I have posted here once in a while about public speaking and conference presentations– how it’s bad for people to just read papers, but it’s also as bad (maybe worse) for people to just “wing it” since very few of us are actually good at that. But the main reason I’m posting this here is as a “note to self” and also as something that I think might make a good teaching tool in the next class I teach that involves student presentations. As is usually the case, ze frank offers advice that is both humorous and extremely useful.
More MOOC-iness than necessary
I’ll get to my update on my experiences in World Music and it’s interesting twists and turns after the break. First I wanted to comment on a few important MOOC-oriented presentations I came across this week. First, there are these two TED talks, the first from Daphne Koller, who is the cofounder of Coursera:
The second is by Peter Norvig, who taught a MOOC on artificial intelligence at Stanford in 2011:
Last and far from least is a talk that George Siemens gave at EDUCAUSE recently called “MOOCs: Open Online Courses as Levers for Change in Higher Education.” The slides are below, but this link will take you to Siemens’ site and a link to his actual talk.
MOOCs EDUCAUSE from gsiemens
I don’t have a recommended order for looking at these talks and I also realize that watching them all is going to take more than an hour, but if you’re interested in the whole MOOC thing, I’d encourage spending the time. For me, these three talks– and really the TED talks vs. Siemens– cover a lot of the possibilities, perils, and frustrations of the current “MOOC-olution” that’s going on in higher education right now. A few highlights for me:
- Koller begins by talking about the issues of access to higher education all over the world and relates the story of a stampede of people trying to get into the University of Johannesburg, an event that the New York Times reported as embodying the “broad crisis in South Africa’s overstretched higher education system.” Coursera, Koller argues, is part of the solution. That’s a noble sentiment and it went over well during Koller’s TED talk, I suspect because the audience is made up of a lot of people who could have also been characters in that South Park “Smug Alert” episode. (For those who don’t remember and/or non-fans: this is where Kyle’s family has to move to San Francisco after his father buys a hybrid car; while in SanFran, the Broflovski’s befriend similar high-n-mighty smug folks who also enjoy the smell of their own farts).
- And it’s also worth noting that Siemens mentions in his talk the encouraging signs he saw first hand of MOOCs being used by students in India. But I have to wonder: do those thousands of largely poor South Africans have the level of computer and internet access to take advantage of MOOCs? And given the larger problems for poor blacks in South Africa (the NYTimes article mentions that the jobless rate among poor youths is 70%, for example), isn’t this a bit of a “let them eat cake” type of proposal?
- The thing I find most surprising and even irritating about both Koller’s and Norvig’s videos is they make it sound as if they have “discovered” online teaching. For example, Norvig makes a big deal about how it turns out that one of the ways to help students succeed in online classes is to have deadlines. Koller makes a big deal out of one way to deal with the huge numbers in Coursera courses is to have peer evaluations. (And more about the troubles with peer evaluation below). It’s maddening, and as you see in the beginning of Siemens’ talk, he feels the same way. To paraphrase/more or less quote him, “It’s as if they are discovering North America all over again.” Coursera et al, Siemens argues, have spent a lot of money on hiring a lot of programmers to get the infrastructure up and running, but they have clearly not paid a lot of attention to the well-developed thinking about online teaching.
- And just to be clear: online teaching is a) not particularly new, and b) it is not only happening in proprietary schools like University of Phoenix or Kaplan. I’m far from a “pioneer” in the field, but I’ve been teaching online for seven years, and I’ve always had online classes that included these radical pedagogical innovations called “deadlines” with students all working together on projects (sometimes even collaborating!) and “peer review” where students comment on each others’ writing drafts. I’m not alone in this. As Siemens points out, about one third of U.S. and Canadian college students have taken at least one class online, and these are at “traditional” universities. That’s hardly undiscovered territory.
- I think Siemens is correct in assessing why MOOCs have all of a sudden become a big deal: money. He say’s in the last 8 months, there’s been around $100 million invested in MOOCs by venture capitalists. You put that much money into anything and there’s going to be at least a ripple. You put that much money into higher education, which runs on the cheap as it is and which has been all about slashing budgets every which way to stop the rising costs of tuition and fees, and you’ve got more than a ripple.
- Finally, I think Siemens draws a good contrast between his MOOC experiments and what Coursera (et al) are doing with MOOCs. Siemens and his colleagues were all about demonstrating how knowledge creation is messy and social, about using relatively low-powered and open-source tools, about emphasizing the development of social relationships that can be fostered after the class, and Siemens describes how he ran his MOOCs “off the side of my desk.” Coursera is all about delivering knowledge in a rather conventional “sage on the stage” lecture format, about using a mix of proprietary tools (like its course shell software) and more open media tools (like YouTube), also about social relationships inside and outside of the class, and Coursera is ultimately about a hope/dream for making a lot of money. Again, Coursera’s founders stated goal of giving the world access to “the best” higher education is noble, but I guarantee that the investors who have put up the money have other goals.
Anyway, on to a few specifics about “World Music” after the break:
Going back to school, MOOC-style: starting “World Music”
Here’s another in what is becoming quite a series of MOOC-oriented posts: after my first quasi-MOOC experience earlier this spring, I’ve once again enrolled in another massive online open class, Coursera’s “Listening to World Music.” Let me preface this with two points:
- When I was an undergraduate a long long time ago, I ended up taking a gen-ed “music appreciation” class in my last semester as an undergraduate because I needed credits– any credits– in order to graduate. For whatever reason, it was a class that covered the Baroque era (more or less Bach(s) and such) and then it skipped ahead to the late 19th/early 20th century. It was a ton of fun and I was exposed to a lot of really interesting music that has stuck with me all this time. So when I saw this “Listening to World Music” class on Coursera’s web site, I thought “sure, let’s give that a whirl.”
- A blog reader– I think it’s someone who more regularly reads emutalk.org, actually– sent me this link from Forbes.com, “How Duke University Deals With Disruption.” Here’s the first paragraph: “Unless I had a top brand, I would hate to run a college today. Colleges and universities are about to meet their disruptive hour. Websites such as Khan Academy and Udacity now offer free courses that blow away 99% of courses available in traditional colleges.” Oh, please. I think there’s a lot to like about this Coursera/World Music thing. But I want in on whatever drug or delusion or group hallucination these business people are on if they really think that MOOCs are “the answer” to higher education woes and who think that they’re substitute for what’s going on in the real world on college campuses. I bet they can hear colors too.
More after the break.
Continue reading “Going back to school, MOOC-style: starting “World Music””
Even MORE MOOC MOOC MOOC! Chronicle article explains the business model
And once again, here I am near the lake, checking in on my online class (which I like to think of as SO-POC– that is, a “small online partly open class” because anyone out there is welcome to visit, join the discussion, do the assignments, whatever, but I won’t grade your work or give you credit if you aren’t enrolled at EMU), and checking my email when I see this from The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses.”
CHE obtained a copy of the contract between Coursera and one of its partners, the University of Michigan. Of course, even what’s here is kind of a “let’s throw stuff against the wall and see if it sticks” sort of plan/model. To quote:
Coursera is following an approach popular among Silicon Valley start-ups: Build fast and worry about money later. Venture capitalists—and even two universities—have invested more than $22-million in the effort already. “Our VC’s keep telling us that if you build a Web site that is changing the lives of millions of people, then the money will follow,” says Daphne Koller, the company’s other co-founder, who is also a professor at Stanford.
Here’s the part of the contract that talks specifically about making money; there are eight ideas listed so far:
- Certificates, which a student would purchase some kind of certificate or badge or whatever (presumably after completing a course, which is a different model than tuition, which is paid up-front) that isn’t actually credit but which the student post some place. As in on their LinkedIn account, they have a “badge” that says they passed Listening to World Music. (BTW, since that one starts in 3 days and I like world music, I might sign up).
- Secure assessments, which is basically the same thing as certification– students would take (and pay for) some kind of test.
- Employee recruiting. This one is kind of interesting; basically, this would allow potential employers to “data mine” Coursera looking for successful students based not on a degree but on skills students might demonstrate through one of their courses.
- Employee or University Screening. I think what this means is that if I was applying for a job where my knowledge of World Music was critical, a company could use my score in the “Listening to World Music” course as a way of making a hiring decision. It also means that if a university wanted to give an entering student a waiver for something, they might be able to use performance in that class– in other words, I wouldn’t get credit at such-and-such a university maybe, but I wouldn’t have to take a gen ed class in World Music. Or something.
Just to stop here for a second: it seems to me that each of these business plans depends on the rest of the business world decides that it is going to validate and/or accept MOOCs as a legitimate educational/certifying enterprise. Given the current reliance of the corporate world for a bachelors degree as an entry point into white collar jobs, that seems like kind of a bold assumption to me.
Anyway, back to the list:
- Human-provided or manual grading. To quote, “Company will provide access to (paid) human tutoring, grading, or other forms of human academic support.” I’m not sure I understand this, but I think it means that maybe students would take these courses for free but they’d pay some kind of tutor.
- Corporate/university enterprise model. Basically, Coursera would sell access to its courses to companies for in-house training and/or to “non-University academic institutions (e.g. community colleges)” (swear to God, that is a quote) with the goal of offering a high quality course at a lower cost than these non-University institutions.
So, let’s dwell on this for a moment. The first idea is corporate clients would contract with Coursera for training. This isn’t that far-fetched to me, but “training” is not the sort of thing that elite institutions do, and it certainly isn’t what’s likely to happen in that World Music course. Rather, most businesses are looking for employee training along the lines of what’s going on lynda.com or similar sites– and by the way, those places are making money and they rely on an individual instructor/contractor model, not an elite university model.
The second idea is to sell these “quality courses” to community colleges. First, the way this is presented in this contract is patronizing at best, but second and more important, there’s already a large enterprise doing this at community colleges and universities alike. It’s called “the textbook industry.” Now, Coursera courses might turn out to be great, but like textbooks, they don’t teach themselves.
- Sponsorship, which is simply running ads along the classes. I don’t see how that makes anyone a ton of money, though that’s Google’s business model.
- Tuition, which is basically reverting to the model that exists for higher education right now.
Two last thoughts here. First, I am certainly not a business person and the people starting this all seem like smart cookies to me. But I have to say this is starting to look like pets.com
Second, I think this passage from the CHE piece is spot on:
When I (meaning Jeffrey Young, the CHE writer) showed the Coursera contract to Trace A. Urdan, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities who focuses on education-related companies, he found it “ironic” that major universities are embracing online education when they have been dismissive of earlier efforts by for-profit companies like the University of Phoenix.
“These are two of the most arrogant types of institutions—Silicon Valley companies intersecting with these elite academic programs,” he says. “Neither of them considers that anyone else has come to this place before they’ve arrived. They say, We’re here now, so now it’s sort of legitimate and for real.”
I guess time will tell if that arrogance is going to pay off.
More MOOC MOOC MOOC craziness
I’m quasi-vacationing this week (that is, I’m away from home at a lovely vacation spot near Traverse City, but I am still teaching online and doing a ton of work stuff so am therefore not really “unplugged” from it all), and while I haven’t been keeping up with my RSS feed too religiously, it sure seems like the MOOC stuff just keeps on coming. For example:
- In the New York Times comes “Universities Reshaping Education on the Web.” MOOCs are discussed as a “tsunami,” a “game changer,” an experiment too big to ignore, despite the fact that there is no evidence that these things will work, there’s no decent business model, and there isn’t even a good definition here as to what a MOOC actually is.
- Coursera is adding a dozen more institutions, and Audrey Watters rounds up some other MOOC news.
- The University of Washington is trying to offer “enhanced MOOCs” that might ultimately grant credit. Or not.
- UVa is getting involved in this and apparently not getting involved early enough was one of the reasons why their board fired the president. Well, before unfiring her.
- Alan “cog dog” Levine has a lovely song about all this (and the graphic I have borrowed above, too). And of course the great Stephen Downes links to smart stuff here and here.
It goes on and on and on! Anyway, a few quick thoughts for now:
- I am far from against online education or incorporating new tools into learning, and I am also not at all against trying to innovative and even seemingly counter-intuitive approaches to pedagogy. These kinds of free-for-all, DIY, learning for the sake of learning communities are awesome in and of themselves. But they’re not a good way to “grant credit,” they’re not a way to pay the bills of higher education, and even the enthusiasts haven’t gotten that part of this MOOC thing worked out.
- This is looking more and more like the 90s tech bubble where all of a sudden tech companies were claiming that they didn’t need to worry about sustainability of making a profit anymore. Or maybe worse, it’s looking like tulips. The thing that’s troubling to me about all this (besides the fact that the bean counters/board members of universities are the ones getting sucked into this and they control the money) is we might not even get to the potential good application of MOOCs before the bubble bursts and/or the administrators are on to a different craze.
- When I mentioned all this stuff to my wife (who I was surprised hadn’t heard of this), she mentioned to me the definition of “mook” in popular culture: a contemptible, incompetent, and even stupid person. A different spelling for sure, but is there something about the similar pronunciation?
“60,000 Times Question,” or the power of making shit up
I’m not sure where, but I can easily imagine this coming back into some teaching in the near future: I came across this today via Stephen Downes’ web site, but the original question comes from this post from Alan Levine. The brief version is that supposedly the 3M Corporation did research that concluded people process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. But even though this is frequently cited on the internets in many different places, neither Levine or Downes can find any of the details behind this claim.
Levine posted an update on his search for an answer to the 60,000 times question that makes for interesting reading. The short version is the search continues and the 60,000 times claim is more truthiness than true.
The SCOTUS decision on Obamacare and “Immediacy” (and digital rhetoric)
I’ve been reading the blogging carnival entries on digital rhetoric with some interest, hoping I could find a way to make a contribution. I don’t know if this is really worthy or not, but here it goes:
My 1996 dissertation was called “The Immediacy of Rhetoric” and it was an examination of the impact of emerging and largely digital communication technologies (particularly the Internet, but television and lots of other things fit here too) on the ways rhetorical situations work. I use the word “immediacy” to suggest the double-edged sword of these kinds of situations. On the one hand, they have the potential of closeness and even intimacy since so many of the usual filters of message, rhetor, and audience collapse. On the other hand, immediate situations are also sites of chaos and confusion precisely because of these lack of filters. That’s the very short-hand/elevator-pitch version.
Two other things I’ll mention. First, somewhere in The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault says that when there are disruptive moments in history (I can’t remember the exact quote right now, but I think he and/or his translator even uses the term “rupture”), one of the first things we have to do to make sense of it all is smooth over that rupture with some kind of explanation. Or something like that. And one of the hallmarks that signals the end of discourse regarding a disruption in particular and a situation in general is self-reflexivity on the way the situation itself was communicated. This happens in main stream media all the time.
Second, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how memory works and the things I’ve read that suggests true multitasking is impossible– that is, we can’t really process two or more tasks at once, but we can shift between multiple tasks very quickly, often in a fraction of a section. I haven’t worked this out in my own head yet, but I think this is one of the reasons why that even with all of the speed, intimacy, and chaos possible with various immediate and fluid situations, we still ultimately make meaning of a rhetorical event afterwords in the same way we make meaning out of pretty much everything else, and we still need, desire and highly value a point of fixed closure– thus the ongoing role of articles, books, and similarly fixed vessels. Interaction, exchange, and commentary are all fine and good as part of a process, but we value (in all senses of that word– as a cultural value, an intellectual value, money, etc.) the last and fixed word.
So, the reporting of the Obamacare decision as an example of immediacy:
I found out about the June 28, 2012 decision while driving through West Virginia and Annette told me. She had found out via her iPhone while doing a reading of Facebook. So that’s a a simple simple example of how current and future technologies change the potential to interact in rhetorical situations: absent these tools, digital rhetoric/immediate situations aren’t possible. That might seem just obvious, though maybe not. I am reminded of a discussion I had with my dissertation advisor about a chapter describing the context of the internet in 1996. She didn’t think it was necessary because how much could change, really? After all, there were already 30 million users and Netscape; how much further could this internet thing go?
In any event, tools matter a lot. Of course, that isn’t necessarily uniquely limited to digital tools since the tools and technology of literacy, writing, printing (followed later by mass distribution technologies like affordable paper), audio recordings, film, video, etc. all have had significant technological/toolish impacts on how rhetorical situations in particular and rhetoric in general works. Or even is, since rhetoric was classically limited to live speakers.
A lot of humanities and comp/rhet types (academics in general, perhaps) downplay the role of technology in our thinking about how rhetoric (and just about everything else) works, I think because many/most humanities and comp/rhet types understand the theory a whole lot better than they understand the tools (or coding or “computers” in general). I’ve read lots of stuff in the name of “digital rhetoric” (and don’t get me started with “digital humanities”) where tools and technology are secondary at best, sort of the bottle holding the wine, and technology merely alters the speed and potential proximity of components of a rhetorical situation. But in terms of both digital rhetoric generally and what I mean by immediacy, that’s the whole point: the evolving speed and presence potential of new technologies have been in some sense gradual and historic (the way that postal systems and then the telegraph changed communication in the 19th century comes to mind now), and in other ways radically fast (the way we find out about emerging situations/events via social media on ever-connected smart phones). The tool is not the only thing that matters, but when it comes to contemplating “digital rhetoric” generally or immediacy in particular, it’s critical. Without contemporary and future-looking computer and media technologies, there’s no “digital” in “digital rhetoric.”
One of the first things that happened when the decision was announced (and that I missed because of being in the car and that I recap here with hindsight and memory) was CNN and FOX screwed it up. As NPR reported, reporters literally ran with paper out of the Supreme Court so that the results could be digitized– that is, broadcast, posted on the web, sent out as audio (analog in how we hear it though digital in how it is posted)– by rhetors (news outlets) to the audience. Dennis Baron had a blog post where he argued that this was an intentional misreading of the decision by these media outlets because they were mislead and because “everyone expected” the decision to be overturned. The media simply reported what they thought they already knew. But I think the right answer is it was sloppy reporting facilitated/enabled by the speed of immediacy, the lack of any interpretation/mediation of events, and the collision of the analog decision (available to reports first as dead trees text) with the digital world. The Supreme Court’s decision Obamacare is of course complex, but it is not misleading. The desire and potential to be the first to report the decision trumped the desire/need to actually be correct.
So again, immediacy is a double-edged sword. Digital media technologies can break down the boundaries between audience, rhetor, message, and interpretation itself, which has the potential for great intimacy. We can “be there” during riots in Egypt as part of the “Arab Spring” through not only major news outlets but thousands of participants in social media and video sites. On the other hand, these immediate situations also have the potential for great chaos and confusion precisely because of the lack of boundaries that define interpretation and expertise. Again, think of the chaos of the Arab Spring, especially through the filter of media, and the confusion of being flat-out wrong as was the case with the decision on Obamacare.
Speed matters a lot, too. Clearly that’s what is at work with the misreporting from CNN and FOX. Sure, this is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened and “scooping” the competition has been the hallmark of journalism dating back to its most yellow days. But the rapidness/simultaneity that is cause and necessity of digital media makes the speed all the more important.
Very shortly after the reports emerged, the efforts at closure (and to seal the rupture in the narrative) began. It’s an understatement to describe the decision as a surprise. Shortly after Annette shared the news via her iPhone, I turned on the radio. All I could find out in the middle of nowhere West Virginia was a conservative talk show, and clearly, the decision was an enormous rupture for these folks. The fact that Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal minority on the court was inexplicable to the commentators and callers.
But within hours, explanations to close and reconcile the rupture emerged (and they continue, too). One theory was that Roberts’ decision based not on the commerce clause but on taxation was in reality his effort to give conservatives ammunition in the fall elections, and conservative commentators immediately changed their attack from being about “individual freedom and choice” to “the largest tax in history.” Quasi-conspiracy theorists suggested that Roberts changed his mind at the last minute, that Justice Anthony Kennedy was pressuring him to switch back, and that this last minute switch is evident in the text from the various decisions. Another theory suggests that Roberts made his decision in the name of protecting his legacy as Chief Justice in particular and the institution of the Supreme Court in general. And so on.
Interestingly enough, I have yet to hear a commentator on either the left or the right suggest that Roberts made the decision he made based on his interpretation of the law. Given that a lot of law professors thought the law was constitutional before the decision, perhaps the real answer is that Roberts did his job as a scholar of the law and a judge. But that account doesn’t explain how a conservative (Republican) judge could possibly side with a liberal (Democrat) policy, which is why I suspect this explanation has been largely discarded.
Neither speed nor the seeking of closure are uniquely digital, though I think they’re altered by the digital in some interesting ways and I think they are inescapable in digital environments. Even as we celebrate the fluidity of possibilities in digital rhetorical spaces, we crave and value in all senses of those terms the closure, finality, and even authority that comes from “print” (either the old-fashioned paper kind or the electronic new-fashioned kind exemplified by eBooks and electronic journals).
I haven’t thought this all the way through yet (or even partly through), so I’ll refer to two other blog posts I had on this. First, there’s my reaction to seeing David Weinberger at U of Michigan talking about his latest book, Too Big to Know. It’s not that I disagreed with Weinberger about the nature of knowledge has changed as a result of the digital age and the internet and such. That’s all fine and good, but Weinberger hasn’t earned intellectual and actual (e.g., money) capital from his blog; he earned it from his book. The same goes for folks like Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book about the future of academic publishing, Doug Eyman and his (hopefully) forthcoming book, Liz Losh and her excellent book, and so on. Even the prize the U of M Press/Digital Rhetoric Collaborative is based on publishing a book.
I don’t say this to dismiss digital rhetoric; I say this to simply point out that there still must be some unique value to books given that is where most of the scholarship on digital rhetoric has appeared.
Second, as I mention indirectly in this post about Daniel Kahneman, everything we describe about rhetoric (digital or otherwise) is definitionally a memory. This post– which I’ve been writing off and on for over a week now– is an effort to examine a specific event that I see as demonstrating characteristics of immediacy, but like any other analysis, it takes place in hindsight. We cannot really think about digital rhetoric as we experience it.
Anyway, a rambling what digital rhetoric means to me. I’m anxious to get back to reading others’ thoughts on this.
The end of one short term, the beginning of another, and an “open learning” invitation
We have two short (7.5 week) terms here at EMU during the summer, and today I’m wrapping up the first one. I have been teaching a couple of sections of English 121, aka “freshmen comp,” and it’s been interesting.
My two sections were made up of students far from the typical demographic of that course with only a handful of true “First Time in Any College” students for fall and winter terms, though the low number of FTIACs is more typical of the spring/summer terms. I had several students who thought they were about to graduate but they had somehow managed to not take one of the only universally required courses earlier– usually because of transfer issues. I had several ex-military folks and a couple of unemployed/underemployed and (approaching) middle-aged and older folks attending to finally finish a degree. I had a number of high school-aged kids who are attending EMU through the Early College Alliance program, which means my youngest students were somewhere around 15 and my oldest was (I think) about 65.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately because I’ve had a number of recent “what are you people teaching in first year composition?” encounters with others at EMU in the last couple of weeks. Under the best of circumstances, it’s an impossible class, really. It’s bad enough that we assume that students can take a single course in a single semester in their first year of college and in this course, they can learn everything they will need to learn about writing clear, “correct” prose and research skills for the rest of their college careers. The idea that I can teach and students can do all that in 7.5 weeks (instead of 15) is ridiculous. I tell students throughout the term that I wouldn’t take my course if I was in their shoes because it’s too much work crammed into too small of a segment of time.
But for the most part, students rose to the challenge, and in an interesting and unexpected way, I think the diversity of the students made for pretty pleasant groups of people in both classes. I once again used RiP! A Remix Manifesto as the framing device/topic for the term, and students found a lot of great things to write about. One thing that’s always nice to see is when a student begins the class knowing almost nothing about whatever it is they decide will be their topic of research and they end it still enthusiastic and a whole lot more knowledgeable than when they started. So it’s all good. It’s not enough (it’s never enough), but it’s a good start.
Oh, and another thing I did this term this term was I incorporated a bunch of readings from Writing Spaces. The results were generally good but mixed– and I mean that as a good thing, because not everything can work equally well in all situations and because I assigned a lot of these readings based on the abstracts and/or titles. There are definitely some pieces in there I’ll be using again the next time I teach fy comp, which could be as soon as this fall or as late as– well, who knows.
But I am turning around and starting up another class for the second part of the summer term in just a few days. Beginning on July 2, I’ll be teaching a 7.5 week and online version of English 444: Writing for the World Wide Web. This is a course I created shortly after coming to EMU back in 1998 and I’ve taught it now at least a dozen times in different formats and versions. I’m very much looking forward to what we’ll be doing this summer especially after learning from some of the less than smart choices I made in trying to include HTML5 coding last term. Ain’t doing that again, and the same goes with this “Content Management Strategy” stuff, though for different reasons I might come back to in a different version of the class.
Anyway, if you’ve read this far into this post and you’re interested in joining in on the upcoming version of English 444, feel free. I can’t give you MOOC-like badges or actual credit or grades or anything like that, but since I spent a fair amount of time over the last couple months bitching about the overselling of MOOCs and open learning and all the like, I figure the least I can do is invite people to see how I do things. Seriously. Sign up if you want to comment, or just read along on the site.
MOOCs and “Prior Learning Assessment”
More in the series of “the summer of MOOCs” articles and posts here: Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article, “Making It Count.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are not credit-bearing. But a pathway to college credit for the courses already exists — one that experts say many students may soon take.
That scenario combines the courses with prior learning assessment — a less-hyped potential “disruption” to traditional higher education — which is the granting of credit for college-level learning gained outside the traditional academic setting.
Here’s how the process could work: A student successfully completes a MOOC, like Coursera’s Social Network Analysis, which will be taught this fall by Lada Adamic, an associate professor at the University of Michigan. The student then describes what he or she learned in that course, backing it up with proof, in a portfolio developed with the help of LearningCounts.org or another service, perhaps offered by a college.
There’s also this handy flow-chart:
This isn’t a bad idea in theory and maybe even in practice. It kind of reminds me of the old days when future lawyers went and studied to take the Bar Exam without needing to go through that pesky law school business. I believe this is how Lincoln became a lawyer.
But it doesn’t take much to spot some potential problems, too:
- “Credit for prior experience” is essentially the formula used by diploma mills to justify their fake degrees– the “PhD in life,” so to speak. So until that well-deserved bias is overcome, getting actual college credit from an actual college will be tricky.
- The problem with prior experience is you have to actually have prior experience. I of course do encounter students at EMU who come into classes I teach with a lot of worthy prior experience. Just the other day, a new grad student asked me if she could get college credit for her prior experience as a teacher (the answer was no). But for the most part, the reason why students come to college in the first place is they don’t have prior experience. So while some combination of MOOC/prior experience thing might be useful for adults returning to college after years in the workplace, it isn’t going to be too useful for most of our students. And by the way, it’s the younger, more traditional college students who are going deepest into student loan debt.
- What exactly would this credit “count” for, anyway? Take the example of the course mentioned in the introduction: that Social Network Analysis course looks like it might be pretty cool, but what exactly would we count that as at a place like EMU? It probably wouldn’t correspond to anything in the Written Communication major, and I don’t think it would count here as a gen ed class. So at best, someone could transfer this class as just “credit,” and any transfer student can tell you that that’s not very useful.
- Even this article says that the process someone would have to go through to make MOOC credit count might not be worth it, “that students might decide it’s easier to retake an equivalent course at a traditional college than to seek prior-learning credit for a MOOC.”
Radiohead v. Red Hot Chili Peppers
Annette and Will and I went and saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers on June 1 and then Annette and I saw Radiohead just this past Monday. Besides putting me way WAY over my usual “one big arena rock show every two or so years,” I thought I would do a little comparison/contrast.
Who/what kind of music:
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Post punk funk pop music, heavily influenced and identified with Los Angeles, CA. They’ve been around since 1983 or so, meaning they are my age or older– well, the original members are at least since there has been quite a bit of rotation with a brand new guitar player in his thirties. They just got into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, too.
Radiohead: British quasi-pop alternative rock, eclectic and sometimes “difficult listening music” with lots of electronic and experimental music influences. Cerebral lyrics and complex sounds ranging from really loud to really quiet, often within the same song. A little younger, but not much– early 40s.
Performance style:
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Shirtless and/or baggy shirts with pants that inexplicably had one leg cut short with colorful soccer socks. Much running about, jumping, leaning against each other, dancing around, etc. Chatty with the crowd and jam playing between songs.
Radiohead: Jeans and shirts– could have been a bunch of GAs. Standing and playing, save for Thom Yorke’s twitchy dancing. Not a lot of talking and it seemed like they had to completely rearrange the stage and every instrument between every song.
The crowd:
Red Hot Chili Peppers: White, mostly middle class, and a variety of ages– Annette and I were fairly close to the middle of the age demographic, though there were plenty of college kids and even kids Will’s age. In my view, a sprinkling of frat boy and/or hard rock kinds of folks.
Radiohead: VERY white, which I found striking from our seats looking at the “festival seating/standing only” floor. More college-aged– Annette and I were a bit more on the older side, though not by much. Annette said she hadn’t seen this many “geeky white boys” at a show in a long long time.
Setlist:
One of those not new (but new to me) web sites is setlist.fm, which is “the setlist wiki.” So, want to know what they played?
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Lots from the new album, but also lots of “greatest hits.” Looks like they pretty much play the same list pretty much every night. One encore.
Radiohead: Lots from the new album, lots of older songs and a number of kind of obscure songs, too. To the extent that they have “hits,” I guess they played them, though I personally was disappointed that they didn’t play more from In Rainbows. They appear to mix up the song order and choices a lot and even played a brand-new song in the first encore (they always do two) that they premiered the previous night.
Lighting/Special Effects:
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Very elaborate light show with lots of moving parts and a big screen that showed a lot of narrative-like movies/images accompanying specific songs. Loud, of course.
Radiohead: Very elaborate light show with lots of moving parts, though a lot more abstract, which makes sense given the more varied setlist. Loud, of course, with bass that made my fillings rumble.
The venue(s):
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Joe Louis Arena, which is both conveniently and inconveniently located in downtown Detroit. Home of the Redwings, which is pretty obvious no matter what direction you’re looking in that building. It’s old with dubious bathrooms and crowded walkways outside the actual arena. I thought we were going to get crushed by the crowd surge on the way out of the show. We were stuck in the parking deck for close to an hour.
Radiohead: The Palace of Auburn Hills, which is both conveniently and inconveniently located far north of Detroit. It’s about an hour away from us, and the easiest way to get there was to actually drive downtown first and then get on 75 north. “State of the art” pro basketball facility (the Pistons) with grand walkways and elaborate restaurants and bars outside the actual arena. Huge parking lot (and not a parking deck), which really worked out well for us: we saw this show on a Monday before Annette was going to Boston and I had to teach, so getting back home at 1 am was not an option. We left before the second encore, avoided the crowd, and whisked out of the parking lot and on to the interstate. We were well on the road before the show was over.
And thus ends big expensive shows for a while. I would have liked to have gone to Deathcab for Cutie (they are going to be in the area in July), but these concerts and the kitchen budget are probably going to prevent that.