Category: Education and Administration

Peter Nicholson: The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority.doc – Powered by Google Docs

Peter Nicholson of the Council of Canadian Academies has an interesting paper that he has given on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. His thesis is:

People today are much less prepared to defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data and information – a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there’s a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is – Well, to ourselves of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that – we can only hope – will help us make sense of it all.

He talks about the “decline of deference” to traditional authorities (from the church to academic experts) and talks about it taking place recently. I suspect its been happening since the enlightenment began and might be a general feature of modernity and improved communication (and democratic institutions.) What is new is the ability of the many to replace authority with a distributed or networked authority. People now believe things are true if they have been negotiated by a community. Something is true enough if it won’t get you in trouble because your crowd has authorized the truth. Most of the time such negotiated truth is fine (with enough eyeballs someone will point out a flaw), but other times the community misses something and is satisfied with not-quite-good-enough.

Canada 3.0 Forum: Stratford Declaration

Ian Wilson of the new U Waterloo Stratford Institute talked to the York/Peking Symposium on the Canada 3.0 Forum among other things. He talked about the Stratford Declaration (reproduced below) that emerged. It is a national declaration that calls for a Canadian project.

Canada 3.0 – The Stratford Declaration June 22, 2009

On June 8-9, 2009, over 1500 people interested in the digital economy gathered in Stratford, Ontario to review and debate the opportunities and challenges for Canada’s future. Canada 3.0 brought together industry, government and academia in workshops and discussions all focused on Canada’s digital future.

Recognizing the need for urgent attention to the issues of digital media, the participants in the Canada 3.0 Conference agreed to the Stratford Declaration:

• Success in digital media will be central to national prosperity in the 21st century. This fast growing field is producing jobs, ideas, products, services, companies and opportunities at a rapid pace – but Canada is not yet a world leader.
• Canada has the potential to be internationally competitive in this field on a sustained and focused basis, but it will not get there based on current trends.
• The foundations of Canada’s digital economy and society are not yet strong and stable. Significant upgrades are required to the digital infrastructure, including both the technological infrastructure and made-in-Canada digital content.
• Consistent accomplishment in the digital economy will require collaboration, partnership and collective action on an unprecedented national and cross-sectoral scale. Canada must use the digital revolution to reinvent the manner in which this country trains, educates, creates new businesses, cooperates, serves the population and views its collective future.
• Canada’s competitive advantage lies in its ability to bridge the technological and content fields, and to thereby produce and deliver internationally competitive products and services. The creative talents of this country must be connected to the technological potential of this age.
• Canada must become a global test-bed for new digital products and services and must be seen as a new economy incubator where consumers, governments and companies are known for embracing digital innovation.
• Canada needs to produce a regulatory and legal environment attuned to the 21st century and needs to use these arrangements to propel the nation into a position of global leadership in digital rights management.
• The digital ecology produces global competition for talent, ideas, patents and emerging companies. Canadians need to make a strong commitment to the country as a place to train, innovate, work and prosper if the digital economy is to flourish.
• There is an urgent need for a national project of such scale, scope and impact that Canadians come to understand the potential of the digital economy and that produces the collaboration, cooperation and cross-country engagement necessary for international digital leadership.
• Canada must set an ambitious target – to become the first truly digital nation in the world – and must move with urgency and determination toward this goal.

Canada 3.0 – La Déclaration de Stratford Le 22 juin 2009

Les 8 et 9 juin 2009, la ville de Stratford, en Ontario, a accueilli plus de 1 500 intéressés qui se sont penchés sur le dossier de l’économie numérique et ont débattu les possibilités et défis qui se dessinent pour le Canada de demain. Réunissant des délégués de l’industrie, des gouvernements et du monde universitaire, la conférence Canada 3.0 a été le théâtre d’ateliers et d’échanges portant sur l’avenir numérique du Canada.

Conscients de la nécessité de porter une attention immédiate aux enjeux liés aux médias numériques, les participants de la conférence ont entériné la Déclaration de Stratford :
• Au 21e siècle, la réussite des médias numériques sera au cœur de la prospérité du pays. Emplois, idées, produits, services, entreprises et débouchés se multiplient à un rythme effréné dans ce domaine en plein essor. Cependant, le Canada n’y occupe pas encore une position de chef de file mondial.
• Le Canada possède tous les atouts requis pour affronter de façon durable et ciblée la concurrence internationale dans le domaine. Cependant, ce potentiel ne se réalisera jamais à moins que le pays ne change de cap.
• Le Canada ne dispose pas encore d’assises stables et solides en ce qui touche l’économie et la société numériques. L’infrastructure numérique doit faire l’objet d’améliorations marquées, notamment sur le plan de l’infrastructure technique et des contenus numériques de confection canadienne.
• En matière d’économie numérique, la cohérence des réalisations nécessite une collaboration, des partenariats et une action concertée sans précédent à l’échelon national et intersectoriel. Le Canada doit profiter de la révolution numérique pour réinventer ses modèles de formation, d’éducation, de création de nouvelles entreprises, de coopération et de service au public ainsi que pour revoir la façon dont il envisage l’avenir collectif de la nation.
• L’avantage concurrentiel du Canada tient à sa capacité de conjuguer techniques et contenus et, ainsi, de produire et de diffuser des produits et services compétitifs dans l’arène mondiale. Les talents créateurs de ce pays doivent être « branchés » sur les possibilités techniques de notre époque.
• Le Canada doit devenir une plateforme mondiale d’essai des nouveaux produits et services numériques. Il doit également être perçu comme un incubateur de la nouvelle économie où consommateurs, gouvernements et entreprises se distinguent par leur capacité de faire place à l’innovation numérique.
• Le Canada doit se doter d’un milieu réglementaire et légal qui s’accorde avec le 21e siècle. Il lui faut également miser sur de telles dispositions pour se propulser au sommet du palmarès mondial de la gestion des droits d’auteur électroniques.
• L’écologie numérique alimente la concurrence mondiale sur le plan des talents, des idées, des brevets et des nouvelles entreprises. Les Canadiens doivent s’engager résolument envers leur pays pour en faire un lieu où apprendre, innover, travailler et prospérer. Le développement futur de l’économie numérique en dépend.
• Il est urgent de lancer un projet national d’une envergure, d’une portée et d’une incidence telles que les Canadiens en viendront à saisir les possibilités offertes par l’économie numérique et qu’il en découlera la collaboration, la coopération et la mobilisation intersectorielle requises pour l’exercice d’un leadership numérique mondial.
• Le Canada doit se fixer un objectif audacieux — devenir la première véritable nation numérique du monde — et s’employer prestement et résolument à atteindre cet objectif. (This is from the Facebook Page.)

Adonis Meeting

I was a meeting organized by the Adonis project (See TGE Adonis | Très grand équipement du CNRS pour les sciences humaines et sociales) to look at international collaboration. Adonis is running a number interesting projects:

  • Revues.org is a platform for e-journals in France.
  • Calenda is a shared calendar of events for French academics.
  • Hypotheses is a shared blog environment for news about projects.
  • Lodel is their content management system for publications.

Some other projects mentioned were:

  • Plume hosts and lets people discover open source software from university research projects.
  • SourceSup is a project management and code versioning environment for academic projects.

We are struggling with issues of international collaboration, archiving data, interoperation and so on. We all see the value to large national (or international) digital archives, but the funding is oriented to projects and not long-term archiving. Some of the issues that came up:

  • Lou Burnard made an important distinciton between archiving and backup. A lot of people want backup for their work or their project and think that archiving services will provide this; they don’t really understand that backup is not archiving. That doesn’t mean that backup isn’t important. Apparently in the student riots in Paris last year a number of computers with irreplaceable data were destroyed.
  • The limitations of centralized solutions. We are all tempted by the thought of long-term central funding to run services, but there are dangers to such centralization. If central funding is cut or shifted (as happened with the AHDS) then everything disappears. Can we imagine decentralized solutions? Would they work? I’d like to see more social research initiatives that support decentralized solutions. I think in the current economic climate we have to explore these.
  • David Robey made the point that we have to do a better job of explaining the value of digital resources and services. We need to educate ourselves to gather evidence of value and that includes the opportunity costs.
  • Paolo D’Ivorio argued that there are certain primitive functions that scholarly systems need including Citation (reliable ways to point to other works), Consensus (agreement in a field as to what is of value and how to assess that), and Discovery/Dissemination (ways of finding and getting at scholarship.)

You can follow some of the meeting is you search Twitter for #ADONIS.

Bad meetings are your fault

Bad meetings are your fault is a great post on Prof. Hacker (Tips & Tutorials for higher ed: productivity & pedagogy in a digital age) sent to me by Stéfan.

I don’t mind meetings, I think it has to do with age and seniority. The older you are the more you like people and the more senior you are, the more you can use meetings to tell others what to do. God probably loves all meetings, that’s why he created the universe – one long meeting he can chair.

Seriously. Meeting can be a great way to keep things moving on projects. People don’t like them because they usually haven’t done what they should have and the meeting will expose that.

Gaming as Actions: Students Playing a Mobile Educational Computer Game

The online journal Human IT has an issue on gaming with an interesting article about mobile gaming (or augmented reality gaming) for education. See Elisabet M. Nilsson & Gunilla Svingby: Gaming as Actions: Students Playing a Mobile Educational Computer Game. The article has a clear and short summary of the literature around serious games and education that points out that there isn’t yet much evidence for the theoretical claims.

The overall conclusion seems to be that even if several studies show effects on learning as well as on attitudes, empirical evidence is still lacking in support of the assumption that computer games are advantageous for use in educational settings. (p. 28-9)

The article touches on the problem we all have when we ask students to role play (whether as part of a game or simulation), which is how seriously they take it.

Some of the groups had a clear ironic touch on almost all of their utterances, at the same time as they were taking on the assignment with a serious attitude. When playing the game, they seemed to constantly oscillate back and forth between the imagined game world and their own reality. They played their alloted fictive role, and at the same time referred to their own personal experiences. (p. 43)

I’m convinced this irony has to do with how comfortable students feel playing roles before others. What does it mean in the web of class relationships to ask a student to act before others? Should they have a choice? Obviously they handle the uncomfort with irony as a way of preserving their identity in the class. That they can do both (play a fictive role and their ironic self) at the same time is impressive. On page 53 the authors suggest that a context where students can alternate (motivations) could make for an “engaging learning experience.”

New Realities in Higher Education

New Realities in Higher Education is a blog gathering news about how the recession is affecting teaching in higher education.

The current and developing global recession is changing realities for students, institutions, and faculty members engaged in higher education. This blog chronicles those changes for academic / historical record purposes. Click on the header of each posting for the link to the complete news report.

I learned about this from the comments to a Tomorrow’s Professor entry about cutbacks at Stanford. The comments have been anonymized and are heartbreaking. A rough sense of what is happening and the attitudes:

  • Many departments are having to cut staff, lecturers, photocopy budgets, travel funds, graduate funding and other types of expenditures not directly tied to tenured faculty and instruction. In short, in many cases departments are being handed cuts that force them to slash anything that is not committed.
  • Early retirement packages are being used to encourage staff and senior faculty to leave. People who take these are generally not being replaced.
  • In some places staff, faculty and administration are taking pay cuts or unpaid vacations.
  • One place is down to 4 days a week so that they can save on energy costs for the fifth day.
  • Some respondents are convinced there is hidden fat in universities that administrators are concealing in order to force change. These respondents think this is a manufactured “new reality”. Whether or not this reality is an appearance or a real reality, the paranoia and antagonism between faculty and administration in some posts is obviously part of what’s happening.
  • And yet there are measured notes that suggest some institutions have good lines of communication where the budget realities are shared and departments are given the chance to develop a consensus about solutions.
  • Graduate students and new faculty are extremely vulnerable with sessional jobs being cut and no new jobs for those about to finish. In some cases their in-program funding (TAships) is drying up and they don’t know how they will survive.
  • There are complaints about investments in non academic functions from sports to new technologies (or the lack of them).
  • Relations between universities/colleges and their state or provincial government are crucial. Does the president go public about the need for adequate funding and get into a fight with the state premier? When a state or province has only a couple of universities does that change the situation?
  • And some places seem not to be facing significant cuts.

I think many of us are wondering if the cuts will be so deep that administrations start laying off tenured faculty or trying other, more drastic changes. On the one hand tenure seems sacred, on the other hand, why should staff and untenured faculty have to take the brunt of the cutbacks? We have already seen a shift in the ratio of tenured teaching staff to temporary teaching staff. That’s in part what the strike at York was about. Is it fair to protect senior research faculty by expanding the pool of temporary staff who are paid by course and have no security? Do we want a two-class system?

The deeper issue is whether the resources we have per student are being well spent. We keep cutting at a system designed some time ago rather than asking how to design a system in the face of very different funding. We keep cutting in the hope that we can hold out until the good times come again, but they never do (or if they do we don’t hear about them in the humanities.) What if structurally we will never be able to make the case for public funding that health care and road work can and therefore always be a budgetary afterthought? What if the cutting will be continuous for a decade or two until the baby boom and their needs have passed? Would we do things differently? Some possibilities are:

  • Someone will have the bright idea that they can cut deeper if they remove the research function. The University of Toronto periodically argues for differential funding – that there should be a small number of universities funded to do research and teaching, and a larger number funded as super-high-schools.
  • One advantage of restructuring as community colleges or high schools is that we might then unionize and negotiate as a provincial block. Negotiations might turn to things like class-sizes, contact hours, and the other things that tend to get cut. For that matter unions might represent all staff whether full-time, part-time, faculty, sessionals, or other. Unions that represent us all might be more able to argue for support for the whole over cuts to weaker groups. I’m not advocating this, just recognizing that our college and school colleagues negotiate differently and don’t seem to perpetually get bigger classes.
  • Other states might move to a distributed distance model like the University of Phoenix that uses lots of practicioners rather than faculty. The idea would be you get rid of most full-time teaching staff, get rid of the demand for advanced credentials (like the PhD), and open up a teaching market so anyone can bid on teaching tasks if they have some credible experience. (What would experience to teach a philosophy course on “Appearance and Reality” look like?) This would keep teaching costs down, and, if you also get rid of the physical campus, keep the facilities costs down.
  • We could see centralization of certain instructional and research functions where a small number of experts at elite institutions do the curricular development, the online streaming lectures, and the research for the rest of us. Poorer places buy services from the few places left that do original work. All you need locally to organize a really big class is a stadium to pipe the lectures into (if they aren’t accessed over the web) and staff to handle the collection of fees, the marking and the credentialing. Any expensive marking, as in reading papers and commenting on them, could be outsourced to the same people who students now pay to write their papers in the first place.
  • We might see a return to very small and personal charter schools run by faculty teams who loosely associate with other teams as a “university.” Four faculty could organize a great book curriculum for 100 students (25 students a year for 4 years) as a very small college. Each faculty member could meet each class of 25 for 3 hours a week for a total of 12 hours of teaching a week. They would rent space and access to public library resources. If the 100 students were paying $10,000 each (half of that might be paid by the state) then the team would have a budget of $1,000,000 which could cover salaries, space and resource rentals. Note that such a model would be missing all sorts of things we take for granted at universities, but it would also have some advantages, especially when it came to class size and attention. There would be no administration to speak of, no admission system, no choice when it comes to courses, no support staff, no campus life, no residencies, no assessment of teaching, little research, no labs and so forth. To implement this we would need a dramatic change to how colleges are chartered. Imagine what it would be like if groups of smart graduate students could throw together competitive mini-colleges around cool topics like computer gaming in competition with us.

These are the dramatic (and in some cases horrible) scenarios. I hope that creative administrators with the involvement of their colleagues come up with humane and imaginative design alternatives for discussion. My point is that we do need to be thinking about the very idea of the university. Whatever choices we make, I think it is time to ask how we could run higher-education differently if we were starting from scratch, especially since that is how we will better understand the design of what we have. I suspect nobody wants to ask the question for fear of losing what we think we have before the barbarians, but surely we are committed to inquiry and that involves inquiry into how we run our institutions. If we don’t explore the scenarios others may do it for us with less pleasant results.

Then again this might all blow over.

Drucker: Blind Spots

Johanna Drucker has an essay in the Chronicle about how humanists should be involved developing their work environments, Blind Spots. She has a nice phrase for the attitude by some scholars that someone else should do the work of developing the knowledge environment of the future – she calls it the “hand-waving magic wand approach to the future”. She concludes here essay,

Unless scholars in the humanities help design and model the environments in which they will work, they will not be able to use them. Tools developed for PlayStation and PowerPoint, Word, and Excel will be as appropriate to our intellectual labors as a Playskool workbench is to the chores of a real plumber. I once bought a very beautiful portable Olivetti typewriter because an artist friend of mine said it was so elegantly designed that it had been immediately put into the Museum of Modern Art collection. The problem? It wasn’t designed for typing. Any keyboardist with any skill at all constantly clogged its keys. A thing of beauty, it was a pain forever. I finally threw it from the fourth-floor tower of Wurster Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. Try doing that with the interface to your university library. Now reflect on who is responsible for getting it to work as an environment that supports scholarship.

We face a critical juncture. Leaving it to “them” is unfair, wrongheaded, and irresponsible. Them is us.

Johanna’s essay is addressed to scholars reminding us that we need to take responsibility for working things out. There is, however, another audience that needs to be addressed and that is the audience that believes that humanists aren’t the right people to be involved in designing infrastructure. The argument would be that there are professional software engineers who are trained to design portals for communities – they should be given the job so we don’t end up reinventing the wheel or doing a poor job. Obviously the answer lies in a creative design collaboration and humanists with computing development experience can play a crucial role in the mix, but how do we build such teams?

What Is Infrastructure?

I’ve written another essay. It seems to be what I do in Sundays. This time I’m trying to work out What Is Infrastructure and how it is different from supplies? The question is a way into trying to understand the role of big projects like TAPoR or Bamboo, both of which I am involved in (at very different levels.) As I thought about it I came to a couple of conclusions:

  • Defining things as infrastructure or cyberinfrastructure is a political move that tries to change how we frame services so we can propose different (and ongoing) ways of funding them. To be more blunt, defining a service as infrastructure moves it from something you ask for a limited grant for to something you ask for ongoing funding for (or something you set up a consortium to provide ongoing funding for.)
  • I can imagine a lighter way of weaving infrastructure out of existing industry provided stuff that we should take seriously.
  • Humanities research infrastructure should be public as in available to everyone and available internationally. Not only can the public participate in humanities research, but opening it up to the public is away of engaging them. Perhaps the relevance of the humanities lies not in their products, but in their participatory processes. Philosophy is not a science best done in a lab that will eventually produce a cure for ignorance. Philosophy is a love of wisdom we should share because we never owned it and we were never appointed its keepers.

Why not crowdsource the humanities? What would it take to make the (arts and) humanities the public disciplines? What sorts of infrastructure would engage the broader public?