wednesday, San Jose State announced that next fall, it will pay a licensing fee to offer three to five more blended edX courses, probably including Harvard’s “Ancient Greek Heroes” and Berkeley’s “Artificial Intelligence.” And over the summer, it will train 11 other California State campuses to use the blended M.I.T. circuits course.  

Dr. Qayoumi favors the blended model for upper-level courses, but fully online courses like Udacity’s for lower-level classes, which could be expanded to serve many more students at low cost. Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash-strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction.

Comment: Never enough money for instructors; always enough money for licensing content from a private provider.

But students will have access to live tutors in Mountain View :

The online mentors work in shifts at Udacity’s offices in nearby Mountain View, Calif., waiting at their laptops for the “bing” that signals a question, and answering immediately.

Comment: Mountain View for now, until it's cheaper to outsource them to another country. I predict they'll be outsourced within 3-5 years, just as accounting firms, software companies, radiology practices, and other professional firms have moved their basic reading/preparing/customer service tasks to India. Remember, this is a for-profit business, not an educational institution.

Near the end, an acknowledgment, of sorts, that some naysayers are trying to rain on the parade:

Any wholesale online expansion raises the specter of professors being laid off, turned into glorified teaching assistants or relegated to second-tier status, with only academic stars giving the lectures. Indeed, the faculty unions at all three California higher education systems oppose the legislation requiring credit for MOOCs for students shut out of on-campus classes. The state, they say, should restore state financing for public universities, rather than turning to unaccredited private vendors.

Rhetorical sleight of hand #1: Is there any part of the "specter" that isn't a real threat? Yet calling it a "specter" pokes fun at those possibilities as irrational fears instead of what is an actual business plan--star professors, glorified tutors, and all of it.

Sleight of hand #2: There are those professorial thugs, the "faculty unions,"  again, wanting to restore state financing instead of, I don't know, giving the money to for-profit companies and dismantling the university system into the bargain. Translation: "they" want to cost you, the reader, money in the form of hard-earned tax dollars, and they don't care about those poor "shut out" students, as "we" do.

Sleight of hand #3: "They say" that, do "they"? See that rhetorical move? The MOOC cheerleaders in the article are the right-thinking people who believe that "students come first," the implicit "we as readers," unlike the union thugs, the "they."

But who cares, right?

And if short videos and embedded quizzes with instant feedback can improve student outcomes, why should professors go on writing and delivering their own lectures?

Sleight of hand #4:  "Delivering their own lectures"--as if this is the sum total of teaching. First of all, WHO LECTURES IN THAT WAY any more (in the humanities, anyway)?  Second, this confirms that the business model is to break the profession of teaching into discrete tasks, assign one superstar, outsource the grading and tutoring to drones, and boom, you're done.

Now the extra credit question:

Are MOOC providers going to hire their own graduates--for they will have graduates, now that they have accreditation? I keep asking this, and I keep being deafened by the silence.

And an extra credit comment (h/t to Jonathan Rees)  and also a link to a prior post:

Percentage of MOOC professors who think that students completing a MOOC should not receive credit at their institution: 72%.  

Writing Inspiration: William James, Epic Procrastinator

Oh, William James, you speak for all of us.  He should have written a book called Seven Slothful Habits of Highly Effective People.

From Slate: 

He was hardly alone in this. William James was another chronic procrastinator. He told one of his classes, “I know a person who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up a newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation—simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests."

The only reason he's poking the fire is that the internet had not yet been invented and there was no way to watch Henri the cat. (Or *cough* no way to surf Slate and write a clip-heavy blog post.)

Then again, there's the Spanish Inquisition of motivators: "Our chief weapon is surprise--surprise and fear."  

Obviously, procrastination can be productive in its own way.The Stanford philosophy professor John Perry is a proponent of structured procrastination, or avoiding doing your most important tasks by dealing with less pressing (but still worthwhile) items lower on your to-do list.

That's one approach. But I think many artists needed to procrastinate simply to ratchet up the pressure, whipping themselves into a state of near panic that, while bad for the nerves, is pretty good for the work. The playwright Tom Stoppard has noted that the only thing that really gets him to write is fear—he has to get “frightened enough to discipline myself to the typewriter for successive bouts.”

Almost spring and almost semester's end

Bardiac has it right: this time of year, we are all busy going to more receptions than Queen Elizabeth in garden party season. We are grading papers and meeting with students as though we all were MOOC superprofessors who had to meet with students and grade. This time of year can make people act out, as with a recent email fusillade that was addressed to, but wasn't really directed at, me per se but at others who had annoyed the person.

It's the time of year when I overheard a student (or student-aged person) say this in Starbucks the other day: "Yeah, and I'll teach them 'Columbus sailed the ocean blue' in whenever it was." She was not kidding, and the fellow student nodded in agreement.

But it will soon be over, and now it's spring, for real. I see flowers, and they're not surrounded by snow.  When I walk, I can smell the trees flowering and the fresh pine chips or mulch that people put around their bushes.  Further out, I can smell that odd combination of pine trees and pine needles and dust that only occurs when there's a dry patch (a few days without rain) in the summertime. I can hear the birds even when the windows are closed.

And so when I went out for a walk/run today, I deliberately put the fusillade and a couple of other recent irritations out of my mind and began to think about that loveliest of topics, the writing house.

At a professional gathering recently, I talked to someone who had visited a famous author who had a writing house on the lawn in back of his/her house. Of course I said "Tell me more." It wasn't large, I learned, maybe about 8 x 8' or 10 x 10', more of a shed than a Michael Pollan-style house. It had rough shelves, and a chair, and lots of books, and electricity. It sounded wonderful, and on my walk I starting trying to figure out if I could actually save up and get one, or at least a garden shed that would be a writing shed in disguise--more George Bernard Shaw writing hut than Dickens's writing chalet.

I don't know why this particular fantasy of having a writing house, which is about as likely as unicorn dropping by to spirit me off to Narnia, is so persistent. Maybe it's the idea that you can walk to the end of the garden and let the rest of it disappear for a while. With the academic world and the end of the semester pressing in, it's a whole lot more pleasant to think about than anything else.

Life after tenure

Dr. Crazy has written about life after tenure, and nicoleandmaggie would like more people to chime in, so here goes--in bullet points for easy Saturday reading:

• To be honest, life after tenure is a lot like life before tenure, except with a lot more service. I was working hard before, and I'm working hard now. The level of work didn't change except that I was expected to do more service and serve on more committees after tenure.
• I was happy to get tenure and didn't feel let down, as many people writing at The Chronicle apparently did. On the other hand, I try very hard not to think myself into a Peggy Lee song, because that could easily take over my life. 
• Like Flavia, I still fund most of my research and conference travel myself. I have never taken a vacation that did not involve visiting family or gone to an exciting place that wasn't related to conference travel. That sounds sadder than it is--I've gone to some good conferences in fun places--but that's the reality of an academic life. It's like K-12 teachers spending their own money on school supplies, only writ large.  If you don't want to do extra teaching or whatever to spend money on your career instead of on yourself, academe might not be for you. 
• I did not take the advice of some senior colleagues*, who said that they never read another teaching evaluation again after getting the tenure letter. Nor did I follow the advice of colleagues and online folks who said "now you can get a hobby." Honestly, most of the hobby-like things I can think of to do (except for riding bikes/running, etc.) aren't as much fun as the research I do. Do reading history (popular histories like Drew Gilpin Faust, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Daniel Howe, Simon Schama, etc.) and blogging count as hobbies? If so, I've got two. 
• The biggest difference was that I realized that yes, it would be possible to hunker down and stay at associate professor forever, but that I chose not to do so. Technically, I do not have to work these long weeks or spend money on conferences instead of vacations. There'd be a hit to performance evaluations, but in an environment with no raises for years on end, what's the incentive to keep working hard?  Personal pride, that's what, and the sense that you want to keep teaching better, writing better, and making a difference. 

*I've read about this on the interwebs, not any place I've worked in a long time, I hasten to add.

Updated to add: For a scientist's view, check out http://mineralphys.blogspot.com/2013/04/life-before-tenure-versus-life-after.html. 

Writing inspiration: thinking more like a writer

I was thinking the other day about two writing posts: Sisyphus's post about Dr. Seuss's hats and one by Natalie Houston over at Profhacker about thinking like a creator (no link; I already spent 15 minutes too many fighting with the Chronicle's search feature and not finding it). In the last six months or so, I have started to think more like a writer.

By "think like a writer" I don't mean someone like Joyce Carol Oates, who clearly must write 3-5,000 words a day, or the cool folk who get published at McSweeney's, or the writers on the sidebar. I don't know what their thoughts are.  In interviews they tell us a little about what their processes are but not necessarily how they conceive of themselves as writers.

Instead, it's more like this:

• I need or want to work on this project every single day and will neglect other things (hello, student writing! hi there, department reports!) to give it room in my head. In other words, even if I'm staring at a screen or leafing through a book or seemingly not doing much, it's still writing, and it doesn't mean that I should stop and do something that someone else wants me to do.
• I have gotten back on the wagon with 750words.com, Scrivener, and all the rest and am now on another streak after travel knocked me off the one I had going before.
• I have trained myself to think about the project first thing every morning and try to get some words down right away. If it's in your head in the morning, it stays in there for the rest of the day, even if you're folding laundry, and you can often get good ideas that way.
• Same holds true for not wanting to start: if I force myself to start taking notes or revising and editing what I wrote previously, new ideas start emerging and I can't wait to get to the real writing.  That's the consequence of writing every day for a long period, I think. 
• When I see a writer on Colbert or Stewart, I am no longer filled just with mild envy--"she's published another book"--but with an immediate rejoinder--"and so will you, if you get your act together and finish this one, which is this close to being done." 
• When I read a bad book not related to work and think, as I did a few weeks ago, "I could have knocked this one out in a weekend" (and trust me, so could any blogger), I think "well, why don't you try, when you're done with this one?" This is, I recall, how James Fenimore Cooper wound up writing the Leatherstocking tales after someone raved about Jane Austen, so maybe there's hope. 
• It seems there's an in-the-book zone, when everything I hear seems part of some larger connectedness that can tell me something about the book. Yes, this is how Area 51 and JFK conspiracy theorists get started, but it's pretty benign if it's about your own writing, isn't it? 
• Other issues that would usually occupy some brain space (MOOCs, jobs, undermining humanities, gender issues, and all the rest) are getting shunted aside in a major way right now because I just want to write. 

And I just want to be done, even if Stephen Colbert's bookers aren't going to call me any time soon. 

At The Chronicle: Anne Trubek on quitting after tenure

A long time ago, I read Sara Davidson's Loose Change, a memoir of the 1960s. What I was supposed to learn from it, I think, was about the excitement of radical movements during those years and feminist empowerment--consciousness-raising circles and all that.

What I actually took away was that people in those days could quit, drop out, or do any damned thing they felt like doing, and there would be someone or something to pick them up afterwards: plentiful jobs, more jobs than there were applicants, seemingly;  a network that would allow the main character, with just a phone call from one of her parents, to go to Europe and work as a translator in Italy; and a generous system of social service benefits that wouldn't let them fall into poverty.  They could change the world--or at least the upper-middle-class white women in the book could--because the world was going to support them financially no matter what they did.  I realize that that's probably not true, but it has a truthiness to it and seems true, given what Davidson describes.

I don't think I really envy that generation, but I did think about it when I read Anne Trubek's  "Giving Up Tenure? Who Does That?"  over at the Chronicle. Trubek's article is cheerful and upbeat, and she gives a lot of examples of people who've given up tenure and are the happier for it.

Trubek is right: people should be able to give up tenure and do something else, if they want to. I love my job and wouldn't quit, but I don't get the "Academia is a Holy Calling" idea where you're a failure if  you want to go into another line of work--or, more self-righteously still, owe it to all those not hired to stick it out even if you're miserable, as one of the commenters suggested. A tenure-track job is work, not a life.

And it's an  increasingly unattainable one, given the job market, as William Pannapacker and others, including the Slate columnist, have pointed out.  There's a prevailing idea or myth in every single one most* of the articles about this (and it appears in the Slate column): the job market in these stories always peaks just before the author went on the market and crashes spectacularly just as she looked for a job.  But if you look at the MLA's numbers, it's been bad since the 1970s, with a couple of blips upward, and that doesn't even include the crash dive it took in 2008. And as Jonathan Rees points out, MOOCs aren't going to make the situation better.

My point, I guess, is that giving people grief for quitting tenure, like giving them grief for taking a non-academic job, is head-shakingly misguided. This isn't Sara Davidson's 1960s, when safety nets abounded. People who take those risks ought to be applauded for their courage, not excoriated for Abandoning the Sacred Banner of Academe.

Your thoughts?

[Updated to add: I just read Historiann's post, which presents the other, darker side of the 1960s coin.]
*See William Pannapacker's comment in the comments section.
[Updated to add: And Kathleen Fitzpatrick didn't quit for good, despite all the publicity in Trubek's article. She's now a tenured professor at Michigan State after her stint at the MLA. That doesn't invalidate her thoughts about the terror of giving up tenure, of course.]

Tech talk: essay commenting software--do you use it?

In reading the comments about the automated grading software EdX is now promoting, I learned about a few new essay commenting software programs--not for automated grading, but programs to help with inserting comments.

I've written before about Markin (which I tried a few years ago but don't use any more) and about using autotext in Word, which I do. Autotext lets me explain things like apostrophes without extra typing so that I can spend more time on the substantive comments. My comments are customized to what I've seen students do and contain explanations that I've written myself. Also: it's free.

I usually use Word for earlier papers (so that I can insert explanations) and iAnnotate on the iPad for the later ones in a course.

Disclaimer: yes, I know about the research that says that commenting on grammatical features doesn't do any good, but if you comment on comma splices, etc., do you use these programs? This isn't a political post; I'm just curious. I don't use any of the following programs but wonder whether others do.

• GradeMark, which is apparently connected to Turnitin.
• GradeAssist, which is a set of prefab comments that you insert in Word. 
• emarkingassistant, which was recommended in earlier comments. 
• EssayGrader for iPad.

Your thoughts?

• If you use them, are they worth it?
•  Do they help student writing? 
• Do they make grading the essays easier?
• What program do you use that's not listed here? 

Cry Wolf

Over at Profhacker, the solution to a mystery:

On January 25, 2013, I began tweeting about what was supposed to be a routine commuter flight from Washington-Dulles International to my home in Charlotte, North Carolina. My tweets grew increasingly frantic though, as I began detailing an emerging,mysterious disaster. Over the course of the next few days I continued this narrative, which eventually wound up with my interrogation at the hands of a strange foreign agent. And finally, after four days of such tweets, following the release of a murky video to my family, my Twitter account disappeared. Poof! I was gone. 

Of course, the whole story was made up.

I had seen some of the early messages on Twitter, and I had been worried--worried enough, anyway, to check various news sites to see if there was other news confirming this, and worried enough to mention it to Spouse. Since I don't know Mark Sample, the internet prankster, in real life and didn't see other confirmation, I concluded that others, whom the writer did know, would take care of it. I still wondered about it, though.

Stupid me. I was worried about a person, another human being whom I thought might be in danger, not realizing that I was part of a War of the Worlds-type  prank. People aren't accountable on the internet. I was stupid for worrying that something bad was unfolding, even though all of us have seen plenty of bad things unfolding on the internet with early intimations being posted to social media.

The writer is now outraged that other people have picked up on this story: some who were, like me, worried, took it upon themselves to find out what really happened; others have hacked into his account and continued it. It's all apparently a form of performance art.

But it made me think.

• Does each new form of media bring with it a kind of credibility on the part of the medium--or, if you prefer, a stupid naiveté or credulity on the part of its readers-- until their trust is violated by enough Onion-style news or pranks?
• How long does it take before you read everything in a new medium as just more faux news on the internet? 

Something about this story bothers me, but aside from learning valuable lessons (1. Ignore Twitter. 2. Ignore Twitter. 3. Ignore Twitter), I can't quite figure out what it is.

Your thoughts?  [Edited to add: I had taken this down but a comment on the other post convinced me to put it back--thanks, Stacey!] 

Edited to add: here's a link to the #OccupyMLA hoax, otherwise known as more pranksters wasting the time and patience of everyone on a serious issue so that tweets about genuine injustices will be ignored next time when people believe it's a hoax: http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/occupying-mla/45357

All three of these hoaxers dressed it up in theory-speak and tried to spackle it  over with pretensions to doing something useful, but this is the same juvenile mindset that makes 11-year-old boys put firecrackers in mailboxes every 4th of July.  I don't see why we should either excuse it or trust the perpetrators.

3/15/21 Edited to add: Eight years later, and I've purposely never read any "scholarship" that the prankster bros have written. Once bitten, twice shy, indeed.

Random paragraphs of internet controversies

1. The "Mrs. Degree" controversy:  You can read a reasoned approach to this at Historiann's. As I understand it, a woman who went to Princeton and is now getting divorced regrets that she didn't marry someone from her cohort there and urges young women not to repeat her mistake. 

Yes, this does sound like advice from 1953. I have more faith in young women, though, than that they'll heed this advice, first because they're sensible, and secondly because who ever heard of a college sophomore who wasn't the smartest person on the planet, much smarter than any Woman of a Certain Age?

Seriously, though, this is disheartening. 

2. They've perfected the automated university.  

a. First, you eliminate the professors, or "content providers" (h/t Jonathan Rees):http://chronicle.com/article/Under-California-Bill/138235/

b. Then you get grading software, which is much better than any professor except a SuperMOOC one. Here's the best part: 

Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better than at most schools. “Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world." 

See how that works? The hierarchy of quality goes like this

1. Prestigious institutions. 
2. Grading software. 
3. All other institutions (the "real world" where the "level of pedagogy" is by implication not so hot). 

c. What's missing? Essay-writing software for the students so that they won't have to write the essays that no one will read.

Robot grading and the real student essay

As it always seems to do just before The Season of Heavy Grading, the issue of robot grading is making the rounds again.  Alex Reid has a thoughtful post on it in which he points out that what we mean by machine reading and human reading are two different things. What we want from good writing isn't merely a correct sentence--the "Hitler discovered America in 1315 and published it in the Magna Carta" stellar writing that the machine grading programs love--but something that shows an awareness of the rhetorical complexity beneath expressing something worthwhile. You know, something that shows human thought behind the words.

Let's leave aside for a minute the kinds of tasks that promoters want robot graders to do, including high-stakes testing that determines students' futures. I want to know what the robot graders are going to do with these kinds of papers, which I've gotten plenty of over the years:

• The Adorable BS Artist paper.  Adorable BS artist is that charming and very bright student who writes beautifully, but because her busy schedule doesn't always allow time for actually reading the text, the essay she produces is a lovely, airy souffle without any actual content in it. Adorable BS Artist will often reassure you that she's never received less than an A on a paper in her life, and you can see why a work-weary high school teacher would be dazzled by the sentences.  But excellence in college writing demands more than that, and if you point out the difference to her early, she can develop into a really good writer, one with substance as well as style.   If Adorable BS Artist puts in a date or two, though, the robot grader will never know the difference, and she'll never learn to think.
• The Patient Plodder paper. Patient Plodder's paper is almost painfully correct. The sentences are correct. But there is not one idea in the paper, not one, that you have not talked about in class, and there is absolutely no evidence of the writer's original ideas. Yet it is correct, it is of the required length, and it throws in a date here or there. Patient Plodder believes that she should receive an A because "there's nothing wrong." But "there's no there there," and a human grader would point out the difference between "nothing wrong" and "not enough right." Would a robot grader do this?
• The Icarus paper. The Icarus writer has tried, really tried, and has put herself out there in terms of assertions. Parts of the paper are near-brilliant. Parts of it are a train wreck, in part because the writer has overreached and in part because she doesn't know how to integrate quotations without making a mess of them. If you're a human teacher, you help her sort it out and nurture the brilliance. If you're a robot, you melt those wax wings and let her fall into the sea.

By the way, here's a helpful tip for students: if your essay is being graded by machine and it's not long enough to get full points, copy and paste it again into the essay box. The machine will never know the difference, and you'll get full points!  Win-win!

Leaning in

All the posts about leaning in (see Flavia & nicoleandmaggie) have me thinking about this more than reading the Time article did.

Two things have resulted, one less than positive and one more positive:

• After reading about Sandberg's schedule, which is timed to a fare-thee-well with nothing that I would recognize as leisure included in it, I now feel deeply and incredibly guilty if I am not doing something productive every minute. Watch House of Cards with family? Guilty. Reading blogs and puttering around the house in between grading discussion posts instead of powering through? Guilty. She is a shining beacon of reproach to me every day. I'm sure this wasn't what Sandberg intended, but it's a real effect, so I'm reporting it. 
• On the positive side, after turning down a number of administrative opportunities, I've said yes to one after being asked, in part because of the women in positions of power thing that Sandberg talks about.  I turned them down, by the way, not because of the "I'm not worthy" mindset that Sandberg talks about but because they interfered with a greater professional goal that I wanted more. Now that that's within sight or at least hailing distance, it might be time to think of an opportunity that's a leadership role, and yes, all the talk about Sandberg made me think of it that way. 

The guilt should fade, but the position, once finalized, should last, so I would call that a net positive effect. 

MOOCs for Administration (humor at CHE)

Now here's an idea whose time has come: Let's apply MOOC principles to administrators!

Sample:

If the administrators cannot compete and be effective online, then it’s time to get out of the way for the people who can. After all, no student ever thought it was worth $55,000 a year for time in a room with a particular dean or vice president, but we might be able to convince them, at least for a while longer, that the educational experience of the classroom is worth it.

Not only would putting administration online cut costs and raise profits, it would also cut down on wasted faculty hours at meetings. We faculty could log on and follow administration online, just like the students in MOOCs log on to learn. And like MOOC students, if we didn’t find the administrators entertaining or educational enough, we could stop logging on and just become freer agents in the marketplace of knowledge.

Job skills 101: don't be rude

Northern Clime is in a friendly part of the country, and it's been a long time since I've encountered real rudeness at the university. I'm still trying to figure out what to make of a mild little incident that occurred the other day.

I was at a remote campus site to participate (watch, really) by videoconference in a day-long workshop. I've been at enough of these to know that the usual drill is go in, make a little polite conversation with whoever shows up in the conference room, and pay attention. Everyone there has signed up for it, so you can assume that we're all colleagues of one kind or another.

I enter the room, and, as the senior person there (judging by my being older, more professionally dressed, etc.), give a friendly greeting to the two younger women sitting there.

"Hi.  Are you all here for the workshop?"

No answer.

Undeterred, I press on:

"Are you faculty here?"--thinking I'd introduce myself after getting the conversation started.

One smirks. "No."

Without learning a lesson (not used to rudeness, remember):

"A grad student?"

Another smirk. "No." Glares at me and turns away.  The other woman looks a little unnerved and says nothing.

What I think is this: What on earth is your problem? 

What I say is this: "I was making conversation."

And that is the extent of the conversation in the room until Rude One leaves at the noon hour and Unnerved One unbends a little bit.

******

What I don't understand is the thought process of someone like that.  It's not about being a professor and having someone suck up to you (don't care about that) or about my being senior to both of them (though why would you go out of your way to alienate someone who might be able to help you?).

It's about being three human beings in a room for the next six hours, and why would you want to make the room tense with rudeness if you didn't have to? It's not as though we were bumping into each other on a downtown street: there was a context and purpose for what we were doing.

I don't get it. I have had students in the past who seriously wanted to Stick It To The (Wo)Man, and one who actually gave me a Nazi salute (!) to indicate that I was Hitler and she was a Brave Iconoclast.  (Yeah, that was a fun time.) Could that be it?

Or is it that she wasn't a professional like the other people I've met through these workshops and didn't understand how they operate?

Your thoughts?

Work to live or live to work?

Nicoleandmaggie recently asked readers whether they could visualize financial independence for themselves, and Dr. Isis apparently shocked the blogosphere with a recent post about maybe quitting academe and doing something else. To me, these seemed to get at a deeper question: do you work to live or live to work?

Unless you're independently wealthy, you have to work; that's not the question. Maybe not surprisingly, the few people I know who are financially independent in nicoleandmaggie's terms don't seem to regret leaving work one bit. I also don't mean choosing between family and jobs (work/life balance), which has a different set of issues from loving the job that you do. This is basically the Office Space "What would you do if you had a million dollars?" question.

But a lot of people who are fully employed at jobs that would seem to provide a decent salary and job satisfaction would still quit in a heartbeat if they could afford it. This completely unscientific poll includes a lot of the First Person columnists over at the Chronicle, who are unhappy in academe, and the few people I've talked to about this, including nonacademics like lawyers and contractors and architects. They work to live and wouldn't do it if they didn't have to, even if their jobs would seem to be satisfying otherwise. That's not to say that all lawyers, etc., feel like this; it's not about the job per se but about an emotional approach to the position.

I'd define the "live to work" academics  as those who, despite having to work for the money and the frustrations of the workplace, get up most mornings with a sense that what they're doing is important and that there's a contribution they can make by teaching, writing, and publishing--that what they're doing in the world makes a difference.  I felt this way during the many years I was an adjunct, and I feel it now.  It's economically unsound if we feel this way--that's what allows universities to exploit part-time faculty shamefully--yet it's what a lot of academics feel, I think.

Academe is just a job, in a way, yet it's not because it brings up all the Holy Calling issues that erupt whenever leaving it gets mentioned.

So how about you? Work to live or live to work?

(Off-topic) Postwar hauntings: Dana Andrews and Don Draper

Reposted because this is Dana Andrews's birthday. 

This is probably truly not of general interest to anyone except old movie buffs and Mad Men fans, so if you're neither, feel free to skip it.

If you think about a postwar character, a handsome, modern, alienated sort of man, one whose dark moodiness occasionally gives way to a smile that masks an inner sadness, you may think of Don Draper. As I was rewatching The Best Years of Our Lives a few weeks ago, it struck me that the actor Dana Andrews is the prototype for this character.  Like Don Draper, he's a creature of the time he's been born into yet always distanced from it. 

Andrews is probably best known as the detective in Otto Preminger's famous noir Laura, where he's a detective in the Raymond Chandler Lite mode--that is to say, cynical, hardboiled, with a few light wisecracks masking a serious attempt to get at the truth. This film defines the Andrews persona of the haunted man: here, what haunts him is a portrait, but elsewhere, there are other memories that haunt him. 

The part that Andrews pays in The Best Years of Our Lives is that of a returning war veteran whose high status as an officer disappears once he returns. The only job he can get is his old job, as a soda jerk, in a drugstore that's undergone a corporate takeover. He seemed to have everything--good looks, status, a bombshell of a wife (Virginia Mayo)--but now there's no place for him in this world. His skills as a bombardier are obsolete. Earlier, we've seen his PTSD, nightmares of a fire on a plane, a dream that he apologizes for. One of the movie's themes is that no one wants to remember the war, now that it's over, but that those who lived it can never forget. 

Near the end of the movie, Andrews  sits in the midst of an airplane graveyard, surrounded by the junked metal that a postwar world doesn't need.  He sits in the nose turret of one of the junked bombers, hearing the sounds of the bombing missions he made and realizing that he's also one of the nation's discards.

His reverie is broken by a voice from the future: the foreman of a construction crew that's turning wrecks into prefab housing. If he wants to live, he has to forsake the past, abandon his old identity, and start a new life. There's a happy ending of sorts for the film, but that haunted look is there to stay, along with the inner torment that inspired it. 

Sandberg controversy: The preachments of the wealthy

Update: nicoleandmaggie and Flavia (in the comments) have convinced me that I've missed some important features of Sandberg's perspective, so while I'm leaving this post up, you don't need to read further.  

I've been away from the news for a while and missed the uproar over Sheryl Sandberg's book telling women to "lean in," which seems to mean "pay attention to your career and demand more."

Sandberg has a lot of advice spoken and unspoken. The spoken part: (1) be ambitious, (2) support women in positions of power, and (3) ask for power yourself. The unspoken part: (1) be wealthy, (2) have household help, (3) attract a powerful mentor such as Lawrence Summers so that he can help to elevate you above the crowd.

Sandberg says she wants women to be paid more and to teach them to negotiate to do that.  How are we negotiate and "marshal power" in academe, when there are hundreds of people for each t-t job and the humanities are under attack as it is?

I gather Sandberg's book originated in a TED talk, which for all the hype about them seem to go something like this:


What's most interesting to me is that the media is portraying this as a war of women against women--women trying to tear down other women by sniping at their levels of privilege.  I don't care about her feminist credentials or lack thereof, and who's giving out those badges, anyway?

What's galling, I think, is that this is just the latest person of privilege telling the rest of us how to live.

• What about Bill Gates telling us how to reform education by replacing teachers with software?
• What about MOOC providers telling us that our lecturing is bad but theirs is transformational?
• What about Paul Ryan, with a gold-plated Congressional health plan, telling us that "just let 'em die" vouchers will be a good system of health care?

It's not so much that she's a woman, or is or is not a feminist, or what have you. It's that we're getting tired of the preachments of the wealthy explaining why what we do isn't good enough and that our low salaries are our own fault.