The hanging of a census worker is going to be quickly dismissed by the Right as the work of meth-heads or moonshiners.

I'm not sure I'd disagree with that analysis. But what it misses is this: all those ACORN workers that the Right has been demeaning over the past weeks? All those census workers that Bachman has been demonizing?

They work incredibly difficult and dangerous jobs. Like many of the government workers that the Glenn Beck crowd demeans, they serve in areas rural and urban that Glenn Beck would pee himself to drive through.

And lest people think this is too political for an education blog, consider this the next time you hear a middle manager or millionaire pundit dig into teachers as "leeches on the state":

Between 1996 and 2000, 599,000 violent crimes against teachers at school were reported. On average, in each year from 1996 to 2000, about 28 out of every 1,000 teachers were the victims of violent crime at school, and 3 out of every 1,000 were victims of serious violent crime (i.e., rape, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault). Some teachers are at greater risk for victimization. Male teachers are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime, and teachers at middle/junior high schools are at greater risk than those in elementary or senior high schools. Violence against teachers is also higher at urban schools.

Additionally, teachers face threats of violence and intimidation. In the 1999-2000 school year, 9 percent of all teachers were threatened with injury by a student from their school, and 4 percent were physically attacked by a student.

I'm furious right now. I can barely keep the string of obscenities in check.

You'll hear a lot of right-wingers talk today about how they are not responsible for Bill Sparkman's death. I can't imagine a lower bar. Census workers, teachers, and social workers deserve more from the Right than an alibi. They deserve respect and support for their work, and I would not lay off the Right until they get it.

David Brooks, last May, on how the "Harlem Miracle" proves that the proles just need more stick and less carrot:

To my mind, the results also vindicate an emerging model for low-income students. Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.

....

Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.

Ravitch and Meier in Education Week, today:

Oh, by the way, the school that saw the biggest drop in its overall score was the Harlem Promise Academy Charter School, the school that David Brooks of The New York Times held up as a national model, claiming that it had closed the achievement gap. Our blog had quite a lively exchange of letters about that school last spring. Seems it dropped from an A to a B; in the present regime of inflated scores, a B in New York City today is nothing to brag about.

And the reason it's nothing to brag about? New York State has dumbed down its tests over the years in order to fake progress:

A few weeks ago, Kolodner reported that city students were able to pass the state tests by guessing. After the article appeared, a city schoolteacher, Diana Senechal, tried an experiment, which she described at gothamschools.org. She took two state tests without reading the questions. She answered the questions at random (checking A, B, C, D) and received enough points to reach Level 2, sufficient for promotion in the city.

Because the state tests have been dumbed down, test scores soared. The number of students at the lowest level - those who are at risk of being held back in their grade - dropped dramatically. In sixth-grade reading, 10.1% (7,019) were at Level 1 in 2006, but by 2009 only 0.2% (146) were. In fifth-grade reading, the proportion of Level 1 students fell from 8.9% in 2006 (6,120) to 1.0% (654) in 2009. In seventh-grade math, the proportion of Level 1 students plummeted from 18.8% (14,231 students) in 2006 to 2.1% (1,457) in 2009.

So all these miracles, are, well, a little suspect. It turns out that miracles in the New York State school system have become a bit of a commodity.

And given that, the real person here that needs a "No Excuses" policy is David Brooks. I eagerly await his reanalysis of the miracle in light of the new data. I'm sure his "middle-class values" of hard work and honesty will compel the correction.

Cross-posted from the new blog you MUST subscribe to -- the Keene State CELT blog...

I'm meeting with a quite a few people doing interesting things around quantitative literacy, and I can't help but be amazed with the audacity of what they are attempting. If any of you are reading this post, know that you all are my heroes.

It occurs to me though that many people developing IQL start building courses from a different direction than I would start. Usually the course is nearly fully developed before the professor begins to try to seek out publicly available data for the students to use to defend or attack quantitative propositions. And very often that data turns out to be spotty, shallow, or not directly manipulable with the tools that students have access to (data, for instance, that is locked up in PDF charts).

This is understandably frustrating -- it's difficult to push students to do real analysis when the data is limited.

That's where the concept of building a course "from the data out" comes in.

When you build a course from the data out, you identify the data sources you will use early in the process of designing your quantitative literacy course. Say you want to teach a quantitative literacy course, and you would like it to be on the general topic of poverty and health. When you design from the data out you start by doing an inventory of public data sources pertaining to the subject.

Looking at the data you can ask yourself these sort of questions:

• What sort of activities could students do with the available data?


• Are there opportunities here fro original analysis?


• Is the data rich and varied enough to support multiple viewpoints?


• Will the data work with free visualization tools?


• Are there collaboration or crowdsourcing opportunities?

In other words, start by building rich authentic activities and projects around the data, and then start to work backwards to the larger course structure which will help give meaning and relevance to the activities and projects, and provide the scaffolding necessary to student success, and your job will be a lot easier.

I'm sure everyone will be happy to know that Mark Bauerlein has now migrated to his natural habitat: The Wall Street Journal. And, displaying the sort of intellectual rigor that made him an expert on Gen-Y, he manages to write an entire column on Why Gen-Y Johnny Can't Read Nonverbal Cues without citing a single study showing that Gen-Y has trouble with non-verbal cues. Indeed, he pulls the oldest freshman composition trick in the book towards the end of the piece, asserting that the fact we don't know how extensive the "problem" is (or whether it exists) only proves that the problem is more extensive than we imagine:

Nobody knows the extent of the problem. It is too early to assess the effect of digital habits, and the tools change so quickly that research can't keep up with them. By the time investigators design a study, secure funding, collect results and publish them, the technology has changed and the study is outdated.

I wouldn't let even a student get away with mush like that.

As for the rest of the piece, I don't even know where to start. Bauerlein's view of language here is enormously confused. He mentions the work of Edward T. Hall as if it was buried somewhere and linguistics had forgotten about nonverbal cues. In fact, there is an incredibly vibrant literature around the subject. There has been for decades.

Fine. Jumping over a half century of research is a common tactic for those who wish to inflate their importance. But Bauerlein's lack of knowledge of the area (and in fact his lack of any coherent theory of communication) shows in his argument. He takes work talking about cross-cultural differences in nonverbal communication:

This is why, Hall explained, U.S. diplomats could enter a foreign country fully competent in the native language and yet still flounder from one miscommunication to another, having failed to decode the manners, gestures and subtle protocols that go along with words. And how could they, for the "silent language" is acquired through acculturation, not schooling. Not only is it unspoken; it is largely unconscious. The meanings that pass through it remain implicit, more felt than understood.

And then seems to use that to argue that Gen-Y lack non-verbal cues:

We live in a culture where young people—outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another—are ever less likely to develop the "silent fluency" that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to "read" the behavior of others, they are all thumbs.

You see that, right? He's not even making the dubious (and likely erroneous) claim that Gen-Y is developing a substantially different set of non-verbal cues. Incredibly, he's making the argument that they are not acquiring non-verbal cues at all! In the history of human evolution they will be the first generation with no understanding of non-verbal cues. They will not be fluent in their native language! What a tragedy!

Of course it's absolute nonsense.

If you actually follow this out to its absurd conclusion, this means that were the Gen-Y set to go out to the bar and talk to one another, I could read a typed transcript of the conversation, and it would essentially be information complete. There would be no phrases like "Sorry for going on about this" without someone explicitly saying, "I am losing interest in this story." No one would volunteer to buy the next round after a pause without someone explicitly saying "I've bought the last two rounds, and I'd like you to buy this one." No one would ever say to two obviously enamored people "Well, I guess I'll leave you two alone" -- not without someone verbally evincing love or infatuation first.

In fact, I'm not quite sure how Gen-Y students, under Bauerlein's analysis, would be able to hook up at all. One can imagine the torment (Is she showing interest or not? Does moving closer mean infatuation or rage? Oh, damn, how I wish I'd had more practice with face to face interaction!).

Movies would also be a puzzle to this generation ("Wait -- the character isn't saying anything, the camera is just zoomed in on their face! Dammit, speak! How will I know what you are thinking!"). If Bauerlein is right, we may have to introduce closed-captions for Gen-Y to help them know if Bruce Willis really *is* happy for his wife or not (Caption for Gen-Yers: [facial expression indicates he does not mean what he is saying here.]).

Of course students have non-verbal language, and of course they are fluent in it. Is it comprised of exactly the same set of cues as adults? Is it different from adults, but within historical norms for generational change? Or is the "generation" the wrong division here, and do nonverbal dialects tend to divide more on regional, economic, and ethnic lines? And should the things that Bauerlein is obsessed with -- taking a text message in a conversation, for example -- really be seen as central to "learned" non-verbal communication anyway? Or do they more properly fit into a framework like Relevance Theory which allows that cues can be interpreted according to general principles and assumptions, and does not necessarily require that they be transmitted as explicit vocabularies?

Answering those questions would require looking at the wealth of research out there on such things. I haven't done that, so, unlike Bauerlein, I'll stop here.

Former Spellings Commission guy Robert Zemsky talks with University Business this month on the problem with online learning:

One of the big problems is that we’ve gotten the idea that “it’s about the web.” It’s funny—there’s a whole lot of interesting technology on learning, but it’s not on the web. The really interesting stuff is on discs. The web just doesn’t work. We’ve adopted a distribution system that is like trying to run a race in a sack.

The web is very linear, and learning on the web is equally linear. You do the problem, it gives you the answer, and if you get the wrong answer it circles back, and so on. That’s not the way you are going to learn a foreign language, for example. You can use really interesting technology to learn a language. Just don’t do it on the web.

That's right - the future is DVD-ROMs, because learning on the web is too linear.

I knew we were screwed by the Spellings Commission, and I knew they were out of touch. But that statement shocks even me.

From the AFL-CIO's newest report:

The career goals young workers find most important demonstrate a keen desire to move into adulthood—to achieve financial security and, above all, to have the time and resources to support a family. But although they prioritize time with family just as much as older workers, many young workers have to postpone starting families until they are more financially secure. Thirty-one percent worry very or somewhat often about this potential delay.

And:

With the rising cost of education, it’s increasingly difficult for low-income workers to pursue the education that could help them advance. A full 54 percent of these workers worry about paying for education, compared with 24 percent of workers with incomes over $30,000. Even more disquieting, low-income workers are just as likely to live with parents as to live on their own. These results indicate that young people with incomes under $30,000 find even more roadblocks on their path to financial independence and adulthood than do young workers overall.

In fact, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, the greatest decline in employment rates since 2000 has been among those without college diplomas.

The whole report is worth a look. We get in rarefied discussions sometimes about this issues, but access and equity (and the endeavor of public education itself) is so crucial to the lives of so many people. I think that this is where I worry a bit about the "current education does more harm than good" approach. Theoretically yes, but if I had a magic wand that had to choose between instantly instantiating better education or universal access, I would choose universal access in a heartbeat.

Pretty incredible clip. I'm actually a bit speechless.

Thank God the newspapers are keeping everyone honest, right?

Recently, one of our faculty, a leading authority on Autism, shared this amazing video he had found:



This to me is the promise of education writ large: helping kids (and adults!) to find their unique abilities, no matter who they are.

One thing that makes it possible, of course, is that it is free. In a world where SketchUp still costs $500 most of this is unlikely to happen.

So I kind of wanted to hate this project, b/c a) it's a Microsoft Competition, and b) the project is so mired in the bureaucratic context of grade-school that it begins to sound like something out of The Office:



2009 U.S. Innovative Teachers Network: Columbus East High School, Columbus, IN from Carrie Hipsher on Vimeo.

But as I listened to it, what I saw was something different -- a way to introduce some amount of choice in a bureaucratic system that aligns against student choice. A way to build choice into an environment where state standards and testing and the need for far too many documented outcomes pull one in eighty different directions.

I have two daughters in public school right now. Would I love to see a real revolution in education, where we did away completely with the one-size-fits-all curriculum? A thousand times yes. But failing that, would I like them to have the option, even in this strange way, of choosing projects which suit their unique talents better? Absolutely. They'll be well on their way to college before the current idiocy in education is addressed. Whatever helps them in the meantime is welcomed.

I feel like I'm constantly in this spot, hating the reform by increments approach, but painfully aware that the students we have currently need more flexibility right now, if only by degrees.

I still don't know what is right, but I think I have finally decided that these people are my friends, not obstacles in the path to a bigger revolution. We're completely different creatures in some ways, but we can't afford to be enemies.

It's increasingly important to consider how the Good Enough Revolution pertains to education. I'm a fan of educational research, but worry that it focuses too much on marginal differences, in a world that does not value marginal differences in quality anymore.

What does the world care about? The Wired article gets it right -- we want ease of use, accessibility, and continous availability. And education is no different.

One way of looking at it is that the idea of quality has been enlarged, not demeaned. In the manufacturing model, quality was something that pertained to objects, because objects were their own contexts. A dishwasher doesn't need to play well with your clothes dryer or your radio. It can,  for the most part, be evaluated on how well it does its job.

What the MP3 explosion showed us is that people are willing to trade quality as traditionally defined for portability, shareability, and availability. As the Wired article points out, we've seen this again and again with netbooks, Skype, Google Docs,  and YouTube. The question is not "How good is this?", but "How well does this play with the other parts of my life?"

I've heard people mock the quality of University of Phoenix courses and other online offerings  -- and in traditional terms they may be right As an object, I am sure that any course we are offering on campus is better than a UoP course.

But taking a more holistic view of quality this is not as clear. And as we move from the Manufacturing Age to the Network Age that is where the future of quality is headed.

Google Bundles is likely to be a good thing for classroom use, because it's essentially the OPML idea with a catchy name (in fact, it looks like every bundle also creates an OPML file).

I don't want to get into an argument about why things like Google Bundles and Twitter take off while things like OPML languish (one clue: OPML is a crappy, crappy name). If every Bundle produces an OPML file, I think we should postpone the religious war and promote this.

Google Bundles are a great way to turn sense-making and curating from concept to practice. I can see a teacher in a journalism ethics class selecting out the CJR feed, Jay Rosen's blog, and a couple other sources and asking students to scan these for relevant posts. Bundles can also be used to pull together all the blogs created by students in a class, so that an institution with no internally provisioned Web 2.0 system (like Otago Polytechnic, for example) can reduce the administrative load of providing a way for all the students to see each other's work -- Bundles aren't just for curators, but for peer groups as well.

Finally, I can see a group of people (whether students or staff) divvying up all the things they want to read into different bundles -- Wendy and I will take Bundle A, Jenny and Mel will take Bundle B, Russ and Kim will take Bundle C, etc. Stories of interest that each group finds they can bookmark via delicious with a specific tag (which then flows it back into Google Reader). There's less of this divide and conquer around than I'd like to see -- Bundles might add a level of ease to it.

[And yes, the first person that says "You can do all this with OPML" gets flamed.... I know, you can. That's not the point.]

Most people don't understand the mess the Senate has become in terms of its delaying tactics and the use of filibuster by delay. The press doesn't cover it, because they'd rather film people shouting at town halls than tell us why our system is broken.

The game nowadays, especially for Republicans, is not to vote against popular legislation. It's to try to kill bills through endless amendments that delay or ultimately prohibit votes -- and ultimately the use of the threat of filibuster by amendment to extract concessions from the Democrats that poison the chances of the bills passing.

When the Republicans tried this tactic two years ago to try to block the minimum wage increase by proposing amendment after amendment, and it looked like once again the minimum wage increase would not pass, despite the overwhelming victory the Dems had achieved, Ted flipped his lid, in an absolutely beautiful way, and showed why he will be sorely missed. Please take five minutes to watch it, it will inspire you:



Remember this video as you watch the health care debate, and the talk of reconciliation. When the Republicans say that reconciliation is not fair, they are saying that because of one reason only -- it does not allow these sort of tactics. The best tribute to Kennedy at this point would be to push a good bill through via reconciliation, which will kill the game playing and allow our Senators to focus on the issue that was so close to Kennedy's heart -- how do we protect the weak, the underpaid, the people our society has forgotten. How do we of good fortune help those who have not been as lucky?

We can make that the discussion, or we can have another four weeks of pretend revisions and amendments and centrist posturing by people who are in practical terms obstructionists.

I know what Ted would have done.

...and good riddance. From the NY Times:

Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.

“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.

Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.

In fairness, Digital Native Theory isn't dead, because there was never any such thing. There was talk of Digital Natives in feel-good sessions across academia, but not, at least as far as I can remember, any serious exploration of the concept as something falsifiable. It would be as if I decided that British English was a completely different language than English, and then stood around for a couple hours swapping stories about how those crazy Brits call trucks "lorries" and elevators "lifts". It wouldn't pass muster in linguistics and we were insane to let it spread in education.

Now maybe, finally, we can get to the real questions: How do we teach our students to collaborate, cooperate, and communicate in ways fit for the agile projects the future requires? How do we give them methods to make sense of a world where filters are no longer at the point of production?

These teens that we are teaching are the same ones my wife watched go to McDonald's on their high school Italy tour. Taken as a group, they aren't the most adventurous lot, and that hasn't changed because they have cell phones. It used to be the job of colleges to open up their mind to the possibilities they didn't know about, to expose them to the opportunities they weren't exploring, to get them to rethink how they approach problems. Now that this digital native nonsense is finally dying, maybe we can start addressing that.

"Kay's dad has got recessive gene that she may have, she doesn't know if she has it has it, so she is genotyping that gene in herself in her closet, and she's going to figure out if she has it...."

If you are thinking of doing some authentic instruction in biology, you MUST, repeat, MUST watch this video on DIYbio and the biohacking movement.

The DIYbio Community - Presented at Ignite Boston 5 (2009) from mac cowell on Vimeo.

I cannot imagine a more compelling way to engage the future biologists of the world than to show them this video and to encourage them to come up with their own projects (or to join up with someone else's project). The "standard" approach to biology (first, memorize some stuff, then do some lab work that has been done one million times before and check your results against the key, then maybe by senior year do some original research) weeds out many of the exact people biology needs -- hackers, creative types, problem solvers. While it might seem that biohacking and institutional education are incompatible, this is by design, not definition. And we can change the design. After all, that's what hackers do, right?

On a related note I came across this while putting together the instructional design sourcebook. I'll talk about the sourcebook more later -- it's a project based on my belief that teachers need a browsable resource that ties networked learning pedagogies to specific classes, organized by discipline (I know for us that might sound ridiculous, but thee is some discipline tunnel vision holding us back, we can either deny it or address it, and denying it is not working). I am desperately in need of some innovative instructors in the sciences who can provide me with syllabi of innovative courses, or descriptions of unique net-enabled, student centered processes or techniques they are using. Please mail me at mcaulfield at keene dot edu. I'd be including them in this beast I am assembling for our faculty.

Downes makes the point repeatedly that we talk too much about collaboration (which is something new technology allows us to do better) and not enough about cooperation (which is something the network allows us to do for the first time on this unprecedented scale).

The neat thing about cooperation is that if you can structure a solution to a problem as a cooperative one rather than a collaborative one you can solve very big problems in a very short amount of time -- because at it's best, cooperation requires simply that you do what you normally do, but in a way that allows cooperation. Which is why I will be watching this project closely:

If you’re a lawyer, and you use the crazy-outmoded PACER system to access federal court documents, check out the new RECAP system launched today by Tim Lee, Harlan Yu, and Steve Schultze with the help of Princeton’s CITP. If you use PACER, you know it’s difficult to use. It also charges citizens to access what are nominally public documents, something that makes little sense online. This combination has resulted in a multi-million dollar surplus for the judiciary’s IT department, and lousy access to data that would be useful not just to lawyers and litigants, but to bloggers, librarians, reporters, and scholars.

Schultze, Lee, and Yu’s scheme to free the documents on PACER is an ingenious one. They have built a Firefox plugin called RECAP that attorneys and other regular users of PACER can install on their computers. When a user downloads a document from PACER, the plugin sends a copy to RECAP’s server, where it is made publicly available. If enough PACER users install RECAP, it will only be a matter of time before the entire database is liberated. Why would lawyers participate? When they search for a document, the plugin first checks the RECAP database to see if a copy has already been liberated. If it has, then the lawyer can retreive it without paying PACER. Like I said: ingenious.

I think we have to teach our students to think about problems in this way. It's a shame that the one area where students have solved problems in this cooperative way, through music file-sharing, has been criminalized. But that just makes it more urgent that we introduce kids to the legitimacy of the cooperative approach.

We are still just at the beginning of understanding what can be accomplished in cooperative frameworks. So one question for any instructional designer has to be whether we not only encourage students to develop collaborative frameworks, but cooperative ones as well. That starts with defaulting to open solutions, providing RSS, using open licensing, etc., but as the above example shows one can go even further in designing such approaches. And the potential impact graduating hundreds of thousands of students who understand how to think in this way -- well, it's huge. It's the sort of thinking that could likely solve global warming, famine, income disparities -- you name it.

(Side note: Is it just me, or is it enraging to think that the actions of the record companies are likely reducing our ability to solve problems that are core to the continued existence of our species -- just because Billy Ray Cyrus needs his royalties for Achy Breaky Heart?)

If anyone has any good examples of encouraging cooperative thinking in a project-based class (beyond a general predilection to openness), please let me know, either through the comments or email to caulfield dot mike at gmail.

We scoff at the ancestor worship of other cultures, and consider divine right and kingship and all that stuff to be anti-American. So can someone explain to me why we will endure any kind of nuttery if it is tied to something one of our Founding Fathers once said?

Case in point -- at the town hall Obama will be at in New Hampshire today, there is a right-wing freak with a pistol strapped by his side and a big sign that references the Jefferson quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." This quote he is so endeared with is not a public statement of Jefferson -- it's a comment on the Shay's Rebellion made in a letter to a friend in 1787. From a pre-Reign of Terror Jefferson.

In other words, take away the Founding Fathers as Gods myth, and it's just something some guy said to a friend, something that he may not have even believed a couple years later.

And once you realize that, guess what? It turns out you're guy bringing a pistol to an Obama event with a sign that seems to be calling for Obama's assassination. That doesn't make you a hero, and at best it makes you a dick. At best.

Just a short follow up to the last post -- when we talk about efficiency or productivity in education, I know that eyes roll and someone usually starts composing a rant about how kids aren't items on an assembly line and the point isn't to push out twice as many in half the time.

This misses the point that productivity is value neutral. It's an increase in capacity that can be used to do more things at the same level of quality, or do the same amount of things at a higher level of quality.

Given the current funding constraints on higher education, you can't be for quality education and against looking for ways to increase productivity, at least productivity in the sense of finding more efficient uses of limited time and physical resources. If I read the cost disease theory right (and I may not be), without productivity gains a product is either going to have to cost more over time or be produced at a lesser level of quality. And the time where we could continuously charge more for our product is about to end.

I couldn't get at the Chronicle article "College Administrations Are Too Bloated? Compared With What?" from home (no login here),  so I read the paper it looks like it may have been based on instead.

It's well worth a look -- it articulates what I think many of us knew but could not express -- that college is expensive because it is structured as a service industry, and the rise of college prices relative to the rest of the economy is actually in line with how all other labor-intensive service industries have tracked. And it introduces an explanation which is apparently well-known to economists, but is new to me -- cost disease theory. In cost disease theory, gains in productivity in industries benefiting from technological and process enhancements adversely affect costs in service industries, where there are no such gains -- both types of industries compete for the same pool of workers, and the rising wages in the industries experiencing productivity gains force wages in the service industries upward -- even in the absence of productivity gains.

There's really only two solutions to this, according to the authors. The first is not really a solution per se -- it is to see the situation rather like a haircut or a musical concert -- you cannot significantly increase productivity associated with the delivery of the service. You're just going to have to lump the costs. The second is to reconfigure the process of delivery and achieve productivity gains.

But the key point here is that if you do not achieve productivity gains, costs will not remain stable -- they will rise.

[One interesting note -- I probably could have written this in half the time if I could have blockquoted some text from the paper to explain the above concept. But the PDF is locked against copy and paste. If you want to explain why higher education is doomed when it comes to productivity, closed processes like that might make a good start.]

Please discard from your pitch:

• Tom Friedman world-is-flatism


• Kurzweilian Singularities


• Prenskyan Digital Nativism


• Dot-commer "Marginal cost of zero" talk

And please replace it all with this simple observation by Tom Hoffman:

I don't understand why "computers can make it easier to do the difficult, sophisticated things we've been trying to do for years" is a less appealing, or at least less used, argument than "New! Disruptive! Etc."

(Feel free to suggest additions to the discard list).

There's a great post over at Zeroday -- a project to have a mob of us ask, politely, via twitter, what the artists cited in the Sony v. Tenebaum decision think of it. In other words, there are 17 bands or so Joel Tenenbaum was cited for downloading. The plan is to get a comment from each band on what they think of the $675,000 fine.

As part of that activity he's posted a spreadsheet of the bands Joel was sued over. And excuse me if I don't get a whiff of must off of it:

Nine Inch Nails
Radiohead
Aerosmith
Nirvana
Sublime
NOFX
Green Day
Janis Joplin
The Rolling Stones
Pink Floyd
Simon & Garfunkel
Elliot Smith
Buckethead
The Kinks
Beatles
Unity Reggae Band
Creedence Clearwater Revival

Put aside the irony that Reznor released his last work for free, and the most idiotic thing about the list is how old the works must have been (assuming Joel wasn't listening to that hot new CCR record).

Most of this music has to be thirty to forty years old. A lot of the people that made it are dead. (How long do the record companies feel they are entitled to make a living off of Janis Joplin & Elliot Smith?)

In other words, the list tells us the same thing that crappy radio does -- the plan of the record companies has always been to make a living off the short-tail back catalog, first by forcing everyone to rebuy old albums on CD, and then hopefully by selling more of it to a whole new generation.

"Teens don't tweet" is trending on twitter right now, I imagine in response to this Nielsen report.

My thought on this is that there are an awful lot of activities that are useful to adults but not to teens, and vice versa. If we'd get over the insane notion that the cultural wave we are experiencing right now is being driven by 12-year-olds (it's not), maybe we'd get further on analyzing this.

My guess is that many teens don't tweet partially because the micro-societies they belong to are rather insular, and often place-bound, places where the "friend" model works well. Twitter's "pub-sub" system is a far more flexible and effective system for gathering information outside your primary group of friends -- but I think for many teens this is not a huge issue.  Things move directly from the College Humor site or YouTube hotlist, into their circle of friends and that's fine.

I don't know about you all, but what I find is that for professional communication at least, Facebook is lousy. It's lack of pub-sub seperation discourages people making the sort of far-flung connections they need to stay informed. The way that it closes off your updates to non-friends is great for concealing you life from the eyes of parents, but lousy for professional use, where all of your updates are not searchable by the community at large.

What I use Facebook primarily for is keeping up with friends. Twitter ends up being about collecting and disseminating professional and political information (with some cultural bits in there). If we dropped the Prensky nonsense for just a minute, it might be easy to see that although many teens don't use tools like Twitter they may need them in the future as they develop networks based more on interest and professional need than on, well, socializing. In an ideal world, responsible higher ed institutions would see guiding students through that evolution as one of their primary roles.

That's what we'd do, at least, if we'd get over the insane notion that the cultural wave we are experiencing right now is being driven by 12-year-olds. And I think society is on the cusp of making that realization -- just not quite yet.

As many of you know, my dad, Art Caulfield, died two weeks ago, at the age of 66, from anaplastic thyroid cancer. In a way it was due to a long illness -- the anaplastic form of this cancer was new, but he had battled thyroid cancer before, both in his 30s and about eight years ago. But the new incidence was sudden, moving from a pain in the shoulder on father's day to his death five weeks later.

I could have written a river of prose on this blog about him and his life in the days just after he died, and I felt compelled to, but something about that felt to cloying and too raw, as if I was asking for pity or condolence, when that wasn't really the point.

But today, curious, I googled "Arthur Caulfield" and "Arthur E. Caulfield" and found that the man that had introduced me to the power of the Internet -- the person who encouraged me to join my first bulletin board site as a kid of 13, the person who I remember excitedly coming home one day in the late 80s with a copy of Vanevar Bush's "As We May Think" and telling me how hypertext on top of networks was going to change the world -- this man has no internet footprint of his own.

And that's just wrong, just plain wrong.

So I beg your indulgence here -- I am pasting his eulogy below.  It's not a plea for sympathy or condolence -- but just a matter of justice I think -- For those that may be looking for him in the future, whether they be old friends from Presque Isle, people he knew when he served in Vietnam,  or friends he may have had at Digital Equipment (DEC)  -- I want them to find something substantial. And this blog is the most effective way to make that happen.

Eulogy for Arthur Caulfield

===========================

The Greeks had a word to describe a quality of perfect conversation, one which translates roughly as "a graceful playfulness". It's the place in between being meaningful yet joyless, and, on the other extreme, being light-hearted yet lacking in depth. It's the perfect intersection where a lightness of heart and creativity of the mind meet deep meaning and emotional resonance.

Anybody who talked to my Dad for even a couple of minutes knew he had that in spades. A conversation with him was a joy. It was never labored, it was engaged without being adversarial, it was witty but deeply meaningful. He fired on all cylinders: emotional, moral, intellectual, and it was all suffused with the joy he took in being with you in that exact moment. I've been struck all my life how deeply people that have only talked to my Dad a couple times feel they know him. I'd be defensive, and think that they can't REALLY have known him, but often talking to them you find that they do. And I think that that is because his conversation was very much a reflection of his life. He had a graceful playfulness in all he did.

His relationship to my mom was extraordinary. They never fought. For 45 years they drank in one another's company, and they never ran out things to say. They were partners, best friends, true lovers. They were inspiring to watch. Once when I was joking about Nicole and I going on a "date night" I remembered that my Mom and Dad had had a couple date nights way back when and I asked my Dad whatever happened to that. He told me he and my Mom had figured out they didn't have to go somewhere to be on a date. And as much as I'd like to attribute that to his legendary frugality, it was true. Every morning at the breakfast table was a date for them.

He loved us kids. The images and memories we will treasure are often related to the curiosity and interest he had in everything in the world. He loved a good science project, the boom of the Van De Graf generator at the Boston Museum of Science, or sitting in the backyard watching a total eclipse of the moon. Even when he was completely overwhelmed with work, he couldn't resist a Lego or Erector Set.

And he'd turn all these things into good-natured competition, not out of a sense of aggressiveness, but out of that boyish exuberance and wonder that he never lost, no matter how old he got. He would sometimes lumber and shuffle around, but challenge him to a game of ping pong, and the man was Baryshnikov. I am sure it was not lost on him that in the last All-Caulfield ping-pong tournament he won, at the age of 66, over us thirty something upstarts.

He treasured his retirement. He was made to be a grandfather, and he took to it like something he had trained for all his life. His grandchildren adored him, and he indulged them accordingly. Once in Florida, my sister watched two of her kids making a game out of dumping buckets of warm and cold water over his head in the pool. He hammed it up, thanking them for the hot buckets, and making mock-aggravation noises when the cold buckets were dumped on him. Jen watched, wondering when he would finally have had enough of the water torture, but soon realized as long as the kids were having fun, he would never say he had enough.

He always took better care of other people than he did of himself. The minute someone had car problems he'd pack up his tools and help them out, and get their car into tip top shape. At the same time, he preferred to drive his Taurus wagon around with a bumper visibly affixed with twine and superglue, clearly avoiding the chore of maintenance. For every unfinished project in his own house, there are four or five projects he finished in someone else's.

He couldn't stand for people to be worried over him, although he worried very much about other people. He fought very hard on his last day to stay lucid, because he knew his children were on his way to be with him. He wanted us to have a chance to say goodbye, for our own sake. We were told not to stop, because Dad thought that he could only hold on a bit more. When we got there could barely speak through the pain and the swelling, but with us all around the bed looking so despondent he managed to say "You know, I sure wish I could throw a better party." It was the last sentence he would end up saying.

Grace, and wit, and a deep resonant love that warmed you to your core.

In the hospital, the day before he died, my brother Ben came to visit him and my Dad told him how happy he was that Ben and Caitlin were getting married. "I hope you have a wonderful marriage," he said. Then he struggled a bit, trying to concentrate through the toxins and said "After all these years you'd think I'd have have some better words of wisdom for you, but I just can't think of anything else right now".

He shouldn’t have worried. He had given us wisdom all his life. "Life is what happens while you're making other plans" he would always tell us, quoting Lennon -- and it was true, because in the end for each unread book in the house and each abandoned business idea in the basement, for each thing undone or unsaid or unfinished, there are the things he chose to put his time into instead -- the people around him, his friends, his family, and most of all, his life with Mom, who he loved more dearly than anything. People in the hospital would ask if this was their second marriage -- they couldn't imagine people being so tender and dedicated to one another after forty-five years. I watched as nurses came into the room crying, and saying how much my parents love had inspired them. That was over a period of two and a half weeks. Many people here saw that love over a lifetime, and it inspired all of us that much more.

It's hard, it's very hard. He was taken away far too young. I'd say he had so much more to give, but he gave so much already. More to the point, I wish he was here so we could give back to him, to repay him for everything he did for us. But it's not to be, and anyway it would take a lifetime to repay.

When I think of him, and how he would want us to react to this, however, I'm pretty sure I know. He wants us all to be happy, and light-hearted right now -- he knows that we can be serious without being depressed and moral without being self- important. He went as far as he could, and it is now up to us to share that graceful playfulness that was his gift to us for so many, many years.

Eulogy for Art Caulfield
===========================

The Greeks had a word to describe a quality of perfect conversation, one which translates roughly as "a graceful playfulness". It's the place in between being meaningful yet joyless, and, on the other extreme, being light-hearted yet lacking in depth. It's the perfect intersection where a lightness of heart and creativity of the mind meet deep meaning and emotional resonance.

Anybody who talked to my Dad for even a couple of minutes knew he had that in spades. A conversation with him was a joy. It was never labored, it was engaged without being adversarial, it was witty but deeply meaningful. He fired on all cylinders: emotional, moral, intellectual, and it was all suffused with the joy he took in being with you in that exact moment. I've been struck all my life how deeply people that have only talked to my Dad a couple times feel they know him. I'd be defensive, and think that they can't REALLY have known him, but often talking to them you find that they do. And I think that that is because his conversation was very much a reflection of his life. He had a graceful playfulness in all he did.

His relationship to my mom was extraordinary. They never fought. For 45 years they drank in one another's company, and they never ran out things to say. They were partners, best friends, true lovers. They were inspiring to watch. Once when I was joking about Nicole and I going on a "date night" I remembered that my Mom and Dad had had a couple date nights way back when and I asked my Dad whatever happened to that. He told me he and my Mom had figured out they didn't have to go somewhere to be on a date. And as much as I'd like to attribute that to his legendary frugality, it was true. Every morning at the breakfast table was a date for them.

He loved us kids. The images and memories we will treasure are often related to the curiosity and interest he had in everything in the world. He loved a good science project, the boom of the Van De Graf generator at the Boston Museum of Science, or sitting in the backyard watching a total eclipse of the moon. Even when he was completely overwhelmed with work, he couldn't resist a Lego or Erector Set.

And he'd turn all these things into good-natured competition, not out of a sense of aggressiveness, but out of that boyish exuberance and wonder that he never lost, no matter how old he got. He would sometimes lumber and shuffle around, but challenge him to a game of ping pong, and the man was Baryshnikov. I am sure it was not lost on him that in the last All-Caulfield ping-pong tournament he won, at the age of 66, over us thirty something upstarts.

He treasured his retirement. He was made to be a grandfather, and he took to it like something he had trained for all his life. His grandchildren adored him, and he indulged them accordingly. Once in Florida, my sister watched two of her kids making a game out of dumping buckets of warm and cold water over his head in the pool. He hammed it up, thanking them for the hot buckets, and making mock-aggravation noises when the cold buckets were dumped on him. Jen watched, wondering when he would finally have had enough of the water torture, but soon realized as long as the kids were having fun, he would never say he had enough.

He always took better care of other people than he did of himself. The minute someone had car problems he'd pack up his tools and help them out, and get their car into tip top shape. At the same time, he preferred to drive his Taurus wagon around with a bumper visibly affixed with twine and superglue, clearly avoiding the chore of maintenance. For every unfinished project in his own house, there are four or five projects he finished in someone else's.

He couldn't stand for people to be worried over him, although he worried very much about other people. He fought very hard on his last day to stay lucid, because he knew his children were on his way to be with him. He wanted us to have a chance to say goodbye, for our own sake. We were told not to stop, because Dad thought that he could only hold on a bit more. When we got there could barely speak through the pain and the swelling, but with us all around the bed looking so despondent he managed to say "You know, I sure wish I could throw a better party." It was the last sentence he would end up saying.

Grace, and wit, and a deep resonant love that warmed you to your core.

In the hospital, the day before he died, my brother Ben came to visit him and my Dad told him how happy he was that Ben and Caitlin were getting married. "I hope you have a wonderful marriage," he said. Then he struggled a bit, trying to concentrate through the toxins and said "After all these years you'd think I'd have have some better words of wisdom for you, but I just can't think of anything else right now".

He shouldn’t have worried. He had given us wisdom all his life. "Life is what happens while you're making other plans" he would always tell us, quoting Lennon -- and it was true, because in the end for each unread book in the house and each abandoned business idea in the basement, for each thing undone or unsaid or unfinished, there are the things he chose to put his time into instead -- the people around him, his friends, his family, and most of all, his life with Mom, who he loved more dearly than anything. People in the hospital would ask if this was their second marriage -- they couldn't imagine people being so tender and dedicated to one another after forty-five years. I watched as nurses came into the room crying, and saying how much my parents love had inspired them. That was over a period of two and a half weeks. Many people here saw that love over a lifetime, and it inspired all of us that much more.

It's hard, it's very hard. He was taken away far too young. I'd say he had so much more to give, but he gave so much already. More to the point, I wish he was here so we could give back to him, to repay him for everything he did for us. But it's not to be, and anyway it would take a lifetime to repay.

When I think of him, and how he would want us to react to this, however, I'm pretty sure I know. He wants us all to be happy, and light-hearted right now -- he knows that we can be serious without being depressed and moral without being self- important. He went as far as he could, and it is now up to us to share that graceful playfulness that was his gift to us for so many, many years.

Leigh Blackall's recent post is well worth a read, but a tangential matter in it struck me. It references the 2004 video EPIC 2014. It's a video that has been floating around for four years or so, and is still shown, I believe, at gatherings of newspaper people when they get the vapors, as a sort of smelling salt for the stenographer class.

If you haven't seen it, well, I'm going out on a limb here, but don't bother. It paints a dystopian future where news media fails and is replaced by a loose network of people living online under a umbrella organization called the Googlezon, replacing news with essentially citizen journalism and Digg-like ranking systems. Newspapers collapse, and we are left with a double edged sword for a gift -- a system of news that has more breadtha nd depth than ever before, but one that has been severed from the wisdom of its newspaper and TV news overlords, and therefore is vulnerable to being about trivia and being manipulated by corrupt individuals.

The disappearance of the news overlords is bad, you see, because historically those overlords have done so well at keeping news relevant and uncorrupted (cf. The WaPo selling influence to lobbyists at $250,000 a pop, the Michael Jackson death cult, Pentagon analysts used as "independent commentators", and that whole messy cheerleading us into the Iraq War thing).

As for me, I thought the Googlezon was actually a bit of an improvement. Given the choice between an news organization that believes selling itself to health care lobbyists is a creative business strategy, and one that wants to make a living putting a Viagra ad next to my blog post on Bob Dole, I'll take the Viagra pushers every time.

But that's not what this is about. This is about something I've just realized is very funny in retrospect. You see, the whole EPIC 2014 project was inspired by a speech that Martin Nisenholz, the CEO of NYT Digital, gave back in 2003. Nisenholz was the idiot behind TimesSelect's tiered content  initiative, which fellow news lovers will remember as the "You know what? I didn't want to read your crappy article anyway" section of NYT Online. His brainchild, heralded by the news industry of the time, including the EPIC 2014 creators, was to take the best NYT content and put it behind a pay-wall. This lasted from about 2005 to 2007.

They abandoned it in 2007, because their stats told them the lesson newspapers seem to have to learn again and again: given the choice between a free product of marginal quality and a low-cost quality alternative, people will choose free every time. As Chris Anderson points out, Free is a special price -- it allows us to share, for one thing, and it frees us from the mental conflict of deciding if we should pay for something that might not be worth it.  TimesSelect's tiered content approach led to no one linking to those sections of the NYT (non-free is a pain to share) and led to an unprecedented amount of bounces on the sign-up page (non-free is too much commitment for someone who just followed a link out of marginal interest). And it did these disastrous things without getting near the couple million subscribers that Nisenholz predicted they would get (and that they needed to offset lost ad revenue).

None of this was really thought through in 2005 by a stunning number of newspaper people, although the move was widely seen as catastrophic among bloggers.  Jay Rosen detailed the coming train wreck the most comprehensively, but Brad DeLong, Kos, Kaus, Duncan Hunter,  and countless others from the unwashed masses predicted what would happen exactly: People would stop reading the New York Times stuff behind the pay-wall, and the pay-wall itself would permanently damage the reputation of the paper. The paper wouldn't move itself to profitability -- it would simply remove itself from the public debate.

So anyway (returning from that tangent) it was Nisenholz's speech that inspired Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson to put together EPIC 2014, in an effort to convince newpaper people to take Nisenholz's ideas seriously.

Which brings us to the punch line, Robin Sloan talking about the film in 2005:

Asked if he truly subscribes to any of the theories presented in the film, Sloan offered a speedy denial. “I definitely don’t believe Google and Amazon are ever going to merge,” he says. “I don’t believe it would ever be called Googlezon. I don’t believe the NYT will actually go offline.”

In actuality, the 2002 Michigan State University graduate who majored in economics believes that the New York Times will be the very last organization to fold. “Some of the stuff they do online is incredibly good and incredibly smart,” he says.

As the the wise gatekeepers circle around Chris Anderson's Free with their pitchforks,  and the newpapers form a suicide pact to lock up all thier precious content, it's worth remembering who has been right before, and who has been absolutely and completely wrong.

I'm back, and once again trying to figure out whether I need to centralize my online persona, which has spread rather thin across multiple projects. In any case, you might want to subscribe to one of the following tags in place of the main feed, in case we try another grand unification: learning, art-lit-film-music, keene, politics.

It seems really impolite to disagree with someone on the source of their own fame, and more than a little presumptuous. Probably a bit foolish as well. But the recent story in the Chronicle can't be allowed to go unanswered. The story so far: in Chris Anderson's Free, there is a pull--out box which says this about Professor Richard A. Muller's OCW "Physics for Future Presidents":

To date, one of Muller's lectures has garnered 200,000 views. That's three times the capacity of the football stadium at UC Berkeley. After becoming a web celeb of sorts, Muller secured a book deal to write a popular hardback version of the textbook he penned for his class. Released in the summer of 2008, Physics for Future Presidents was widely reviewed in the mainstream press. Months later, it remained atop one of Amazon's best-seller lists. It's easy to see how good free has been to Professor Muller.

This is where the Chronicle comes in. In their classic fight-picking style, they play Muller off of Anderson, asking Muller, a physicist, how he believes the success of his book came about:

"I have been personally contacted by about 1,000 people who saw my Webcasts,"
said the professor. "When the book came out, I arranged to e-mail all of them (using Norton's account) to let them know that a book was now available. I then watched the sales very carefully. (I actually have a computer that downloads the ranking every hour from Google.) Although I had seen huge jumps in my sales when I was interviewed on NPR (3 times) or had a book review in The Boston Globe, and a few other things, the massive e-mailing to my Web fans produced no discernible increase in sales. My conclusion: Web viewers don't buy many hardcover books."

This represents a relatively naive view of how new media impact works.  Here's a couple questions I would have asked about his best-selling book, which has been widely reviewed in the mainstream press, and the subject of no less than three NPR interviews.

1. How many of his previous books were widely reviewed in the mainstream press?

This is hard to answer. But doing basic media mention searches over at newslibrary.com I can see the following:

• Richard Muller "Nemesis: The Death Star": 1 brief, incidental mention.


• Richard Muller "The Three Big Bangs": 5 mentions (incl reviews in Rocky Mountain News, Tampa Tribune, and SF Chronicle)


• Richard Muller "Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes": 2 mentions, mainly incidental mentions by global warming skeptics attempting to use his book as backing for their beliefs.


• Richard Muller "The Sins of Jesus": No mentions.


• Richard Muller "Physics for Future Presidents": 80 mentions, although it's hard to disaggregate mentions of the course from the book. One notable fact is that there are a number of AP stories covering his book in the mix. Since a lot of AP content is not archived under the newspapers that run it, the likely reach of that story is far greater. There are also reviews in nationally distributed papers

(I should note that because electronic archives are a bit spotty through the eighties and early nineties, the first book's impact may be off by a bit).

Correllation is not causation. Absolutely. But citing the four books Muller had published before as an indication that the OCW had nothing to do with Muller's popularity (b/c he was already an established author) appears to be even less substantial, at least based on a preliminary check of mainstream media mentions.

2. How much of the favorable press coverage came as a result of the course being open?

Dealing with that press coverage, let's look at the titles of the early coverage of the course:

• World listens in online when Cal professor teaches physics (San Francisco Chronicle (CA) - November 6, 2006)


• UC Berkeley expands events and academic content streamed online in new YouTube agreement (Associated Press Archive - October 3, 2007)


• CLICKS: Berkeley puts up full courses on YouTube channel (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The (GA) - October 7, 2007)


• HOW TO TAKE A COURSE AT MIT FREE -- AT HOME: (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA) - November 18, 2007)


• Professors find new audience of students through iTunes (Wenatchee World, The (WA) - December 4, 2007)

There's also this TV News segment from ABC-7 News in San Franscisco. Aired in May of 2007, the title is Top Universities Offer Free Lectures Online, and the lead interview is with Dr. Muller about his course.

This is really just the early coverage, but you get the point. The early coverage produces later coverage. The people booking the NPR shows that spiked up book sales did what bookers always do -- they looked for something that had already been vetted by the press as a significant story.  They kept their eye out for news in the local and national press that might make a good segment. Was Muller's book newsworthy? Was it of interest to people generally? Well, yes, looking at the wide variety of citations in the media, from every corner of the country, it was.

And those initial citations are, as far as I can tell, a direct result of the OCW.

Could they see whether this person would be an engaging speaker?

Yep, it's right there on YouTube.

As an analogy, I could point out that I served as an analyst once on NYC's WCBS radio. They wanted someone to parse what the Iowa caucus results meant for New Hampshire. Had I had a book to sell that day, I probably could have sold quite a few.

But how did I come to be booked on that show? Two reasons. First, my free political writing on my blog had recieved national coverage, which would have been seen by the people booking guests in NYC. Second, for the person interested in booking me there existed an easy archive of material they could scan quickly (both to weed out kooks and dullards).

Had I had a book to pitch, my sales would have jumped from that WCBS show more than from anything done with my blog. But it would be ridiculous to say that the blog wasn't primarily responsible for those sales. That is what Anderson means by the indirect nature of this. Each situation is different in how one comes to make a living from free, but the forces are the same.

I really want to stress that this is in no way an attack on Muller -- it's more an attack on the simplicity of this model the Chronicle presents where people watching the videos run out and buy the book, each and every one, directly and immediately. That's not what Anderson is proposing, and the Chronicle shouldn't be engaged in such straw man theatrics.  And Muller's response to that may be as much a product of the false frame presented to him as anything else.

But I am reminded of a story Muller opens one of his NPR interviews with. He mentions a student told him about a dinner party where a physicist had scoffed at solar energy, saying you'd have to cover the entire state of California with cells to supply enough power for the state. The former student of his, who had no background in physics sans his course, did have one fact she was armed with-- she replied that there's a gigawatt of power in a square kilometer of sunlight, and that's not that much bigger an area than a nuclear power plant takes up. The physicist, to his credit, thought about that, and replied he'd have to go back to the numbers and maybe rethink some of his assumptions.

As the paid-media lynch mob out to sink Free continues their crusade, I hope Dr. Muller will rethink some of his own assumptions, far outside the frame that the Chronicle provides.

Via NYT, last week:

Mr. Colting’s lawyers argued, among other things, that the new novel, titled “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” did not violate copyright laws because it amounted to a critical parody that had the effect of transforming the original work.

Judge Batts rejected that argument, writing:

To the extent Defendants contend that 60 Years and the character of Mr. C direct parodic comment or criticism at Catcher or Holden Caulfield, as opposed to Salinger himself, the Court finds such contentions to be post-hoc rationalizations employed through vague generalizations about the alleged naivety of the original, rather than reasonably perceivable parody.

The judge’s ruling weighed literary arguments made by both sides in the dispute. “To the extent Colting claims to augment the purported portrait of Caulfield as a ‘free-thinking, authentic and untainted youth,’ and ‘impeccable judge of the people around him’ displayed in Catcher by ’show[ing] the effects of Holden’s uncompromising world view,’” Judge Batts wrote, citing a memo submitted by Mr. Colting, “those effects were already thoroughly depicted and apparent in Salinger’s own narrative about Caulfield.”

I don't know if the judge could have ruled differently -- I haven't read the work, and I understand the constraints of current precedent.

But I always come back to the Copyright clause in the Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Whether or not this particular work was any good, the decision actually chills "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by dissuading anyone from attempting something better that plays off the original.

It's been 57 years since the publication of CITR, and the only thing copyright law is doing right now is protecting Salinger's ego. Given that he hasn't written a word in about a half-century, I'm not sure that that is really contributing to the "progress of the arts".

Edupunk vs. EduIT in a nutshell?



I tend to see Jim Groom as Harry Tuttle. But YMMV. I'd probably trust Tony Hirst more with plumbing.

I came across Nina Simon's Self-Expression is Overrated: Better Constraints Make Better Participatory Experiences via @jonmott, and I have to say it is one of the better meditations on teaching in a participatory culture that I've read.

The main premise of the post is that we design our so-called 2.0 experiences around creators, and this is wrong. The majority of people faced with an exhibit (or a class) don't want to create, but are happy to participate, or critique, or fill a half dozen other roles. Structure a participatory exercise that devalues roles other than CREATOR, and your exercise is bound to fail. One has to set well thought-out constraints to participation so that people can participate meaningfully:

Why aren’t more museums designing highly constrained participatory platforms in which visitors contribute to collaborative projects? The misguided answer is that we think it’s more respectful to allow visitors to do their own thing, that their ultimate learning experience will come from unfettered self-expression. But that’s mostly born from laziness and a misunderstanding of what motivates participation. It’s easy for museums to assign a corner and a kiosk to visitors and say, “we’ll put their stories over there.” It’s harder to design an experience that leverages many visitors’ expression and puts their contributions to meaningful use. It’s like cooking. If you have a bunch of novice friends, it can be maddening to find appropriate “sous chef” roles for them to fill. Many cooks prefer just to get those clumsy hands out of the kitchen. It takes a special kind of cook, artist, or scientist to want to support the contributions of novices. It takes people who want to be educators, not just executors.

There's a lot here that reminds me of the Curatorial Teaching idea that that George Siemens put forth a couple years back, and more particularly of some conversations with Jon Udell, who told me one day that he'd imagined this world where everybody was blogging locally, until he realized that most people hate writing. Of any sort. Public writing is right up there with public speaking for a lot of people, and an endeavor based on everybody writing publicly may be bound to fail.

And so a truly participatory culture will find other ways for people to participate. For Jon, the answer was trying to get people to share their calendars so that they could participate in a public calendaring project. Facebook, which knows a thing or two about participation, puts a "like" button on comments now, for the writing-shy. YouTube viewers have long been able to rate things up. Delicious bookmarkers can show what they think is interesting while remaining mum. Crowdsourcing projects like the Guardian's give people very directed tasks to accomplish -- look at some pages, and just categorize these things. Professional astronomers work with amateur astronomers in supernova search networks, by dividing up the sky.

These experiences aren't necessarily creative -- but they are meaningful to those involved. And what's more, they are often meaningful precisely because everyone is working together to achieve what is ultimately someone else's vision rather than being presented that blank canvas Nina talks about. It's a hard thing sometimes for us creative sorts to remember that not everybody wants to be Cezanne -- but it is worth remembering.

From the always insightful Informed Comment:

Moreover, very unfortunately, US politicians are no longer in a position to lecture other countries about their human rights. The kind of unlicensed, city-wide demonstrations being held in Tehran last week would not be allowed to be held in the United States. Senator John McCain led the charge against Obama for not having sufficiently intervened in Iran. At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul, 250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, 'protest zones' were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations outside designated 'protest zones' would be illegal in New York City, apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil damages.

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

I applaud the Iranian public's protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a 'Homeland Security' national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word 'terrorist' around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort.

I know, this is too easy. But here's the Chronicle six months ago:

The way Brainify tries to set itself apart, however, is in its exclusivity, Mr. Goldberg said. Unlike general-interest sites like Delicious, Diigo.com, and Ma.gnolia.com, Brainify restricts membership to those with college e-mail addresses. And rather than link to fried-chicken recipes or the latest YouTube hit, users are likelier to bookmark animated illustrations of particle physics or explications of John Donne’s poetry.

You know, I'm going to blockquote that again, because the world-view behind this is just incredible:

And rather than link to fried-chicken recipes or the latest YouTube hit, users are likelier to bookmark animated illustrations of particle physics or explications of John Donne’s poetry.

That's what they think of all you "cutters" by the way. You're eating fried chicken and watching Fred on YouTube while they read the collected works of John Donne.

So six months has passed, how's their club working out?

Well, here's the front page:



Yep. Twenty-seven links on the fine arts.

Oh and that Donne poetry we were into finding?



That reads "Displaying 1-0 of 0". That's with a Chronicle-fueled launch.

Here's what the fried-chicken cookers came up with:



That's 369 results on Donne on delicious, for those of you that might not be able to read that.

Once again, this is too easy -- but as they say on another blog, it's important to document the atrocities. Especially when every month brings a new attempt to prove that what we all need is an "academic version" of all this Web 2.0 stuff.

I just became aware of this extraordinary story last week:

Caroline Moore is 14 years old and just discovered her first supernova. Moore, who lives in Warwick, NY, is the youngest person ever to discover the exploding remains of a dying star in a distant galaxy. She's a member of the the Puckett Observatory Supernova World Search Team headed up by principal investigator, Tim Puckett. Every clear night at various locations around the globe, members photograph thousands of galaxies remotely using computer-controlled robotic telescopes (no humans involved). The images are then analyzed by 28 team members for the telltale brightening of an exploding star. These suspect stars are confirmed and then reported to the professional astronomers for study.

Which brings to mind John Seely Brown's analysis of such endeavors (here summarized in the new MacArthur report):

John Seely Brown has noted that it took professional astronomers many years to realize that the benefits to their field of having tens of thousands of amateur stargazers reporting on celestial activity far outweighed the disadvantages of unreliability...The result has been a far greater knowledge, amassed in this participatory method, than anyone had ever dreamed possible, balanced by collective and professional procedures for sorting through the data for obviously wrong or misguided reportings.

This is not digital utopianism. This de-centering is not vaporware, or Silicon Valley hype. It is happening right now, around the world, in thousands of endeavors. From the use of twitter in Iran, to the Guardian crowdsourcing investigative journalism, to astronomers using distributed methods, this is not the latest whim of the digital elite -- this is the way the world is now. I mean, crikey, that was just the news from last week.

As I watch my own daughters grow up, what I find most difficult is not that education is not supporting the sort of experience afforded amateur astronomers, but that in many cases our system actively works to quash such approaches. Everything in it is aligned to tell people like Caroline to be quiet and listen, to do fake problems out of special books made for students. To think about what they want to be when they "grow up". To wait patiently until they graduate college, and then, maybe, after a couple years of doing crud jobs, if they are lucky enough to get the right job they'll get assigned an interesting project, and then, and only then, at 26 years old will they come to realize what a gift their education was, and how all that proving themselves to the gatekeepers was worth it after all.

To which I say:



This is Caroline. She is 14 years old, and she just discovered a supernova.

Are we telling our students they can do that?

Or are we telling them they can't?

1. My enthusiasm that new technology is allowing Iranians an additional tool for dissent is tempered by the fact that so many people reading the tweets from there seem to have fallen in into an uncritical mode in their reading of them. Suddenly everyone is an expert and it has been decided the election was stolen. And of course, Something Must Be Done.

New media production meets old media psychology. That's a mixed bag.

2. An AP article yesterday ends with this:

Gaurav Mishra, the 2008-09 Yahoo Fellow at Georgetown University, said he hasn't seen any evidence in past events such as the Moldova elections that Twitter was the dominant way people are organizing.

"It's sometimes difficult to differentiate the hype from the media," he said. "Just because people are tweeting about something doesn't mean that there's actually coordination involved."

I think that's a bit of an odd distinction. I don't think the point is to say that Twitter is how they are getting so many people to their protests, or that there is some sci-fi "Wait, Third Street is unsafe, go to Tenth!" thing happening.

The point of the protests and the twittering are parallel, not hierarchal. Both the protests and the electronic activity aim to set the public narrative, in and out of the country. That's why most of the accounts were created recently, that's why so many are posting in English -- these are accounts created specifically to try and fight any frame that activity in Iran is settling down, that the rallies are dwindling, that the government violence is minimal. They aren't necessarily people using their normal accounts, they are very conscious activists.

It's part of an ecosystem -- to the extent that the public narrative is one of momentum, the protests will keep happening, even in the face of violence, and the government will feel the pressure. To the extent Iran feels the world is the audience as well as the current regime, the protests will keep happening, etc., etc. These things feed each other, but not necessarily in the pattern digital utopians would prefer.

Will there be Twitter fraud? People twittering eyewitness accounts from 5,000 miles away? Well, absolutely. I'm sure there are some fakes in there. If there is an election at stake and you think there will be qualms about faking an eyewitness report, you're less cynical than I. A lot less cynical.

So it is synergistic, but not in the futurist way some would want. I'm not quite sure why we assume our digital utopia is free of political motivation and deception and spin. The point is not that those things are eliminated, but that they are de-institutionalized. And people should read accordingly.

A little over a year ago there was a bunch of hub-bub about how Twitter "reported" the SoCal earthquake about 9 minutes before the AP story went out.

That was a lousy frame for understanding what Twitter is and what it does.

When people years from now look back for the a-ha moment where they got citizen microreporting, they will likely remember the Iranian election protests. With bandwidth throttled, and the state tightly controlling traditional media access, those involved with the protests are reporting what they see through Twitter. I've followed a bunch of the protestors and here is what has come out in the last four minutes:

StopAhmadi Mousavi: "they were not brought for potatoes" = Ahmadinejad bribed ppl in pre-election w/ potatoes in villages
1 minute ago from Seesmic Desktop

Bahram81 UN secretory general asked IR gov. to respect people's will #iranelection
1 minute ago from web

madyar Dispersed fights in Tehran; sound of shooting heard #IranElection
1 minute ago from web

StopAhmadi Mousavi: "these masses were not brought by bus or by threat. they were not brought for potatoes.they came themselves"
1 minute ago from Seesmic Desktop

Bahram81 people chanting "don't fear, we are all together" #iranelection
2 minutes ago from web

Bahram81 BBC Persian doubling its daily broadcast time #iranelection
3 minutes ago from web

parhamdoustdar People being surrounded in Shiraz and Rasht. Fights have broken out in Shiraz. #IranElection
3 minutes ago from mobile web

Bahram81 A hypothesis,in case regime wants to backtrack this farce, Ahmadinejad could b sentenced similarly if he's "trown under d bus" #iranelection
4 minutes ago from web

iranbaan ??????? ??? ??????? ????? ?????? ???? ???? ???? ???
4 minutes ago from web

I don't know the veracity of these claims (and make no claim to knowing the truth of the Iranian election). But I do know that this is the frame that is useful for understanding Twitter microreporting: that it subverts traditional authority, routes around censorship, and allows people to organize and to inform each other in a non-hierarchical emergent way.

It's not that traditional media can't do that as fast, but that traditional media isn't about doing that at all.

I think Mark Bauerlein might need a Quantitative Literacy course. He might possibly also need a dictionary to look up the meaning of "paradox". From today's Chronicle article "Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers":

Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, cites the reading and writing scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which have remained fairly flat for decades. It is a paradox, he says: "Why is it that with young people reading and writing more words than ever before in human history, we find no gains in reading and writing scores?"

If I was trying to make an argument that the explosion of social media has adversely affected student writing (as Bauerlein does later in that article) I am not sure I would choose a test that shows writing gains since social media began to take hold around the turn of the millennium:

[caption id="attachment_497" align="alignnone" width="512" caption="12th Grade NAEP Results, Writing"][/caption]

I mean, honestly, I probably wouldn't use NAEP in this context at all. As some of the people down-page in that Chronicle article note, standard measures of formal academic writing might not be the best tool to measure how students are communicating outside the classroom. And I am suspicious of NAEP in general.

But I think if I were trying to create a "paradox" where students were writing more than ever but are not getting any better I would make a particular effort to not cite that test as proof.

This clip, from Boing Boing, is pretty incredible. Various educational organizations are currently in Washington requesting an DMCA exemption to rip DVDs so they can take clips for classroom use. The MPAA responded, apparently, with a video on how to camcord a screen, which they see as the preferred method for teachers to use. This seems like a comedy skit... check it out.

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo.

More info here.

You know that whole Ghandi thing -- "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you" or something like that? Does it happen in reverse as well? Because I think we just went from the fighting to the laughing.