What need one?

In The New York Times, Andrew Hacker asks "Is Algebra Necessary?" and says it's not. Using pejorative language like "prohibitive," he argues that algebra and pretty much all math is just a major impediment to keep "talented" students from getting a college degree. He supplies worlds of anecdata to support his point: he says he doesn't know any vet techs who need it, for example, although a slew of vet techs reply in the comments to say yes, indeed, they use algebra and other forms of math every. single. day. (For a logical analysis, see Timothy Burke's post.)

Some questions:

1. If math is so inherently limiting and a "barrier," why can other countries succeed at teaching it to students? Is it because they emphasize the work and patience necessary to grasp the concepts and emphasize that some knowledge is acquired rather than innate? Don't successful math classes in this country teach similar concepts of hard work?

2. Hacker cites the tracking system in Germany as an example of one possibility, and indeed it's the system that obtained in this country 50 years ago: "general" industrial preparation in math,  business math, and "college prep" math (algebra, trigonometry, geometry, calculus). That shift would question the gospel that all students should prepare to go to a 4-year college, though, which would be political dynamite. 

3. If we cut out all the challenging math and science classes on the grounds that they're keeping "talented" students away, won't this contribute to the hierarchy where those who go to Caltech and MIT (as he suggests) to be industry leaders have the chance to know all levels of math and the worker bees don't? 

4. In this effort to redefine college by eliminating a challenging subject, I was somehow reminded of this: 

 KING LEAR

Made you my guardians, my depositaries;

But kept a reservation to be follow'd

With such a number. What, must I come to you

With five and twenty, Regan? said you so?

REGAN

And speak't again, my lord; no more with me.

KING LEAR

Those wicked creatures yet do look well-favour'd,

When others are more wicked: not being the worst

Stands in some rank of praise.

To GONERIL

I'll go with thee:

Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,

And thou art twice her love.

GONERIL

Hear me, my lord;

What need you five and twenty, ten, or five,

To follow in a house where twice so many

Have a command to tend you?

REGAN

What need one?

Slacktastically refreshing

Short version of the last couple of weeks: I cooked for lots of people every day, shopped for groceries, picked up and dropped off people at the airport, did laundry, did lots of dishes, and helped to fix a pump.

Instead of going to the gym, I got some exercise by whipping cream, making biscuits, and other labor-intensive activities.

Also: went kayaking, read books, and talked to family.

What I didn't do: any writing at all.

I'm a slacker, but it was refreshing.

Smooth and balky writing

I've been working on a chapter for quite a while now and blew past my self-imposed deadline for it a couple of weeks ago. The substance of the chapter is there, but some of the rationales have been rewritten many, many times. Everything I write seems either blindingly obvious or too inside baseball for the chapter.

And the writing is balky. I know that only horses or animate things can be balky, but this writing is animate, I swear. The sentences lose themselves in a trail of bad writing practices--long "way in which" clauses and nominalizations and passive voice and compound predicates where a single verb would do.  Sentences like "the ways in which the couch is red are as follows"--stuff that sends the reader running for the exit--are like massive balky gatekeepers preventing the reader from getting to what are the really interesting parts.

I rewrite and prune them back, but there they are again in a different form, growing like that plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Since I've worked on this for so long, I started wondering if maybe I'd lost the ability to write graceful or lively prose. I feel like the father in the Laocoon getting overwhelmed by snakes.

But then I had to complete some minor edits on an accepted piece. The prose in there was much better, and to put to rest my worries, the new sentences I wrote were more smooth and lively. The piece didn't fight me. It didn't balk.

So the good news is that I can still do this kind of writing, if I have to. The bad news is that, even with a balky piece, I have to.

A fresh start and a break from rants

I'm starting to feel as though this poor blog is turning into a soapbox from which I continually yell "hey, kids, get off my lawn and while you're at it, start thinking about what you're doing with that new technology."

How did that happen? I like technology. I teach some classes online and do a good job with them. I don't want to get in the position of holding up a banner for The Way Things Have Always Been Done, including handwriting, because mindlessly preserving tradition is not how I feel, yet that's how these posts are sounding to me. They're pushing me into a false corner and making me sound like someone I don't want to be.

Here's the common theme of those posts: I just want people to pay attention to what they're doing when they adopt something shiny and new and to think about the consequences of it more than 5 minutes down the road.  There, I've said it, and now I'm going to shut up about it for a couple of months.

So for a while, you can come here safe from MOOC musings, alarm about the liberal arts, and ridicule of what our new educrat overlords have in store for us this week. (Well, maybe a little of the last will find its way in.)

I'm off to the Land of No Internets soon, so posting will be light anyway. The real reason, though, is that I want to write about something less stressful for now.

Do we need to know ancient technologies, like handwriting?

Tenured Radical has a good post up about one of my favorite topics, handwriting; she'd like to know (1) the reason behind the poor handwriting of the recent generation of students and (2) whether they want us to excuse them for it when they apologize for poor handwriting. I'm not sure that it has gotten worse recently, although I do hear more apologetic murmurs of "I hope you can read my handwriting" than I did 15 years ago.

TR says that handwriting practice was boring (true) but good discipline for undertaking other boring tasks like checking footnotes (also true). However, boring tasks let your mind run free, else why would so many of us write notes and doodle when we're in a meeting? No one's ever going to ask  for the notes, and are you really so fascinated by the meeting that you want to memorialize it in letters?
There's also a goodly amount of research linking writing by hand to learning.

But is writing by hand really necessary? I said here that some people treat it as a ridiculous thing to learn, like powdering a wig, but Bob Zenhausern goes me one better by stating that teaching handwriting is "an insane practice" . Since "pre-school children would figure out texting on their own," why teach them to write on paper? They should be given a keyboard, not a pencil, he continues. [Question: If they would learn texting on their own, wouldn't that be a good reason to teach them something they don't know, like writing by hand, when they get to school?]

 Zenhausern is a K-12 educator, and I am not, so maybe he knows something I don't about the developmental qualities of using a pencil in eye-hand coordination, learning to recognize letters, muscle control, and, yes, TR's discipline. Maybe those aren't necessary; I can't say.

 But here is the equipment you need to type or text: a functioning phone, ipad, or computer and electricity or a solar charger.  Here is the equipment you need to write by hand: a pencil and paper or your finger and a smooth stretch of sand or mud.

That's not a good argument, though, not really, nor is the "you need to be able to write your signature" argument a strong one. We sign things electronically all the time, including tax forms, without using handwriting, and if we stop learning to write manually, why, we can just revert to ancestral practices and sign with an X.

I think that handwriting is the canary in a very contemporary coal mine. Right now we're in the midst of a great dividing process between what some think of as  "frills" and "no-frills" education, where "frills" are coded as old fashioned and "no-frills" are fabulously modern and the wave of the future.

Frills:

• critical thinking (which Texas just voted against)
• a sense of history
• the humanities ('nuff said)
• knowledge of foreign languages and cultures, including ancient languages
• knowledge of multiple kinds of literacies in addition to digital literacy 
• knowledge of literature other than current literature and media
• handwriting
• the arts
• multiple forms of writing, including essays as well as contemporary short forms (texting, tweeting) 
• in-person education with live professors and classes on a human scale with essays or other writing assignments

No-Frills:

• technical knowledge gained for a specific certification or job
• knowledge of digital literacy and present-day popular culture
• independent learning with crowdsourced feedback 
• automated lectures and grading
• texting, tweeting, and other forms of contemporary writing only (no essays)
• multiple-choice tests 

Which frills are we willing to go to the mattresses over? Will handwriting be one of them? 

An economic argument by analogy

Back in the 1960s, after a lot of well-documented studies of abuses in mental health institutions and the warehousing of people within them, there was a push for a more humane system of care. A system of well-funded community health organizations, ample prescription benefits and social services support, and access to trained mental health professionals could allow people to be treated humanely and to lead productive lives.
Long story short: good plan, bad execution. Thinking that if those in need of mental health services had medication, they had no need of support systems (psychiatry, psychology, social workers, and other supports), states took the money, spent it on other things, and gutted the support systems for mental health. The Feds cut back and cut back until now, if I recall correctly, the jail and prison system is the place where a lot of people who could have been helped in other ways now receive care, if at all. Institutions were removed with promises of support, but the support never matched the rosy promises.
Mental health institutions are not universities, and the mentally ill are not students, and there are a lot of other things that don't work as an analogy here. But consider this:
New and equally rosy promises are being made about MOOCs right now. We can all go to Coursera or Khan Academy! Teachers can become tutors--the "guide on the side" to match the "sage on the stage," which has now moved online. Recent articles on getting course credit for these suggest that course equivalency exam mills now springing up and the venerable CLEP exam that's been around since George Washington crossed the Delaware will now give credit.
And so I ask again: how long are state legislatures going to support education--that is, the tutoring and grading that university professors will still be allowed to do in this system-- if students are being "educated" with videos from Famous Professors at Famous Places? How long will they support research? How long before the glorified tutoring goes online, too, and gets outsourced? And, the question no one seems to care about: what happens to a quality liberal arts education in this system?
Dave Barry once said that the cereal ads that tout Froot Loops or whatever as "part of a nutritious breakfast" should really say "adjacent to a nutritious breakfast." If education leaders promoting MOOCs don't want us to see them as "adjacent to a liberal arts education," they need to step up and answer some of those questions.
The only programs that won't be subject to this are the really important, hands-on ones--like football.

The writing process right now

So what's happening besides noticing that everyone seems to have a little promotional tag on their multi-line email signature line these days ("Author of Forthcoming Fabulous Book"), which inspires an emotion that might be fury but is in fact envy?

Here's a little snippet of the writing process for me right now.

Days 1-6. Work on continuing to write a chapter. Be stuck on how this fits with the rest of the manuscript.
Day 7. Get brilliant, amazing, and exciting idea of what to add to hook reader in and connect the dots.
Days 8-12. Write brilliant and amazing transitional hook.
Day 13. Realize that brilliant and amazing hook doesn't work after all. Put it in junk document.
Day 14. Go back to chapters.
Day 15-17. Try to rescue hook because you find it so enthralling.
Day 18, earlier. While folding laundry, realize that hook really does not fit and throw it back into the junk document.
Day 18, later. Wince as you see the word counts for what you've written for the last three weeks. Get back to work.

Happy Fourth! Let's say it with musicals.

Here's hoping that all those without power and with too much heat on the east coast get more of the former and less of the latter.

For some inexplicable reason and contrary to its usual custom, TCM is not showing the most patriotic (or as TR says "bouncy patriotic schmaltz") movie of all time (Yankee Doodle Dandy) today, choosing instead to run the world's longest musical (1776, which runs for about 16 hours, give or take). You can see a clip of James Cagney at Tenured Radical's place. 

In lieu of that, I offer you a different clip of Fourth of July dancing,  "Say it with Firecrackers" from Holiday Inn:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlgAj_29Z7U.


And to think about the two sides of patriotism, this short list of WWII-inspired musical numbers:

1. Yankee Doodle Dandy, as above. They started shooting this movie, which had long been planned, on December 8, 1941, and according to Cagney and the rest, this spurred them on to make this movie good. Do you think that when Cagney as George M. Cohan yells "Everybody sing!" into the camera during the "Over There" number that 1942 audiences complied? How many of the songs in the "You're a Grand Old Flag" (originally, btw, "You're a Grand Old Rag") number would your students recognize and be able to sing along with? Discuss. ("Over There: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYV044H5muI)

2. The scene in Casablanca where Major Strasser's troops sing "Die Wacht am Rhein" and are drowned out by "La Marseillaise." Do you tear up every time you see this scene? If not, are you made of stone? Discuss. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM-E2H1ChJM. Fun fact: "Die Wacht am Rhein" was banned in Nazi Germany.

3. The terrifying side of patriotism: in Cabaret, the young boy singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," all about the future and youth and nature and whatnot.  Then the camera pans past his arm and you see the swastika. Is there a better example of the power of crowds and emotions to inspire people to evil, outside of The Triumph of the Will? It's chilling. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs5bnVoZK4Q.

TL;DR--a student response to paper comments?

I've been thinking about the efforts of e-book purveyors to quantify our interest level in the books we read and had this idea for an invention:  what if someone could build a device or application that could track how students really respond to our comments on their papers?

There are lots of studies on this; that's how "minimal marking" and other trends in grading got started.  But what if we could know what they actually focus on, not through self-report or hand-coding responses based on video, but on real-time tracking depending on where their eyes went on the page?

Let me hasten to add that this ought to be done as an experiment with IRB approval and all that; I'd never advocate this kind of spying on people's reading routinely (although Amazon, B & N, and, as we all found out last week, Orbitz are all ready to do so).  But just think what we could find out:

• Do students, when confronted with a mysterious check mark, pause and wonder what the minimal marking means, or do they skip over it to go to the comment where something is actually written? If you return papers electronically and provide links in the margins, do they click on the links for an explanation? 
• If you've marked up a paragraph to show typical errors and then said something like "can you see other examples in the rest of the paper?" do they actually look at the other paragraphs to see if they made those errors? 
• Do they read the marginal comments or skip right to the end to see the grade? I think most of us as classroom teachers have a well-documented set of cases that say that skip-to-the-end is what happens, but are there times when it doesn't happen?
• I occasionally read comments (laments? bragging?) from teachers who say " . . . and then I added a full single-spaced page of comments at the end of the paper." I guess that's okay if it works for you, but I wonder if they're confusing quantity of comments with the effectiveness  of comments. Past a certain point of writing the end comment, it seems more effective to call the student in and talk with him or her than to keep writing.
• Given the way we've been trained by internet reading to look for short paragraphs, do the students even read long comments like that all the way through? Or if they could, would they write "tl;dr" and stop before you've been able to convey all those helpful hints?
• Another part of this invention: should we structure our comments like those ridiculous slideshows that are oddly compelling and force you to click through to see the whole thing? "Five Good and Bad Things about Emily's Paper: Click here to continue"? 
• Or should we maybe give them a chance to say "tl;dr" in comments to our comments? 

Book hunger

The Wall Street Journal says "Your E-Book is Reading You":

Barnes & Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books.

The privacy issues are disturbing. So's the idea that publishers can predict when readers think to themselves "So bored now! Done with this book!" and can push for killing off characters or shortening books. On the other hand, Hunger Games or Game of Thrones fans tend to gulp books right down. That's one kind of book hunger.

 Except for Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, which I just finished, most of the e-books I read have a grand total of 5 people worldwide reading and highlighting them, although I usually turn off the feature that tells me this. As a result, I'm less concerned than I might be or should be, probably, about the privacy issue. Caro on the Kindle app is a lot easier on the arms than the heavy bound version would be, although the latter would be, as Dorothy Parker would say, suitable for throwing purposes.

 But what e-books don't satisfy is the second kind of  book hunger. I like to look at books on shelves, books I don't own. I like to think about reading books that I don't have. I like to leaf through books and look at unfamiliar print. Near me there's a used bookstore, and I've been looking at it longingly recently while saying to myself, "Stop that! You have plenty of books. Just go down and pick some off the shelves."

That didn't help, though, especially when Bookstore tempted me with the bargain racks outside. So I started cleaning up my shelves, found some duplicates and other books I didn't need, and took them to Bookstore to trade them in.

 Once I had the trade credit, I could indulge my book hunger. I could browse. I could leaf through the books. Ultimately, I could use my trade credits to buy a couple of books.

 Why is that process more satisfying than the 60-second Kindle or Google Books download? I don't know, but it is. I wonder if people who read exclusively on e-devices, especially students, will ever get that kind of book hunger.

New ways to overcharge students for textbooks

Here's a great way to hasten the increasing irrelevance of textbooks:

The college student tradition of sharing or selling used textbooks could come to a screeching halt based on a professor's new patent. That patent would require students to buy access codes with their textbooks to join in mandatory online discussion boards — and failure to participate would mean lower grades.

More from Slate:

On June 5, Joseph Henry Vogel, an economics professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, was granted U.S. Patent No. 8195571, which proposes a Web-based system to make it easier for publishers to make students pay. The system is based around an online discussion board—one that students would be required to participate in. To get access to the board, you would need to use a code provided in the course’s associated textbook. The budget-conscious could still take advantage of used-books stores—but they’d also have to purchase a (discounted) code.

So in addition to being teachers, graders, service workhorses, entertainers, inspirers, and straw men with supposedly fabulous salaries for politicians to beat up, professors have to become unpaid enforcers for the big textbook companies? Are you ready to say"No code? No grade for you!"?

A few thoughts on the "Michigan mishegas"

Historiann recently had a post about the "Michigan mishegas" in which State Representative Lisa Brown was silenced for saying the word "vagina." Apparently Rush Limbaugh can use vile language to attack a woman with only the mildest of rebukes, but a woman naming a body part is well beyond the bounds of what the Republicans call "decorum," which is an entirely flexible concept depending on whether a man or a woman is doing the speaking.

I think they were not shocked but annoyed because Brown had broken the barrier of invisibility. When she spoke up like that, they had to look at and listen to her without the usual protective shield of inattention, and it really irritated them.

 Lots of studies and anecdata show that women don't necessarily get listened to with the same attention as men. How many times have you brought up a good point in a meeting, had it ignored, and heard the same idea praised 5 minutes later when a man said it? (*Disclaimer: Not all men do this, of course, but I'm thinking about the Michigan situation.)

 This goes double for women older than Brown who are at the true American women's invisibility barrier. I don't know the exact age, but at a certain point, women become mostly invisible (ask any older woman about this), and at that point their speech instead of silence apparently really grates. How many times in 2008 did we hear about Hillary Clinton's "shrill" voice (which isn't), her "aggressive" tone (and why is that wrong?), and so on? The pundits and the media were absolutely merciless about that, regardless of her brilliance and rationality. Now that she's Secretary of State, media types are full of praise because she's doing wonderful work that they don't pay much attention to. She's back being invisible--sadly so, IMHO, but still invisible. They don't have to listen to her, which as far as they're concerned is as it should be.

 Tina Fey said something in Bossypants that sheds a little light on the invisibility issue: "I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they’re all 'crazy,'" she said. "I have a suspicion—and hear me out, because this is a rough one—that the definition of 'crazy' in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to --- her anymore." By saying what she said, Lisa Brown made it impossible to see her as "invisible," and let's keep breaking that barrier.

Update on Peer-to-Peer University

Back in 2009, I wondered about Peer-to-Peer University's business plan, which kept prices low by using volunteer faculty:

"While it has yet to get accreditation, the not-for-profit [Peer2Peer University] plans to offer bachelor's degrees in business and computer science using open courseware and volunteer faculty; fees would add up to about $4,000 for a full four-year degree." Uh-huh. "Volunteer faculty." What's not to love about working for free?

This update on P2PU at The Chronicle confirms that, yes indeedy, there were a few glitches in getting faculty with mortgages and lives to work for free:

When plans for P2PU were announced, in 2008, the idea was to have well-known professors moderating the discussions, with graduate students serving as tutors and grading papers. But finding volunteers to keep the courses going has been a challenge, the organizers admit, and the push recently has been toward transforming courses into "challenges" that require little or no mediation by outside experts.

P2PU has developed a modified alternative, though--sort of a MOOC lite, with badges and students teaching each other. It seems to depend on social networking to put like-minded learners together to complete "challenges." That's intriguing, because the gamification of learning is something that's being much touted these days, and completing challenges sounds like an interesting way to approach some topics.
But as Jonathan Rees of More or Less Bunk points out, expertise (Ph.D.-holding professors) ought to count for something: peer-to-peer may work for a book club, but what about getting at the hard questions or unpopular topics that sometimes are necessary for really understanding a subject?

Of Mad Men and MOOCs

Of MOOCs: Once again, with the UVa mess, we have a group of privileged people who presumably reaped the benefits of face-to-face higher education in the humanities anxious to ensure that others do not receive the same benefits (go read the links at Historiann's or IHE). Once again we have wildly enthusiastic cheerleading with no critical analysis from the Masters of the Universe at the WSJ:

This challenge can be met. Over the long term, online technology promises historic improvements in the quality of and access to higher education. The fact is, students do not need to be on campus at Harvard or MIT to experience some of the key benefits of an elite education.

The WSJ and the U.Va. board members cited Head Cheerleader David Brooks, so no surprises there. And this:

Institutions such as the University of Phoenix—and it is hardly alone—have embraced technology aggressively. By integrating online courses into their curricula and charging less-than-elite prices for them, for-profit institutions have doubled their share of the U.S. higher education market in the last decade, now topping 10%.

Aside from showing an astonishing lack of awareness that just maybe traditional institutions are also promoting online courses and maybe, just maybe, have also pursued technological innovation, this is the "if it makes money, it must be good!" school of logic, the kind that says that a summer blockbuster is better than an indy film because it makes more money.
And this:

College X can thus offer stellar lectures from the best professors in the world—and do locally what it does best, person to person.

No one is asking whether College X can continue to exist if it focuses only on high-intensity, high-cost person-to-person classes without the lecture classes to support it. Is a state legislator going to fund those courses in this continuing Great Recession?

Of Mad Men (season 5 spoilers ahead):

• Great concluding scene. Great music.  After the two James Bond music cues, I expected to have him say, "Draper. Don Draper" to the girl at the bar. 
• One parallel between Lane Pryce and Adam Whitman, besides the manner of their deaths and Don's guilt, is that they are both redheads. Should any male redheads on this show worry about their longevity? Or is that any redhead of either sex except Joan, given that the woman Don strangled in his fever dream had red hair (as did Megan's friend who got fired from Dark Shadows)?
• Weiner & co. are paying attention to physical similarities this season even more than before--hence Pete & his virtual twin Beth with their youthful looks and twice-discussed blue eyes.  No wonder Pete fell in love: she's the female Pete physically as well as emotionally. Megan, dark hair and sexy good looks, is a young advertising wunderkind like Don who uses her sexuality to control him. Roger has met his match with Marie  "don't bother me with commitment" Calvet. Is Weiner saying that men can only fall in love with female versions of themselves? 
• Megan tells Don she loves him more frequently than Betty ever did--but it's always in the context of something he does for her.  He gets her an audition: "I love you, you know." Is it just a way of thanking him, or does she mean it? 

(More David Brooks: https://www.chumplady.com/2019/04/ubt-the-second-mountain-the-quest-for-a-moral-life/)

Of Foreign Lands and Places

Traveling to a place you've never been is both lovely and exhausting--lovely because of the food, architecture, and immersion in the past, and exhausting because you have to figure out every single thing, from street directions to how to get train tickets to how to work the faucets, from scratch. What's wonderful, though, is how every tiny thing you manage to do becomes an "aha! success!" moment. Walking down the street and realizing that you actually know where it leads after getting lost a number of times becomes as much a pleasure as figuring out new places.

It's a ridiculously low bar for success, but here's a little context: My family didn't travel, mostly, and when we were growing up we were strongly discouraged from travel because any trips beyond a 200-mile radius from home would surely result in our being eaten by wolves [country version] or killed by muggers and stuffed in a trash can [city version].  I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea: I've traveled a lot since then, but I'm still a naive, not sophisticated, traveler.

This trip was especially exciting because I'd been reading about these places and seeing pictures of the art and architecture since high school. It's a cliche to say that the U. S. is a young country, but when you get money from an ATM that reminds you that the bank was established 700 years ago, it really hits home. Looking down some narrow, empty streets, I kept picturing youths like Botticelli's Young Man with a Red Cap walking around with swords and looking for a fight, a vision inspired equally by history and Shakespeare and Hollywood movies.

To round out this post with one more cliche: it was great to be there, and it is good to be home.

http://youtu.be/DIXZ8SzL1Vo

Quiet for a little while

Due to travel and some writing that needs to be done basically yesterday, I won't be posting for a little while.

Nicholas Lemann on higher ed

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker on MOOCs, with my comments:

Now that we know that either Obama or Romney will be President next year, we also know that, from 1989 through at least 2017, every President of the United States will have had a degree from either Harvard or Yale or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. That could be a three-decade accident, or it may be a sign of something lasting—the educational version of the inequality surge, elevating “one per cent” institutions far above the rest.

Lemann also says that the name schools aren't charging enough, because the social capital that they confer means that people will pay any amount for them.

The top schools, led by Stanford, are now aggressively exploring online education, which they had previously left to the for-profits. This doesn’t mean that they will suddenly start granting degrees online to ten or a hundred times as many students; instead, they are likely to offer a second, cheaper (or even free) tier of education that will only enhance the lifelong value of their traditional, in-residence degrees.

I wondered about this: how could free online education "enhance the lifelong value" of a name-university education? Then I realized that what it really enhances is the brand. The top 20 or so schools are basically in a demolition derby to enhance their brands internationally--hence the MOOC concept.

It's possible or maybe even likely that both sets of brands, once the Ivy-lite brands become more available, will crowd out public education. Stanford degree-holders can run the companies, and Stanford-lite badge holders can run the machines. Public institutions can't even play in that demolition derby because they're too poor to buy the cars for it.

Once I thought of it in this way, the willingness of high-profile schools and professors to cheerlead for MOOCs made sense. A lot are probably motivated by altruism--teaching to the masses--but they don't particularly care about the effect on other universities because they don't have to. They'll still have their jobs and be teaching no matter what.

Lemann also sees (as I do, but he knows what he's talking about) the possibility of a two-tier educational system:

In higher education, the United States may be on its way to becoming more like the rest of the world, with a small group of schools controlling access to life membership in the élite. . . . All those things which commencement speakers talk about—personal growth, critical-thinking skills, intellectual exploration, breadth of learning—will survive at the top institutions, but other colleges will come under increased pressure to adopt the model of trade schools.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/05/28/120528taco_talk_lemann#ixzz1wNcmjO6w

Writing inspiration: keep going

Rachel Toor's article "Bad Brain Days" gives just about the right level of encouragement. You should go and read it, but the gist of it is this: keep going, even if you don't think what you're writing is working. Get it done, even if it's making you momentarily miserable.
Like Toor, I've finally figured out that sometimes, writing is not a joyful act and that sometimes it can make you feel as though your brain isn't working. What's been helping?
.. Recognizing that I'm too restless and energetic in the morning to write but that it's important to do something related to writing--reading, making notes, walking around. Once I'm a little tired, my resistance to writing goes down and I get at it.
--The key is to make something related to the project the first thing I do. If I warm up by reading things related to the project, I stay on task. If I check email or news sites at all, that concentration is gone. Those things are a trip wire to web distractions.
.. Counting, timing, goals, and rewards. Right now I'm excited about the work, but that leads to bouncing all around the manuscript, and that means not getting anything down. So I set the pomodoro time, write down the word count, write down a word count goal for the time, and get moving. It sounds mechanical, but there's something inherently gamelike in seeing if you can make or even beat the word count.
.. As Toor would say, keep at it. Or as another person told London Fog, "There will be good years, and there will be bad years, but it is always going to rain."

Writing inspiration post, Mad Men-style

Don, help me out here; I need to get this thing written.

 Don Draper via Henry V speech from Evangeline Morphos at WSJ:

This day is called the feast of Crispian…
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…
Prepare to take a great leap forward…
Every agency on Madison Avenue is defined
By that moment they got their first car.
When we land Jaguar, The world will know–
We have arrived.

(Shakespeare, Henry V Act IV, scene 3)

"If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation."

"If you think a lot about it and then stop, the answer will come to you." (Don said it better, but I can't recall the exact words.)

"Fear stimulates my imagination."

I'll write a real post soon, once I get the thing written. 

Come the revolution . . . the university could disappear

Maybe Facebook should hire Thomas Friedman to do its ads. His ad for Coursera (h/t Indyanna's comment at Historiann's) column on online education pretty much explains why the 100,000-person online class and the flipped classroom, with local professors as glorified tutors, is the way to go. The comments are good, and they ask the same questions we've all been asking and come to some similar conclusions.

But does a university have any other functions besides teaching students a specific body of information?

• The university is an economic system as well as an educational and social system. If there aren't any large lecture classes, those being the province of the 12 or so online superteachers left in the system once this revolution occurs, what pays for the smaller classes, including practicum classes in things like nursing?
• The university funds innovation, or rather it provides a support system within which researchers can compete for grants and so on.  What will support that kind of research once the professors and the university that supports them are gone?
• The university is also a place where diverse interpretations can be debated and creative thought can be encouraged. It's easy to say that this creativity and diversity of interpretation will be preserved, but simple economics says that if Harvard is promoting its brand via a course in 18th-century poetry for free, "free" will drive out "expensive" and there'll be pressure to adopt one course to the exclusion of others. 
• What'll happen when this course drives others out of the marketplace?  I'm sure it would be a fantastic course, but wouldn't everyone then be trained in the same way, without being able to talk to or question the professors in person?
• We all laugh at the "yellowing lecture notes" stereotype, but are the lectures that are produced and put in the can for these courses going to be updated every semester, as a professor's course would be? 
• Will the badges and certificates (which--sorry-- I keep picturing as being on a shoulder-to-hip sash like the one I wore in Girl Scouts) be accepted by companies by Microsoft, Apple, and Google?

It's hard to be against something that promises education for the multitudes, especially since Andrew Ng, whose 100,000-student class is a prototype, is so earnest and excited about it. It sounds so revolutionary to say "free education for all" or "steal this book" or whatever. How could you possibly want to withhold education from people who want to learn?

But those who are cheerleading for this movement aren't answering those hard questions with anything like the serious approach that they use for other topics.  Do they put on Unicorn Dazzling Rainbow Goggles before they write those columns?

And for the record, I don't think that all universities will disappear. High-status universities will always remain for the Eloi. For us Morlocks?  What's your guess?