Computers and Education – Page 8

GRAND 2013 Conference

I’m at the GRAND 2013 conference which is synchronized with Canada 3.0. I’m writing my Conference notes on GRAND 2013 here. I’m also tweeting on this under #GRAND2013 and #CDA30.

Jen Jenson organized a great panel on Women and Games with Grace gtz, Anita Sarkeesian, Cecily Carver, and Brenda Baily Gershkovitch.

The closing of American academia

Sarah Kendzior has two challenging articles in Al Jazeera about the plight of adjunct faculty, The closing of American academia and Academia’s indentured servants. She is right to draw attention to this and right to accuse those of us who have positions of being silent. But first, the situation:

On April 8, 2013, the New York Times reported that 76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors – an all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top $160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and receive no health care or other benefits.

Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the poverty line. Some are on welfare or homeless. Others depend on charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.

I suspect it isn’t quite as bad in Canada where we typically pay CAD $4000-$8000 a course and everyone has healthcare, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are depending increasingly on sessional instructors to teach our courses. If you don’t count the teaching done by graduate students I’m guessing that about 50% of the teaching (instructorships) in large universities is done by graduate students or sessionals. (This guess is based on limited and anecdotal experience. Here is one story I found.) The effects of the increased dependence on adjunct faculty are sobering:

We are now in a situation where most faculty are living from contract to contract and being paid little. They have little commitment to the universities that hire them because they aren’t treated well or given a chance to engage over the long term.
We have created a situation where highly-trained instructors are exploited to keep our cushy tenure-track faculty jobs.
We are developing a caste system where a small number of tenure-track faculty have significantly different working conditions and opportunities due to the labour of a large adjunct class.
Full-time faculty have to spend an inordinate amount of time hiring and supervising adjunct faculty.
Students don’t get taught by full-time faculty until the end of their programs, if then. They often don’t know any full-time faculty and they can’t ask for recommendations from any.

I frankly don’t know how we will get out of this mess. The Adjunct Project is making a start by collecting data so adjuncts can vote with their feet and move to where the conditions are better. Perhaps online courses and colleges like The Minerva Project will introduce competition for good instructors and set an example with fair contracts. Perhaps adjuncts will unionize and strike for better conditions as they did at York. Perhaps we should all try merge with the local high-schools where at least they don’t exploit teachers the way we do.

The Cube at QUT – world’s biggest multitouch installation

Luciano sent me this link to a stunning multipoint touch installation at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, The Cube at QUT – world’s biggest multitouch installation. I like how they have the touch at ground level, but the screen extends up.

I note that the Cube folk also have a Lego Education Learning Centre. I’m doubly envious.

Humanities Unraveled – The Chronicle

Michael Bérubé has written an important essay in The Chronicle titled The Humanities, Unraveled. He revisits the question of accepting all these grad students for whom there aren’t jobs and, following an essay No More Plan B by Anthony Grafton, makes the case for graduate programmes designed for alternative careers.

[W]hen we look at the public reputation of the humanities; when we compare the dilapidated Humanities Cottage on campus with the new $225-million Millennium Science Complex thats a real example, from my home institution; when we look at the academic job market for humanists, we cant avoid the conclusion that the value of the work we do, and the way we theorize value, simply isnt valued by very many people, on campus or off.

The alt-ac community poses a timely and bracing challenge to that attitude. It asks us what graduate curricula might be most readily transferable to careers outside academe perhaps curricula that include semester-long internships and/or administrative experience?—and whether those careers will be honored and validated by deans and provosts, who remain likely to evaluate the success of graduate programs in the humanities by their placement rates, which are likely to continue to refer exclusively to placements in academic positions.

I think the time has come to stop talking about Alt-Ac careers as only an alternative and start seriously designing graduate programmes for Alt-Ac first. Why first? Because I think the academy would actually benefit from students prepared for Alt-Ac. So what should we be thinking about?

Despite what Grafton says, we should scale back the dissertation to something that can be written in a year or two. We have to scale it back or be open to alternative dissertations so that there is time/opportunity for other things. We should encourage project driven dissertations and funded dissertations where a Ph.D student is funded by a research team to do their research on the subject of the grant as part of the team. This is normal in the sciences and engineering and leads to faster completion times and healthier interaction between student and team. Imagine working on a thesis other people were actually interested in because it connected to what they were doing? Imagine being funded to complete in a timely fashion?
We should stop trying to protect graduate students from things like internships, other disciplines, computing, and yes … jobs. Instead we should encourage them to try the things they are interested in while they have time. While for many of us the time of writing the dissertation has become an idealized moment of peace and focus before the chaos of a job, that doesn’t mean that is the only way to be a graduate student. Lets encourage students to get breadth along with some depth.
Whether we leave the dissertation as is, we should change how they are supervised to make sure that students get more open and broad support. There are all sorts of healthy models out there that are less feudal. Even if we leave things as is we should expect of ourselves that read the literature (and university policies) about best practices in supervision. To my colleagues who supervise – RTFM!
The trend has been to get rid of Masters programmes and focus on the PhDs. Direct-entry PhDs generate more money, but they are creating a situation where students have no way to test the waters before entering immediately into a stick-it-out-for-years-or-fail programme. I think this is a mistake as a significant MA could be the Alt-Ac degree, freeing the PhD to be the academic extension. Our 2 year MA in Humanities Computing has a thesis that forces students to embark on a substantial project. The two years give them enough time to learn skills and then apply them. Most take a third year either because they are in the joint MA/MLIS programme that gives them the professional degree or because they involved in so many neat projects (for which they are paid.) Most of our students have no trouble getting work even before they finish and it is because the programme gives them real apprenticing opportunities.
We should break down the disciplinary barriers that make it difficult for students to take courses in other department or for students to apply to do an interdisciplinary PhD. Despite the best of intentions, students who want to cross boundaries find they have to do all the requirements for both units. There are all sorts of reasons for this and interdisciplinary escape hatches are expensive to maintain for the number of students that take them, but it should still possible and we should be vigilant to maintain those escape hatches. It would be interesting to imagine more radical approaches (as in accepting students into the humanities and helping them to develop their own programme.)
We should get away from the sacred 3 unit – one semester course. We should encourage shorter intense courses and longer languid ones. I learned Aristotle by taking two solid, but slow years of it with a prof who basically had us think about a page of Aristotle a week. We went so slow it began to make sense as a way of thinking. Likewise I’ve been at intense retreats like THATcamps where I learn a lot in four days. Such short courses can help students engage a breadth of Alt-Ac perspectives without making too much of a commitment.
Comprehensives and other forms of exams should be thrown out and replaced with internships, experiential applications, project apprenticeships or teaching apprenticeships. Lets give PhD students a choice of professional experiences instead of exams. Ask students to embark on 3 projects (from a teaching project to a community-based one) and then report back in different ways. That would give us a much better measure of whether a student was ready to write about a subject so as to make a career of it. Exams just relieve our fears of granting degrees to people who don’t know enough when the problem is we are granting degrees to people who can’t do much.
Make it easy to do a graduate degree part-time. Many of the people who would actually benefit from an MA or PhD already have careers. Why aren’t we helping them expand their horizons and acquire knowledge/skills within the context of a real career? Many of our students end up working almost full time anyway, why not recognize the realities of their lives. We no longer live in a world that can provide a 7 year retreat experience for any more than a handful of students. Part-time students should be our primary audience, not an add on.
Build graduate programs across universities. It is doubtful that universities will have the new resources to be able to start new graduate programs unless we collaborate. We have to find ways to build multi-university programs, as difficult as they are to administer. Properly done they provide students with access to a greater breadth of faculty and experiences. They also give us the capacity to innovate without having to make the case for 5 tenure-track positions in order to start a programme.

All of these may sound too radical, and none of this is original or easy. I certainly wouldn’t want all programmes to change just for the sake of a crisis (that has lasted a while so it may not count as a crisis). Rather, I would like to see a breath of experiments from the alternative to the purist that show that humanists value what they do enough to keep on adapting it for the next generation. Lets relax the reins and give some space to those who want to experiment (or not). It may be that the best approach is one of paying attention to the care of a programme however alternative or not it is.

I should add that I think the term “alternative” is misleading. There should be nothing alternative about careers beyond the academy. Extramural careers should be the norm not the alternative.

Clay Shirky: How to Save College

Clay Shirky has another essay on MOOCs titled, How to Save College. This essay from February 7th is in the Awl. He makes a couple of important points:

The cost of college is going up faster than its value (see graph above that originally comes from here). Costs have been going up 5.6% (in the USA) and the earnings of people with just a Bachelors have been going down 1.6% a year. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get a Bacherlor’s, and I think the graph is a bit deceptive, but the rise in cost of higher education in the USA is unsustainable.
“Things that can’t last don’t. This is why MOOCs matter.” While I am not sure MOOCs are the answer, I agree that higher-education can’t continue as is if the costs continue to go up at this rate. Various forms of competition are cropping up and more will.
Shirky reminds us that for most people college is not the elite residential liberal arts colleges or even the large public universities. It is the commuter colleges teaching 2-year degrees (that people do part-time in many more years.) He could also have pointed out that it is becoming the millions of youth in India and China who can’t get into the coveted university positions, but still want to learn. The elite liberal arts colleges and public universities are not threatened by MOOCs – they will continue to offer an elite education to a minority who can afford the time and money it costs. It is just that cheaper alternatives to college will become how a larger and larger percentage of citizens learn.
Shirky is particularly critical of the defensiveness of academics in the face of change. For Shirky what we do “is run institutions whose only rationale—whose only excuse for existing—is to make people smarter.” We should be open to new technologies and configurations that can do this better or reach a different audience rather than getting huffy and looking for reasons to dismiss MOOCs.
Shirky feels academics shouldn’t be trusted “when we claim that there’s something sacred and irreplaceable about what we academics do.” We are inside the existing institutions and are invested in them. There is a danger that we will get more defensive and less willing to experiment as we feel more threatened.
Shirky also addresses the issue of why all the fuss now when MOOCs and other alternatives have been around for a while. For him it is a matter of perception. Only now are people taking alternatives to the university seriously and that change in perception could lead to all sorts of people trying alternatives.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m less convinced MOOCs will make such a difference, but do think that rising costs will lead to more and more people trying alternatives (of which MOOCs are only one.) The cost issues is also very different outside of the United States in countries that don’t have super expensive private colleges. In Quebec, for example, tuition is below $3,000 a year. Student protests have made it very difficult for governments to raise tuition. It is hard to imagine students choosing MOOCs that cost almost as much once you add all the course fees. Instead MOOCs will probably just be woven into public university education as a way of cutting costs so you will end up with more or less the same education.

The good news is that there is renewed interest in education which is important to education. Even better is that people still want to learn whether through MOOCs or college or reading books. Even if MOOCs turn out to be no better than reading a how-to book we should still welcome any addition to our collective knowledge and learning opportunities.

Lack of guidelines create ethical dilemmas in social network-based research

e! Science News has a story about an article in Science about how a Lack of guidelines create ethical dilemmas in social network-based research.

The full article by Shapiro and Ossorio, Regulation of Online Social Network Studies can be found in the 11 January, 2013 issue of Science (Vol. 339 no. 6116, pp. 144-45.)

The Internet has been a godsend for all sorts of research as it lets us scrape large amounts of data representing discourse about a subject without having to pay for interviews or other forms of data gathering. It has been a boon for those of us using text analysis or those in computational linguistics. At the same time, much of what we gather can be written by people that we would not be allowed to interview without careful ethics review. Vulnerable people and youth can leave a trail of information on the Internet that we wouldn’t normally be allowed to gather directly without careful protects.

I participated many years ago in symposium on this issue. The case we were considering involved scraping breast cancer survivor blogs. In addition to the issue of the vulnerability of the authors we discussed whether they understood that their blogs were public, or if they considered posting on a blog like talking to a friend in a public space. At the time it seemed that many bloggers didn’t realize how they could be searched, found, and scraped. A final issue discussed was the veracity of the blogs. How would a researcher know they were actually reading a blog by a cancer survivor? How would they know the posts were authentic without being able to question the writer? Like all symposia we left with more questions than answers.

In the end an ethics board authorized the study. (I was on neither the study or the board – just part of a symposium to discuss the issue.)

Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics

Open Book Publishers has just published Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics online. Stéfan Sinclair and I have two chapters in the collection, one on “Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community” and one on “Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis.”

The Acculturation chapter sets out the ways in which we try to train students by involving them in project teams rather than only through courses. This approach I learned watching Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker at the University of Virginia. My goal has always to be able to create the sort of project culture they did (and now the Scholar’s Lab continues.)

The editor Brett D. Hirsch deserves a lot of credit for gently seeing this through.

Clay Shirky: Napster, Udacity, and the Academy

Clay Shirky has a good essay on Napster, Udacity, and the Academy on his blog which considers who will be affected by MOOCs. He makes a number of interesting points:

A number of the changes that Internet has facilitated involved unbundling services that were bundled in other media. He gives the example of individual songs being unbundled from albums, but he could also have mentioned how classifieds have been unbundled from newspapers. Likewise MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), like the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence run by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, unbundle the course from the university and certification.
University lectures are inefficient, a poor way of teaching, and often not of the highest quality. Chances are there are better video lectures online for any established subject than what is offered locally. If universities fall into the trap of saving money by expanding class sizes until higher education is just a series of lectures and exams then we can hardly pretend to higher quality than MOOCs. Why would students in Alberta want to listen to me lecture when they could have someone from Harvard?
MOOCs are far more likely to threaten the B colleges than the elite liberal arts colleges. A MOOC is not a small seminar experience for a top student and doesn’t compete with the high end. MOOCs compete with lectures (why not have the best lecturer) and other passive learning approaches. MOOCs will threaten the University of Phoenix and other online programs that are not doing such a good job at retention anyway.
MOOCs are great marketing for the elite universities which is why they may thrive even if there is no financial model or evaluation.
The openness is important to MOOCs. Shirky gives the example of a Statistics 101 course that was improved by open criticism. By contrast most live courses aren’t open to peer evaluation. Instead they are treated like confidential instructor-patient interactions.

While I agree with much of what Shirky says and I welcome MOOCs I’m not convinced they will have the revolutionary effect some think they will. I remember seeing the empty television frames at Scarborough college from when they thought teleducation was going to be the next thing. When it comes to education we seem to forget over an over that there is a rich history of distance education experiments. Shirky writes, “In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn…” but I don’t see evidence that he has done any research into the history of education. Instead Shirky adopts a paradigm shift rhetoric comparing MOOCs to Napster in potential for disruption as if that were history. We could just as easily compare them to the explosion of radio experiments between the wars (that disappeared by 1940.) Just how would we learn from history? What history is relevant here? Shirky is unconvincing in his choice of Napster as the relevant lesson.

Another issue I have is epistemological – I just don’t think MOOCs are that different from a how-to book or learning video when it comes to the delivery of knowledge. Anyone who wants to learn something in the West has a wealth of choices and MOOCs, if well designed, are one more welcome choice, but revolutionary they are not. The difficult issues around education don’t have to do with quality resources, but with time (for people trying to learn while holding down a job), motivation (to keep at it), interaction (to learn from mistakes) and certification (to explain what you know to others).

Now its my turn to learn from history. I propose these possible lessons:

Unbundling will have an effect on the university, especially as costs escalate faster than inflation. We cannot expect society to pay at this escalating rate especially with the cost of health care eating into budgets. Right now what seems to be being unbundled is the professoriate from teaching as more and more teaching is done by sessionals. Do we really want to leave experiments in unbundling exclusively to others or are we willing to take responsibility for experimenting ourselves?
One form of unbundling that we should experiment with more is unbundling the course from the class. Universities are stuck in the course = 12/3 weeks of classes on campus. These are the easiest way for us to run courses as we have a massive investment in infrastructure, but they aren’t necessarily the most convenient for students or subject matter. For graduate programs especially we should be experimenting with hybrid delivery models.
Universities may very well end up not being the primary way people get their post-secondary education. Universities may continue as elite institutions leaving it to professional organizations, colleges and distance education institutions to handle the majority of students.
Someone is going to come up with a reputable certification process for students who want to learn using a mix of books, study groups, MOOCs, college courses and so on. Imagine if a professional organization like the Chartered Accountants of Canada started offering a robust certification process that was independent of any university degree. For a fee you could take a series of tests and practicums that, if passed, would get you provincial certification to practice.
The audience for MOOCs is global, not local. MOOCs may be a gift we in wealthier countires can give to the educationally limited around the world. Openly assessed MOOCs could supplement local learning and become a standard against which people could compare their own courses. On the other hand we could end up with an Amazon of education where one global entity drives out all but the elite educational institutions (which use it to stay elite.) Will we find ourselves talking about educational security (a national needing their own educational system) and learning local (not taking courses from people that live more than 100K away)?
We should strive for a wiki model for OOCs where they are not the marketing tools of elite institutions but maintained by the community.

In sum, we should welcome any new idea for learning, including MOOCs. We should welcome OOCs as another way of learning that may suit many. We should try developing OOCs (the M part we can leave to Stanford) and assess them. We should be open to different configurations of learning and not assume that how we do things now has any special privilege.

Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale

The other day while browsing around looking for books to read on my iPad I noticed what looked like a dissertation for sale. I’ve been wondering how dissertations could get into e-book stores when I remembered the license that graduate students are being asked to sign these days by Theses Canada. The system here encourages students to give a license to Library and Archives Canada that includes the right,

(a) to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell my thesis (the title of which is set forth above) worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats;

I now just came across this cautionary story in the Chronicle for Higher Education about Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale. It seems it is also allowed in the US.