WISDOM @ WORK
Lou Marinoff was doing practical philosophy before it was cool. In the 1990s, he helped pioneer and popularize philosophical counseling and authored the international bestseller Plato not Prozac. His work has been featured in The Economist and the The New York Times, and beyond his work as a professor and counselor, he has consulted with many organizations all over the world, including the World Economic Forum.
Continue reading “Episode #24: Plato Not Prozac: Lou Marinoff (Part 1)”
Tim Richardson is a Washington, DC, based multi-client government affairs and media
consultant. After extensive political and business publishing and two congressional aide
stints, Richardson has become the nation’s only private sector consultant that has worked
on Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spill restoration. In addition, he has served
as Wildlife Forever’s Washington, DC representative since 1995.
In our conversation, Tim sings the praises of what he calls “normative careers,” and explains why studying the humanities and philosophy can not only lead to a fulfilling life, but a successful career. Tim has worn many hats throughout his career–journalist, speechwriter, fundraiser, consultant, lobbyist–and worked for a number of politicians, including Lloyd Bentsen. But what unites his efforts is his grounding in philosophy.
Continue reading “Episode #12: Tim Richardson (Part 1)”
Over the last decade, Greg Sadler has emerged as the “YouTube philosopher.” Someone was inevitably going to fill that role, but the title is well deserved: Greg has produced around 1400 videos, has 84,000 subscribers and, at this writing, has received almost 8,000,000 views.
After leaving a conventional academic career as a philosophy professor, Greg struck out on his own and built a consulting business geared toward putting philosophy into practice. Through his company, ReasonIO, he offers a suite of services–consulting for organizations, counseling and coaching for individuals, curricular design for educational institutions, and more. Greg also edits the popular blog, Stoicism Today, is a prominent voice in the modern Stoic revival, a frequent public speaker, and is involved in oodles of cool philosophy projects.
In Part 2 (Part 1 here), we dive into how Greg developed a presence on YouTube, the simple power of making distinctions in business , and his advice for young philosophers considering leaving academia.
Continue reading “Episode #10: Greg Sadler (Part 2)”Over the last decade, Greg Sadler has emerged as the “YouTube philosopher.” Someone was inevitably going to fill that role, but the title is well deserved: Greg has produced around 1400 videos, has 84,000 subscribers and, at this writing, has received almost 8,000,000 views.
After leaving a conventional academic career as a philosophy professor, Greg struck out on his own and built a consulting business geared toward putting philosophy into practice. Through his company, ReasonIO, he offers a suite of services–consulting for organizations, counseling and coaching for individuals, curricular design for educational institutions, and more. Greg also edits the popular blog, Stoicism Today, is a prominent voice in the modern Stoic revival, a frequent public speaker, and is involved in oodles of cool philosophy projects.
Join us as Greg walks us through his reasons for leaving academia, the struggles he faced in the wild building a new professional identity, and how he became the YouTube Philosopher.
Continue reading “Episode #9: Greg Sadler (Part 1)”I’m thrilled to announce that Wisdom at Work is officially a member of Lyceum! Lyceum is a new app whose hand-curation cuts through the noise of a million podcasts to help people find great educational shows and have great conversations about them, right in the app.
Download the app at lyceum.fm and then check out Wisdom at Work’s Discussion Room to hang out with me and other listeners.
Listen and Subscribe:
Should philosophers focus less on Value Theory, and more on Value Added?
Over at Salon, a plea for philosophers to swallow their pride and get on with selling themselves and their profession:
if philosophy is so important, then selling itself to the culture at large is important too. So it’s time for philosophers to put their clothespins on their noses, wade into the stench of real-world commerce, and ask some of those tanned and toned marketing majors who skipped out on Philosophy 101 for some help.
Philosophy, in short, needs a Marketing Makeover.
Continue reading ““Caged Wisdom,” Part One: Value Theory, Value Added”
Over at Adjunct Rebellion, a scathing assessment of MOOCs:
While the last 20 years of academia have seen these two destructive practices aimed at the professoriate, it hasn’t been until lately that the threat is driven by the internet — in the case of academia, in the form of MOOCs that are now looming enormous, casting monstrous shadows over the college campus. The MOOC model, from the standpoint of the professoriate, is an entirely exploitative one. The professor designs a class, has lectures and other media support shot and “canned” — and then the university, or the MOOC itself owns that material. It OWNS the intellectual property of a professor who has trained for, on average, a decade for advanced degrees, who has taught for years and developed skills and abilities. And, once that particular area of scholarship is canned — who needs the professor, ANY professor, anymore?
This is an example of the rhetoric of crisis I discussed earlier, and let me be clear that I don’t always think that’s a bad or un-useful thing–it just depends on what your goals are. If your goal is to wallow, then it works great. If your goal is to get tenure, you’re barking up the wrong tree (these two goals, incidentally, are espoused by the folks over at the Philosophy Smoker Blog, a nest of nattering nabobs of negativism, which openly admits that its focus is to “bitch about” trying to make it in academic philosophy). If your goal is to make a living, then just quit and do something else (and you CAN do something else).
Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke, has a great idea:
In January 2014, I will offer a six-week Coursera class, “The History and Future of Higher Education,” free and open to anyone. I’d like to turn the class’ weekly forums into an opportunity for a massive, global, collaborative, constructive, peer dialogue about how higher education got to its current dilemma. And from there, I hope we can come up with some creative, innovative, and workable ideas to make a better future.
A MOOC about MOOCs seems to make a great deal of sense for a few reasons.
For one, it provides a forum for investigating just what a MOOC is, what it can and cannot be, whether and to what extent it does indeed enhance learning, and whether and to what extent and in what ways this can be measured. If it turns out that such an experiment yields a more nuanced and useful picture of the ontology and application of the MOOC, then this itself would be evidence that the MOOC is a sound design and delivery mechanism.
Second, as Cathy notes,
In the present mood of high polemic, hyperbolic promise, and hysterical panic, it is almost impossible to sort out the questions, let alone the answers to these questions, on either a national or international level: Is now the time to reject or embrace massive online learning? Do MOOCs yield improved learning and free and open access to those who have been excluded from higher education—or are they yet another cynical attempt to defund the public and extract profits from tax payers and diminish the value of what virtually all universally claim to be the public good of higher education?
Crisis rhetoric is seductive but does not have a great signal-to-noise ratio. A MOOC that took a, well, academic approach to MOOCs might help to dispel the fervor over the MOOC-ment and help people think clearly about just what it is and what it means.
Third and related, much of the chatter about MOOCs is so focused on the “disruption” of the status quo, but sometimes the storied history of that status quo is not sufficiently excavated. An inquiry into MOOCs in the context of the history of higher ed might help us see that the notion of Higher Education enshrined in our social imaginary is a historical anomaly made possible by a set of specific events, notably World War II and the G.I. Bill. The Chronicle of Higher Ed just ran a piece along these lines (though it is paywalled).
I have finally decided to take the plunge: I have signed up for Coursera’s “Internet History, Technology, and Security” course. It’s not quite Christopher Hitchens voluntary trying out water boarding in order to do his subject justice, but I figure it only makes sense to walk the walk. Reports forthcoming.
Robert Maguire has profiled a math MOOC funded by the Gates Foundation and launched at the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse that had an unexpected effect: though it was offered worldwide, it was widely embraced around the state by high schools and led to deeper coordination between high school and college students, teachers, and administrators in order to avoid the “redemial math trap and close what we might call the “Preparation Gap.” From McGuire’s interview with two representatives from the college:
McGuire
The way MOOCs are growing I imagine a lot of graduating high school seniors are thinking about using them this summer, whether they’re being driven to it by the necessity of a placement exam or for enrichment or to stay sharp for college. What would you advise a graduating high school senior who’s thinking about taking a MOOC?
Kosiak
A MOOC can be helpful to show what a college course actually looks like, how it’s done and what to expect in their first year of college.
McHugh
Over summer, taking a MOOC is going to help them learn how to be an independent learner, how to study, how to find that internal motivation, how to seek out resources, recognizing that they do have multiple ways they learn, and they need to find that strategy within themselves.
Students might look at what’s aligned with their discipline of study. If someone’s looking at going into a history major, then they might look for some different history MOOCs. They can use the MOOC as a way to find out, “Is this something I am really passionate about and want to study for the next several years of my life.”
This is proof positive of an idea Noel B. Jackson floated which I mentioned yesterday: MOOCs not only expand open access to what, for convenience sake, I’ll call the Third World (Globalization), but they can strengthen local and regional communities in the (f/c/s, again) First World. They not only expand the net to wire more nodes, but they deepen the connections around each node. MOOCs can potentially have “glocal” impact. In the case of the MathMOOC at UWL, the connections are spanning vertically across the different levels of the education system. This might take the teeth out of the objections of MOOC skeptics, who dismiss MOOCs as trojan horses for neoliberalism or digital colonialism.
This “localizing” side-effect of MOOCs targets a serious problem that so many college teachers face: beset with near illiteracy and/or innumeracy in their students, they find themselves asking, “How did these kids get into college?” This often happens with writing skills. The college teacher faces a dilemma: should I teach them the content, or teach them how to write? If you just teach the content, then a) they aren’t likely to grasp it as roundly, since you can’t cleanly separate the ability to write clearly and the ability to think clearly, and b) you shirk your responsibility as the “last line of defense” before the students get out into the real world bereft of solid writing skills. If you teach them how to write, you’re not teaching the content. And if you try to split the difference, well, as Lao Tzu says, “if you chase two rabbits, both get away.”
Better coordination between high school and college teachers and administrators could help close the “preparation gap” that frustrates so many teachers and short-changes many students.
By the way, MOOC News and Reviews is a treasure trove of information about the cluster of issues orbiting the MOOC-ment.
(image courtesy of http://www.apartmenttherapy.com)
Noel B. Jackson, a professor of literature at MIT, has a thoughtful and balanced take on MOOCS over at “Sustained Inattentions”–he has the advantage of proximity, since he is essentially at one of the two ground-zero’s of the MOOC movement (Silicon Valley and Cambridge). He testifies that, in his time at MIT, no issue has arrested the attention of folks in higher ed as much as the MOOC. His view on the place of MOOCs in current discourse about higher ed is insightful:
“The MOOC has become a repository for utopian and dystopian narratives about the present and future directions of higher ed.”
The rhetoric of crisis and disruption can inhibit us from thinking clearly and carefully about how best to surf this strange new wave. The utopian and dystopian narratives are, as Noel points out, the views that MOOCs are either democratizing or corporatizing: that they are either making the highest quality education available to the world’s poor, or they are merely the latest step in the corporatization of the university that has been underway for decades.
Confessing his ambivalence about MOOCs, he points to a possible benefit of MOOCs that I hadn’t heard of before:
“My interest in MOOCs extends to how the format can be imagined to provide access to a university curriculum to populations that may not have had this kind of access, as this is the population that stands to gain most from them. But in addition to the flat, global learning community ritually invoked as the audience for MOOCs, we could benefit from thinking locally too. How can the online course format make possible new relationships not only with the most far-flung remote corners of the earth but with the neighborhoods and communities nearest to campus? Can we make MOOCs that foster meaningful links with the community or create learning communities that cut across both the university and the online platform?”
This is certainly a pressing need at the university I teach at. Fordham University’s main campus is an oasic bubble plopped in the middle of one of the poorest counties in the country, and few of the students venture past the perimeter of security-saturated environs. Anything that could facilitate a deeper engagement–heck, any engagement–with the world beyond the walls would be a very good thing; and perhaps MOOCs and other online approaches might facilitate that, though I’m not sure how.
(image courtesy of http://www.apartmenttherapy.com)
Genius. (Analytic)
My favorite:
“Is fictional construct designed to make you feel superior.”
“Will still do better than you on the job market.”
Not quite as funny, but also kind of genius. (Continental)
[Reposted from the following discussion thread]
Discussions about education these days often reference something called “gamification”: the use of games or game-like structures to enhance learning.
On the one hand, I see the appeal: rather than fight the forces affecting students’ behavior outside the classroom, harness them and integrate them into the learning process. “Badges” will replace “grades,” and “competence-based learning” will replace degrees, etc. Now earlier iterations of online learning may well fall prey to the diploma mill problem (a piece of paper saying you can now do what you could already do), but it sounds as though the next generation of online learning tools will be more sophisticated: they will be able to empirically demonstrate that student x has learned skill y to do job z. And they achieve that result through an engaging learning process that motivates them through gamified learning modules (like a video game) that take less time (more efficient) than the traditional course/degree model.
But what unsettles me about this, from something like a sociological perspective, is that it turns everything into a “game”–the game of professional advancement and money-making that people will be playing for most of their lives, of competing and achieving and winning, will become seamless with the educational sphere. It feeds into the hyper-competitive culture we are becoming more and more each year.
Moreover, the shift from text to image based learning seems to be a kind of surrender to our culture, which has been image-based for a long time. In my view one of the chief functions is to give students the tools to RESIST and challenge and criticize the present culture–to give them a chance to be an individual. And so gamification seems like another stage in the subsumption of education by corporate values: “fun” on the outside (infotainment), soul-eroding on the inside. All to equip students with 21st century skills so that we can “beat China”, or whatever.
But to challenge THAT–video games aren’t what they used to be. Many involve sophisticated cognitive tasks. So part of the gamification craze is a challenge to the highbrow, elitist prejudice that only book smarts and book learning are real smarts and real learning. There is a parallel here to the time-lag in critiques of capitalism. I wonder whether Marxist, or Marxish, intellectuals are ragging on a form of capitalism that was, well, creatively destroyed, ages ago, and not that capitalism is perfect, but 21st century capitalism is an importantly different animal. They might retort that it is still the same SPECIES–inherently, structurally unjust and exploitative and dehumanzing, and so on…which is an essential debate to have.
My initial post, and the included infographic from OnlineColleges.net, generated a great discussion thread over at the Unemployed Philosopher’s Blog. Reposting it here.
David Brooks has, I think, made progress in the discussion about MOOCs and online education. His central idea is that given the increasing sophistication and decreasing cost of online learning as a delivery mechanism for technical knowledge and skills, universities can no longer cling to a business model in which they charge a small fortune to impart technical skills. As Brooks flatly states, “There will be no such thing as a MOOC university.” One thing they can do–perhaps with a somewhat lower price tag–is specialize in the acquisition and development of practical knowledge and skills–the “Practical University”:
So far, most of the talk about online education has been on technology and lectures, but the important challenge is technology and seminars. So far, the discussion is mostly about technical knowledge, but the future of the universities is in practical knowledge.
Practical knowledge is not about what you do, but how you do it. It is the wisdom a great chef possesses that cannot be found in recipe books. Practical knowledge is not the sort of knowledge that can be taught and memorized; it can only be imparted and absorbed. It is not reducible to rules; it only exists in practice.
While Brooks’ notion of “practical knowledge” is a bit thin (column-sized), the point is important. What makes all of this possible is the “flipped classroom.” While humanities teachers have generally shaken their heads at and pooh-poohed EdTech, the flipped classroom is a game-changer. Lectures on Plato, colonialism, and Melville can now be placed online (and software can check to make sure students are watching them), while class time can be used exclusively for seminar-style interactions in which students can develop prized social skills. As Brooks notes,
Think about Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, “Lean In.” Put aside the debate about the challenges facing women in society. Focus on the tasks she describes as being important for anybody who wants to rise in this economy: the ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t.
Let’s face it: where and when do we deliberately try to develop these “soft”, “people” skills? One might carp at Brooks using an example of a corporate environment–a critic might say that this just makes university seminars into a lab for “behavior modification”–but we can view his point more expansively: that universities taking this approach are helping to develop the whole person; in that sense, they could become more congruent with the original liberal arts ideal.
Whereas before professors had to (often awkwardly) balance lecture and discussion, now they can have a clearer division of labor. I can testify to the challenge of “getting through” lecture–transmitting the ideas, interpretations, facts, etc., that you want to highlight from the reading–to get to what, in my heart, I consider the real business of teaching: the conversations that you foster and facilitate in the classroom.
Brooks explains how technology might be used to enhance the classroom environment:
The goal should be to use technology to take a free-form seminar and turn it into a deliberate seminar (I’m borrowing Anders Ericsson’s definition of deliberate practice). Seminars could be recorded with video-cameras, and exchanges could be reviewed and analyzed to pick apart how a disagreement was handled and how a debate was conducted. Episodes in one seminar could be replayed for another. Students could be assessed, and their seminar skills could be tracked over time.
In this way, technology can create the space in which a stronger sense of community can take root in the classroom. Moreover, in reviewing their performance on video, they would be able to see how they appear in public. This would make students uncomfortable in the very way that we want them to feel uncomfortable.
The general sense in these sorts of discussions is that all of this EdTech stuff is bad news for humanists. However, notice that the technical knowledge sounds like stuff that robots can do; as Kevin Drum details, the long imagined future of the robot worker is not too distant at all. This might lead to a cruel irony: online learning is maturing–through gamification, analytics, adaptive learning mechanisms, and so on–at around the same time as automation. What is the sense in equipping the masses with all of these technical skills if robots are just going to perform the jobs to which they are suited? Then, you might say, people should be trained how to build the robots and do the programming and engineering, etc. But the reality is that there are only so many people who will be needed for this kind of work. All of which begs the question: just what the hell are all of these people going to do for a living?
But this might put humanists in a surprisingly good position. Daniel Pink, one of the new darlings of the business self-help industry, has argued that Right Brainers will rule the future. And indeed, Forbes recently listed the Top 10 In Demand Skills in 2013–check out the top four. What is driving this? I think it’s the fact that life in our new Technopolis is creating problems and raising questions that are not scientific and technical problems and questions.
My chief concern with Brooks’ proposal is not about substance, but about scale. It’s easy to imagine something like this going on at Harvard et al. But at Wannabe University?
(image courtesy of marketingzen.com)
One more point about the Bloomberg article raises pertains to the plight of adjuncts. Though SNHU’s online program was initially supported by adjuncts getting paid the usual pittance, it has generated enough revenue to hire full-timers to do more (and, hopefully, eventually, most) of the teaching. This may be a way to break the fatal logic of the adjunct dilemma as it exists at (solely) brick-and-mortar universities. Not only would schools have the resources to ensure that many, most, or all of their on-site teachers are full time, but now adjuncts could still teach part-time, but do so more comfortably, without having to shuttle from campus to campus, which is a major drain on time, money, and mental health.
Of course, the true adjunct dilemma is faced by the teachers themselves, not the administrators. My fellow blogger Dan Mullin recently shared his ambivalence about going back to adjuncting after a hiatus.
Check out this infographic on MOOCs posted over at http://www.onlinecolleges.net:
I will have more to say about the developing debate over MOOCs later, but at first blink, I have two impressions based on everything I have read:
The Good News: MOOCs will disseminate the highest quality education to the poorest people. As I noted in a previous post, and as Thomas Friedman has pointed out, whatever the fate of MOOCs in higher ed in the developed world, one unadulterated good they provide is giving people in the developing world a chance to acquire the knowledge and skills they will need to have a fighting chance in the 21st century economy.
The Bad News: The new strains of premium MOOCs being devised and piloted by the elite universities–the Big Three players listed in the graphic above–threaten the other players in the higher ed ecosystem: for-profits, non-profit, 2nd and 3rd tier private schools, and non-profit state universities. Harvard et al., fueled by virtually unlimited coffers, can BOTH kick butt in the arms race for prestige, and leverage that prestige to dominate the online landscape, thus furthering weakening the hand of mainstream, “middle class” universities. Indeed, (ironically) Harvard economist David J. Collis predicted as much; in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Frank Donogue explains Collis’ prescient speculation:
“[Collis] speculates that these top universities, made all the richer by capitalizing on their brand names to market “basic lectures and course”s online, could then ‘shift back to the tutorial system to differentiate their on-campus education’ experience. They will, in other words, offer convenience to one market of students and prestige to another.”
They will, in other words, corner the markets for both the Technical University and what David Brooks has recently called the Practical University. I will treat Brooks’ proposal–which seems correct but salutary in a depressingly restricted sense–in a separate post.
But one thing to notice is the story behind how Harvard made the decision to MOOC forward. As Nathan Heller recently reported in the New Yorker,
One day in February, 2012, a social scientist named Gary King visited a gray stone administrative building in Harvard Yard to give a presentation to the Board of Overseers and Harvard administrators. King, though only in his fifties, is a “university professor”—Harvard’s highest academic ranking, letting him work in any school across the university. He directs the university’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and he spoke that day about his specialty, which is gathering and analyzing data.
“What’s Harvard’s biggest threat?” King began. He was wearing a black suit with a diagonally striped tie, and he stood a little gawkily, in a room trimmed with oil paintings and the busts of great men. “I think the biggest threat to Harvard by far is the rise of for-profit universities.” The University of Phoenix, he explained, spent a hundred million dollars on research and development for teaching. Meanwhile, seventy per cent of Americans don’t get a college degree. “You might say, ‘Oh, that’s really bad.’ Or you might say, ‘Oh, that’s a different clientele.’ But what it really is is a revenue source. It’s an enormous revenue source for these private corporations.”
HARVARD feels threatened? Are you serious? One is reminded of the bizarre phenomenon in recent American politics, in which the RICH plead that they are under attack by the “takers.” Whereas under “normal market conditions,” the only class reasonably contemplating any kind of protest and revolt would be the lower and working classes, in today’s bizarro world of Gilded Age income inequality, the people at the top are so out of touch with reality, so insecure about their position at the top–perhaps haunted by a kind of “thriver’s guilt” fueled by the deep down knowledge that they did not really earn it, but won a cruel lottery–that they deceive themselves that they are under attack. It is not enough that Harvard win the prestige game, it is not enough that they be the richest (with an endowment of–take a deep breathe, because i guarantee you are not ready for this figure–over $30 billion)–no, they must one-up the “1.0” for-profits (University of Phoenix, et al.) by leveraging their brand name, with one hand, and undermine the strapped middle class state universities and struggling 2nd and 3rd tier private universities, with the other.
This is a seriously incomplete and somewhat ranty account, and there is much more to the story–and, I think, more Good News that what I noted above–but it’s a perspective that needs to be laid out on the table and reckoned with.
![Gunung-Mulu-National-Park-Deer-Cave-entrance[1]](https://i0.wp.com/davidestorey.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/gunung-mulu-national-park-deer-cave-entrance1.gif)
After a prolonged hiatus–due almost exclusively to the interminable demands of the mad campaign of the academic job market–I am finally returning to blogging. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be exploring the supercluster of issues orbiting education, technology, and the rapidly evolving relationship between them (so-called “EdTech”).
Along the lines of education, I’ve been working my way through several of the most recent screeds on and exposes of higher education. I’ll be trying to sort through issues such as the following:
One of the most fascinating things I’m coming up against in this research, again and again, is how ignorant many academics, particularly humanists, tend to be about the conditions of their labor (as well as their reluctance to recognize what they do as labor), about how the university works, about the macroeconomic forces operating, as Hegel might say, “behind the back of consciousness.” Our reflexes dictate that we bemoan the corporatization of the university, and scoff at the conservative critiques of tenure, intellectuals, and academia in general, yet we often fail to consider whether these positions have a kernel of truth. What the research suggests–what students and the public suspect, and what more self-aware academics know–is that the university is not what it seems to be.
In much the same way that we continue to refer to something called “the middle class” in America, despite the radically changed and changing economic landscape of the last few decades, and especially the last five years, we continue to cling to a conception of the university that arose in a very different era; it is part of our “social imaginary” and is deeply bound up with our understanding of what it means to be a successful, middle class American; which, for many of us, sadly, is more or less equal to what it means to be a full citizen and, like, an actual human being.
On the technology front, I will be exploring recent critiques of the micro- and macro- roles and effects of technology: in our personal lives, and in our political economy and culture. Jaron Lanier, a founding father of virtual reality and early web, has emerged as one of the most perceptive and, given his tech chops, authoritative, critic of digital culture. Lanier’s most troubling claim is that Web 2.0 and what he calls the worldview of “cybernetic totalism” is not only making it more difficult to be an actual person, but is accelerating the erosion of the middle class set in motion decades ago.
The great danger, he thinks, is that cultural creatives–musicians, journalists, and the like–are canaries in the “data mine”, but the first wave of middle class professions that will be rendered “redundancies” as more and more jobs are made obsolete by robots, computers, etc. To this list, we can add professors. As Lanier has it, a democracy is not possible without a middle class, but a middle class is not possible unless a society is structured to provide sufficient opportunities for most of the people to amass more wealth than the infinitesimally small number of people at the top. The symbolic numbers of Occupy Wall Street point toward what Lanier considers the barely distant future: In our new technopolis, there are the Lords of the Cloud, and the digital peasants. Digital technology, the child of a democratic society in which prosperity was widely shared, is coming to undermine the bulwarks of the society that spawned it.
While Lanier focuses more on the political, economic, and social dimensions of tech, Sherry Turkle, MIT sociologist, zeroes in on how tech might be harming our psyches and our relationships. Her central concept–that in the new, hyperconnected world we are always and everywhere “alone, together”–points to the dark side effects of technology, and the ways in which we have become addicted–like the incubants in the Matrix, or the prisoners in Plato’s Cave.
And that, it seems to me, is what connects these two great themes of education and technology: they so pervasively define the contours of life in today’s world, yet their recent pasts are so unknown, their present effects are so hard to pinpoint, and their likely futures are so difficult to predict. They constitute such a crucial part of our contemporary Cave. The great task, then, is to patiently, persistently grapple with them.
(Image courtesy of gasparandmichelle.com)
Thomas Friedman, ever the technological optimist, heralds the coming revolution in online education.
There is a kind of Hegelian strain in Friedman’s boosterism for neo-liberalism and globalization; not the state, but the free market is the march of spirit on Earth. Any nasty consequences are just the acceptable side-effects and bugs of the beta version of something that will be surely perfected in the next iteration or soft-ware update. Though Friedman’s natural optimism sometimes gets the better of him, his point about the potential impact of online learning in so-called developing countries is hard to deny. This, coupled with increasing access to nimble tools like micro-finance, may well give people in the poorer countries and forgotten places of the world more opportunity to improve their lives.
We often discuss the merits and demerits of online education in the context of life in the developed world. While this is surely an important discussion to be having, it may blind us to the prospect that the most far reaching, world-historical effect of online education may be felt not by us, but by those still struggling to secure basic needs.
My friend and colleague Dan Fincke just posted a reflection on his own journey through the twisted funhouse of the academic employment market. Dan’s energy and passion–as a teacher and a blogger–has for years simply dumbfounded those of us who know him; his efforts are über-human, and in this way he is true to the ideal of his favorite philosopher, Nietzsche.
Dan’s situation is a symbol for what is wrong with professional philosophy. In much the same way that Andrew Sullivan–one of Dan’s role models as a blogger–has led the charge in upsetting the conventions and exposing the limitations of traditional print journalism, Dan is leveraging the new medium of the blog to do philosophy in way that is accessible, interesting, relevant, and important for a broader audience. I don’t say “popular” audience because that carries the whiff of “pop culture,” which spells “dumb.” But today’s popular audience, in some parts of the country and the world, at least, no longer spells dumb. When academics turn their nose up at “popular” writing and venues, I think they have this 19th century vision of a semi-literate hoi polloi a world removed from the elite bastions of oak-adorned studies and sophisticated salons. But Dan, like an increasing number of younger academics, smells the rot and decadence that infects this way of thinking and this way of doing philosophy. Again, like his intellectual hero, Nietzsche, Dan is finding a way to do philosophy outside the confines of academic scholarship. And it should concern us that the 20th century was the first in which almost all the major philosophers were academics. I heard a talk recently where a scholar argued that philosophy has always done better as a parasite (gadfly?)–when it uses something else as fodder for reflection, be it new developments in science, culture, technology, or politics. Whenever it tries, or pretends, to become it’s own thing, it retreats into a sorry sort of solipsistic solitude, a cloud of self-important knowingness; a retreat fueled by fear and insecurity. Voltaire’s Candide is precisely a mockery of this tendency–Dr. Pangloss (literally, “all words”) is the caricature of this mindset.
What leadership looks like:
On Thursday afternoon, on Day 2 of the Council of Graduate School’s annual meeting here, Michael F. Bérubé was scheduled to give a plenary address titled “The Future of Graduate Education in the Humanities.”
“There is no way to talk about the future of graduate education in the humanities without talking about everything else involved in the study of the humanities,” he told a rapt audience of about 700 graduate deans, most of whom were not from humanities fields.
…
Mr. Bérubé opened his remarks by saying that every aspect of graduate education in the humanities is in crisis, from the details of the curriculum to the broadest questions about its purpose. “It is like a seamless garment of crisis, in which, if you pull on any one thread, the entire thing unravels. It is therefore exceptionally difficult to address any one aspect of graduate education in isolation,” he said.
Among the problems he cited were high attrition rates among graduate students, the many years it takes students to get their degrees, the need to revise the content of graduate courses so that students are prepared for jobs outside of academe, whether alternative forms should replace the traditional dissertation, and if some programs should be reduced in size or eliminated altogether.
Mr. Bérubé also noted the glut of Ph.D.’s in the academic-job market and the 1.5 million people now employed as adjuncts, with no hope or expectation of ever getting a tenure-track position.
“For what are we training Ph.D.’s in the humanities to do, other than to take academic positions in their fields?” Mr. Bérubé asked the audience. “What does one do with a Ph.D. in philosophy or history, other than aspire to teach and conduct research in philosophy or history?”
The great task of the current generation of graduate students and early-career academics is to answer that question–together. The university system cannot save them.
Lenny Cassuto makes one:
What if we reconceived the guiding assumption that Ph.D.’s are supposed to become professors? As the Versatile Ph.D., a Web site dedicated to alternative careers for Ph.D.’s, pointed out in a comment to me, “Recognizing nonacademic placements as legit communicates a much more positive message about the skills and abilities that are nurtured by graduate education. It affirms the value of the entire enterprise.”
But it also throws a bone to administration. If graduate programs were tricked out with nonacademic job training programs and workshops; if they forged partnerships with university career services offices, AltAc alumni, and administrators; talked openly about applying PhD training and skills, rather than relegating these conversations to the shadows; and/or incorporated internships and/or service learning into their programs–if any or all of these things are done, then graduate schools gain a competitive advantage. They can say to prospective students: “We don’t just place our graduates in tenure-track jobs. We prepare them for a whole host of careers in different sectors.” A healthy culture is one capable of criticism, reform, and adaptation–that is how institutional metabolism works. But as Cassuto points out, cultural change can only happen if it starts at the academic equivalent of birth:
That affirmation has to begin at the earliest stage of graduate school. Professors need to shape students’ expectations before they enter graduate school—which means more transparency about their career options. And we need to shape students’ expectations while they’re in school about what’s waiting for them afterward. Most important, we need to alter their training accordingly, to prepare them for the full range of jobs they will be able to get.
The system only gets fixed from the inside, granted. But I worry that Cassuto’s solution is only a rearguard action that eases the passage of the current generation of graduate students but concedes that the war is lost: admissions will be cut and programs will close, and “becoming a professor” will no longer be a legitimate career path.
In any case, if present trends continue, I think we’re likely to see three species of PhDs: the few Elites idling in Ivy Heaven , the many Plebs toiling away in Adjunct Hell, and the plucky, creative NACs who parlay the PhD into something new.
This week, both The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times added to to mounting conversation about the status, role, and nature of college in our present moment–this time from the teenage perspective, proposing two alternatives to the traditional high-school-to-college conveyor belt: later or never.
In the last two posts, I broached the question of what long-term, structural effects online learning will have on higher education. At Thanksgiving, I spoke a great deal with my two nieces, who are getting ready to go to college next year, and their parents, about the myriad dimensions of the process. Like health care, college has become one of the most complicated, and most anxiety-inducing, pieces in the puzzle of modern life, not least because they are the sectors in which costs mock inflation. Indeed, with the election over, I’d wager that families discussed these issues more than maybe any others.
As we’ve seen over the last decade, industries we considered staples of life in the modern industrialized world–music, journalism, and retail–were radically disrupted and transformed when the world became Flat. This year, the New York Times has declared 2012 the Year of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), with 3 flagship online universities pioneering the new platform:
I want to follow up and throw into the mix two other perspectives I’ve come across in the meantime:
Continue reading “The AUdacity of MOOCs: “These are people who just want to learn””
The NY Times’ fascinating report on the rise of the MOOC raises questions about what we might call the “Professors of the Future”:
Udacity courses are designed and produced in-house or with companies like Google and Microsoft. In a poke at its university-based competition, Dr. Stavens says they pick instructors not because of their academic research, as universities do, but because of how they teach. “We reject about 98 percent of faculty who want to teach with us,” he says. “Just because a person is the world’s most famous economist doesn’t mean they are the best person to teach the subject.” Dr. Stavens sees a day when MOOCs will disrupt how faculty are attracted, trained and paid, with the most popular “compensated like a TV actor or a movie actor.” He adds that “students will want to learn from whoever is the best teacher.”
The implications are enormous, and difficult to sift through.
Apparently 2012 is not only the return of Quezacotl and Mayan Apocalypse, but, according to the The New York Times, the Year of the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course).
The paint is barely dry, yet edX, the nonprofit start-up from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has 370,000 students this fall in its first official courses. That’s nothing. Coursera, founded just last January, has reached more than 1.7 million — growing “faster than Facebook,” boasts Andrew Ng, on leave from Stanford to run his for-profit MOOC provider.
“This has caught all of us by surprise,” says David Stavens, who formed a company calledUdacity with Sebastian Thrun and Michael Sokolsky after more than 150,000 signed up for Dr. Thrun’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” last fall, starting the revolution that has higher education gasping. A year ago, he marvels, “we were three guys in Sebastian’s living room and now we have 40 employees full time.”
“I like to call this the year of disruption,” says Anant Agarwal, president of edX, “and the year is not over yet.”
What does the MOOC mean for the future of the traditional university? The $20 million question–or, perhaps more accurately, the $50K/year question–is whether digital technology will do to higher education anything like what it did to the music industry. A decade ago, few would have thought that a computer company would replace the record store; but here we are.
What might a tipping point look like?
Continue reading ““Faster than Facebook”: the Brave New World of MOOCs”
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