CHICAGO — When was the last time you were alone, and unwired? Really, truly by yourself. Just you and your thoughts — no cellphone, no tablet, no laptop.
Many of us crave that kind of solitude, though in an increasingly wired world, it’s a rare commodity.
We check texts and emails, and update our online status, at any hour — when we’re lying in bed or sitting at stop lights or on trains. Sometimes, we even do so when we’re on the toilet.
We feel obligated, yes. But we’re also fascinated with this connectedness, constantly tinkering and checking in — an obsession that’s starting to get pushback from a small but growing legion of tech users who are feeling the need to unplug and get away.
“What might have felt like an obligation at first has become an addiction. It’s almost as if we don’t know how to be alone, or we are afraid of what we’ll find when we are alone with ourselves,” says Camille Preston, a tech and communication consultant based in Cambridge, Mass.
“It’s easier to keep doing, than it is to be in stillness.”
One could argue that, in this economy, it’s wise to be constantly wired — to stay on top of things, to please the boss. Preston knows people who get up in the middle of the night to see if their boss has sent them an email.
But she and others also see more hints of limit-setting going on, this movement of solitude-seekers with roots in the technology industry, ironically enough.
“When I think about truly disconnecting, I look to my truly techy friends,” says Cathy Davidson, a Duke University professor who co-directs the school’s PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge.
Those friends, she says, take long, unwired vacations and set “away messages” telling people to write back after they return. “And they stick to it,” Davidson says, wishing she could do the same.
“They’ve come up with a socially acceptable convention for their own absence from the world of technology and everybody recognizes it.”
One organization called Reboot has started the Sabbath Manifesto, a call to unplug one day a week to find solitude — or to simply take a day of rest with family and friends.
Bigger corporations, some outside the tech industry, are starting to catch on to this type of limit-setting.
To encourage work-life balance, Volkswagen shuts off mobile email in Germany 30 minutes after employees’ shifts end and turns it back on 30 minutes before their next shift starts.
Google, Nike and the Huffington Post, among others, provide space for employees to take naps, or to meditate. The idea is that employees who take time to themselves to reenergize will be more productive.
John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist, thinks there might just be something to that.
He has spent much of his career tackling the topic of loneliness and isolation, which researchers have proven can affect humans adversely, all the way down to gene expression.
“Feeling ignored sparks feelings of loneliness,” says Cacioppo, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.
But getting away, he says — “that’s the opposite of being lonely.”
It’s time that you take by choice, Cacioppo says. So while the cognitive effects are still being studied, he says it’s very likely that that type of solitude is good for the brain.
Dan Rollman had little doubt of that when he and a few others from Reboot, a group of Jewish “thought leaders,” gathered in 2009. That’s when they created the Sabbath Manifesto, inspired by the traditional Jewish sabbath, but aimed at people from any background who are encouraged to unplug one day — any day — of the week.
The idea came to Rollman when he found himself craving a simpler time, when stores closed on Sundays and life slowed down.
“I knew I wanted a day of rest,” says Rollman, who is CEO of the company RecordSetter.com.
The Manifesto — described as “a creative project designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world” — has 10 principles. They are suggestions ranging from “avoid technology” and “connect with loved ones” to “get outside,” ”drink wine” and “find silence.”
To help with this, the organization has created “The Undo List” — an email that arrives Friday afternoons “with ideas for conversation topics, readings, local outings and creative endeavors to ease the time away from technology and help make the day better.” There also are specific activities for subscribers in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Rollman himself avoids doing work on Saturdays, whenever he can, and often unplugs altogether then — and encourages his employees to do the same.
“There’s a huge sense of relief,” Rollman says. “It is a liberating feeling to walk out of one’s door and not have your cellphone in your pocket.”
Leah Jones, a 35-year-old Chicagoan, hasn’t gone quite that far.
But she has cut back, turning her cellphone to “silent” mode from 11:30 p.m to 6 a.m. and putting it away when she goes out.
“I’m a better friend when I don’t have my phone in my hand,” says Jones, who is 35 and vice president of social and emerging media at Olson public relations.
For her, solitude might simply be sitting home and watching a few episodes of TV.
“I might tweet while I watch it, but it’s a perfectly acceptable way to spend an afternoon,” she says.
Is that really solitude, though?
Davidson, at Duke, thinks it is.
“For some people it’s dancing and blasting rock music,” she says. “We tend to think of it as solitude, which is sort of a lofty term, when in fact for many people, it’s also about being joyful.
“The real issue is fun vs. work.”
And often, she says, her students are better at it than she is.
“They seem very fine to go off on a bike ride and leave a cellphone,” she says.
Renee Houston, an associate professor of communication studies at Puget Sound University in Washington state, also finds herself envying a colleague who regularly unplugs. “He will drive two hours to go to the coast just to step away, just have time to think,” she says.
She’s not there yet but is finding small ways to set limits. Her family has a rule, for instance — put cellphones away during dinner unless there’s a crisis.
She, too, has noticed more after-hours tech limits in the business world. But it can be as difficult to set those limits with close colleagues or friends who’ve come to expect instant responses, and get miffed if they don’t get one.
“The friend is saying, ‘But wait! It’s me!’” says Cacioppo from the University of Chicago. “But you have to wonder — what kind of friend are they?”
The key, he and others say, is to develop a reputation for being responsive, but not hyper-responsive. He sets those limits himself — has given up Facebook and generally answers emails or texts from colleagues or students within half a day, if it’s nothing too urgent. If you make yourself available all the time, people come to expect it even more, he says.
“And the more responsive you are, the more trivial things you get queried about.”
Davidson, from Duke, says it also helps when there is a “built-in alibi” — the message from a work or social circle where unplugging is accepted, and even welcomed.
But Jones in Chicago says you also have to let yourself off the hook and resist the urge to constantly check in to see what friends are doing.
Social networking “makes it seem like everybody’s doing something awesome,” she says. “But you can’t always worry about what other people are doing.
“You have to give yourself permission to miss out.”
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Online:
Sabbath Manifesto: http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/about
The Undo List: http://theundolist.com/
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Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org or via http://twitter.com/irvineap
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edSurge: Are MOOCs Really the Future of the University?
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Cathy wrote this article for edSurge on the possibilities and challenges presented by MOOCs for the future of higher education. The full article is posted below, or can be read on the edSurge site here.
In the last few weeks, faculty at universities from Amherst to Duke to San Jose State have been pushing back at the incursion of MOOCs on their campuses. The San Jose professors offered this reason: that giving in to MOOCs now means that “public universities that have so long and successfully served the students and citizens of California will be dismantled, and what remains of them will become a hodgepodge branch of private companies.”
Point well taken! If we centralize teaching through a few commercial or even non-profit MOOC providers, what is the future of the professorate? If undergraduate teaching is centralized by MOOC providers, how can we sustain future graduate programs except at a handful of elite universities? Without graduate departments, what is the fate of basic research?
Government and industry offer less and less support for theoretical and specialized research in the sciences; neither do they support the full range of research in the human and social sciences. As the prospects for teaching careers grow dim and support for teaching assistants dwindles, many fields at many universities will simply disappear. That’s a problem, particularly because it may well be the research in these fields–pursued without a clear commercial end product–that results in transformative, world-changing insights, possibilities, discoveries, and breakthroughs.
MOOCs are forcing universities to confront some challenging issues including the cost of tuition, and who wins and who loses as this kind of online education emerges. Faculty and institutions are wrestling with these questions and are often rightly concerned about their future.
But left out of that conversation are the urgent demands of hundreds of thousands of students who are struggling with the cost and access to higher education–and potentially with staggering personal debt. Currently 450,000 students are on the waiting list for California community colleges alone. In the great technical schools in India, the admission rate is less than 2% as selected from only that tiny percentage of students eligible to take the entrance exams. The average GPA of a student entering the University of California Irvine this year is 4.1 on a 4.0 scale, and the students need perfect test scores and a host of extracurricular activities to get into their state university, too. That’s a tragedy for the students and for society.
MOOCs address students’ cost problems by offering free or low-cost courses to anyone, often without prerequisites or entrance requirements. Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity, in a recent video has said that 300,000 students have enrolled in just one Udacity computer science course. And, thanks to individual mentoring and tutoring, drop out rates for a number of the San Jose courses offered by Udacity are falling rapidly, even as new research suggests that problem-based, online learning in areas of study such as computer programming can achieve comparable retention rates of traditional lecture-style classes–and rival those classes when assessed on the “applicability” of the work.
It’s for those kinds of reasons that Georgia Tech recently announced its first online master’s degree in computer science, funded partly by AT&T and offered by Udacity, and intended to reach a global audience far beyond the normal student body taught by Georgia Tech faculty.
What we have at the moment are competing values, competing goals, and, unfortunately, a lot of anxiety.
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?
As a small attempt to find clarity and some creative new answers to the problems of access and affordability, I’ve decided to teach a MOOC this coming academic year that, among other things, I’d like to offer up as a referendum platform on MOOCs.
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.
To start to demystify MOOCs, I’ve already started blogging at least once or twice a week on the hastac.org website about MOOC mechanics, methods, and financing. I’ve also posted the draft storyboards for The History and Future of Higher Education videos here. I’m happy to hear your feedback. We plan to begin filming the videos for this class in June.
Starting in January 2014, I will also be teaching a face-to-face course at Duke on “The History and Future of Higher Education” right alongside the Coursera course. These Duke students will meet and discuss ideas with one another and then also register in the Coursera course and participate in similar online conversations, in the forums that can host literally thousands of participants worldwide. My goal is to use the stable online Coursera platform to build an engaged and expanded community interested in this topic. I suspect I’ll have about 30 on-campus students and who knows how many online.
Even better, I’ve been hearing from other teachers who want to teach similar courses also during the Winter 2014 semester, in their brick-and-mortar classrooms, using a similar method of face-to-face conversation combined with online interaction.
So far, I have heard from about twenty college professors and high school teachers—and one teacher at a middle school—who plan to teach a version of this course alongside me. We’ll use the six hours of video as a “textbook” for the course. I will also have two student-produced textbooks available for free download. Others will be invited to contribute to an online bibliography for the class.
Together, the students in our face-to-face classes will all have a chance to take part in the weekly global Forums where we will address current problems in higher education, explain existing solutions that individuals have come up with for their institutions or region, and propose still other new ways of learning and teaching together. MOOCs will be key to the conversation in every way.
You’re invited to join us! I love the idea of using the centralized Coursera platform of “Sage on the Stage” videos to generate a connectivist, peer-to-peer sharing of ideas, insights, and methods. Perhaps together we’ll come up with an action agenda, something better for the future of higher education.
Duke Today: Teaching 2.0
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Duke Today featured “Surprise Endings” the undergraduate class that Cathy is co-teaching with Dan Ariely on its website. You can read the full text of their article below, or view the original story here.
February 11, 2013 | By Eric Ferreri
DURHAM, NC - For Cathy Davidson, flipping the classroom isn’t enough. She’d prefer, as she likes to say, to make it do cartwheels.
That’s the general idea of the new course she’s co-teaching this semester with behavioral economist Dan Ariely.
In “Surprise Endings” – an exploration of both literature and social science — the students help select course topics, pick their own projects and ultimately create their own version of the class to be offered free on the Internet. They do lots of work between classes on a public blog, and as of yet haven’t told the professors what their final projects will be.
This level of student empowerment is one cornerstone of the course, which Davidson is calling a meta-MOOC because of the product expected at the end. All semester, students are piecing video segments together based on class readings and exercises. Collectively, those video segments will be freely available on the web, much like a Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, which is a new style of online learning that’s gathering momentum at Duke and across higher education.
“You learn best both by doing and by teaching someone what you know,” says Davidson, an English professor and expert in digital learning. “It puts them into the role of teacher, and they learn far better that way.”
It’s a level of responsibility that Sarah Du, a freshman, hasn’t experienced in a classroom before.
“It’s a little scary,” she says. “You’re putting a lot of responsibility in the hands of college students. It’s great they trust us with it.”
Of course, the students aren’t entirely on their own. Ariely and Davidson armed them with a website filled with resources and advise the students as they conduct their group work. A professional videographer and a team of graduate teaching assistants are on hand to assist.
In one recent class, the 32 students wore red, an ode to the upcoming Valentine’s Day and its themes of love, romance and relationships, which the class is exploring through readings and blogging.
Davidson has dressed for the occasion as well, with a red blazer over a black skirt and black stockings.
And Ariely? The red-and-black striped smoking jacket from the Hugh Hefner collection is the tamest thing he has on. He is also wearing mismatched, striped socks and orange and blue sneakers. A pair of bright green, oversized heart-shaped sunglasses are perched on his head.
Again, this is not your normal college classroom.
Ariely conducts two class exercises that illustrate the norms and awkwardness of dating. In one, each student affixes a sticky note with a number to his or her forehead; without knowing their numbers, students are directed to seek out the highest numbers — 5s — on other foreheads. The 5s represent the most attractive people. The drill shows how people determine their relative worth and attractiveness.
In Ariely’s second exercise, each student is given 10 dollar bills and told to pair up with a student of the opposite sex, using the money as bait. The problem is there are 15 men and 13 women, which means that two men will be left dateless — much like a high school dance.
The students who ended the exercise with money got to keep it.
Later in the same class, Ariely and Davidson toggle between their expertise areas in fielding a far-ranging swath of questions from students. A business professor who specializes in explaining human behavior in plain language, discusses how love influences how people behave. When he pauses, Davidson — the English professor — dives in with a literary analogy.
There’s an ease in this give-and-take that Davidson and Ariely say comes naturally, in part, because their areas of expertise are so often intertwined.
“Social scientists reflect on life, and people in literature reflect on life,” Ariely says. “It’s just from different perspectives.”
Click to watch on YouTube
The State of Things: The Science Behind Paying Attention
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WUNC’s The State of Things recently invited Cathy to discuss what it means to pay attention and the complicated ways we each learn to do so.
“The point of turning the classroom around is to get away from thinking that attention is always something hierarchical that someone makes you do and [to] make you a little bit more mindful of your own learning,” she told Frank Stasio during the interview. “Once you know something and have to teach it to somebody else , it’s a different level of learning than when you just regurgitate it on a test.”
You can listen to the full program here.
University World News: Stop Polarising the MOOCs Debate
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Cathy penned a piece on the competing narratives surrounding MOOCs this week for University World News. The full text is posted below or can be read on the UWN site here.
The academic conversation on MOOCs is starting to polarise in exactly the talking-past-one-another way that so many complex conversations evolve: with very smart points on either side, but not a lot of recognition that the validity of certain key points on one side does not undermine the validity of certain key points on the other.
I regret this flattening of online learning into a simple binary of ‘politically and financially motivated greed’ on the one hand and ‘an opportunity to find out more about learning’ on the other. Some of both in different situations can be true.
It’s always hard to be able to hold two complex and even contradictory ideas in one’s mind at once but, well, that’s life. Both can be true. And there is so much to be gained from a sustained conversation on every side and from each side’s learning from the other, without assuming the other side is being naive or callous in its concerns.
Here’s a case in point: although I’ve not done a data count, I would say that, about a year ago, the majority of articles on higher education in the mass media in the US ran the gamut from snide to extremely negative, often spring-boarding off entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s offering cash rewards to students choosing not to go to college.
The rhetoric of so many articles seemed to be “is higher education really worth it?” These articles (I bet there were dozens if not hundreds) were often filled with hard data about the soaring costs of higher education and horrific student debt pitted against anecdotes of unemployment among the college educated.
It was virtually a meme; that if you are fool enough to go to college, you end up deeper in debt and unemployed and therefore college isn’t worth it. The tone in the press emphasised that latter point, demeaning the importance of higher education, laughing slyly at anyone who thinks higher education is a worthy goal.
Enter MOOCs
Enter massive open online courses: MOOCs. Whatever else one may think about MOOCS, their vast popularity proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that very many people want – really, really want – more not less higher learning.
Has anyone else noticed that the tone of the conversation has now shifted from “is college worth it?” to “how can we make necessary, important, invaluable learning available to the widest number of people for the lowest cost?” I certainly have.
Those who hate MOOCs and reduce them solely to a device of the neoliberal rich to diminish the role of the tenured professor, should at least be using the vast popularity of online courses to argue the value of a college education. It’s demonstrable. It’s massive.
And those same people who see MOOCs as a way to diminish the role of the tenured professor (from both sides) should also be thinking about who is actually taking MOOCs.
Often, they are not the same students who sit in the classrooms of tenured professors, themselves a constantly diminishing percentage of all those who teach in higher education – a situation that existed long before MOOCs.
There is no evidence that students are dropping out of brick-and-mortar universities in droves in order to enrol in online courses. On the contrary, the typical online course student is someone who would not otherwise have access to higher education.
The ridiculous (and pernicious) University of Virginia trustees who forced a president to resign because she wasn’t moving fast enough on MOOCs, as if that would drive down the tuition costs for the university’s elite public cadre of students, simply didn’t know the numbers.
There is no evidence MOOCs will do much if anything to change the tuition costs of higher education except for those taking MOOCs. Period.
At the same time that there is a lot of bad economic reasoning by those who think MOOCs can solve the crisis of high tuition costs in higher education, there is equally bad economic thinking by those who blame MOOCs for declining public support for higher education.
That process began long before MOOCs existed. The University of Michigan, for example, currently receives only 6% of its funding from the state of Michigan – and MOOCs were not in the picture to make that happen.
Disparities
Nor are MOOCs the source of the vast economic disparities that beset America’s contemporary higher education (and school) system.
If anything, MOOCs illuminate the terrible economic disparities of higher education (worldwide) by offering a cheap, massive alternative – not to those sitting in the classrooms of tenured professors, but for those who have no opportunity to be in those classes.
MOOCs work, for example, for those seeking to retool their learning to prepare for new professions when their own no longer exists, who are seeking a second career, or who want simply to enjoy the benefits of learning but are not able to participate in actual face-to-face classroom learning.
To have the time and be in a location where you can actually attend college physically is pretty rare in a world of two-career families. And community colleges (where tenured professors are rare indeed) do a great job, but they too require face-to-face engagement and cannot begin to serve all the students who want to take courses.
Sadly, higher education is more and more becoming priced for the global 1%, a trend that began long before MOOCs existed. It is often noted that tuition costs have risen far faster than inflation. True. But they have not risen faster than the kinds of goods and services designed for the global 1%.
In fact, private university tuition costs (and, increasingly, out-of-state public tuition costs) are quite in line with the escalating costs of such things as elite tax services, financial advisors, hedge fund managers, elective surgery, luxury travel, and luxury goods in general. They are also in line with the costs of private preschool and elite boarding schools.
Indeed, in many cases MOOCs will not solve the problem of the high cost of tuition fees at face-to-face institutions; but, in the end, they may help more people who have never conceived of attending a ‘real’ college participate in the higher education that, the numbers show, is coveted, prized, valued, sought after.
And thus – for MOOC lovers and MOOCs haters alike – an important rhetorical point we should all be emphasising, in every conversation: in the complex, changing world in which we live, advanced learning is necessary. Not a luxury. It deserves the public support of other necessities. Advanced education is far too important to price out of the market for all but the global 1%.
If the question is, “is higher education worth it?” we know from the massive enrolment in online courses that the answer is a resounding “yes”. It is also significant that world history courses are enrolling as many students as Python’s open source software. People want higher learning.
Whatever else one may think of MOOCs, they are an important game changer in the anti-higher education conversation that raged not so long ago.
* Cathy N Davidson is co-founder of HASTAC, a 10,000+ network committed to new modes of collaboration, research, learning and institutional change. She teaches at Duke University, where she co-directs the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. She is author of The Future of Thinking: Learning institutions for a digital age (with HASTAC co-founder David Theo Goldberg), and Now You See It: How the brain science of attention will transform the way we live, work, and learn (Viking Press). She is co-principal investigator of the HASTAC-MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions. In October 2012, she and David Theo Goldberg were named Educator of the Year by the World Technology Network.
* NOTE: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and not of HASTAC. This is an edited version of the article, “If MOOCs are the answer, what is the question?”.
Inside HigherEd: Digital Learning, for the Learners
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This week, ”A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age,” a document co-authored by Cathy and colleagues throughout the public and private sectors, was released in the hopes of galvanizing a conversation surrounding the considerations and rights of online learners. Inside HigherEd reports on the reception of this document:
It was probably inevitable that any group of people who sought, however tentatively, to define “the rights, responsibilities, and possibilities for education in the globally connected world of the present and beyond” would find themselves accused of excluding important parties, of being “top-down,” and of hubris.
But the cadre that drafted “A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age” — which included scholars such as Cathy Davidson and Jesse Stommel, technologists such as John Seely Brown, and entrepreneurs like Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun — thought that amid all the hubbub about massive open online courses, “it would be useful to have some kind of document that describes the broader vision for where digital learning can go,” and for ensuring that the needs of learners themselves, rather than of institutions or providers or instructors, are central, said one of the authors, Peer 2 Peer University’s Philipp Schmidt.
And while the authors drew significant praise Wednesday in many quarters for the thoughtfulness of the document, they also absorbed the expected critiques on various fronts, especially from those noting that the group lacked obvious any representatives of individual learners themselves. In response, the authors reiterated more forcefully a point they had sought to make in initial document: that it was meant to be the fledgling starting point for something repeatedly revised and ultimately much more broadly representative.
“If the result is a big conversation that gets people engaged and involved, including self-learners, then it’s a success,” said Schmidt. “This is not intended to be anything remotely like a final version.”
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, a lecturer in comparative literature at Stanford University (who is also, as she puts it, “married to the MOOC,” as Sebastian’s wife), said that she and her husband had gathered the dozen invitees in December with the goal of crafting a “manifesto” of sorts to put into context the hysteria that has evolved around MOOCs, specifically, and online learning more generally as a result.
As they talked, the manifesto concept morphed into an attempt to initiate, for the digital age, the kinds of student bills of rights that others had created before them. The effort embraced the idea, she said, that the digital age is different, offering both possibilities — “a powerful and potentially awe-inspiring opportunity to make new forms of learning available to all students worldwide” — and dangers, with massification also making possible greater exploitation.
And the bill of rights they crafted acknowledges both positives and negatives. It cites the prospect that digital forms of education can broaden student access to high-quality learning (“online learning has the potential to ensure that this right is a reality for a greater percentage of the world’s population than has ever been realizable before”).
But it also recognizes the risk that massive amounts of data on students will be collected (and possibly misused) and that students deserve financial transparency (“the right to know how their participation supports the financial health of the online system in which they are participating,” including for “free” courses) and pedagogical transparency, so they know whether a course will lead to a credential or not, and if so, what its authenticity and value are.
“Students have the right to care, diligence, commitment, honesty and innovation,” the authors write. “They are not being sold a product — nor are they the product being sold. They are not just consumers. Education is also about trust. Learning — not corporate profit — is the principal purpose of all education.”
As Silicon Valley and venture capital money flows into the online learning market (and the MOOC space, including for Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity), one might expect Thrun and other entrepreneur types to bristle at, rather than sign on to, calls for significant financial transparency. But Dierkes-Thrun said her husband fully believes in “holding providers accountable,” and that the document represents the “12 of us speaking together.”
Amid the cheers of “Well done, folks” and other praise for the document in blogs and on Twitter, some critiques emerged. In an e-mail message, Cable Green of Creative Commons tweaked the authors for implicitly contributing to the mania about MOOCs by failing to note that while they are “open” in the sense of who can enroll in them (by virtue of being free), many of the course materials are not openly licensed so they can be used and reused in the public domain.
And Anya Kamenetz, an advocate for truly open and do-it-yourself learning, noted that while a “bunch of educators got together to write a ‘bill of rights’ for online learners,” the problem was “they didn’t ask any learners what they wanted.”
Several of its authors, in blogging about the process and its result, went out of their way to acknowledge those limitations and to make clear that they didn’t intend for theirs to be the last word.
“We want lots of people with lots of different groups to remix it, edit it, make it their own,” said Schmidt.
You can read more, at Inside HigherEd.
Inside HigherEd: MLA’s Big (Digital) Tent
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Inside HigherEd’s Serena Golden recently profiled the Modern Language Association’s “Avenues of Access: Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communication” panel. As part of the presentation, Cathy gave a talk entitled “Access Demands A Paradigm Shift.” Here’s what Golden had to say about Cathy’s presentation which parsed questions of scale and access in the digital humanities:
Panelist Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, tackled a different aspect of “access” in her talk, contending that — in contrast to the current craze for MOOCs, which “massively scal[e] an outmoded model of education” — academics “should be massively remodeling our institutions for contributive, connected participatory learning.”
But Davidson — herself the founder of HASTAC, a decade-old online and in-person network of scholars and others interested in the transformative potential of new technologies for teaching, learning, communicating, and conducting research — also argued that the digital humanities are intrinsically connected to ideas about breaking down barriers and undermining hierarchies.
In its early days, Davidson said, “the field was largely, though not exclusively, about digitizing and scaling and making ‘available’ existing archives. The rhetoric, too, was about access in a fairly narrow conceptual sense: digitizing existing knowledge so more people could use it.”
But as their work has grown and evolved, Davidson said, “digital humanists have seen that, once you change access, you open the floodgates to a range of other questions about content, authority, hierarchy, and power that you may not even know you were asking.”
To read the full article, visit Inside HigherEd.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Multiple Choice Exam Theory
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Prof. Jonathan Sterne, an associate professor of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, recently read Cathy’s book Now You See It in preparation for his fall course load. The book spurred an in-depth consideration of multiple choice testing. Sterne shared his ruminations on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker blog. You can read the full text below or on The Chronicle’s website.
Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)
January 10, 2013, 8:00 am
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Jonathan Sterne, an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His latest books are MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press) and The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge). Find him online at http://sterneworks.organd follow him on Twitter @jonathansterne.--@JBJ]
Every summer, before I assemble my fall courses, I read a book on pedagogy. Last summer’s choice is Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It (except I read it in the spring). Those who are familiar with critiques of mainstream educational practice will find many familiar arguments, but Now You See It crucially connects them with US educational policy. The book also challenges teachers who did not grow up online to think about what difference it makes that their students did. In particular, Davidson skewers pieties about attention, mastery, testing and evaluation.
The one part of the book I couldn’t make my peace with was her critique of multiple choice testing. I agree in principle with everything she says, but what can you do in large lecture situations, where many of the small class principles—like the ones she put into practice for This Is Your Brain on the Internet—won’t work simply because of the scale of the operation?
When I asked her about it, we talked about multiple choice approaches that might work. Clickers are currently popular in one corner of pedagogical theory for large lectures. Like many schools, McGill promotes them as a kind of participation (which is roughly at the level of voting on American Idol – except as Henry Jenkins shows, there’s a lot more affect invested there). I dislike clickers because they eliminate even more spontaneity from the humanities classroom than slideware already does. I prefer in-class exercises built around techniques like think-write-pair-share.
Multiple-Choice Testing for Comprehension, Not Recognition
I’ve got another system I want to share here, which is admittedly imperfect. Indeed, I brought it up because I was hoping Cathy knew a better solution for big classes. She didn’t, so I’m posting it here because it’s the best thing I currently know of.
It’s based on testing theory I read many years ago, and it seems to work in my large-lecture introduction to Communication Studies course. It is a multiple choice system that tests for comprehension, rather than recognition. As Derek Bruff explained in a 2010 ProfHacker post, multiple-choice works best when it operates at the conceptual level, rather than at the level of regurgitating facts. This works perfectly for me, since Intro to Communication Studies at McGill is largely concept-driven.
A couple caveats are in order here: 1) students generally don’t like it. It looks like other multiple choice tests but it’s not, so skills that were well developed in years of standardized testing are rendered irrelevant. 2) multiple choice is only one axis of evaluation for the course, and as with Bruff’s final, multiple-choice makes up only part of the exam, with the other part being free-written short answers. Students must write and synthesize, and they are subject to pop quizzes, which they also dislike (except for a small subset that realizes a side-effect is they keep up with readings). On the syllabus, I am completely clear about which evaluation methods are coercive (those I use to make them keep up with the reading and material) and which are creative (where they must analyze, synthesize and make ideas their own).
So, here’s my multiple choice final exam formula.
Step 1: Make it semi-open book. Each student is allowed to bring in a single sheet of 8.5″ x 11” paper, double sided, single-layered (don’t ask). On that sheet, they can write anything they want, so long as it’s in their own handwriting. They must submit the sheet with the exam.
The advantage of this method is it allows students to write down anything they have trouble memorizing, but it forces them to study and synthesize before they get to the moment of the test. Even if they copy someone else, they still have to expend all that energy writing down the information. And most students turn in very original, very intricate study guides.
Step 2: Eliminate recognition as a factor in the test.
Most multiple choice questions rely on recognition as the path to the right answer. You get a question stem, and then four or five answers, one of which will be right. Often, the right answer is something the student will recognize from the reading, while the wrong answers aren’t.
But recognition isn’t the kind of thinking we want to test for. We want to test if the student understands the reading.
The answer to this problem is simple: spend more time writing the wrong answers.
Pretty much all my multiple choice exam questions take this form:
From here, you’re basically set, though I often add a 4th option that is “the common sense” answer (since people bring a lot of preconceptions to media studies), or I take the opportunity to crack a joke.
Step 3: Give the students practice questions, and explain the system to them. I hide nothing. I tell them how I write the questions, why I write them the way I do, and what I expect of them. I even have them talk about what to write on their sheets of paper. I use my university’s online courseware, which as Jason Jones explained in a 2010 ProfHacker post, takes the practice quiz out of class time, and lets students have multiple cracks at it as they get ready for the exam.
A few other guidelines:
Step 4 (optional): For the first time in 2012, I had students try to write questions themselves. Over the course of about 10 weeks, I had groups of 18 students write up and post questions on the discussion board (that follow the rules above) that pertained to readings or lectures from their assigned week. A large number of them were pretty good, so I edited them and added them to my question bank for the final exam. So for fall 2012, my COMS 210 students wrote about half the questions they were likely to encounter on the final. If they were exceptionally lucky, their own question might wind up on their own exam (we used 4 different forms for the final).
Here are links to my syllabus and to a copy of the write your own multiple choice assignment (with the names removed).
Caveats
I think a lot about large-lecture pedagogy and I’d be delighted to hear from other profs—in any university field—who teach big classes and who find ways to nurture student learning and intense evaluation in an environment structured by limited resources and large numbers.
Photo “Do NOT attempt to answer this question, your head will explode!” by Flickr userdullhunk / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0
Inside Higher Ed: Why Students Gripe About Grades
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Why Students Gripe About Grades
You are the best teacher in the world and you’ve just turned in your grades for the best class you’ve ever taught. If you are a college professor you know what comes next: the barrage of complaints about the low grade, the litany of excuses for why this or that missed assignment was due to health reasons, the pleading that the B+ be raised to an A- or medical school plans will be foiled and a life ruined, the thinly veiled threat that changing a grade is easier than dealing with a student judiciary complaint (or an irate parent). It’s the most demoralizing part of being an educator today.
And here’s the paradox: If our students weren’t all tireless grade-grinders, we educators would have failed them. Yes, you read that right. They were well-taught and learned well the lesson implicit in our society that what matters is not the process or the learning but the end result, the grade. A typical college freshman today has been through 10 years of No Child Left Behind educational philosophy where “success” has been reduced to a score on a test given at the end of the course. For a decade, they have had the message that a good teacher is someone whose students succeed on those end-of-grade standardized tests. Teacher salaries can be docked in some states, whole schools can be closed or privatized in others, if students score too poorly. The message we’re giving our students today is all that really counts is the final score. No wonder they fight for a good one!
Conversely, for all that colleges say about not being solely concerned with test scores, almost all boast their average score, and that score helps colleges with their own rankings in U.S. News & World Report and more serious collegiate ranking and accreditation systems. And, to go one step higher, aggregated scores on those tests are what make the world educational rankings in the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — you know, the ones where our students humiliate us each year by coming in 14th in reading, 17th in sciences, and 25th in math.
It’s not like an examiner is standing there really probing to see what each child in the world does or does not know, what they remember, or how well they apply their knowledge. All those rankings reduce all the skills and content one learns in a subject to how well one does on a standardized test that research shows might actually cover about 20 percent of the actual content of a course, demotivates actual learning, and can be “scammed” either through intensive cram sessions, pre-testing tutoring in the form of the test, or enormous amounts of class time dedicated to “teaching to the test.” None of those are good educational philosophy, but in a world where the final score is what counts, those methods get the end result you want — not of more learning but of a higher score that opens doorways.
So don’t blame the next 18-year-old who calls, knocks on your door, or e-mails to boost that B- to an A-. He’s been taught his whole life how to get the good final score that equals educational success. Why should he be able to forget that lesson just because it’s a seminar and the grades are based on essays requiring eloquence, persuasive rhetoric, critical thinking, and analytical skills? If he has absorbed the educational philosophy of our nation that grade achievement constitutes educational success, then whining for an A- makes him … what? Well, eloquent, rhetorically persuasive, and a final critical and analytic thinker. Right? Doesn’t he now have the grade on his transcript to prove it?
I wish I were being simply ironic and flippant here, but I think this is very serious. I know just how serious when I talk to corporate recruiters about the current crop of students and they tell me that, whereas it used to take six months for a great student to become a great coworker, it now takes a good year to two years. This generation of students is still waiting for the final grade, for the test score that shows they’ve aced a subject, not for some demonstrable achievement of mastery or — the most crucial workplace skill — an ability to survey one’s skills and knowledge, understand where one might be lacking, and then find someone to fill in that gap through a collaborative effort or to find some way, typically online, to learn the skill one needs in order to make up for previous educational losses.
It takes nearly two years because they’ve been educated in a system where the grade is all but have to live adult lives in a world where self-awareness, diagnosis of a problem, an ability to solve a problem by applying previous knowledge, and collaborative skills all count — along with eloquence, persuasive skills, critical thinking, and analytical skills.
Here’s the punch line for college profs out there: We will not eliminate the grade-grubbing until we change our current educational system. Until then, we will need to be putting up with a lot of whining by students who have mastered the system that educators and policy makers have created for them.
Here’s the punch line for college students out there: Until you educate yourself beyond the assumptions of the system we’ve foisted off on you, you’ll be depriving yourself of the real skills and knowledge that constitute the only educational test worth anything: the test of how well your formal education prepares you for success in everything else. Cherish the great seminar teacher, even if she gives you a B-. It’s what went on inside that classroom — not the grade at the end of it — that truly constitutes achievement in the world beyond school.
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As an editorial postscript, I should mention that I almost never have grade-grabbing and whining, but, for over a decade, I’ve been using peer-grading, contract grading, and other forms of participatory learning (such as the class writing its own standards and constitution at the beginning). I write about a lot of that in Now You See It.
And, if you never have a chance to take a class with a truly inspiring seminar teacher, you’d do worse than to master the “rules for students and teachers” offered by the great avant garde composer John Cage. You’ll notice he never says anything about test scores, grades, teaching to the test, or OECD rankings. The test he wants you to pass is the big one: success in the rest of our life.
And one final bit of wisdom for today, Gandhi’s “rules for an ethical life” – great rules for teaching and learning, too.
Bio
Cathy Davidson is co-founder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) and co-director of the Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University. This essay first appeared on her HASTAC blog.
Internet Time Blog: Jay Cross Reviews Now You See It
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Business and eLearning guru, Jay Cross, recently reviewed Cathy’s book Now You See It on his blog, Internet Time. Cross calls it, “brilliant,” “extremely well-written,” and “nearly impossible to put down.” You can read the review on Jay’s blog or see below for the full text.
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I finished reading Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It yesterday afternoon. It is brilliant. Extremely well-written. Nearly impossible to put down. I love the way this woman thinks. This is a beautiful book.
Have you ever watched the television series Eureka? The characters get trapped in a virtual reality environment and when the force field gets hosed, the picture jiggles and sometimes what you thought was the real world begins to pixelate and morph into little cubes. Your eyes are pried open by the reality shift. That’s what I experienced reading Now You See It. The world’s not quite what I thought.
We all suffer inattention blindness. Humans have low bandwidth. When we pay attention to one thing, we don’t register lots of concurrent alternatives.
Our culture is leaving the industrial era. It’s not accidental that we began to imagine our brains were linear, machine-like, inflexible, and subject to decay a hundred years ago; we came up with the assembly line and time clock at the same time. We’ve got to see that for what it is and then cultivate the distraction to take another perspective. Oh yeah, those aren’t chickens; they’re ducks. Classrooms discourage learning. Grades and multiple choice and standardization are obsolete.
She gets there, in the words of a reviewer for The Times Educational Supplement by
I recall someone at IBM’s Almaden Lab once lamenting that “We look at the world through industrial-age goggles.”
The first time I read Frederick Taylor in the original, I was outraged. How could he think so little of his fellow man? What gumption it must take to tell someone, “You’re not paid to think.” As I reflected on the value created in industrial age and the comforts it showered upon us, I tempered my feelings. Taylor wanted to increase production so there would be more for all to share. However, at the end of the day, whatever you think of Taylor and his one best way, he’s dead and those days are over.
We need a new set of tricks. Davidson asks,
What confuses the brain delights the brain. I love this” “The mind always wanders off task because the mind’s task is to wander.”
One thing I don’t get yet is the IBM-in-Second Life thing. The big section on Chuck Hamilton and his avatar pals got me to skipping pages. Maybe I’m an old fuddie duddie. (Or need a corporate sponsor to fund my technology needs.)
The Wall Street Journal Review neatly summarizes that the “….central argument of the book: that since every individual is bound to miss something, by working together people can cover one another’s blind spots and collectively see the big picture.”
In a review for The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Chabris trashes Davidson’s thesis by saying there’s no proof of what she proposes. “No hard evidence.” The reviewer also studies inattention blindness. In fact, he corrects Davidson for calling the phenomenon attention blindness. The “Now You See It” of Davidson’s title gives away the theme of the reviewer’s book, which is about the famous gorilla-sighting video. Sour grapes?
Budges? We don’t need no stinking badges.
“No hard evidence”
The Times reviewer’s putdown reminds me of a run-in I had with an American academic at a conference in India earlier this year. He had opined that 70-20-10 was hogwash — spurious figures somehow derived from a misinterpretation of Archimedes. I flipped out and challenged him to a debate at the conference. He said he wouldn’t dignify this totally make-believe myth because it had never been verified and reported in a peer-reviewed journal. Specifically, he told me six PhD students who combed the past 50 years of peer-reviewed articles couldn’t find any empirical research to back it up. He said the numbers were therefore meaningless and the issue was not debatable.
This is the sort of nonsense Cathy Davidson warned us about” using yesterday’s yardstick (50 years!) in an attempt to measure today’s reality. It’s not apples and oranges. It’s apples and black holes. Nothing to compare.
And guess what? When you’re on the cutting edge, there isn’t any proof yet. Maybe there’s an emerging pattern, but there’s no “hard evidence.” That goes with the territory. Otherwise, you’re not on the edge. Given that the entire world is getting edgier (you can quote me on that), you better get used to it.
The book reviewer finds Davidson overly optimistic. I share her pronoia — the feeling that the world is conspiring to make our lives better. Davidson’s stories will inspire you to think highly of the future of learning and work. You got a problem with that?
I’m an advocate of common sense. Davidson gives us lots of ponder.
#eyeopener
#justsayin
#wakeupcall
#dreamland
#itateam
Size Isn’t Everything
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Reblogged from the Chronicle of Higher Ed
For academe’s future, think mash-ups not MOOC’s
By Cathy N. Davidson
My reading material to and from London recently for the annual open-source programming event known as Mozfest, or the Mozilla Festival,included two glossy magazines focusing on the future of education: the November 19 cover story in Forbes and the entire November issue of Wired UK, an offshoot of the American magazine. Education is rarely seen as sexy or lucrative enough to take over business and technology magazines.
Should educators be delighted by this unexpected attention—or very, very worried?
A little of both. Wired UK raises the possibility that the university may have to restructure itself. That undoubtedly will raise numerous hackles. But from an intellectual standpoint, it signals a revolution in waiting. Forbes, on the other hand, touts the financial promise of investments in MOOC’s and other digital educational offerings. Entrepreneurs and college administrators are already heeding that siren call. But it is mostly the sound of yesterday.
Let’s look at Wired UK first. The issue is devoted to MIT’s famous Media Lab and its innovative approach to research, teaching, and collaborative learning. It marks the return to the magazine, after a hiatus of many years, of one of its original backers, the legendary Nicholas Negroponte, who also co-founded the Media Lab in 1985.
Featured are both Negroponte 1.0, the editorial that launched Wired in 1993, and the new Negroponte 2.0. In the 1.0 version, Negroponte promises that as your “television’s intelligence increases, it will begin to select video and receive signals in ‘unreal time’” and predicts that companies like Nintendo, Apple, and IBM (not TV makers) will soon be presenting the world with multimedia products for the home. “The six o’clock news can be not only delivered when you want it, but it also can be edited for you and randomly accessed by you.” Well, the man got that one right!
Given that such 20/20 foresight is rare, it is worth paying attention to Negroponte 2.0. The new message isn’t much different from his old. Negroponte still insists, for example, that what makes the Internet different from devices like the dumb TV is that we contribute to it, shape it, make it; we do not just “consume” the World Wide Web.
He also still maintains a position he stated long ago: “Computers are not about computing, but everyday life.” Everyday life is being transformed not by technology, he argues, but by the new ways that humans, globally, connect to one another. Boundaries and hierarchies are becoming fuzzier as “work and home, reader and author, education and entertainment, container and content” overlap. And disciplines are coming apart, as imagination and creativity become (as Steve Jobs also said) the lifeblood of technology and (Negroponte) “perspective is more valuable than IQ.”
So what’s different in 2.0? Mainly, Negroponte is no longer predicting; he is describing our reality, and the rest of the issue shows how the Media Lab has transformed education for this merged and fuzzy world. The changes described in the lab’s research protocols for everything from robotics to preschool education are enormous.
Indeed, it is clear that the Media Lab is dismantling many of the institutional forms, divisions, metrics, and assumptions of the research university that have been honored at least since the late 19th century. If you think it is about time education moved away from Fordist, production-line compartmentalizations and hierarchies of knowledge, there is much to applaud in the Media Lab’s arrangements. If you are a traditional educator, you should be scared.
The Media Lab is dedicated to changing just about everything in the traditional system, starting from the current assessment methods based on assumptions about quantifiable student intelligence and educational outcomes. The lab’s keywords for learning are “experience,” “motivation,” “curiosity,” “imagination,” “creativity,” or, to use Negroponte’s word, “perspective.”
The lab means to remake education from preschool onward, adding in such fabulous open-source learning experiences as Scratch, a free online resource that has enticed more than a million kids to create and share animations, and mix and remix narratives and games while learning basic programming skills.
In the words of Joi Ito, the dynamic new head of the lab, himself a famous college dropout, the key to 21st-century learning is “antidisciplinary,” not just “interdisciplinary.” Ito’s goal is “a world of seven billion teachers,” where everyone on the planet has something important to teach to someone else, and everyone does.
“Educational reform” is also on the lips of many college presidents and policy makers these days. However, I worry that, for many of them, reform is less about learning than about new sources of revenue. Too often, their idea is less like the vision presented in Wired UK and more like the one in Forbes.
If you are a traditional educator, Forbes’s manifesto for educational reform should have you shaking, too. Forbes hails the revolutionary opportunities available in MOOC’s. But, reflecting the magazine’s focus, its cover story is less interested in how the online courses transform learning for students than how they offer investment opportunities for venture capitalists. Higher education of the MOOC variety is touted as the Next Big Profitable Thing, what Forbes calls “The $1-Trillion Opportunity.”
Read against Wired UK’s story, the opportunity Forbes describes seemsrevolutionary but, in its DNA, is the opposite. The MOOC model depicted here ossifies the already outdated mission of 19th-century education. Far too many of the MOOC’s championed in the article use talking heads and multiple-choice quizzes in fairly standard subject areas in conventional disciplines taught by famous teachers at elite universities. There is little that prepares students for learning in the fuzzy, merged world that Negroponte sees as necessary for thriving in the 21st century.
Making courseware “massive” may dangle the eventual possibility of trillion-dollar profits (even if they have yet to materialize). But it does not “fix” what is broken in our system of education. It massively scales what’s broken.
The subheading of the Forbes article states, “No field operates more inefficiently than education. A new breed of disruptors is finally going to fix it.” The part of the magazine’s pitch that is absolutely right—and that every educator must take to heart—is that the current educational system is failing too many students, at every age. As the magazine notes, “The U.S. is the only developed country to have high proportions of both top and bottom performers.” We’ve all seen the statistics.
What is missing in the Forbes analysis is exactly what is implied by the comment about top and bottom performers: Educational success in the United States maps all too precisely upon wealth. We know that at elite private universities, where a student’s finances are less crucial to being admitted and succeeding than at many public universities, graduation rates far outstrip those in the rest of higher education. Money is a major factor.
What is smart and wise about the Forbes article contributes a missing piece to the glorious creative playground of the MIT Media Lab: the emphasis on free offerings, the new awareness of motivated global learners, and the promise of scale.
So Salman Khan, executive director of Khan Academy, is on to something: He makes learning free (or at least universally affordable), available any time, anywhere, to anyone who wants it. Millions of people who cannot afford traditional education are taking advantage of the opportunities. The Media Lab, by contrast, can only educate a small cohort of elite students. Even in starting exceptional programs in places like Detroit, its reach cannot come close to that of the MOOC’sForbes points to, offered by Khan, the for-profit Coursera, or MIT’s own not-for-profit MITx.
For the most part, however, what Forbes seeks to scale for venture capitalists is a for-profit model in which learning is neither free—nor innovative.
In the future, merging a Media Lab 2.0 with some form of MOOC’s might prompt traditional educators to think seriously about new learning models, methods, and audience. Sebastian Thrun, chief executive of Udacity, a private organization that offers MOOC’s, is also featured in the Forbes article. Thrun’s commitment to democratizing learning is profound, and so is his visionary idea about education. He suggests that we should abolish false divisions of the human life span into separate stages of play (early childhood), education, work, and then play again (retirement). He wants all of those mixed and merged—play with learning, work with childhood, education lifelong.
He also offers a clearer business model than some of the other MOOC’s. Udacity offers courses free to those for whom learning is the objective. If students want to take Udacity courses for official credentials or to be part of an employment service, then they have to pay—or the prospective employer (such as Google) does. That model probably won’t yield the trillion-dollar investment Forbes promises. But it does offer a challenging new paradigm for learning.
We need the challenge. It’s a tragedy that we are robbing our public universities of funds at a time of such radical technological change, when education is so desperately needed. But even if by some magic our universities were suddenly to be refinanced, we would still need a huge overhaul of our traditional educational institutions.
The astonishing enrollment in MOOC’s in the past few years has taught us an important lesson about the powerful motivation people have to learn. From voluntary, participatory sites such as Yelp or Wikipedia, we also see that people love to contribute what they know and are willing to learn from one another (as Ito notes), not just from experts. That’s the paradigm shift that, as educators committed to the future well-being of our students, we need, fearlessly, to embrace.
Forbes may see an investment opportunity for profit-based online educational companies. But there is also an investment opportunity for any educator (with or without degree) to rethink learning top to bottom, inside out. We have a potential for a learning mash-up of the loftiest, most creative, learner-centered kind. Whether we are talking about Khan’s millions of learners who have a handful of teachers or Ito’s billions of teachers learning from one another, the idea that we educators don’t have to force education, that people like to learn if there is something worth learning, is the gold mine for the digital age offered by the glossy promises made by these two popular magazines.
Cathy N. Davidson is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke University. She is the author, most recently, of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking Press).
Duke Today: Davidson Discusses Upcoming Meta-MOOCs
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The Duke Today website featured two upcoming classes that Cathy Davidson will teach in the Spring semester. One graduate and one undergraduate course will offer students a chance to participate in what she’s called a Meta-MOOC. Read more.
NEXT: A META-MOOC
In the spring, two Duke professors will offer what they’re calling a “Meta-MOOC,” a face-to-face course for Duke undergraduates where the undergraduates turn the course content into online public Web offerings. They will be partnering in producing the public online course with graduate students who will also be learning the theory and history behind the best ways to learn, teach, publish, and do research on line.
The undergrad piece will be called “Surprise Endings: Social Science and Literature,” taught by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, and Cathy Davidson, an English professor with vast experience in digital learning. Davidson will teach the graduate course, called “Digital Literacy, Digital Knowledge and Digital Humanities: Theories, Methods and Tools for Research and Teaching.”
The venture is advertised as a crowd-sourced attempt to learn how to learn and think how to think. The free, online piece of the course may utilize public discussion groups, book chats, broadcasts of interviews students conduct with the professors, and quizzes, papers and peer evaluation.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time — certainly at Duke and maybe elsewhere too — that students taking a course will be actually working together to turn that course into public, open content,” Davidson said. “It will be a kind of ‘open university course’ that anyone in the world with an Internet connection can participate in.”
Duke Chronicle: Duke professor discusses HASTAC, education award
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By Danielle Muoio | October 31, 2012
Reblogged from Duke Chronicle
The Chronicle: You were recently named Educator of the Year. Can you tell me more about the award?
Cathy Davidson: It’s a little bit like the Academy Awards for technology. The designer of the Mars landing won in one category and the CEO of Pinterest won in another category. There were probably 30 categories. What I am most honored by is it is awarded by peers—people in the world of technology nominate peers and then a judge makes the final selection. It was quite an honor and a very big surprise. I’m a huge fan of the person who won last year, so it’s a bit like winning the year after Meryl Streep won. I can try and act above it all and impartial, but it was really an honor.
TC: I know you are the co-founder of HASTAC. Can you tell me more about HASTAC?
CD: In 2002, David Theo Goldberg and I were at a national meeting of education right after we started the Franklin Center at Duke. We were at the meeting to discuss technology in the Franklin Center and its motto: The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. We stepped out [of the meeting] and saw that we knew all of these people in the sciences, arts and humanities who were thinking about the way we can use the World Wide Web to increase the possibilities for lifelong learning, so we thought “Why don’t we start our own organization?”
The reason we have this horrible acronym is because no one wanted to be left out of this. We’ve been working in different ways since it started, and it’s up to about 9,800 network members. Our basic principle was to take the spirit of the open source web and apply it to education, by that we mean you don’t have to force people to learn because people want to share their knowledge. Like Wikipedia, who knew it would be as huge as it is and that people would contribute their knowledge for free? As educators, we should be taking advantage of the fact that people like to learn from one another.
TC: Were there any challenges you faced in creating HASTAC?
CD: At first no one had a clue about what we were talking about. People would look at us like we were talking Martian. I would say now the problem is the opposite—because we [did this] before everyone did in education, we are treated like gurus and are called upon to help people in higher education think about the future of learning.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was called the most hated educator in America because I said I didn’t want to require traditional term papers. I wanted students to write papers that would be a public contribution to knowledge—any paper wasn’t just for me, they had to find a place to put and make a contribution to public knowledge. I didn’t think that was that radical—I thought it was an uncynical view of learning.
Part of that was I was involved in the iPod experiment in 2002—Apple approached us about taking technology and using it on our campus for learning purposes so we decided to use one with no educational use and challenged students to come up with an educational use to it. We gave out free iPods as an educational experiment.
Everything from telemedicine—students figured out ways you could listen to heart arrhythmias through your iPod that could help rural doctors evaluate heart arrhythmias—to conventional learning techniques—like listening to a Shakespeare play instead of reading it. The first academic podcasting conference was held at Duke, and it was all student-run and came out of this experiment.
We got a lot of flack, and people had to swallow their words when it worked because people didn’t want to believe students would want to do anything but have fun with them. They didn’t see that if you respect students’ intelligence, they will far exceed anything you have on a syllabus. If I don’t treat students like they’re babies every step of the way, but instead respect them and collaborate with them, students always exceed my expectations.
TC: You’re also the co-director of the annual Digital Media and Learning Competitions, can you tell me more about how you got involved with the competition and your role in the competition in particular?
CD: In 2006, the MacArthur Foundation asked us to start running the Digital Media Competitions and [the award] has grown from $2 million to $4 million per year. We partnered with Mozilla and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, as well, and have 89 programs in 20 countries. We’re in our fourth competition this year, and we give awards each year to grantee. For their first full year as grantee, we have weekly webinars on every possible topic from management to assessment to implementation to better collaboration.
We really work with the winners of the annual competitions, so you win money to make your product work. You also have an entire team that makes sure that what you want to do to improve education and learning really works. It’s astonishing to work with dedicated people all over the world from different [socioeconomic] levels—some are elitist and some are incredibly poor in small villages in Africa and Asia. It’s a really diverse range of programs.
TC: It seems you are both a part of the humanities world but also the technological world. Can you talk about how you’ve been able to successfully meld these seemingly separate spheres together?
CD: I don’t think there is a difference between them. For the last 100 years, we’ve tried to convince people that there is a difference. But what people get wrong is they think our era is about computing when it’s about everyday life, values, history and how we interact as humans. Those are deep, profound subjects in humanities and social sciences. In the information age, we’ve gone through such a paradigm shift that if you just leave things to people in technology and science, we will miss the implications it will have on humanity.
I don’t think every English teacher needs to learn Python, and I don’t think every computer programer needs to know Shakespeare, but we have to learn better ways of communicating with each other and sharing our expertise to get the best out of this world that we live in. To do that, we need to think across the boundaries and silos of education. That’s why I’ve given 79 talks in the past 14 months—I’m an evangelical on the need to have a new way of learning together.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Davidson has given 79 talks in the past 14 years. She has in fact given 79 talks in the past 14 months. The Chronicle regrets the error.
CBS MoneyWatch: Can true solitude be found in a wired world?
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CHICAGO — When was the last time you were alone, and unwired? Really, truly by yourself. Just you and your thoughts — no cellphone, no tablet, no laptop.
Many of us crave that kind of solitude, though in an increasingly wired world, it’s a rare commodity.
We check texts and emails, and update our online status, at any hour — when we’re lying in bed or sitting at stop lights or on trains. Sometimes, we even do so when we’re on the toilet.
We feel obligated, yes. But we’re also fascinated with this connectedness, constantly tinkering and checking in — an obsession that’s starting to get pushback from a small but growing legion of tech users who are feeling the need to unplug and get away.
“What might have felt like an obligation at first has become an addiction. It’s almost as if we don’t know how to be alone, or we are afraid of what we’ll find when we are alone with ourselves,” says Camille Preston, a tech and communication consultant based in Cambridge, Mass.
“It’s easier to keep doing, than it is to be in stillness.”
One could argue that, in this economy, it’s wise to be constantly wired — to stay on top of things, to please the boss. Preston knows people who get up in the middle of the night to see if their boss has sent them an email.
But she and others also see more hints of limit-setting going on, this movement of solitude-seekers with roots in the technology industry, ironically enough.
“When I think about truly disconnecting, I look to my truly techy friends,” says Cathy Davidson, a Duke University professor who co-directs the school’s PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge.
Those friends, she says, take long, unwired vacations and set “away messages” telling people to write back after they return. “And they stick to it,” Davidson says, wishing she could do the same.
“They’ve come up with a socially acceptable convention for their own absence from the world of technology and everybody recognizes it.”
One organization called Reboot has started the Sabbath Manifesto, a call to unplug one day a week to find solitude — or to simply take a day of rest with family and friends.
Bigger corporations, some outside the tech industry, are starting to catch on to this type of limit-setting.
To encourage work-life balance, Volkswagen shuts off mobile email in Germany 30 minutes after employees’ shifts end and turns it back on 30 minutes before their next shift starts.
Google, Nike and the Huffington Post, among others, provide space for employees to take naps, or to meditate. The idea is that employees who take time to themselves to reenergize will be more productive.
John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist, thinks there might just be something to that.
He has spent much of his career tackling the topic of loneliness and isolation, which researchers have proven can affect humans adversely, all the way down to gene expression.
“Feeling ignored sparks feelings of loneliness,” says Cacioppo, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.
But getting away, he says — “that’s the opposite of being lonely.”
It’s time that you take by choice, Cacioppo says. So while the cognitive effects are still being studied, he says it’s very likely that that type of solitude is good for the brain.
Dan Rollman had little doubt of that when he and a few others from Reboot, a group of Jewish “thought leaders,” gathered in 2009. That’s when they created the Sabbath Manifesto, inspired by the traditional Jewish sabbath, but aimed at people from any background who are encouraged to unplug one day — any day — of the week.
The idea came to Rollman when he found himself craving a simpler time, when stores closed on Sundays and life slowed down.
“I knew I wanted a day of rest,” says Rollman, who is CEO of the company RecordSetter.com.
The Manifesto — described as “a creative project designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world” — has 10 principles. They are suggestions ranging from “avoid technology” and “connect with loved ones” to “get outside,” ”drink wine” and “find silence.”
To help with this, the organization has created “The Undo List” — an email that arrives Friday afternoons “with ideas for conversation topics, readings, local outings and creative endeavors to ease the time away from technology and help make the day better.” There also are specific activities for subscribers in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Rollman himself avoids doing work on Saturdays, whenever he can, and often unplugs altogether then — and encourages his employees to do the same.
“There’s a huge sense of relief,” Rollman says. “It is a liberating feeling to walk out of one’s door and not have your cellphone in your pocket.”
Leah Jones, a 35-year-old Chicagoan, hasn’t gone quite that far.
But she has cut back, turning her cellphone to “silent” mode from 11:30 p.m to 6 a.m. and putting it away when she goes out.
“I’m a better friend when I don’t have my phone in my hand,” says Jones, who is 35 and vice president of social and emerging media at Olson public relations.
For her, solitude might simply be sitting home and watching a few episodes of TV.
“I might tweet while I watch it, but it’s a perfectly acceptable way to spend an afternoon,” she says.
Is that really solitude, though?
Davidson, at Duke, thinks it is.
“For some people it’s dancing and blasting rock music,” she says. “We tend to think of it as solitude, which is sort of a lofty term, when in fact for many people, it’s also about being joyful.
“The real issue is fun vs. work.”
And often, she says, her students are better at it than she is.
“They seem very fine to go off on a bike ride and leave a cellphone,” she says.
Renee Houston, an associate professor of communication studies at Puget Sound University in Washington state, also finds herself envying a colleague who regularly unplugs. “He will drive two hours to go to the coast just to step away, just have time to think,” she says.
She’s not there yet but is finding small ways to set limits. Her family has a rule, for instance — put cellphones away during dinner unless there’s a crisis.
She, too, has noticed more after-hours tech limits in the business world. But it can be as difficult to set those limits with close colleagues or friends who’ve come to expect instant responses, and get miffed if they don’t get one.
“The friend is saying, ‘But wait! It’s me!’” says Cacioppo from the University of Chicago. “But you have to wonder — what kind of friend are they?”
The key, he and others say, is to develop a reputation for being responsive, but not hyper-responsive. He sets those limits himself — has given up Facebook and generally answers emails or texts from colleagues or students within half a day, if it’s nothing too urgent. If you make yourself available all the time, people come to expect it even more, he says.
“And the more responsive you are, the more trivial things you get queried about.”
Davidson, from Duke, says it also helps when there is a “built-in alibi” — the message from a work or social circle where unplugging is accepted, and even welcomed.
But Jones in Chicago says you also have to let yourself off the hook and resist the urge to constantly check in to see what friends are doing.
Social networking “makes it seem like everybody’s doing something awesome,” she says. “But you can’t always worry about what other people are doing.
“You have to give yourself permission to miss out.”
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Online:
Sabbath Manifesto: http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/about
The Undo List: http://theundolist.com/
___
Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org or via http://twitter.com/irvineap
Winners of the World Technology Awards, inc Educator of the Year
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To visit the 2012 World Technology Summit & Awards website, CLICK HERE .
Here is a list of the 2012 World Technology Award Finalists {WHO ARE NOW THE NEWEST FELLOWS (FOR INDIVIDUALS) OR CORPORATE MEMBERS (FOR ORGANIZATIONS) OF THE WORLD TECHNOLOGY NETWORK.} CLICK HERE to see the list.
Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg Recognized with 2012 World Technology Award
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Recognized for Visionary Contribution to Science and Technology in Education
NEW YORK, N.Y. (October 24, 2012) – The World Technology Network recognized Cathy N. Davidson (Duke University) and David Theo Goldberg (University of California Humanities Research Institute) as winners of the prestigious World Technology Award in the “Educator” category last night at a gala ceremony held at Rockefeller Center in New York City. A list of all winners is available at WTN.net.
Davidson and Goldberg were named Educators of the Year for their work as co-founders of what has become a 9500+ global learning network, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC, pronounced “haystack”). Begun in 2002, HASTAC has had a profound impact leading innovative reform on higher education. Davidson and Goldberg also co-administer the annual Digital Media and Learning Competitions supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The four Competitions to date have sponsored and mentored 89 learning projects in more than 20 countries.
The World Technology Network (WTN) has been honoring the top innovators in science and technology since 2000, singling out the “most innovative work of the greatest likely long-term significance.” Nominees for the 2012 World Technology Awards were selected by the WTN membership in more than 40 countries through an intensive, global competitive process over a period of many months.
“It’s a gratifying to see HASTAC go from an idea to an influential, international knowledge network which helps shape new programs and mentor the next generation of teachers, professors, and community learning leaders,” said Davidson, who holds two Distinguished Professorships at Duke University, where she also codirects the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. “This wonderful recognition from the WTN isn’t just for us, but for everyone who contributes to HASTAC, including the 720 students in the HASTAC Scholars network, and all the DML grantees who share our commitment to new forms of peer-based education, informal learning, and vital community information exchange and social action. We are deeply honored to receive this distinguished award.”
Now in its tenth year, HASTAC is a global learning network primarily based in higher education and dedicated to knowledge that crosses disciplines and translates specialized scholarly research for a larger public. HASTAC was founded “to lead inventive and innovative knowledge production and learning at the interface of humanities, the natural and social sciences, the arts, and digital technology,” said David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and Executive Director of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at the University of California, Irvine, supported by the MacArthur Foundation. “We were concerned that knowledge making not be limited by the conventional silos. The Digital Media and Learning Competition grew out of the collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation and our mutual interest in surfacing and recognizing the sorts of learning technologies and practices that would foster such innovation. We are thrilled that the World Technology Network has found this work worthy too.”
HASTAC’s central administrative offices are at Duke University, which has provided invaluable support for the peer-produced virtual network since its founding. The www.hastac.org website is an open community that anyone can join for free. It serves as a collaborative platform, an authoring tool, an information commons, an innovative electronic publishing outlet, and a web communication tool. Community members use HASTAC for research, classroom teaching, online public discussions of research collaborations, and forums on technological and social issues such as “Race After the Internet” or “Pedagogical Ethics in a Digital Age.” HASTAC’s two mottos are “Learning the future together” and “Difference is our operating system.”
The winners of the World Technology Awards were announced during a ceremony at the Time-Life Building on October 23 at the close of the World Technology Summit, a two-day thought leadership conference presented by the WTN in association with TIME magazine, Fortune, CNN, Science/AAAS, Technology Review, and others.
“The World Technology Awards program is not only a very inspiring way to identify and honor the most innovative people and organizations in the technology world, but also a truly disciplined way for the WTN membership to identify those who will formally join them, as WTN Fellows, as part of our global community,” said James Clark, Founder and Chairman of the World Technology Network. “By working to make useful connections among our members, we look forward to assisting Professors Davidson and Goldberg in continuing to help create our collective future and change our world.”
The WTN is a curated membership community comprised of the world’s most innovative individuals and organizations in science, technology, and related fields. It exists to “encourage serendipity” — the happy accidents of colliding ideas and new relationships that cause the biggest breakthroughs for individuals and institutions — and works to accomplish its mission through global and regional events for its members and extended audience, to help make connections among them, and to examine the likely implications and possible applications of emerging technologies.
# # #
About Cathy N. Davidson
Cathy N. Davidson teaches at Duke University, where she co-directs the Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge and is the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. She served as Duke’s first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and helped to create the Program in Information Science + Information Studies and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She was recently appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities. In July 2012, she was named the first educator on the six-person Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation.She has published more than 20 books, most recently Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century (see: http://english.duke.edu/people?Gurl=/aas/English&Uil=cathy.davidson&subpage=profile).
About David Theo Goldberg
David Theo Goldberg is the Director of the system-wide University of California Humanities Research Institute and Executive Director of the MacArthur-sponsored UCI Research Hub in Digital Media and Learning. The latter is the international center coordinating all research for the MacArthur Foundation initiative in connected learning. He is a Professor in Comparative Literature, Anthropology, and Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine. He has written extensively on digital media’s impact on higher education, on race and racism, law and society, and on critical theory. He has published more than a dozen books, most recently The Threat of Race (see: http://uchri.org/about/staff/dr-david-theo-goldberg/).
Davidson and Goldberg are the co-authors of the widely read The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (MIT Press, 2010).
For more information about Cathy Davidson, please contact:
Anna Rose Beck
Executive Assistant to Cathy N. Davidson
anna.beck@duke.edu
919-684-8471
For more information about David Theo Goldberg, please contact:
Arielle Read
Executive Assistant to David Theo Goldberg
aread@hri.uci.edu
949-824-8900
For more information about HASTAC, please contact:
Hilary Culbertson
Program Coordinator, HASTAC
hilary.culbertson@duke.edu
919-668-1913
For more information about the World Technology Network, please contact:
Beth-Ellen Keyes
Director of Events and Operations, The World Technology Network
Awards2012@wtn.net
646-246-1081
A new curriculum for real-world success
BY ·
Reblogged from The Globe and Mail
CATHY N. DAVIDSON
Special to The Globe and Mail
Nearly 50 per cent of postsecondary students in America end up leaving without a degree. The data suggest that they drop out because of a shortage of funds or a lack of interest – but also because they do not see real-world relevance.
Some argue that online courses (including those offered free by universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard) are the answer. If well constructed, they work exceptionally well in certain fields, especially technical ones suited to individualized, challenge-based learning. But skills acquisition is no substitute for a degree. Just ask companies like Google and Apple: They may pick the cream of the online-educated crop for outsourced jobs that come without benefits or security, but typically they do not consider these students as corporate leaders of the future.
In fact, U.S. surveys of employers reveal, over and over, that what they prize most in future managers are excellence in written and spoken communication, critical and creative thinking, an ability to collaborate across distances and cultural differences, breadth of knowledge and experience that takes students out of localism and provincialism, basic technical skills, quantitative literacy, and an ability to be flexible and take risks in changing environments.
That’s a great syllabus for a new approach to liberal arts.
But first we need to transform our rhetoric. The opposition of “liberal arts” and “vocational education” carries with it a lot of residual 19th-century class snobbery as well as 20th-century quantitative bias. In the real world of the 21st century, though, there aren’t “two cultures” – the arts and the sciences. We need both. As a cartoon circulating on Facebook would have it, “Science can tell you how to clone a Tyrannosaurus rex. Humanities can tell you why this might be a bad idea.”
To get us thinking about the possibilities of educational reform, I propose a Start-Up Core Curriculum for Entrepreneurship, Service and Society. Hokey, yes: SUCCESS.
Neither a “great books” program (which, however profound, rarely connects to a student’s specialized major) nor the “duck, duck, goose” model of distribution requirements (where students are left to make coherence from a welter of rhetoric, statistics, art appreciation, natural science, foreign language or other offerings), SUCCESS is not just about content mastery, but about putting deep knowledge into practice to address real-world global problems.
The program would take up two years, with the first devoted to a thematic cluster of problem-based courses. For example, if the liberal-arts topic were “global health disparities,” interdisciplinary, team-taught courses would touch on health but also humanities, the arts, social sciences and computational and biological sciences. Weekly meetings with all faculty and students would help to connect the intellectual dots.
That’s a great start. But it’s expensive and not as entrepreneurial as students today might want, so let’s push the model further. To save costs, a SUCCESS program might include a mix of large lectures and online courses (in areas such as introductory statistics, foreign language or HTML). Both formats would be supplemented by small group meetings with peers, teachers, teaching assistants and sometimes guest experts.
Seminars would be devoted to the great books, from Socrates to Amartya Sen. But from there, students would be challenged to investigate how these thinkers would contribute to issues of general social health and welfare and tie their work into business and management frameworks. So, Dr. Sen insists that we account for the intangibles that enhance or cripple our lives (inequality, life expectancy, infant mortality or disease). How would you create a cost-benefit analysis and a strategic business and workflow plan that might embody those ideas?
The second part of the program would then take students off campus for an eye-opening year of entrepreneurial, service-oriented, practical work.
Simultaneously contributing to the world, and learning from it, an engaged practicum would address the very real issue of “sophomore slump” (when the dropout potential runs highest). It would also be a targeted alternative to the typical year-abroad experience, which, even for the lucky 14 per cent of U.S. graduates now able to afford it, is often not linked to coursework or future careers.
Of course, you do not need to go abroad to learn how to participate in and contribute to diverse cultures and populations, given the gap between rich and poor in North America. Many, if not most, colleges and universities are located with radical income and health disparities a few kilometres, if not blocks, away.
For their practicum, students could be placed in non-profits, community organizations, small businesses and after-school programs. They would lend their new expertise, deep thinking and skills in communication, leadership and collaboration to organizations desperate for help in financially strapped times. In turn, students would learn more about the urgencies of deep and broad knowledge, the importance of general and specialized education, the necessity for computational and social networking skills and the imperative for hard work and true dedication – not all of it well rewarded – than any classroom could begin to instill.
As for the subject focus, even if a student were not to go into one of the many fields related to global health, such a foundational first year and experiential second year would show how the “wisdom of the ages” can help us deconstruct some of the cant of our era. After all, the “real world” itself demands serious, critical thinking – including how we might redesign the siloed, hierarchical, pre-professional research university that arose in the late 19th century. With a backlash against higher education in full swing, what better time than now to take up this challenge?
As award-winning journalist Thomas Friedman recently suggested, “Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” Let’s get started.
Adapted from Fastcompany.com.
Cathy N. Davidson is a professor at Duke University, where she also served as the first vice-provost for interdisciplinary studies. This summer, she was named the first educator on the six-person board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation.