So, what business are we in?

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki comments on the rapidly shrinking newspaper readership.  (Yes, the market for my newspaper op-eds is in grave danger, and I am not sure whether anyone cares for my blogs!)  Anyway, in that column, Surowiecki notes that:

Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades—as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago—but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology. In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

Which got me thinking: what is our "business"? I am not referring to the horrible distortion of academe into some kind of a customer- and industry-friendly corporate model.  That is a different discussion for another day.

But, if, suppose, "liberal education, and developing life-long learning skills" are the business that we are in, then shouldn't we learn from the newspapers and make sure that we too don't become irrelevant in a way?  

Look at the parallel: there is a great deal of interest in news reports and analysis and, interestingly enough, there is way more than what we need that can be freely accessed.  Journalists are beginning to complain that while their work, skills, and knowledge are recognized as important, there is no money in them in the web-based model.  In fact, the NY Times itself is so deep in debt that by May it has to raise 400 million dollars.  Of course, the parent company of the LA Times went bankrupt! 

The other day the recently retired managing editor of WaPo (whatever his name is!) was a guest on Terry Gross' Fresh Air.  He said that going by the number of visits to the WaPo site, it is clear that the paper has never had such a readership ever in its history.  The challenge, he said, for WaPo and every paper was to figure out how to translate that phenomenal readership into money.

On a similar note, knowledge, which used to be available in restricted brick and mortar campus environments, is now freely available for anyone who wants to learn.  Want to make cocaine? Want to read the complete works of Shakespeare? You have questions?  The Web has answers! At the rate at which Google is everywhere, it won't surprise me if the company comes up with a neat way to offer a formal education through Google itself!  

Aren't we looking at the same fate that the newspaper industry is facing?

Online teaching and learning is, therefore, an extremely important strategy to avoid the redundancy that we otherwise face.  We might have a few more years left in terms of the system delivering "captive audiences" who will fill the classroom space.  But, that time will end soon.  It is not if, but is a question of when that end will come.  

The liberating Web :-)

So, to give you an example of why I prefer the flexible approaches of the various free tools available over the rather suffocating LMS like WebCT or Moodle ....

I teach an online class this term (GEOG 418).  The syllabus, schedule of tasks, etc, which are the basic contract items with students, are at pages that I maintain at wou.edu.  Here is the homepage for the class.

The discussion questions and the student responses are all through emails--from our respective wou addresses, so that we don't have to be concerned about any spam/blocking issues.  I have a group distribution address for this class--so, students email to this one address (geog418) and we all get the messages.

I have started doing videos to clarify concepts.  These videos I route through YouTube.  I have set up a blog for the class, where I post my emails to the class and the YouTube videos.  Just as any post here in this blog automatically is pushed out to your email addresses, which is how you are reading it now, I have set up my class blog to be automatically mailed to the same geog418 address.  So, it is not that students have to check my blog as well--all they need to do is check their emails :-)

On top of all this, I have also set up the class homepage  such that the latest two blog posts are automatically fed into that page.  So, when you go to this class homepage, you will find the latest two blog posts also there.

The neat thing is that once I have set these up, there is no additional work for me because all these from different service providers work well and automatically with each other.

Thus, I am not sure whether I should invest time and effort to migrate to Moodle.  If there are some serious advantages, please let me know and I shall certainly look into it.

ps: I don't have students also blogging because then I need to provide support for some kind of a "blogging 101", whereas no new learning is needed to read and send emails ....

Educause: “Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009

After four months of spirited discussion, the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community has voted on the, “Top Teaching and Learning Challenges, 2009.” The final list for 2009, ranked by popularity, includes (click on individual Challenges to visit their wiki page):

1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.  
2. Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).
3. Reaching and engaging today's learner.
4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.

The community has spoken. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and contribute ideas from your vantage point on campus to build a network of solutions around each challenge. Do you have a reading or a resource to suggest? Would you be willing to interview colleagues on campus providing a snapshot of how your campus is addressing an issue? Would you volunteer your name as a resource for others to contact to learn more about your campus solutions? In the coming weeks, we’ll use individual challenge wikis to begin organizing content under the guidance of volunteer workspace managers.

In the meantime, visit the project homepage to get the background and find your place in the Challenges Ning network. Then, bookmark this wiki to begin adding your voice to the community.

Source: http://connect.educause.edu/wiki/TLChallenges09

Recession and online classes

Ms. Allen also expects the number of students enrolled in online courses, which two-year and private for-profit colleges have embraced, to rise during the recession. Back in November, the Sloan survey asserted that the high cost of gasoline might compel more people to learn from home. Although gas prices have since fallen, Ms. Allen said she still expects the struggling economy to push more students into online courses for other reasons.

“If you don’t have a job, lowering your gas costs is not your primary motivation for going back to school online,” she said. “Time-wise, you have the flexibility of logging online and taking the course whenever you want. We also see that most of the online learners are older, and there are family issues.” With online programs, she said, “you don’t have to leave your house. If you have a family, that’s going to make things much easier for you.”

If the recession does move more adults into cyberclassrooms, it will accelerate a trend that has been happening since the Sloan Consortium began publishing its online-education reports

That is an excerpt from the Chronicle--my go-to site every morning for news and updates on the academic front.

Of course, the Sloan Consortium has an online agenda.  But even otherwise, it is only common sense that people without jobs--and that number is rapidly increasing--would way prefer to upgrade their academic qualifications from their homes as opposed to rushing around to classes.  They would rather rush around to meet with people for possible job openings.  

Rating faculty becomes easier in the online mode?

The reports at Maryland remind us that as professors put material online, they are leaving far more of a trace than traditional lecturers ever did. In the old days, once a class ended, the chalkboard was quickly erased by the next group, and the scrawlings were gone forever. Now professors are converting their yellowing lecture notes to text on course-management systems, or posting videos of their lecture performances for students to watch later for review.

All of those materials are preserved on college servers. And such data could easily be used to evaluate the quality of the teaching going on behind closed classroom doors, though the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has no plans to do that.

Though the idea of using technology to rank activity is new to teaching, it has long been a staple of academic research.

For decades, scientists have tracked the number of times their articles are cited by others, and such citation indexes have been important for career advancement.

Teaching has had no similar metric—except, of course, for student evaluations. But many people consider those evaluations imperfect measures because students may rate most favorably those professors who are more generous with their grading rather than those who challenge them.

So in an era when colleges are under more pressure than ever to be accountable for their costs and quality, the question arises: Will colleges begin to use technology to help them measure teaching? And should they?

This excerpt from a report in the Chronicle will not help sell online teaching and learning to the unocnverted.

But, at some time, we will have to recognize the fact that there is no "metric" for teaching.  It is an article of faith that those who teach are good at it.  The reality is though we faculty are far from being good teachers.  

I joke around with my students that they should thank their stars that they were not in my classes even five years ago--I know I sucked then compared to now.  Even two years ago!  In California, the first time I taught a televised class, I got a copy of the first telecast, which I asked my wife and daughter also to watch.  I came home and asked them for their feedback.  As they started listing the different things I was horrible at, I remember how awful I felt.  I stopped them after a while.  

Later, when they were asleep, I played the VCR (yes, that antique item!) and watched my lecture in solitude.  I was awful.  Simply awful.  My hands were flailing all over the place.  Every sentence had ums and ers.  I was asking students for their views, but not putting them together to tell a story.  My PowerPoint slides were awful.  There was nothing that seemed ok.  Bloody depressing it was.

Yet, there was nothing in the system to pull me up for the awful teacher that I was (And, after having observed quite a few, I am sure there are even worse than me!)  Do we run any other service with such profound implications where we care not about the quality of the service?  A simple error at the DMV and we are ready to pounce over the separator and assault the person!

Thinking and reflecting about teaching and learning has made me better, no doubt.  I am not sure if I am anywhere near being a "great teacher"; I am just happy I am not as bad as I used to be :-)

I am sure though that it is only a matter of time that society--maybe the goverment--demands that there is a measure of teaching.  It will be neat if we can preempt that.  But, I doubt it.  After all, I am at a university where even the student evaluation of faculty and courses happens only once a year and not every time!!!!!

Virtual professors won't ask for tenure!

Projects like Typealyzer, that I blogged about, are all heading towards that grander idea of Artificial Intelligence. Soon, we will be able to train computers to think like humans, and do a better job at that than we humans can do. (Will computers then also make movies like The Matrix? Hmmm....!)

Today, I headed to one of my regular sites--The Chronicle of Higher Education, and there is a piece on scientists and business leaders getting together to "plan a new university devoted to the idea that computers will soon become smarter than people."

When I read that, my thought was perhaps you folks would want to know about this. Hence, this post. The piece adds:

The idea that gave the new university its name is championed by Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist who argues that by 2030, a moment — the "singularity" — will be reached when computers will outthink human brains. His argument is that several technologies that now seem grossly undeveloped —including nanotechnology and artificial-intelligence software — are growing at an exponential rate and thus will mature much faster than most linear-minded people realize. Once they do, computers will take leaps forward that most people can hardly imagine today.

Finally,

Computers will become better at teaching than most human professors are once artificial intelligence exceeds the abilities of people, argues Ben Goertzel, director of research at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Palo Alto, Cal., a private organization promoting Mr. Kurzweil's ideas.

These new computer teachers will have more patience than any human lecturer, and they will be able to offer every student individual attention — which sure beats a 500-person lecture course.

Sure, one-on-one human teaching will always exceed a computer-student experience, Mr. Goertzel acknowledges, but what college undergraduate gets a personal tutor these days?

Virtual professors probably won't ask for tenure. And Mr. Goertzel sees them as key to expanding educational opportunities, by greatly reducing the price of a high-quality education.

Read the entire piece here.

The personality of this blog

The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

That was the result from Typealyzer. I will leave it up to the readers and participants of this blog to determine how much this analysis is correct.

If you are interested in how Typealyzer evaluated my personality in my regular blog, you will be impressed at how quite different the two personalities are :-)