On Seeming Contradictions or Maybe Not-So Seeming

Reading Kathleen Megan on education national rankings is interesting.

A couple of quotes from which to develop:

Meotti said the New England 2020 report on educational attainment forecasts a 3 percent decline from 1993 to 2020 in the number of 30-year-olds in Connecticut holding bachelor’s degrees or higher.

and

He said the situation points to concerns that he and other state educators have raised about college graduation and retention rates and about the percentage of students who arrive at college unprepared for college-level work.

and

“The business community is concerned about this,” Kaufman said. “If we are going to be able to pull ourselves out of this recession, we must focus on high-skill, high-wage jobs: engineering, science, math. We need a highly educated workforce. We would be very disturbed to know … that we are not as competitive as we once were in the national rankings.”

Kaufman’s remark at the end of the article doesn’t, it seems to me, point to a set of real solutions to Megan’s suggested problem: a decline trend in percentage of higher ed degrees. But it does, in sentiment, reflect a focus on educational goals that might be expressed as a general “good.” The general good is “high-skill, high-wage jobs” and “a highly educated workforce.” Unfortunately, the relationship between “high-wage” and “engineering, science, and math” and thereby a fix to the recession seems thin and not strongly connected for good conclusion drawing. How, for example, would a ton of engineers pull us out of the recession? Maybe they would but the article doesn’t develop this cause and effect relationship. Maybe lots of highly-educated writers would do the job. Or maybe not.

Another method of coming at the issue of higher ed, degrees, economics, and recessions is to consider “reality.” Currently in Connecticut the political winds are pointing toward actually reducing resources for primary, secondary, and higher education. In New York we have the SUNY Albany situation, which, I would assume, is a general trend across the country, at least in terms of the conditions under which universities and colleges would consider reducing costs. In this context, to lament any sort of reduction in student preparedness, trends in levels of higher ed and access in the United States, and declines in the creation or sustainability of “high-wage” sectors would seem to be irrelevant without an appropriate response.

In yet another Megan article we have:

For the first time ever, enrollment in Connecticut’s public and private colleges and universities broke 200,000 this fall, driven by soaring numbers at community colleges and at eight of the state’s private colleges, including four for-profit schools.

That’s a lot of people going to school. Question: are there enough chairs and classrooms to accommodate this number? If not, more might be built. Or maybe not, as states have no money with which to augment their infrastructure. If not, should more be built so that the required number of “math, science, and engineering” students can satisfy the requirements of their degrees.

Across the country and under the cloud of the current “accountability movement,” teachers and their institutions are required to do more with less, which was “less” even when enrollment was lower. If more students enroll in a particular college, that particular college has to expend more resources to maintain its mission. The pickle is that a particular college or university will not be provided those resources because the additional resources–space, wages, staffing, professional development, overhead–don’t exist or are being used elsewhere.

We could say, “Well that’s just the way it is.” Fine. But, to grumble therefore about the bus in the driveway that won’t move because it lacks a rear tire, and a mechanic is at the moment removing the other rear tire, and then to continue slapping the driver in the back of the head for “going so slow”–none of this seems very rational to me.

The Problem with Solutions is They’re Boring

The last several years I’ve attempted to get students interested in design, urban/suburban relationships, and issues related to human ecology. It’s not exactly sexy stuff when compared to the typical college classroom writing fare, as illustrated in rhetorics and readers: death penalty, drug legalization, gun control. That sort of thing. The death penalty has very much been in the news and people get excited and impassioned about it, but, in the classroom, it’s difficult to develop fresh and impactive perspectives.

I would hazard that most issues come with nuance, but nuance can be boring and even boorish, much like punning when under the influence or during a card game. In his article, Balancing Act: What Can be Cut from State Spending, John McKinney promotes three arguments in support of a cost cutting project. He writes:

Being honest about the crisis we face; building a bipartisan coalition of legislators committed to reducing government spending and creating jobs; and bringing state employee wages and benefits more in line with the private sector are keys to responsibly balancing the budget.

This thesis goes for the throbbing jugular of that cussing giant so often seen in adventure tales. The first issue goes to the image of GAAP, which most commentators agree will reveal the real CT budget mess and hence promote an honest picture of what needs solving. The second issue goes to the image of a “balanced” legislature with equal parts Democrat and Republican (but not Green Party) which would promote “bipartisanship.” The third issues goes to the image of the over-expensive state employee as moocher (I fully disclose myself as one of these cadges).

I contend that these “images” are fads. While exciting, they amount to either herring being dragged along the path or those typical “perspectives” of the out party who always accuses the in party of either having caused all the problems, having ignored the real solutions, or keeping all the marbles to themselves. As the issues with state employee moochers, the author does supply evidence of this grubbing. He writes:

Connecticut’s government has grown beyond taxpayers’ ability to pay for it. In fact, state spending has increased 227 percent since 1980 — rising from $4,400 per household to more than $10,000 per household — while median household income remained relatively flat.

and later

Unlike the state’s private sector, which lost 100,000 jobs during the recession, the public sector avoided layoffs by granting concessions. Still, state employee wages and benefits account for nearly 25 percent of total government spending (more than $4.5 billion annually), and further concessions must be part of any responsible proposal to eliminate our deficit.

There are a couple of issues with this evidence, all, of course, subject to rebuttal. The author does supply the cost of its own employees to the private sector in order to provide comparison. In argumentation, relations should accompany statistics to supply both context and relevance. What is, for example, the percentage of payroll for GM or Apple, Inc and, even better, why and even better why the difference? Secondly, the author fails to define “private sector” or evolve the issue of “entity” in the eyes of government, as “small business” are treated differently than large corporations, and sectors complicate things. A sub-issue here has to do the other “75 percent” question or to payroll as “percentage of gross” benchmarks across the board.

In addition, the author does not develop this idea: “bringing state employee wages and benefits more in line with the private sector are keys to responsibly balancing the budget.” This idea is a garble requiring definition and substantive evidence. Would, for example, lining up state employee wages and benefits be “key” or would it make things worse? Line them up with what, for example, as “lining” would imply similarity that may be difficult to solidify?

While there is debate about the proper application of idioms such as “the devil is in the details” (van der Rohe) or “God is in the detail” (Flaubert?), I generally agree with Tom Condon in his assessment of “the problem.” The problem is in the sewer. But that’s not very exciting. And Jeffrey Thompson’s recent study on infrastructure and tax incentives certainly makes an alternative case than McKinney’s. But no one’s going to build a reality show around “drinking water infrastructure.”

Questions Questions

I’m currently reading Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. One: to prove that new media people read books and skim only when required. Two: for some probing into the question of youth and age. Three: because I like a window into cognitive changes over time.

Why? For one thing, the world in which Franklin grew up is both a fiction and our historical lineage, a thing against which to frame and compare ideas, such as public space and communication technology, and, sure, statements of value and political estimations of authenticity.

As kids growing up in El Paso, Texas, we had to study things like the pilgrims. We made hats, performed plays where native Americans met the English newcomers from overseas, and implanted the impressions of our little hands onto cold plaster and then turned those constructions into ash trays. Such images and the history were alien: we didn’t understand and couldn’t imagine ice storms, cold winters, and the stories of witch burnings and English hellfire. The southwest grew out of a totally different heritage than the one I experience as a fiction living in New England now, but it was Thanksgiving and who were we to question the ingrained, seasonal subjects whose symbols were dry, multi-colored corn ears and paintings of forest-surrounded picnics.

The kicker is this though. As a teacher, I wonder at what my students know and how they know it and what they should know or be able to do, whatever that may mean in context. I wonder, might they be able to read the Nicomachean Ethics at the age of twelve instead of “age-appropriate” matter. And what is the basis of “age-appropriateness” anyway: good science, logic, or fear? At the age of twelve, what did Benjamin Franklin read and how was he able to do it? What does twelve mean?

Why am I reading the bio? Because of that last question.

New Media Website

So, our new media program website is up and running and we’re currently looking to enroll students. We’re also looking for input on the website and other features that might work. Of course, student showcases will go up as soon as relevant. Our first and current extended project is Apartment 9 (a text-based virtual work with graphic interface experiments), which will grow as a concept and is just getting started.

What to do about the season?

This video by Robert Desposada is one of hundreds of persuasive artifacts running this political season. I’ve heard that the cost of all campaigns will run upwards of billions, and yet politicians will claim that they want to run as cost savers, fiscal conservatives, and reformers. The California Ryan campaign might have done better to invest in start-ups and other investments, rather than dumping short term money into a Governor’s job. It’s an astounding phenomenon that would-be politicians, tea-partiers or nor, would seek work in institutions they despise and waste so much money to do so and yet claim they would support the smoke of lower taxes and the diminishment of an already diminished government or, as I’ve been wont to joke, guvment.

Everyone likes the sound of efficiency, reform, and change. But to advance the argument that the Obama administration hasn’t done enough after two years is somewhat ignorant and historically ineffective. Madison, Jay, and Hamilton are light on qualifications for office in their writings about the character of public servants, but I don’t think they would claim that one person might be better than another if those people who ran shared deep commitment and knowledge about the world and the systems with which we work.

As an academic, I’ve lived most of my professional life on the fringe of “public opinion,” as liberal, socialist, commie, and atheist. Because I’m a professor, I have “no clue about the real world,” “have never met a pay role,” am “biased toward the progressive crowd,” and sit at the knee of “satan.”

I really couldn’t give a jot about any of the above, but I am amazed at the litany of ignorance on the air waves and have, happily enough, found sanity in John Dankoski and Company at WNPR as they’ve carefully brought almost every candidate in for questions and debate and have brought a coolness to things unviewable on TV. But the larger climate is soured by waste, tendentiousness, cliche, lazy logic, and a strange impatience by the electorate after so many years of bizarre destruction that can’t be easily dusted away as a “that was then” phenomenon because that’s a dismissal of history and the linger of past influence.

Yes, we can cheer the second amendment (which is, of course, good for the gun business), but that’s not the only amendment in the document that matters, and, like the bible, the whole is being lost to easiest stitch to remember or the most quotable bit.

Those who voted in GW are paying for their choice just as are those of us who didn’t. We have trillions to spend yet on GW’s decisions and that’s real money that people could’ve kept. And the bills will mount on national health care and the schools will continue to crumble no matter how many guns people buy. Beware.

Questions of Fairness and Common Sense

Rob Simmons in today’s Hartford Courant writes: “I’m told that up to 30 percent of state employees are eligible for retirement. If so, then a 30 percent across the board cut is not out of the question. Nor is it unfair. It is common sense.”

This comes in one the Courant’s more bizarre opinion sections, where Simmons and Lamont write about politics in the context of their experience and party affiliations.

The above opinion by Simmons grabbed my attention. It would be more than interesting if those eligible at the college retired because the result of such mass exodus would pretty much render the institution unable to fulfill its mission, which is difficult to do as it is at current staff levels, and the possibility of this slow diminution is actually not so far from reality. I’m cool on the sentiment Simmons makes, although the logic of attributing cuts to common sense is inaccurate. The question of pairing back on government is a serious one but it would involve major study into what aspects of government might be unnecessary or inefficient. That would cost money also.

Tinderbox, Emberlight, Apartment 9: On Collaborative Linking and Learning

In this year’s first iteration of New Media Perspectives, we’ve started a long-term project called Apartment 9. The specific assignment for students can be found here.

For Apartment 9, students are provided proper names to grow inside the world using Tinderbox. The students also know the nouns of the other students in class so that they can call to each other with ideas from one side of the room to the other. “Does anyone have a parrot,” for example. As we’ve just started, these proper nouns are the first pieces of the puzzle. Students develop their places and characters, send me their files, and I add those individual maps to the master Apartment 9 document on my computer. Then, with the air of the screen and projector, we start interlinking the maps, reading sections of text, assessing the potential for links, and traversing the narrative to ascertain how the reader might react if, for example, in one space Slater the Dog is walking down the street and suddenly becomes Slater the Cat sleeping on a jazz club piano after the reader has clicked on a link.

In Apartment 9, bubble worlds, simultaneous choices, and competing figures of speech are permitted.

To lead up to the project, students read hypertexts, built a smart-phone simulation, engage new media concepts, embark on some system interpretation, and were provided some tutorial lessons on Tinderbox and Emberlight. We also introduce useful pattern concepts that help to concretize the often baffling relationship between making something and understanding it as a user. Making an essay for example without really worrying about pagination is very different from composing an essay with explicit visual and tactile references to its structure.

Since we’re dealing with maps and worlds, we developed some pattern principles such as color, size, and spatial proximity. In addition, the more distant a note from another “linked” note, the more spacetime is expanded, like a slow fade in film might convey a big time jump. We also work with container hierarchy, juxtaposition, explicit referencing, natural English work order, visual irony, and a variety of stacking methods. The big question at the moment is how to represent an initial state of a world that could grow for as long as we have CPU with which to calculate it.

We have yet to link in the Monday Wednesday NMP course, but the Tuesday/Thursday people are pretty much done. In moving through the collaborative linking process, which might move the reader from one student map to another student map, or from one voice to another voice, the significance of the Tinderbox/Emberlight relationship is becoming that much more powerful. For example, a student asked yesterday if they could link to an Emberlight note from Facebook. The answer is yes, as each note in Emberlight comes with its own URI. Thus, a student could link to some portion of the Facebook Graph and then provide the note URI in a update or Facebook Note, allowing re-admittance back into the note and to the structure of Apartment 9 as a whole, where every note is a place to begin in the world (at least ideally). This is incredibly powerful, as the web is held together by links and link APIs, and thinkers may want to consider these powerful tools for collaborative work of their own stamp. Conceptually and physically, Apartment 9 could be a container for Facebook and Google, depending how one traverses space to space.

Consider a poet who writes a poem on a weblog and links to a relevant note in Apartment 9 (or to a poem some other writer has placed in Apartment 9). The poem becomes, therefore, a part of that space, and the space becomes a part of the poem, extending the fiction ad augmenting the reality of it.

David P and Trent W visited class last night and watched the students work at connecting their ideas in Tinderbox and were quite taken by this activity, claiming that they wished they’d been able to do this and then watch it all go onto the web for further relationship building. Why? I’d suggest that the power comes from revision and additional ideas that grew as we sought linkage and remediated errors. New ideas came, new link ideas, and fresh eyes could see weaknesses better. They also saw, I think, the pedagogy: Apartment 9 feeds well into the next phase of the course where the floor plan has already been laid for work with Inform 7. We can build further dimensions of Apartment 9 (again it’s a world, a virtual world) in a whole separate vision for constructing digital objects and yet still link them all together with the aid of a web-based z-machine.

Future work with Apartment 9 opens up several learning possibilities, such as work with object-oriented concepts, linkages to other objects, such as eportfolios, Alice games, and a whole host of other potential digital creations, and when Emberlight ventures into the mobile world, things will get even more interesting. Of particular interest will be to fashion search, agent, and navigation principles around figures of speech massaged into prototypes, such that notes that contain elements such as flashback and plot turns take on the attributed of those assigned prototypes and thus can be pumped into sections of Apartment 9 for study and organization.

For example, we have a working prototype called recipes and an agent that finds them. Anytime, therefore, a student writes in a recipe, the note will appear in a separate Tinderbox/Emberlight container, turning Apartment 9 into a tool for cooks.

Interestingly, we have all the problems of world builders: how to organize, what to build, how to keep some semblance of quality, boundary definition, and system coherence. But what will it look like in 5 years?

Do Students Study Enough and the Problem of Achievement

I’m always amazed at how resourceful and smart my students are in whatever area I’m into at the moment. Even those students who self report that they were unhappy in high school show loads of potential. Invariably, however, many of the men and women in my courses just don’t put in the time required to learn as much as possible. And, unfortunately, the “work hard” ethic isn’t as easy to explain or understand as politicians would think. I could always say, “Well, my students just don’t work hard enough” and walk away. One response might be: “Yeah, what are you going to do about it?” My response: “There’s not much I can do about it.” In academic circles, this subject of student success falls under the category of underachievement.

Freshman writing and research courses aren’t that hard. But I would assume that without adequate context, time, and good study habits any college course can be daunting and even impossible to understand. In my second semester Composition II course, for example, I ask students to do research and write papers around three general questions

What is the best way to design urban or suburban spaces to enhance quality of life? What standards should be used to determine quality of life in the city or suburb? What technologies are being used or should be used to enhance quality of life in urban or suburban spaces?

We come at the research process by evaluating subjects against three standards: is a researchable topic substantive, topical, and debatable. This is a matter of information literacy. If a student choses to go with transportation, they must prove that the subject is debatable, topical, and that lots of people are engaging the issue. Transportation is a go and would fit nicely inside any of the research questions blockquoted above.

Megan Balduf’s article Underachievement Among College Students published in the Journal of Advanced Academics in 2009 provides substantive reference to studies on underachievement that pose different questions:

In previous studies of collegiate underachievers, both motivation and goal valuation were key factors in determining why students were not succeeding. In a recent study, Hsieh, Sullivan, and Guerra (2007) found students whose GPAs put them on academic probation (below a 2.0) had goals that were counterproductive to academic success. These poorer performing students were less likely to search out assistance in reversing their underachievement (Hsieh et al., 2007). Shim and Ryan (2005) found that students who valued mastery—mastering the content regardless of the academic gain—had higher motivation, while performance-avoidance—shying away from challenge and situations that could result in failure—related to lower motivation. Underachievers tended to have lower motivation and difficulties dealing with stressful situations and challenges (Preckel, Holling, & Vock, 2006). A study of Turkish collegiate underachievers found that the majority of participants (67%) had low motivation and a slightly higher percentage (69%) had issues with preparing for their coursework (Baslanti, 2008). Overall, Baslanti’s study found that students who had previously experienced academic success encountered situations in college wherein low motivation contributed heavily to underachievement. (278)

Balduf’s study approaches the question of underachievement this way

The purpose of this study was to answer the following research questions. To what factors did first-year college students at an elite university attribute their underachievement, and what interventions or remediation did they feel might reverse that underachievement? (279)

The definition of underachievement Balduf takes for a frame comes from McCoach and Reis

For the purposes of this study, underachievement was defined as a “severe discrepancy between expected achievement . . . and actual achievement” (282)

The results of Balduf’s study, which drew from voluntary participants, are as follows

In response to the factors that contributed to their underachievement, three major themes emerged: lack of preparation for Queen Mary College, problems with time management, and issues with self-discipline and motivation. These themes recurred throughout participant responses in the interviews. (284)

Generally speaking, these results sound reasonable and square with the results of other studies (288). They also fall in line with my own observations and conversations with students when they’re hit with assessments they find surprising or demonstrate through questions and submissions that reflect avoidance of the material. Often students will say, “Well, I got As in all my high school courses” or “I really didn’t need to study all that hard in high school.” And so, some students will admit that they really don’t know how to study, don’t know how to move through a study week, or don’t know how to prepare to prepare for college work, which collapses several issues into the vague admittance: “I don’t know how,” which can be translated to mean: “I don’t know how to sit with a piece of reading, take notes, map classroom discussion into study time, wrestle with vocabulary, and review and revise.” These interpretations snake back into students’ previous learning experiences where “grind stone” habits were never engendered.

A key and murky issue is the problem of motivation. As referenced by Balduf, students who want to learn material regardless of the assessment framework (grade or ability-based) typically do well, as I would assume that the habit of learning is less of a concern for these students than those who are confused about what to do with subject matter. This is not the same a goal problem. A student may have the goal of grabbing a nursing or computer science degree and be unable to learn the material because they’re really not interested in the material or don’t know how to become interested in it or are simply frustrated by the enormity of the work and content. In addition, these same students may be struggling through illness, working a lot to assist their families or just working a lot, or may have long standing behavioral issues. It’s hard to know for sure without being able to follow a student through their lives and observing their problems in action.

It’s typical for me to encounter student work that has neglected basic diligence. Often students have trouble reading assignments, even finding them on my course weblog. It’s often the case that students will submit work that doesn’t reflect the details of an assignment. In these cases, my only option is to forgo assessment. I remind the student that they should review things better and take more time. In many cases, students will simply fall too far behind to take advantage of the pedagogy and will not benefit from catchup, which is sad because all my students are smart enough to do the work.

Withal, I don’t find academic studies on underachievement all that useful as being able to identify and describe a problem is one thing, while deriving a model for solutions is difficult in a national culture that values political gain and tu quoque arguments over providing people opportunities for achievement later in life. We have solid examples and knowledge about good learning methods and frameworks. We know that learning thrives when students have provocative, challenging, and disciplined environments in which to stake their claims. We spend billions on political campaigns, and the rhetoric of those campaigns often has to do with monetary waste. This is the worst sort of hypocrisy. We don’t need to “throw” money at schools. But we should invest in people wisely knowing full well that when students skate through high school (I think they should be reading and debating Aristotle by the time they’re 12 years old), they will hit an entirely different animal in college, which should be a choice, unlike the compulsory early learning grades.

So, do students study enough? The answer is of course not. More importantly, do we?

The “Recovery” Metaphor

The “recovery” metaphor persistent in writings and talk about the US economy is somewhat puzzling, as it would require some explaining about the malady and the expected outcome. “Recover from” and “recover too.” “Recover” would imply that the “outcome” would match some desirable past state or condition. But I don’t think a recovery would aspire to 2006. What about 1995? Could 2006, for example, have been 2006 with clever monitoring of the difference between real productivity on national scales and funny money activity, such as betting on the housing bubble?

During lunch I watched a little of MSNBC and the talk about today’s job numbers. Of course, the talk was all about what the “administration” should do and what this means for Democrats and Republicans and what so and so should do and so and on and so forth with very little concern for much else. I found this as odd as the metaphor of “recovery.”

And, of course, I don’t have much more to add.

Coming Up From Under My Rock

I’ve come up from under my rock to check things out for a moment before squirming back under. That’s where I work.

But what’s up in the open air? Saw a commercial for a company that can’t hire a song writer and so it steals Harry Warren’s That’s Amore’. And there’s something called the Values Voters Summit but no one invited me. It’s a wonderful of example of argument by name or title. The Values Voters Summit. It’s a Summit, a Summit for Values Voters. I took a look and listened to some things I don’t think the speakers really believe. It’s an interesting thing to hear speaker after speaker speak their mind. It’s illuminating. Especially as we head into the deeps of Sir Gawain, where I’d much rather stay.

What was it that Twain wrote:

Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded itself as gold, and was only brass.

and

For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon – laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication,
persecution – these can lift at a colossal humbug – push it a little –
weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to
rags and atoms at a blast.

And so back under the rock I go.