In about 10 minutes I am headed to orient our small group of incoming MA in Social Technologies grad students. I figure this is a chance to get down verbally with the young folk and give them some advice for succeeding in grad school.

1. Have a plan (A and B)

It’s true, many people enter graduate school by default. They aren’t quite sure what they are going to do with a grad degree that they aren’t without. But humans are goal oriented. You need a goal that you are working toward. It doesn’t matter what that goal is, or if you have to have a new goal (you will), only that you have a place you are moving toward. Like sharks, a grad student without a target is dead in the water. Don’t expect, as with undergrad, for the conveyor belt to just keep turning and plop you out on the other side. This isn’t a holding pattern.

Our program has dual ends: it is intended both for those interested in an academic research career and for those interested in a more traditional career path. You should prepare for both. Even if the academic side isn’t your thing, now is the time to engage in that. Even if you are very sure you don’t want to go into business, you should prepare to. You should dedicate your time to both Plan A and Plan B, and ideally to work that will allow you to build toward both.

Relatedly, from day 1, you should be putting together an “idea file” or “dream book” that you can draw on for your degree thesis project.

2. Say “yes.”

One of the pieces of advice that you hear a lot of in grad school is “you don’t have to do everything.” There are so many things that come along that have absolutely nothing to do with your own coursework or research, that it is tempting to tunnel. In my experience students who say yes to opportunities and try for things that they may never get have a far more rewarding graduate experience.

Someone interesting coming to campus? Go. Someone doing a research symposium on a topic you have only a passing interest in? Go.

For goodness sake, go and talk to your faculty. Set up a time just to get together and chat about their and your research. Make an excuse to meet with them.

Apply for things you know you cannot get. It isn’t wasted effort. It’s good to get accustomed to rejection, and to realize that you have 0% chance of getting something you don’t apply for. And please do apply for money. Get someone else to pay for your school.

Volunteer to help. Yes, you don’t have time. But look for projects (with other students, with faculty, within the community) where you can have a positive effect. There’s no better way to find your passion.

3. Brand yourself.

Yes, the terminology here is icky. But you should be “that person.” People should know what you do. That means, minimally, you should tie your work together in a public way. But it also means you should have a short statement that relates to your goal(s) (see #1), and you should talk publicly about it in as many venues as you can and at every opportunity. You want to open up the possibility that when someone says “Oh, you have a question about blockchain?” someone in the room will say “Fiona is all about that.”

Part of this is also networking on the network. You should seek out opportunities to get to know people who are interesting and who might be able to help you. The fact is, you probably don’t know who can help you, and so it is a good idea to meet as many people with shared interests as possible. This is a big university, and a bigger city. Swim outside the local pool.

4. Own your time

When I started grad school, I had a great mentor (Gerald Baldasty) who told us something that should be obvious: break your day into segments–15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour if you must–and accomplish something in each of these. The single most significant point of failure I have seen for grad students is those who think grad school is about showing up to the seminar and nothing more. Showing up really is important, but without the work that happens outside of it, it ends up not mattering.

He also reminded me that grad school only lasts for a few years, but that the people you love can be a lifetime relationship. Make sure you keep your priorities straight. It’s important that grad school is prioritized, but your family is more important. It may be the only thing that keeps you relatively sane through this process.

What did I miss? What advice would you give to a new grad student?

Honestly, you probably don’t care about any of this, but I’m putting it out there because (a) you might care, and might actually want to be involved in some way and (b) nobody really reads this blog any more so it’s not too self involved to do this. I guess I could always make my To Do list entirely public–but I suspect that would increase rather than decrease my stress. I’ll put that project on a back burner for now.

1. Funding Proposal. Trying to put together a proposal to the NSF for extending the work on BadgePost, applying it to peer-certification of social science methodology expertise. This is a bit of a last-minute push, but I’m hoping to throw it together pretty quickly. Two of the people I asked to serve on the advisory committee are applying to the same solicitation, so my suspicion are odds are pretty low here, but it’s worth a try, at least. Also Co-PI on a different proposal with a colleague.

2. Book Proposal. I’ve been saying I’m writing this book, All Seeing for years, but haven’t actually proposed it to a press. I need to do that before Christmas, and getting the book in some kind of drafty state will be the major project of the first part of 2016.

3. Talk at Harvard. If you are in chilly Cambridge in late January, I’ll be giving a short talk and a discussion with Alison Head about social search, looking especially at the potential for tracing search patterns in a more discoverable way.

4. Article: Death of the Blogosphere. I’ve proposed a chapter that looks at what the blogosphere meant, and what influence it had, and how it might stand as a counter-example to “platformed” social media.

5. Article: Badgifying Linked-In. I have been sitting on survey data that shows what people think when you swap badges in for LinkedIn skills. I really need to write it up, but–to be honest–it’s one of those things that doesn’t quite fit anywhere. I have a potential target journal, but it’s way outside of my normal submission space. At least it might provide interesting reviews. Hard to get excited about this one for some reason.

6. Course: Technology & Collaboration. This is a new course for our new masters program. I actually have a syllabus for it, but it was for the course proposal, and it is kind of horrible. This week, I need to get a new syllabus in working order so people know whether they want to take it. It’s online, which means it has to be more structured that my usual approach, and the hope is that students will have early drafts of Real Research™ by the end of the semester.

7. Course: Sex Online. I’m really hoping I can fall back a lot on what is already “in the can” for this course, though I have a long list of updates I need to make to it, and because FB killed my private group last year, I have to figure out whether to go with Reddit or Slack for discussion.

Projects on Hold

1. International Communication Association. I really wanted to get more than one thing in. I have a great panel on peer-veillance and IoT in, with a great group of people, but ICA is always a crapshoot. I’ve only had one (maybe 2) things ever rejected, but I thought they were my best work. And the worst thing I ever submitted got an award. So, waiting to hear on reviews. This is a long haul (Fukuoka), but if accepted, I will try to see if anyone in Japan wants me to give a talk (or potentially in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.). And there looks to be a fun post-conf on Human-Machine communication, which is of interest to me.

2. Mapping StackOverflow Achievement Sequences. Did some work with Hazel Kwon on figuring out how to make sense of the order in which people achieve certain badges on Stack Overflow. It was kind of a sticky analysis question, but we finally worked out something, and I think I even ran the analysis. But something came up, and it’s fell off my radar. Now I have to figure out if I took good enough notes to be able to recover it or if I have to re-do a lot of thinking and work on it. Probably won’t touch it until the new year.

In recent months a number of people have written about quitting academia. A recent piece in Inside Higher Ed indicates that this represents a particular genre of academic Dear John letters: “Quit Lit.” It could easily be imagined that this means that people are leaving the professoriate in droves, but there is little evidence of that. They are beginning to leave less quietly.

Thatâ€s probably a good thing. Certainly, they may be accused of sour grapes, and it is easier to attribute their criticisms to cognitive dissonance than it might be when you hear the same criticisms from those who continue to teach. But it would be short-sighted to dismiss them out of hand, as this essay seems to. But that piece does end with a useful suggestion: the writing of “staypieces.”

Unfortunately, I think most people stay in academia for some of the reasons many people go to graduate school: to escape the alternative. I was certainly initially in that camp. A year in a cubicle and a suit was as much a spur for me to go to graduate school as was my thirst for knowledge. But that is not why I stay.

ABQ: Always Be Quitting

This morning I had coffee with a doctoral student and we started talking about the life of an academic. She came from the corporate world for the greener pastures of academia. She’s had conversations with faculty and students who see the corporate world as a Mecca of predictability, salaries, and benefits. Of course, neither side of the hill is all that grassy.

A decade ago, I left the University at Buffalo, just ahead of news that the college in which I was teaching was on the chopping block. Naturally, I wasn’t alone in jumping ship. I noted in a blog post that I had submitted my last grades at Buffalo, and many assumed I was quitting academia, rather than just moving to another university. I wasn’t, but not because I was dedicated to the endeavor. My Plan B, my BATNA, has always been in play.

When I was in grad school, I had a Plan B. When I got my first job, the Plan B was always there, along with C and D. Today, were ASU to suffer the coup de grace the state seems intent on delivering, it would be a huge disappointment. And I would go to my Plan B. I’ve suffered far worse set-backs, and I will again. The pessimist in me requires that I be prepared for imminent disaster, and that preparation provides me with a great deal of comfort.

So when a former chair took me aside after a faculty meeting and told me I shouldn’t ruffle the feathers of senior faculty until after I had secured tenure, I could tell him honestly (though perhaps not calmly) that I wouldn’t want tenure in a place that made not ruffling feathers a requirement of the non-tenured. I said it because it was true.

Now, with the seeming security of tenure, I’m in the same position. I make accommodations, of course. But generally, if tomorrow I was told that I no longer could research what I want, write what I want, build what I want, or teach what I want, I could walk away from the job and do something else that required less compromise.

The trick is, at least for me, being a professor strikes a balance between security and freedom that is difficult to find elsewhere. It also provides me an opportunity to change lives in a way that would be difficult in many other places.

Changing the System From Within

When I was still a grad student, I vividly remember a conversation with two of my fellow TAs. I was railing against the way in which we taught and how universities work. One said I sounded like an anarchist. (And he said it like it was a bad thing!) Another asked why, given my antipathy toward institutionalized education, I was on the professorial track. I had a lame answer—one that I’ve heard many others use—I wanted to change the system from within.

Of course, institutional capture is always looming. I find myself working in a university structure that—sometimes in spite of the rhetoric often associated with ASU—is Byzantine, bureaucratic, and technocratic. I face the same kinds of fears many academics do: Am I doing enough? Am I making the kinds of choices I should? Am I making use of the freedom and security that the university job provides?

I think now the greatest challenge to changing the system from within is changing the system within. Graduate education is the feeder for a kind of strong culture that is far more binding than the gears of bureaucracy are. Make no mistake: the greatest obstacle to a revolution in higher education is the faculty.

Job Requirements vs. Reputational Income

Part of the problem with the freedom and security of faculty positions is that people so rarely take advantage of them. We may complain about the lack of remuneration offered by work in the Academy, but that lack is balanced against relative job security and autonomy. But who collects on those fully?

There are certain things you need to do to earn tenure at a Research I institution. They almost never involve creative teaching, taking on administrative roles, or community service. I’ve done all those things because I wanted to; because the university let me. Except in the rarest of cases, we do this to ourselves.

Getting tenure is hard, to be sure, but most people seem to be determined to make it harder than it is. As Nagpal noted in The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life, treating the tenure-track job as a 7-year job, rather than the start of a life-long commitment to a single institution, makes it a much more interesting proposition. I would love to see universities desperately trying to retain their tenure-track faculty, who are fielding a range of other possibilities at that stage of their careers. Unfortunately, most have burrowed their way into the self-imposed anthill of Academia.

Most of us want open access scholarship, but we publish in commercial journals. Most of us want to just do research. In the social sciences, that very often does not require funding. But we pursue it because it is perceived (or actually) needed for either social capital within the university or for extracting resources for our students. In practice, many of the stressors that lead to 60-80 hour work weeks are self-imposed. There’s nothing wrong with doing what you love for 60 hours a week, but we delude ourselves into thinking that a citation count, a funding goal, or perfect teaching evaluations are somehow required by our jobs. In most cases they are not. Many, in an effort to do everything well, find themselves in a circuit of time-consuming mediocrity.

If these needs are not directly and obviously dictated by the university (and I recognize that in some cases they are, but I think this is often the exception), where are they coming from? Mostly from our peers and a structure of competition for attention and reputation that we willingly engage in. This isn’t Hunger Games. The creation of a dog-eat-dog, winner-takes-all academic structure is certainly encouraged by the policies of many of todayâ€s universities, often with the aid of state legislatures in the US. But it’s all too often one we make ourselves.

The Joyful Professor

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

As I said, I donâ€t think I can claim to be all that different from the rest. Iâ€ve played into the game as much as anyone else has. And now, in the mid-point of my three-decade-long mid-life crisis, I recognize a lot of wasted effort on things I did not love and could not change. I dream of winning the lottery and starting my own shade-tree school or university. In the meantime, I can do the same, quietly, from within.

It takes a lot to get rid of a tenured faculty member. I am staying a professor, at least today. Iâ€m not going to get rich doing it, but I get paid plenty. I also have the freedom to do the things I want to do. If I donâ€t do those things, that is no oneâ€s fault but my own. I donâ€t want to increase my h-index. Things being what they are, I don’t expect I’ll ever catch up to the leaders in the field when it comes to publications or citations. I donâ€t want perfect student or peer-teaching reviews. If someone wants to give me grant money, Iâ€ll take it, but Iâ€m not going to waste time writing grants with little chance of being funded just to support a university that needs it to offset the lack of public funding. That’s not what I signed up for.

If I don’t use the freedom that makes academia so attractive to so many people, thatâ€s not the fault of the institution. And I strongly suspect that if more people had that attitude, the institution would be a much better one.

The Hagakure, which lays out much of the “way of the samurai,” gives clear advice on this front:

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one’s aim is to die a dog’s death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim. We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like. But not having attained our aim and continuing to live is cowardice. This is a thin dangerous line. To die without gaining one’s aim is a dog’s death and fanaticism. But there is no shame in this. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai. If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

We enter into something of a contract as a faculty member: we trade income for autonomy and security. If we do not use the latter, we enter a fool’s bargain. This is why I stay, and why being ready to quit is an important part of staying.

Of course, there are issues here. For one thing, this kind of education is mostly one-way. Yes, there are ways of feeding back. A lucky student might be able to grab a sliver of the teacher’s attention, but generally, it’s about the passing of knowledge from one-to-many. Also, students in many cases get together in groups and discuss the work–building on one another’s knowledge. But this isn’t the same as the circle around the sage, the guided conversation that has gone on as long as we have had schools.

Transforming teaching from the kind of conversational learning community that is–at least ideally–found in the university classroom to this sort of massive version is more than just switching media. It means that the teacher has to shift the structure and format of her work. In many cases, this means moving to text, but it also means framing the work more didactically, shaping ideas into units and subunits that can be consumed in little bites.

And this can be amazingly advantageous to many students; students who can’t necessarily get into a classroom each week because of the expense of tuition, because they have full-time jobs and maybe families. Yes, this could potentially be a less rich form of learning than a classroom, but it can reach people who might otherwise never get at that education. It can be provided relatively cheaply, and often for free.

Now some of these are absolute crap. No, check that, I would argue that most are absolute crap. And some have called for their elimination because of that–and a return to more traditional forms of face-to-face learning. The response is natural, and especially when presented with some of these weak examples, it’s clear why they might want to do away with them altogether.

But here’s the key. Many of those who engage in this massified version of learning find their way into the more traditional classroom, or maybe even new forms of learning communities we haven’t even thought of. In other words, although this new form may replace some of the traditional classroom learning, every indication is that there are opportunities for synergy between traditional forms of learning and leveraging new media. There have been calls to move away from massification of learning, and as a person who is interested in networked approaches, I find sympathies with this. But I think a much more reasonable approach is to ask how we can continue to combine these largely “broadcast” models to help enhance what we do in the traditional face-to-face classroom.

So, I say, let’s keep up with this book-writing thing. It might turn out to actually be worthwhile.

Reputation matters for a Tesla, but I do end up with a decent chunk of steel (and plastic aluminum). And yes, I’m buying some kind of caché: I have a Tesla and must therefore be cool by extension. With the university degree, that’s all I get. I get to say “I am a college graduate” or “I am an ASU graduate” or “I am a Stanford graduate” or “I went to school in Boston.” In other words, I give up a good chunk of cash, and four years of my life, and get certified. People know that I was good enough to get into Harvard, so I must be good enough to work for them.

Yes, I hear you saying university is more than that. It’s about social networks. It’s about socializing people into a particular class. It’s about organizing your time and behaving at some minimally professional level. And maybe it’s even about learning a little along the way. But that’s not how people choose their universities, even if they could. Yes, many do come to ASU because of its reputation as a party school, but usually they also want it to provide at least some indication of future ability to pay school loans. (And ASU happens to do pretty well in that regard.)

Because of this, you are unlikely to buy into a degree from Hyundai university. It might be cheaper than the Princeton sheepskin, it might even be a much better bang for the buck, but when you are buying brand, you can’t afford to take chances. And that means it is much harder for Hyundai U to even compete with Mercedes U–it is a self-fulfilling prophesy. The barriers to entry for “real” schools are incredibly high. And a lot of that has to do with the size of required investment. (I think you could make similar arguments about the difficulty of making progress on residential building for the same reason.)

Unbundling and Garage Universities

One way to address this is to unbundle the things that the university does. I’ve written about this before on several occasions. A few years ago I gave an Ignite talk at DML on the topic of Garage Universities–but few people were interested. (Ironically, they preferred the talk I didn’t plan.) The basic argument was that the linchpin that held together the university bundle was the credential: the certification of the 4-year degree. Pull that out and things fall apart.

The university structure falling apart is a scary thing to many people, but I remain convinced that many of the best parts of the university will not only survive, but thrive. I also think, at least in the US case, that what really needs innovation is schooling in K-12, but in many ways that’s harder to crack. In that realm, though, you have seen new opportunities for start-up schools, and starting a private school–because they tend to be relatively local and limited in scale–is pretty easy.

What happens when you have a new system that allows for the agglomeration of smaller learning “chunks”–a kind of rolling up of degrees through the earning of smaller certificates. Among other things, it means starting a “small school” of higher education becomes much easier. I don’t have the time, money, or risk-taking behavior to start a new university, but I could start a program, and I could definitely start a course or series of courses.

Small courses and series already exist, of course. I can go to the Learning Annex and improve my understanding of Tarot, for example. But these courses exist on the fringes and are not in any way interoperable with university credits. Of course, there are very real economic reasons for universities not to accept credit not earned at the university. At one level at least, it means that tuition dollars are going to someone else. But it also costs money to evaluate outside credit and decide what “counts.” Articulation agreements make that a little easier, but they are time consuming and difficult to manage.

Coin of the Realm

A unified set of standards around certifying learning would not change this immediately, but it would cut down in the overhead of accepting, verifying, and sharing credentials. A good set of badging structures constitutes an innovation infrastructure.

Certainly, this doesn’t save anyone from the hard part: designing exciting and effective learning environments. Or even for the slightly less difficult task of figuring out how to pay for it. Just as a number of technologies made selling online easier–eBay, Paypal, Etsy, Square–a microcredential infrastructure makes it easier to experiment. At present, it seems like MOOCs are the experiment du jour, but there are other forms of experimentation possible, both within institutions and outside institutions.

When

The question everyone seems to be asking is what the tipping point might be for such an infrastructure. I am a fan of the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure, in part because, unlike the examples in ecommerce I mention above, it is not controlled by a single entity. There is no guarantee that it will happen, but if it does, it needs to happen at a large scale, and it needs to happen where people already are.

That means places like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, at least as a start. Ideally–and this is where it gets tricky–it means that it happens the same way across these platforms, and no one tries to own it. There is a promising mention of the Mozilla OBI in Reid Hoffman’s “Disrupting the Diploma” post. But on the other hand, there seems to be an effort to try to bottle badges up, keep them at home, all the better to monetize them. I suspect strongly that–like for blogging–the future of badges rests on understanding the sharing process.

We need to understand better the mechanisms of why people might post a badge and what they get out of it when they do. And that means more than private sharing or putting it on a personal portfolio, it means understanding how badges pass into the open, participatory worlds of social media.

It also means understanding how microcertifications relate to other forms of marking achievement and experience, both quantified and more informal. A number of systems exist for marking “karma” or check-ins. A better feeling for the range of ways in which experience is shared, appreciated, and recorded.

Google selected me as one of (the many) Google “Glass Explorers”, thanks to a tweet I sent saying how I would use Google Glass, namely:

#ifihadglass I’d find myself in the shoes of Vannevar Bush’s walnut-wearing (social) scientist, & I’d remember the names of my students :).

— halavais (@halavais) February 21, 2013

What this means is that I will, presumably over the next few months, be offered the opportunity to buy Google Glass before most other people get to. Yay! But it is not all good news. I get to do this only if I shell out $1,500 and head out to L.A. to pick them up.

Fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money. I’d be willing to spend a sizable amount of money for what I think Glass is. Indeed, although $1,500 is on the outside of that range, if it did all I wanted it too, I might still be tempted. But it is an awful lot of money. And that’s before the trip to L.A.

To be clear, the decision is mostly “sooner or later.” I’ve wanted something very like Glass for a very long time. At least since I first read Neuromancer, and probably well before that. So the real question is whether it’s worth the premium and risk to be a “Glass Explorer.”

As with all such decisions, I tend to make two lists: for and against.

For:

• I get to play with a new toy first, and show it off. Have to admit, I’m not a big “gadget for the sake of gadgets” guy. I don’t really care what conclusions others draw relating to my personal technology: either whether I am a cool early adopter or a “glasshole.” I use tech that works for me. So, this kind of “check me out I got it first” doesn’t really appeal to me. I guess the caveat there is that I would like the opportunity to provide the first reviews of the thing.
• I get to do simple apps: This is actually a big one. I’m not a big programmer, and I don’t have a lot of slack time this year for extra projects, but I would love to create tools for lecturing, for control, for class management, and the like. And given one of the languages they support for app programming is Python–the one I’m most comfortable in–I can see creating some cool apps for this thing. But… well, see the con column.
• I could begin integrating it now, and have a better feel for whether I think it will be mass adopted, and what social impacts it might have. I am, at heart, a futurist. I think some people who do social science hope to explain. I am interested in this, but my primary focus is being able to anticipate (“predict” is too strong) social changes and find ways to help shape them. Glass may be this, or it may not, but having hands on early on will help me to figure that out.

Against:

• Early adopter tax. There is a lot of speculation as to what these things will cost when they are available widely, and when that will be. The only official indication so far is “something less than $1,500.” I suspect they will need to be much less than that if they are to be successful, and while there are those throwing around numbers in the hundreds, I suspect that price point will be right around $1,000, perhaps a bit higher. That means you are paying a $500 premium to be a beta tester, and shouldering a bit of risk in doing so.
• Still don’t know its weak points. Now that they are actually getting shipped to developers and “thought leaders,” we might start to hear about where they don’t quite measure up. Right now, all we get is the PR machine. That’s great, but I don’t like putting my own money toward something that Google says is great. I actually like most of what Google produces, but “trust but verify” would make me much more comfortable. In particular, I already suspect it has two big downvotes for me. First, I sincerely hope it can support a bluetooth keyboard. I don’t want to talk to my glasses. Ideally, I want an awesome belt- or forearm-mounted keyboard–maybe even a gesture aware keyboard (a la Swype) or a chording keyboard. Or maybe a hand-mounted pointer. If it can’t support these kinds of things, it’s too expensive. (There is talk of a forearm-mounted pad, but not a lot of details.)
• Strangleware. My Android isn’t rooted, but one of the reasons I like it is that it *could* be. Right now, it looks like Glass can only run apps in the cloud, and in this case, it sounds like it is limited to the Google cloud. This has two effects. First, it means it is harder for the street to find new uses for Glass–the uses will be fairly prescribed by Google. That’s a model that is not particularly appealing to me. Second, developers cannot charge for Glass apps. I can’t imagine this is an effective strategy for Google, but I know from a more immediate perspective that while I am excited to experiment with apps (see above) for research and learning, I also know I won’t be able to recoup my $1,500 by selling whatever I develop. Now, if you can get direct access to Glass from your phone (and this would also address the keyboard issue), that may be another matter.
• No resale. I guess I could hedge this a bit if I knew I could eBay the device if I found it wasn’t for me. But if the developer models are any indication, you aren’t permitted to resell. You are out the $1,500 with no chance of recovering this.

I will keep an open mind, and check out reviews as they start to trickle in from developers, as well as reading the terms & conditions, but right now, I am leaning to giving up my invite and waiting with the other plebes for broad availability. And maybe spending less on a video enabled quadracopter or a nice Mindstorms set instead.

Or, someone at Google will read this, and send me a dozen of the things as part of a grant to share with grad students so we can do some awesome research in the fall. But, you know, I’m not holding my breath. (I do hope they are doing this for someone though, if not me. If Google is interested in education, they should be making these connections.)

I was thinking about this during the Digital Medial and Learning conference in Chicago this week, and especially during the session titled Make, Do, Engage. The whole conference has a double set of themes. The official theme has to do with civic culture, and my favorite sessions this year have talked about new forms of activism and ways of encouraging social justice. But there is also a focus (including a pre-conference) on making stuff. Panelists spoke about ways students subvert game construction, the idea of jugaad, and thoughts about hacking-based media literacies. There seemed to be an interweaving here between building “stuff” (technology) and building government, and learning. This nexus (learning, politics, and making) was very present at the conference, and hits directly on my specific intersection of interests, so it has been an especially engaging conference for me this year.

In particular, the question is how to lead people to be more willing to engage in hacking, and how to create environments and ecosystems that encourage hacking of the environment. Rafi Santo talked a bit about the “emergence” of the hashtag as an example of Twitter’s relative hackability when compared with Facebook. (The evolution of features of Twitter is something I write about in a short chapter in the upcoming volume Twitter and Society.) Chris Hoadley also talked about the absence of any sort of state support for physical infrastructure led people to have to engage in their own hacks. This recalled for me a point made by Ethan Zuckerman about Occupy Sandy as being an interesting example of collective action that had a very real impact.

At one point Ingrid Erickson mentioned that she had been talking with Rafi about “do it together” technologies–making the hacking process more social. But part of me is much more interested in infrastructure for creativity–forcing people to work together. No one would wish Sandy on any group, but that particular pressure, and the vacuum of institutional support, led to a Temporary Autonomous Government of sorts that stepped in and did stuff because it needed to be done. I also recalled danah boyd mentioning earlier something that anyone who has ever taught in a grad program knows full well: placing a group in a difficult or impossible situation is a good way to quickly build an esprit de corps and bring together those who would otherwise not necessarily choose to collaborate. With all of these ideas mixing around, I wonder if we need a new aesthetic of “undoing it yourself.”

Yes, I suppose that could be what jailbreaking a phone is about, or you might associate this with frame-breaking or other forms of sabotage. But I am thinking of something a bit more pre-constructive.

I went to a lot of schools as a kid; more than one built on one or another piece of the Montessori model. At one, there was a pile of wood, a hammer, and some nails. It wasn’t in a classroom, as I recall, it was down at the end of a hall. If I asked, they would let me go mess with it. It was dangerous: I managed to hammer my thumb with some consistency. And I would be very surprised if they had an outcome in mind; or even if I did. I think I made a model boat. I don’t think anyone would have guessed it was a model boat unless I had told them.

In a more structured setting, piles of Lego bricks might want to look like what is on the cover of the box. And I am sure there are kids who manage–at least once–to achieve the vehicles or castles shown there. But that’s not why you play with Lego. Some part of me really rebels against the new Lego world, with the huge proliferations of specialized pieces. But the truth is that as a kid the specialized pieces were the interesting bits, not the bare blocks. The core 8×2 were there almost as a glue to keep the fun bits together.

Especially in the postmodern world we celebrate the bricoleur, we recognize hybridized work and kludges as interesting and useful, but far less thought is put into where that stuff comes from. Disassembly precedes assembly. I’m interested in what it means to be an effective disassembler, to unmake environments. There is space for scaffolding only once you’ve actually torn down the walls.

I think we need an Undo-it-Yourself movement. People who individually loosen bolts and disconnect wires. Who destroy mindfully. Those who leave junk in your way, knowing that you might see yourself in it. Our world is ripe for decomposition. New ideas about how we shape our built environment and our society are not born out of the ashes of the past, but out of the bits and pieces that are no longer attached the way the Designer intended.

I am not advocating chaos. I’m not suggesting that we should start an evil organization that turns every screw we encounter twice anti-clockwise. Perhaps what I am suggesting is something somewhere between the kit and the junkyard. Something with possibilities we know and we don’t know. Disassemblies of things for playing with.

To provide what is perhaps too brief a gloss on Mitch Resnick’s critique, he is concerned that the badges come to replace the authentic learning experiences. He illustrated this by relaying a story about hiking the Appalachian trail, and having people talk about “peaking”–hitting as many peaks as possible in a given day. This misses the reason for doing the hike in the first place. He worries–as Alfie Kohn did about gold stars–that badges will be used to motivate students. He showed a short conversation between Salmon Kahn and Bill Gates in which they joke about how badges shape kids’ motivations. I am really glad that Resnick raises (and keeps raising) these issues. When badges end up replacing learning, rather than enhancing it, we are producing an anti-learning technology. We need to not be creating a technology of motivation, but one that provides recognition, authentic assessment, and an effective alternative to traditional credentials and learning records.

Which brings us to Oz, and a charlatan wizard from Kansas. You may not remember this, but when Dorothy and her friends show up to get their hearts and minds, the wizard instead awards them with badges. To go back to the source:

“I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy.

“Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”

“Can’t you give me brains?” asked the Scarecrow.

“You don’t need them. You are learning something every day. A baby has brains, but it doesn’t know much. Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.”

“That may all be true,” said the Scarecrow, “but I shall be very unhappy unless you give me brains.”

The false Wizard looked at him carefully.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “I’m not much of a magician, as I said; but if you will come to me tomorrow morning, I will stuff your head with brains. I cannot tell you how to use them, however; you must find that out for yourself.”

“Oh, thank you–thank you!” cried the Scarecrow. “I’ll find a way to use them, never fear!”

“But how about my courage?” asked the Lion anxiously.

“You have plenty of courage, I am sure,” answered Oz. “All you need is confidence in yourself. There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. The True courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.”

“Perhaps I have, but I’m scared just the same,” said the Lion. “I shall really be very unhappy unless you give me the sort of courage that makes one forget he is afraid.”

“Very well, I will give you that sort of courage tomorrow,” replied Oz.

“How about my heart?” asked the Tin Woodman.

“Why, as for that,” answered Oz, “I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.”

“That must be a matter of opinion,” said the Tin Woodman. “For my part, I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me the heart.”

“Very well,” answered Oz meekly. “Come to me tomorrow and you shall have a heart. I have played Wizard for so many years that I may as well continue the part a little longer.”

In the end, he gives them tokens in the book which the three companions take to be real. But in the movie, these mere tokens are replaced by their modern equivalents: the diploma, a testimonial, and a purple heart.

Now, as someone who sees badges as useful and helpful, it may seem odd to raise this as an example. After all, the Wizard keeps his eyes wide open about the value of things like military badges or diplomas. He has no illusions about the ways in which these things are abused in the strange world of “Kansas.” And, as I said, he is a faker.

On the other hand, the Wizard’s actions are about recognizing the achievements of the three. The viewer, of course, knows that the three already have demonstrated their desired abilities, through their journey along the YBR, and their experience meeting with a significant challenge. They have already achieved more than they themselves knew. Badges represent recognition, and as those in the badge community who like the game mechanics metaphor (I don’t) say “leveling up.” In this case, the badges are being used not just to let the world know about the protagonists’ achievements and experience, but also to open their eyes to their own accomplishments–to mark that learning as important.

There will continue to be a tension between motivation–stepping up to meet others’ achievement–and recognizing the achievements of learners. It’s an important tension, and I think there needs to be a significant amount of focus on how we can effectively walk that line. How can we avoid the worst kinds of badging?

I don’t have a good answer to that, but I have two suggestions:

First, the evidence behind the badge should not–cannot–be ignored. Right now the “evidence link” is optional for the OBI. I am happy it is there at all, but I wish that it were required. Of course, it’s wide open–that “evidence” could just be a score on a quiz. But there is the potential for backing badges with authentic assessment. I would love for badges to essentially be pointers to portfolios.

Second, I think it’s vital that learners be involved in the creation of badges. People often drag out the apocryphal quote from Napoleon about soldiers giving their lives for bits of ribbon. There is a significant danger that the future of badges will be dictated by the state (at whatever level) or standardized curricula. I think it is important to keep badging weird. One of the best ways to do that, and to undermine the colonization of badging by commercial interests and authoritative educational institutions is to makes sure the tools to create and issue badges are widely available and dead simple to use.

One of my earliest questions, asked a couple of years ago, about badges and the Open Badge Infrastructure is whether you could put badges into the infrastructure that the issuers didn’t intend (specifically) to go into the OBI. And here we have a great example: the “I walked 5000 steps” badge you see here. When I earned it, via FitBit, it let me share it via Facebook or Twitter, and so I did. Now, on my FB page is a note that I was awarded the badge.

The question is simple. Can you have a “helper app” that takes badges earned on FitBit, or on StackOverflow, or on Four Square (you get the idea), and places them in my badge backpack. Let’s just assume for the moment that these badges, like the FitBit badge, are sitting somewhere out in the open. So, here are some of the questions this raises:

Who owns the badge image

Can I assume, since they are allowing me to put the image on FB, that I can use the image to represent myself in various venues, particularly if the badge is “properly earned”? E.g., is my use above “fair” or am I impinging on their copyright/trademark by using the image? Legally, it seems to me that they could easily claim that they haven’t granted me an explicit license, though I think it would be a mistake to *stop* the flow. After all, why give a badge if you don’t want people to display it? So, at this point, I would say it is an issue of asking forgiveness rather than permission…

More technically, I would assume that the “helper site” would cache the image, rather than providing the OBI with the original image location on, e.g., the FitBit site. That means the helper site would be taking on some liability, but I assume they could easily claim to be a DMCA safe harbor and have appropriate take-down processes?

More generally, the ownership of badge images is likely to become a pretty hot topic. All of the sudden, a lot more people are creating trademarks, and they are likely going to be coming too close to comfort to one another.

Finally, on this topic, I could create a badge that suggests that the FitBit badge was earned, but was my own badge design. At that point, I think there isn’t much FitBit could do to complain. But it would make so much more sense if you could just use the initial badge image.

Are you that person?

The issue of stolen glory is tougher. If you have this middle layer, how does it know you are who you say you are on the other services? If they have some form of data sharing or identity API (e.g., OAuth) there may be ways to “connect” to the account and demonstrate ownership, but these are not universal.

For systems that do not provide an open API for authentication, you would have to play with some kind of work-around to get users to prove they have access to the site. That is possible, but likely too cumbersome to make sense. Luckily, OAuth seems to be more common these days than it once was, and it might be possible to set up a kind of middle layer that helps users on systems that already employ badges move those badges to an OBI backpack. (Some of this could likely be made easier with broad adoption of Persona, but even if I am encouraging my students this semester to set up a Persona account, I’m not going to put too many eggs in that basket until it gets widespread adoption.)

BadgePost2

I unceremoniously killed off the BadgePost system. It was a great learning system, and I can see how it might be useful to others. That said, I think it makes more sense to leverage existing systems. And I like the idea of building a kind of “middle layer” that can draw on badge systems that already exist. I expect my early targets to be:

• FitBit: why not?
• FourSquare: Since even people who no longer use it seem to have 4sq badges :).
• Reddit: They have no badges, really, but we can layer our own on based on karma alone. (Like the Reddit badge for this course, though more automagically generated.)
• WordPress: There is an OAuth plug-in for WordPress already, and several badge plugins. Should be possible to leverage a WordPress site running the right stack…

I want to be able to argue that online courses are as good as their offline counterparts, but it’s difficult, because we don’t really know that. And this is for a lot of reasons.

The UoP Effect

First, if traditional and elite universities had been the originators of successful online courses and degrees, or if they had promoted those successes better (since I suspect you can find some pretty substantial successes reaching back at least three decades), we wouldn’t have the stigma of the University of Phoenix and its kin. For many, UoP is synonymous with online education, particularly in these parts (i.e., Phoenix).

Is UoP that bad? I don’t know. All I have to judge them on is people I’ve met with UoP degrees (I was not at all impressed), and what I’ve heard from students. What I do know is that they spend a lot of money on advertising and recruiting, and not very much money on faculty, which to me suggests that it is a bad deal.

Many faculty see what UoP and even worse for-profit start-ups are doing and rightly perceive it as a pretty impoverished model for higher education. They rightly worry that if their own university becomes known for online education, it will carry the same stigma a University of Phoenix degree does.

The Adjuncts

At ASU, as with many other research universities, the online courses are far more likely to be taught by contingent faculty rather than core tenure-track faculty, and as a result the students are more likely to end up with the second-string. I’ll apologize for demeaning adjuncts: I know full well that if you stack up the best teachers in any department there is a good chance that adjuncts will be among them, or even predominate. But on average, I suspect that a class taught by an adjunct instructor is simply not as good as one taught by full-time research faculty. There are a lot of reasons for this, but perhaps the most important one is that they do not have the level of support from the university that regular faculty do.

I’ve been told by a colleague here that they wanted to teach in the online program but were told that they were “too expensive” to be employed in that capacity. And there is a model that is beginning to separate out course design, “delivery”(ugh!) or “facilitation,” and evaluation. But I suspect the main reason more full-time faculty don’t teach online is more complicated.

Online is for training, not complex topics

This used to be “Would you trust a brain surgeon with an online degree?” which is actually a pretty odd question. Brain surgeons in some ways have more in common with auto mechanics than they do with engineers, but the point was to test whether you would put yourself in mortal danger if you were claiming online education was good. Given how much surgery is now done using computer-controlled tools, I think some of that question is moot now, but there remains this idea that you can learn how to use Excel online, but you certainly cannot learn about social theory without the give-and-take of a seminar.

It’s a position that is hard for me to argue against, in large part because it’s how almost all of us in academia learned about these things. I too have been taught in that environment, and for the most part, my teaching is in that environment. As one colleague noted, teaching in a physical classroom is something they have been taught how to do and they have honed their craft; they do it really well. Why are they forced to compete for students with online courses when they know they would not be as effective a teacher in that environment?

But in many ways this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Few schools require “traditional” faculty to teach online, though they may allow or even encourage it. As a result the best teachers are not necessarily trying to figure out how to make online learning great. We are left with the poor substitute of models coming from industry (modules teaching employees why they should wear a hair net) and the cult of the instructional designer.

Instructional Designers

As long as I’ve already insulted adjuncts, I’ll extend to instructional designers. I know a lot of brilliant ones, but the “best practices” make online education into the spoon-feeding idiot-proof nonsense that many faculty think it is. It is as if the worst of college education has been simmered until you get it down to a fine paste, and this paste can be flavored with “subject expertise.” Many are Blackboard personified.

When you receive a call–as I recently did–for proposals to change your course so that it can be graded automatically, using multiple guess exams and the like, it makes you wonder what the administration thinks good teaching is.

I am a systematizer. I love the idea of learning objectives aligned with assessments and all that jazz. But in sitting through a seminar on Quality Matters recently, we found ourselves critiquing a course that encouraged participation on a discussion board. How did discussion align with the learning objectives? It didn’t. OK, let’s reverse engineer it. How can you come up with a learning objective, other than “can discuss matters cogently in an online forum” that encourages the use of discussion-based learning. Frankly, one of the outcomes of discussion is a personalized form of learning, a learning outcome that really comes out as “Please put your own learning outcome here, decided either before or after the class.” Naturally, such a learning outcome won’t sit well with those who follow the traditional mantra of instructional design.

QM has its heart in the right place: it provides a nice guideline for making online courses more usable, and that’s important. But what is vital is making online spaces worthy of big ideas, and not just training exercises.

The Numbers

I like the idea of the MOOC, and frankly, it makes a lot of sense for a lot of courses. It’s funny when people claim their 100-student in-person class is more engaging than a 1,000-student online course. In most cases, this is balderdash. Perhaps it is a different experience for the 10 people who sit up front and talk, but generally, big classes online are better for more students than big classes off.

Now, if you are a good teacher, chances are you do more than lecture-and-test. You get students into small groups, and they work together on meaningful projects, and the like. Guess what: that’s true of the good online instructors as well.

I think you can create courses that scale without reducing them to delivery-and-test. ASU is known for doing large-scale adaptive learning for our basic math courses, for example, and I think there are models for large-scale conversation that can be applied to scalable models for teaching. It requires decentering the instructor–something many of my colleagues are far from comfortable with–but I am convinced highly scalable models for interaction can be developed further. But scalable courses aren’t the only alternative.

I think the Semester Online project, which allows students from a consortium of universities to take specialized small classes online, is a great way to start to break the “online = big” perception. Moreover, you can make small online course materials and interactions open, leading to a kind of TOOC (Tiny Open Online Course) or a Course as a Fishbowl.

Assessment as Essential

I’ll admit, I’m not really a big part of the institutionalized assessment process. But it strikes me as odd that tenure, and our continued employment as professors, is largely based on an assessment of the quality of our research, not just how many papers we put out–though of course, volume isn’t ignored. On the other hand, in almost every department in the US, budgeting and success is based on FTEs: how can you produce more student hours with less faculty hours. Yes, there is recognition for effective and innovative teaching. But when the rubber hits the road, it’s the FTEs that count.

Critics of online education could be at least quieted a bit if there were strong structures of course and program assessment. Not just something that gets thrown out there when accreditation comes up, but something that allowed for the ongoing open assessment of what students were learning in each class. This would change the value proposition, and make us rethink a lot of our decisions. It would also provide a much better basis for deciding on teachers’ effectiveness (although the teacher is only one part of what leads to learning in a course) than student evals alone.

This wouldn’t fix everything. It may very well be that people learn better in small, in-person classrooms, but that it costs too much to do that for every student or for every course. The more likely outcome, it seems to me, is that some people learn some things better online than they do offline. If that’s the case, it would take the air out of the idea that large institutions are pursuing online education just because it is better for their bottom line.

In any case, the idea that we are making serious, long-term investments and decisions in the absence of these kinds of data strikes me as careless. Assessment doesn’t come for free, and there will be people who resist the process, but it seems like a far better metric of success than does butts in seats.

Using existing social software for course management is also nothing new. The code that runs Slashdot has been used for course management, and there is a robust community of people using WordPress and other blogs to run their courses. (I’ve done this for well over a decade now.) So, why Reddit?

Over the last few semesters, I have been experimenting with a badge system, tagged on to a home-rolled portfolio structure. It wasn’t really what I intended at the beginning, but it kind of evolved into that. And it looked a heck of a lot like Reddit, once things were said and done.

I got there backwards. My interest was not just in “discussion” but in developing students’ ability to argue, critique, and ultimately, to assess the work of others and their own work. Some of that includes “meta-assessment”–or what otherwise might be considered meta-moderation. This shows up in a lot of online discussion environments these days; Reddit is just one. I think Stack Overflow presents an equally strong contender here, but given the topic of the course, I settled on Reddit.

Both Stack Overflow and Reddit offer their code for download (and expansion, etc.). For now, I think that’s unnecessary. That said, I am wondering how hard it would be to simply layer a badge system on top of Reddit (or a Reddit clone). As I said, I got very near to something that looked like Reddit or Stack Overflow by trying to create a system that allowed users to upload something for peer evaluation. I can imagine a badge system that would observe a particular post on Reddit as a claim to a badge, and evaluate the comments (potentially giving higher weight to those who held expert-level badges in the area), generating a badge that could then show up in someone’s OBadge Backpack

The only tricky part of this might be to make sure that the person claiming to be the poster is actually the poster. That authentication bit (see every IAmA post!) is not obvious or easy, without the user revealing their email. I suppose they could be asked to post using a particular code for “linking” their email to a Reddit user-ID, but this seems more than a little clunky.

This could be done with reddit.com directly without ever touching the code. A browser plugin might actually be able to handle all the UI, as well, leaving the backend on a fairly quiet server somewhere.

But maybe not in the way University of Virginia Rector Helen Dragas and others seem to think. For those not playing at home, the UVa recently went through a very public and destructive firing and rehiring of their president. The reason, it turned out, is that their Board of Visitors seemed to think the university should be engaging in creative destruction more quickly. Or something similar to that. They wanted more motion, faster. And MOOCs seem to be the current darling of what elite institutions can do to… well to forestall the inevitable.

To be clear, I agree with the economic doom-casters. I think we are in for a cataclysmic and rapid change in what universities do in the US. I think it will feel a bit like an echo of the newspaper collapse, and in particular, we will see a large number of universities and colleges not make it through the process. Part of that is that there will be challengers outside of traditional universities, and part of it will be that traditional universities will find ways of reaching new students. A big part will be rapid changes in how universities–particularly private universities–are funded.

But I think Siva has MOOCs wrong, in part by assuming that there is a thing called a MOOC and that it is a stable sort of a thing. In particular:

He notes:

Let me pause to say that I enjoy MOOCs. I watch course videos and online instruction like those from the Khan Academy … well, obsessively. I have learned a lot about a lot of things beyond my expertise from them. My life is richer because of them. MOOCs inform me. But they do not educate me. There is a difference.

So, there is a question of terminology. Are Khan courses MOOCs? Let’s assume they hold together into courses and curricula, even then, are they MOOCs? Are MIT’s Open Courses MOOCs? I think calling these MOOCs makes about as much sense as calling a BOOK a MOOC. These are the open resources that make up an important part of a scalable online open course (a SOOC! I can wordify too!).

The main issue here is, I think, his insistence on this idea of “education.” I don’t think I believe in education any more. I’m not sure I believe teaching is much more than setting the stage for the important bit: learning. But he is suggesting that there is more here. That education consists of more than just learning.

But I also think it is way too early to guess at what “MOOCs” do well, when they are a moving target. The idea that calculus or chemistry instruction scales well but history or philosophy does not I think has a lot more to do with institutional structures and university politics than it does with the nature of learning these things.

I think one of the major problems universities–both the elite institutions Siva is talking about and the “less elite” universities and colleges–is that they are the wrong tool for the problem they face. They face students coming to college not well prepared by high schools. The first two years is remedial work, often outsourced to adjunct labor. And since the university wants to put its resources into the “meat” of education, the cool stuff students don’t get to until senior year, they are screwing up what is happening up to that point.

The result is Bio 101 and English 101. Courses that best reflect the worst in college education. They are either 30-student courses taught by first year grad students and/or adjuncts, or 1,200-student courses that involve showing up to class, memorizing key terms, and regurgitating them into the appropriate bubble on a Scantron form. It’s not the 20-person senior seminar on Kierkegaard’s less known knitting patterns that are the target of MOOCs, it is the Bio 101s.

Now, part of the problem is that many large state schools (and small private colleges) only have Bio 101s. I regularly had students at the senior level at SUNY Buffalo who had never written a term paper. At Quinnipiac (which boasts very few giant lectures courses), I heard something similar. As bad as Bio 101 is, it’s a cash cow for the university. If you are able to can that cash cow, all the better.

But here’s the trick, if you are able to can it, and make it available to all for free, it’s not a cash cow, it’s an open service to society. It is not the best solution to the problem (reminder: the problem is failing public secondary and primary education in the US), but it is a stop-gap that doesn’t soak the student.

At present, scaled courses follow the trajectory of scaled courses in giant lecture halls over the last two decades: lecture and multiple choice. The real innovation in MOOCs is the potential for creating networked learning communities within these massive courses. I think it’s possible we can do that. I also think it’s going to take a lot of work, and a lot of time. Which means money.

So, if administrators are excited about MOOCs, I say: good. If they don’t understand the monetization of open education resources, I say: join the crowd.

This is one of those cases where fostering the elite is a good thing. Nothing wrong with funding community colleges or making tuition at four-year institutions more reasonable, but we are systematically undermining our country both economically and culturally by undercutting our large research universities. All hail the MOOC, and for goodness sake, make higher education function more effectively, but don’t use it as an excuse to take the “research” out of research university…

As I did with Buffalo, I feel moved to provide something of a post-mortem, a review of the university without feeling like I need to pull any punches. As I look over what comes below, I realize that it might be seen by some as a bit more bridge-burning than intended, but it’s nothing I didn’t say privately as a member of the community. I still hold the faculty in high esteem, and I still think there is great potential in Quinnipiac. Perhaps what is reflected below is my belief that such potential is not being effectively realized.

Ultimately, Quinnipiac was not the best fit for me. I am not an impartial observer, and what worked poorly for me might work very well for others. QU has a surprisingly large number of dedicated, bright teachers, and that it is a good fit for them speaks volumes about the university as a whole.

What’s Great About Quinnipiac

1. The Campus

Some of the architecture is a bit love-it-or-hate-it, though most (all?) of the buildings were built by the same firm, so you get fairly consistent design cues. The natural situation of the main campus at the foot of Sleeping Giant, and the York Hill campus, with a view over the foothills is breathtaking. Especially in the autumn, walking northward on the campus can be awe inspiring.

The grounds are kept neat and taken great care of. Many of the parents get the feeling of a country club, which no doubt is by design. It can feel a bit corporate, and perhaps because I am more accustomed to the scale of larger universities, when I first arrived it felt a lot like a private high school. The library is comfortable and attractive. The new Rocky Top student center feels like a comfortable lodge resort.

It falls a bit short when it comes to classrooms, which also are very reminiscent of high school classrooms, for the most part. On the new graduate campus, the similarity to a corporate campus is much more extreme: that’s what it was (Blue Cross) until just a few years ago, and the office suites and meeting rooms are much more comfortable and conducive to seminars. But on the main campus, the inside is rarely as pretty as the outside.

2. Student-Centered / Class Size

Although this is changing, I think, it was great to come from an impacted public university and undergraduate course sizes in the hundreds to a department with an average undergraduate course size of 16. It appears that isn’t sustainable, and there are pushes to change to way teaching load is calculated, but the largest room on campus couldn’t hold the smallest freshman lecture from a large state school. On the other hand, the graduate courses, particularly online, are too large.

There is also a real focus on teaching and improving teaching among most of the faculty. There are the star teachers you would get on any university campus, but the median teacher is also excited about teaching and supported in many ways by the administration in their teaching role. Likewise, I think that QU serves the average student better than most schools do, and provides not nearly as much for the exceptional student. I suspect just the opposite is true for many large state schools and elite private universities.

3. Collegiality

There is still the feeling that it is a small school, and faculty know one another and are genuinely friendly. I feel like I probably missed out on some of this, since I lived so far away. But the truth is a lot of faculty live far from the campus (if not as a far as I do). Actually, it may be that lack of proximity that promotes collegiality. It may also be that the School of Communications was more friendly than some of the other schools. (I get the feeling there was some strife in one College in particular), but I think, on the whole, the faculty got along well with one another and there was less plotting, scheming, and arguing that there is on many campuses. This extended also–for the most part–to administrators, though many faculty seemed to have a conflicted view of the president.

4. Resources

This is a hard one, but generally speaking, there was money to do things you wanted to do. Or, at the very least, you didn’t feel like you were working under the sword of Damocles the way you might at a school reliant on state funds. If you had an interesting project that appealed to the president, you didn’t have to jump through tons of hoops to make it happen.

5. Students

They were the best of students, they were the worst of students. I can’t comment too much on the undergrads, but we attracted some amazingly bright, articulate, and dedicated graduate students during my time at QU. I said it more than once–I would put the top 50% of our classes up against any grad program in the US–and maybe even up against any of their top 50%. In many cases, proximity or subject matter drew them to QU, but they could have thrived in any strong program.

What Isn’t

In the end, the things that are wrong outweighed the above advantages for me.

1. Mission Shift / Administrative Caprice

If you don’t like what the university is doing, wait a few years. In some ways, it feels like the president likes retail therapy. You know what we need? A medical school! How about a school of engineering! These are the most recent ventures, but they are at the expense of the core existing programs at the university. Better to be large and mediocre than small and excellent. No doubt, this has something to do with the need to collect tuition from a larger student base. It’s frustrating, of course, when the gaze and resources of the president’s office wanders, but more frustrating that you don’t know which way to look. By the time I left, I had mission fatigue, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

2. Teaching Load

Very simply said, the teaching load is unreasonable, compared to that at peer institutions, and it’s beginning to show. When I joined, it was less, and while it has shrunk on many competing campuses, at QU the teaching expectation seems to have no downward pressure. It doesn’t help that there isn’t a teaching load any longer–you are assigned some kind of teaching by your departments. There isn’t a clear expectation of the number of courses or FTEs you are expected to teach. Moreover, by devolving the decision for teaching loads to the department chairs, they have created a recipe for even distribution of teaching loads, and crowded out any time or incentive to do research.

3. Library

The library is a great space, but not useful for research. Every serious researcher on the campus had finagled access to a real research library somehow–many by buying a Yale card. I mentioned at a publishing conference that QU didn’t have a subscription to ACM’s Digital Library and someone from ACM noted that they would price things so that everyone could get access. But even after putting him in touch with our library, nothing. I recognize that underfunded libraries are a problem everywhere, and as I said, there are good things that the libraries do, but it isn’t a beacon on the campus. While it may serve some of the undergraduate mission, it isn’t big enough to support researchers.

4. Publicity / Tuition Dollars

This may be true of any private university, but there is always a tension between selling yourself and focusing on doing great work. A lot of time and effort is spent on recruiting and making the university look good to the outside, sometimes to the exclusion of improving the core educational experience. At least this is what I heard from students, who felt the campus tour (for example) was deliberately misleading. Efforts to “manage” some of the PR crises on campus (racist incidents, etc.) resulted in an administration willing to stifle both student and faculty comments in public. Sometimes, again, this feels like presidential hubris, as in the case of kicking the Society for Professional Journalism off campus for their critical remarks or taking a Title IX case to court rather than settling it.

Folks on the West Coast of the US generally have not heard of QU, and as you move east, in many cases they know us as a polling institute first, and college second.

As the relevance of universities are increasingly questioned, it’s also hard to establish the value of an undergraduate education at QU. That’s not to say it’s a poor education: I think the faculty serves students reasonably well. The question is whether it’s worth north of $200K. I suspect our tuition is slightly more than that of most private universities, though certainly not in the NYU/Sarah Lawrence range. (On the other hand, QU’s president is one of the 36 in the nation to receive a seven-figure compensation package–the only place where QU ranks in the top 36, I believe.) In many cases, parents are well able to pay the costs of QU, and perhaps because of location or some other determinant they feel the relative value of that money makes the tuition tenable. But I’ve talked to many students who leave our program with wholly unrealistic views of what they will be earning, and student loan debt that–without parental support–will be crippling.

In Sum

I guess what it really comes down to is that QU doesn’t allocate resources the way I would: money or institutional will. On the money side, I think they could do a lot more to support faculty, especially research. I suspect many faculty at many institution feel this way, but if you look at things like office space, teaching loads, and general support for research on some of QU’s peer campuses, it becomes clear that this is not a priority for QU.

And then there is the culture bit and the lack of a shared, consistent mission. It’s not about messaging, it’s about a real sense of purpose. I think many among the faculty and staff at QU are pretty happy about the way the university is already. And as I’ve said, I think there are many reasons for them to be happy with it. But that also provides a bit of a sense of complacency, and little real reason for change.

I still consider myself a friend of QU, and I see a great deal of potential, especially in the School of Communications. I suspect that in the long run it will continue to improve and will find its way toward a future than many at the university can get behind. In the shorter run, I’m off somewhere new, somewhere I get the feeling is already moving quickly. It’s a bit more risky in some ways, and moving is always hard, but I am eager to work in an institution that seems to share my interests and values more closely.

Edit: Hmmm. Slideshare is being flaky on the audio… sorry.

1. Thinking it could be a small shift or change in the way we did things. It took time to explain what we were doing, why, and how. But that time was well spent. The failure here was a failure in scaffolding for using the system. It requires some dedicated time, just as any challenges to existing structure do. Now I devote a good part of the first week to using the system.

2. Too many little badges. I started out with a pattern seen on a lot of websites: make the first badges easy. I still have a “how to get a badge” badge. (Actually, it is the “Human” badge–pictured above and fairly easy to get.) But I’ve moved to fewer, more substantial badges. Several reasons for this. First, a more substantial badge is valued differently. It carries more weight. Second, because there is a certain amount of overhead for earning a badge, it makes sense to chunk things a bit larger. Getting that balance right is key, and not easy.

3. Conflated badges. This is the other side of the above. In one course I had a badge for basic blogging, in which you were required to post on a self-hosted blog (not, e.g., Blogger or WordPress.com), because I wanted to know they could get hosting, set up a domain, and install the software. In another course, this wasn’t as essential, but I had to do another “basic blogging” badge. In other words, I ended up with badges that were bound to the course, when I wanted to avoid that. Again, hard to get away from rolling too much in if you are doing substantial badges.

4. Identification issues. This is both technical and a policy issue, but I’ve gone through a number of authentication processes. I’d love to federate with the university’s system, but also want to let others in. I’ve considered Facebook Connect, or OpenID, or something, but just need to settle on something. Because it will aid with the Open Badge Infrastructure, that will probably be Persona (née BrowserID). There is a part of me that would like to see this integrated into Blackboard, and a much, much larger part urging me to resist the dark side.

5. Bad peer reviews. I actually talked a bit about this in the previous post. It’s really hard to get people to post more than a word or two. Need to figure out some way to reward those who do, and encourage the practice. (Yes, extrinsic reward, but how else will they come to understand the intrinsic value of critique?) Maybe a system by which the recipient meta-judges the critique? Perhaps the number of words of critique you type leads to a bank of credit for getting your own critiques and endorsements? I don’t know.

6. Badly written rubrics. I’ve always hated rubrics, thusly I’m bad at writing them. I’ll need to find some great examples to use.

7. End of the semester rush. I also have no deadlines. I like it that way, but I don’t like the mad rush at the end of the semester. I’ll have grades moving forward, and they will be based on maintaining steady progress toward the end of the semester.

There’s a lot wrong in the details of the technical implementation (and even more in terms of the actual code) but these are some of the issues I had at the broader design level.

It doesn’t really work, but it works well enough, and thanks to some patient and very helpful students, I now know a great deal more about how badges can work in higher education. I make no claim to my successes being best practices, but I at least know more now than when I started, and figured I would share some of this experience.

Why did you do that?

More than a decade ago, I coded my first blog system for a course, though the term was not widely used then. I did it because there were particular kinds of interactions I wanted to encourage, and existing applications didn’t do quite what I wanted them to. I created my BadgePost system for the same reason. I am not really a coder (I dabble) but what I wanted did not exist, and so I took a shot at prototyping something that might work. (As an aside, I also hope that what happened with blogs happens with badges, and I can download the equivalent of WordPress soon instead of having to roll my own.) I knew I wanted:

Peer assessment. I wanted to get myself out of the sole role of sole reviewer. In many cases peers can give better advice than I can. One of the main difficulties of teaching is rewinding to the perspective of the student, and that can be easier, in some cases, for those who have just learned something. I wanted to enable that kind of open peer review in both hybrid courses and those taught entirely online.

Mastery. I also wanted desperately to get away from letter grades, as they seemed like a plague, not just for undergrad courses, but for grad as well. Students seemed far more interested in the grade than they were in learning something, a refrain I’ve heard frequently from a lot of my colleagues. I wanted to move the focus off of the grade.

Peers as cases. Students often ask me for models of good work, and because I change assignments so frequently, I rarely have a “model.” The advantage to open assessment that travels beyond a single course is that there are exemplars to look at, and (hopefully) they are diverse enough not to stifle creative interpretations by new students.

Unbundling the credential from the course. I had a number of problems that seemed to swirl around the equation of course time to learning objectives. For one, in the required technical courses, some people came in with nothing and others with extensive knowledge, and I wanted to try to address the issue of not all students moving through a program in lock-step. I wanted a back door to reduce redundancy and have instructors know that their students were coming into a course with certain skills. Finally, I wanted to give students a range of choices so that they could pursue the areas they were most interested in.

I also wanted non-paying non-Quinnipiac students participating in my courses to have a portable credential to show for it. And I wanted paying, matriculating students to have an easier way of communicating the kinds of things they had learned in the program.

I won’t cover all of these in detail, but will expound a bit more on the assessment and assessing piece…

Peer Assessment

There have been suggestions that the credentialing aspect of badges is separate from the process of assessment that leads to the badge, but in practice I think it’s both likely that they get rolled together, and beneficial when they are. Frankly, students don’t see the distinction, and they can reinforce each other in interesting ways. So, while I have done peer critique in the past, from the outset here, I wanted to get students involved in the process of granting badges via peer critique.

A lot of this was influenced by discussions with Philipp Schmidt and the application of badges in Peer2Peer University. I have long stated the goal of “disappearing” as an instructor in a course, and the place where that appearance is most obvious is when it comes to grading. (And assessment, not the same thing, but bound together.) From the outset, I saw the authority of a badge as vested in the material presented as evidence of learning, and the open endorsement/assessment of that work by peers.

Lots of reasons for this, but part was as a demotivator. That is, my least favorite question on the first day of classes is “how do I get an A?” I am always tempted to tell the truth: “I don’t care, and I wish you didn’t either.” So, I wanted badges to provide a way of getting away from that linear grading scale. I went so far as to basically throw grades out, saying that if you showed up on something approaching a regular basis, you’d get an A.

I should say that this was a failure. If anything, students paid more attention to grades because the unique system made them have to think about it. It wasn’t onerous, but a lot more of the course became about the assessment process. And it’s funny, my desire to escape grading as a focus and process turned a 180, and I am now all about assessment. I should explain…

I hate giving traditional tests (I don’t think they show anything), and hate empty work. And while I now know I like ideas around authentic assessment, from the outside these seemed a lot like more of the same. Now, not only do I think formative assessment is the key element of learning, but that the skill of assessing work in any field is what essentially defines expertise. Being able to tell what constitutes good work allows you to improve the work of others, and importantly, of yourself. At the core of teaching is figuring out what in a piece of work is good, what needs improvement, and how the creator can improve her work.

Beyond Binary

I had expected students to do the work, apply for a badge, and then either get it or not. A lot of other people new to badges seem to have a similar expectation. Just the opposite occurred, and a lot of the changes to my badge system have been to accommodate this.

First, a lot of work that really was not ready for a badge was submitted. I kind of expected students to be very sure of the work that they submitted for a badge, in part because of my experience with blogging in classes, and seeing that students were more careful about their writing when it was for a peer audience. Instead, students often presented work that was not enough for a badge, or barely enough for a badge. I was pleasantly surprised by how much feedback, and in what detail, students gave to their peers.

One of the more concrete changes I made to the system was to move from a binary endorsement (qualified or not, on a number of factors), to a sliding scale, with the center point being passing, and the ability of reviewers to come back and revise their “vote.” As a result, you can see from the evidence of a badge not just what the student has done, but whether their peers thought this was acceptable or awesome.

I’ve also been surprised by how many nominated themselves for “aspirational” badges. When a user selects a badge, it is moved into their “pending” category, and I was confused by so many pending badges that had no evidence uploaded. But students seem to click on these as a kind of note to themselves that this is what they are pursuing. This, incidentally, leads to a problem for reviewers who look at a pending badge before it is ready, and find that process frustrating, but one of the things that needs to improve in the system is communicating such progress. I didn’t plan to need to do that, since I saw badges as an end point rather than a process.

The Reappearing Teacher

The other surprise was just how interested students were in getting my imprimatur. But the reason, in this case, was not the grade–they had that. They actually valued my response as an expert a bit more, I think. This was a refreshing change from students turning to the back page of graded paper to see the grade, and then throwing it out before reading any of my comments. No doubt, some of this comes from a lack in confidence in their peers as well, and I’ve found that in some cases this lack is reasonable.

In some ways, I’m trying to encourage the sempai/kohai relationship, of those who have “gone before” and therefore have more to say about a particular badge. I’ve been reluctant to limit approval to only those who actually have the badge (in part for reasons I’ll note below regarding encouraging reviews), but I may do more of that. There are some kinds of assessment, though, that don’t require having the badge. I don’t need to know how to create a magic trick to be amazed by it, for example. So I don’t want to rule out this kind of “audience assessment.” There is also space for automated assessment. For example, for some badges you need to show a minimal number of tweets, or comments, or responses to comments, or (e.g.) valid HTML. There is no reason to have a human do these pieces of the assessments, though I would hate to see badges that did not involve human assessment, in large part because, again, I think building the capacity to do assessments is an important part of the system.

The Other Motivation

I began by hoping students would ignore the grading process, and have evolved to think that they should pay a lot of attention to assessment. In some courses, students have jumped into peer assessment. In others–and particularly the undergraduate course I’m teaching this semester–they were slow to get started. I want to think about why people assess, and how to motivate them to be involved.

When I did peer assessments in the pre-badge world, I assigned a grade for the quality of the assessment provided. I want to do something similar here, and a lot of this comes of a discussion with Philipp Schmidt in Chicago last year. The meta-project here is getting students to be able to analytically assess work and communicate that. Yes, you could do an “expert assessor” badge, or something similar, but really it is more essential to the overall project.

One way to do this is inter-coder reliability. If I am considered an expert in the area (and in the current system, this is defined as having badges at a higher level than the one in question, within the same “vertical”), those with less experience should be able to spot the same kinds of things I do, and arrive at a similar quantitative result on the assessments.

So, for example, if someone submits the write-up of a content analysis, two of her peers might look at it and come up with two very different assessments of the methods section of the article. Alice may say that it is outstanding, 90/100 on the scale of a particular rubric. Frank might disagree, putting it at 25/100. Of course, both would provide some textual explanation for why they reached these conclusions. Then I come along and give it a 30/100, along with my own critique.
The dynamics of getting students to do peer assessments (some courses they did a lot, some they have not), and my involvement in the assessment, is an interesting piece for me. In this case, Frank should receive some sort of indication within the system that he has done a good job of performing the assessment.

I’m still working out a way to do this that isn’t unnecessarily complex. Right now there is a karma system that gives users karma for performing assessments, with multipliers for agreeing with more experienced assessors, but this is complicated to “tune” and non-intuitive.

There is also the issue of when various levels perform the assessment. For the above process to work, Alice and Frank both need to get their assessments in before I do, and shouldn’t get the same kind of kudos for “me too” assessments after the fact.

Badges

None of this is necessarily about badges, but it leaves a trail of evidence, conversation, and assessment behind. One of the big questions is whether badge records should be formative or summative. As I said, the degree to which students have engaged in badges as a process rather than an outcome came as a bit of a surprise to me. Right now, much of that process happens pretty openly, but I can fully understand how someone well on in their career may not want to expose fully their learning process. (“May” is operative here–I think doing so is valuable for the learning community!)

On the other hand, I think badges that appeal to authority undermine the whole reason badges are not evil. Badges that make an authoritative appeal (“Yale gave me this badge so it must be good.”) simply reinforce many of the bad structures of learning and credentialing that currently exist. Far better is a record of the work done to show that you understand something or can do something, along with the peers that helped you get there, pointed to and easily found via a digital badge.

Balancing the privacy needs with the need to authentically vest the badge with some authority will be an interesting feat. I suspect I may provide ways of hiding “the work” and only displaying the final version (and final critiques) to the outside world, while preserving the sausage-making process for the learning community itself. But this remains a tricky balance.

So begins an article in what has become one of the truthiest sources of news on the web. But it is no longer time for mid-semester evals. In most of the US classes are wrapping up, and professors are chest-deep in grading. And the students–the students are also grading.

Few faculty are great fans of student evaluations, and I think with good reason. Even the best designed instruments–and few are well designed–treat the course like a marketing survey. How did you feel about the textbook that was chosen? Were the tests too hard? And tell us, were you entertained?

Were the student evals used for marketing, that would probably be OK. At a couple of the universities where I taught, evals were made publicly available, allowing students a glimpse of what to expect from a course or a professor. While that has its own problems, it’s not a bad use of the practice. It can also be helpful for a professor who is student-centered (and that should be all of us) and wants to consider this response when redesigning the course. I certainly have benefited from evaluations in that way.

Their primary importance on the university campus, however, is as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Often, they are used as the main measure of such effectiveness. Especially for tenure, and now as many universities incorporate more rigorous post-tenure evaluation, there as well.

Teaching to the Test

A former colleague, who shall remain nameless, noted that priming the student evals was actually pretty easily done, and started with the syllabus. You note why your text choice is appropriate, how you are making sure grading is fair, indicate the methods you use to be well organized and speak clearly, etc. Throughout the semester, you keep using the terms used on the evals to make clear how outstanding a professor you really are. While not all the students may fall for this, a good proportion would, he surmised.

(Yes, this faculty member had ridiculously good teaching evaluations. But from what I knew, he was also an outstanding teacher.)

Or you could just change your wardrobe. Or do one of a dozen other things the literature suggests improves student evaluations.

Or you could do what my car dealership does and prominently note that you are going to be surveyed and if you can’t answer “Excellent” to any item, to please bring it to their attention so they can get to excellent. This verges on slimy, and I can imagine, in the final third of the semester, that if I said this it might even cross over into unethical. Of course, if I do the same for students–give them an opportunity to get to the A–it is called mastery learning, and can actually be a pretty effective use of formative assessment.

Or you could do what an Amazon seller has recently done for me, and offer students $10 to remove any negative evaluations. But I think the clearly crosses the line both in Amazon’s case and in the classroom. (That said, I have on one occasion had students fill out evals in a bar after buying them a pitcher of beer.)

It is perhaps a testament to the general character of the professoriate that in an environment where student evaluations have come to be disproportionately influential on our careers, such manipulation–if it occurs at all–is extremely rare.

It’s the nature of the beast, though: we focus on what is measured. If what is being measured is student attitudes toward the course and the professor, we will naturally focus on those attitudes. While such attitudes are related to the ability to learn new material, they are not equivalent.

Doctor Feelgood

Imagine a hospital that promoted doctors (or dismissed them) based largely on patient reviews. Some of you may be saying “that would be awesome.” Given the way many doctors relate to patients, I am right there with you. My current doctor, Ernest Young, actually takes time to talk to me, listens to me, and seems to care about my health, which makes me want to care about my health too. So, good. And frankly, I do think that student (and patient) evaluation serves an important role.

But–and mind you I really have no idea how hospitals evaluate their staff–I suspect there are other metrics involved. Probably some metrics we would prefer were not (how many patients the doctor sees in an hour) and some that we are happy about (how many patients manage to stay alive). As I type this, I strongly suspect that hospitals are not making use of these outcome measures, but I would be pleased to hear otherwise.

A hospital that promoted only doctors who made patients think they were doing better, and who made important medical decisions for them, and who fed them drugs on demand would be a not-so-great place to go to get well. Likewise, a university that promotes faculty who inflate grades, reduce workload to nill, and focus on entertainment to the exclusion of learning would also be a pretty bad place to spend four years.

If we are talking about teaching effectiveness, we should measure outcomes: do students walk out of the classroom knowing much more than they did when they walked in? And we may also want to measure performance: are professors following practices that we know promote learning? The worst people to determine these things: the legislature. The second worst: the students. The third worst: fellow faculty.

Faculty should have their students evaluated by someone else. They should have their teaching performance peer reviewed–and not just by their departmental colleagues. And yes, well designed student evaluations could remain a part of this picture, but they shouldn’t be the whole things.

Buffet Evals

I would guess that 95% of my courses are in the top half on average evals, and that a slightly smaller percentage are in the top quarter. (At SUNY Buffalo, our means were reported against department, school, and university means, as well as weighted against our average grade in the course. Not the case at Quinnipiac.) So, my student evals tend not to suck, but there are also faculty who much more consistently get top marks. In some cases, this is because they are young, charming, and cool–three things I emphatically am not. But in many cases it is because they really care about teaching.

These are the people who need to lead reform of the use of teaching evaluation use in tenure and promotion. It’s true, a lot of them probably like reading their own reviews, and probably agree with their students that they do, indeed, rock. But a fair number I’ve talked to recognize that these evals are given far more weight than they deserve. Right now, the most vocal opponents to student evaluations are those who are–both fairly and unfairly–consistently savaged by their students at the end of the semester.

We need those who have heart-stoppingly perfect evaluations to stand up and say that we need to not pay so much attention to evaluations. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.

Short of this, we need to create systems of evaluating teaching that are at least reasonably easy and can begin to crowd out the student eval as the sole quantitative measure of teaching effectiveness.

Earlier this week, in the context of discussing what the traditional university provided that crowdsourced and open options did not with my students, I got an interesting mix of the usual suspects and some answers that I hadn’t heard framed in exactly that way before. (And yes, I am always impressed when students are thoughtful about complex issues.) Here are some of the reasons to go to college despite the increased availability of alternatives:

Credentialing

This is no surprise, of course. One of the reasons to go to an accredited university is for the transcript and the diploma. Long after other structures do learning better (if, indeed, such structures or institutions emerge), the university will maintain a stranglehold on students because of its ability to print educational currency in the form of a transcript. For me, this serves as a good reason to loosen that grip.

When MIT jumps on the badge bandwagon and people start talking about Thrun credits, we might argue that this imperative has already been diminished. But does a MOOC that is not a Stanford course hold the same kind of value? I doubt it. Personal brads do matter: that’s why Howard Rheingold and Edward Tufte, among others, can draw paying students to their seminars. But I wonder how far their letters of completion or endorsement carry.

For the time being, if you want to brand yourself as a graduate, you have to go to a university. And completely regardless of the quality of the instruction at that university, the name must be recognized and valued.

Structure

A university tells you what you should be doing, and not just in the classroom. One of my students was open about the fact that if she didn’t have to go to class she wouldn’t: the university in some sense provides a structure of discipline. (Another student disagreed, saying she would get bored without being able to go to class, and was motivated to attend on her own.) This extended beyond the classroom, though, to “life skills.” For many people this is when they are becoming independent, both living on their own and becoming their own thinkers.

Now, I worry that in some places, universities do a poor job of this, extending adolescence well beyond what might be ideal. Many of our students are too scaffolded, and unwilling or unable to put themselves in the driver’s seat of their own learning career. But it was an interesting suggestion: the university provides a needed structure for learning, and frees the student from some of the “meta”: what’s important? when should I study? what are we doing in class today?

Expertise Curation

I thought one of the more interesting answers was that it was hard to find the right people to teach the right things. Yes, there were a lot of self-styled experts out there, but when you don’t know anything about a field, the university provides a faculty that is presumably made up of people who know what they are doing. Perhaps because I’m not as confident in the ways in which universities filter people, this was never one of my top picks for the reason universities exist, but it is an interesting one. For open alternatives to thrive, they need to present a compelling case that they are providing access to experts, and that can be a difficult thing to do.

In some ways, I’m interested in the model of the European Graduate School, which boasts a star-studded faculty. Where else do you find Derrida and John Waters in the same list? Or Peter Greenaway and Donna Haraway? But it is an interesting question: how do you distinguish expertise when you don’t know anything about a field? You don’t. You leave it up to an institution that can act as a filter, and you trust that they hire the cream of the crop.

Guaranteed Skepticism

As an institution, skepticism is built-in. One of the students noted that faculty are willing to expand the conversation by taking positions they may not agree with, by raising questions, by placing skepticism and inquiry in an exalted position. Now, I am sure there are other institutions that do this, but it was heartening to hear this from students: one of the values of the university is a professoriate that is not married to the status quo, that takes nothing for granted, and that encourages a community of inquiry.

Virtuous Community

Because you are–in many cases–sharing the same physical space and bound together in a community, there is some feeling that you are expected to serve other students. Showing up to class unprepared isn’t just a personal failure, but in some way a letting down others in the community. Of course, you can get virtual communities where similar social capital is built, but it is much harder to achieve in the one-off networked class, where dropping the ball (or the course) might have very little effect on other parts of your life. The investment of time in an undergraduate degree means that you are all in the same boat.

Alt-U

I’m a fan of efforts like P2PU. But I also am not quite ready to give up on the university. I don’t think our only choices are the university as it is today or no universities at all. In fact, those two may be exactly the same thing: the university that does not rapidly change to fit the new environment is likely to be buried by the forces of history. As I’ve said before, we are about to go through a sea change in the way universities work that will make the newspaper shakeup seem tame by comparison. The mountain of student loan debt (some of which I continue to carry) constitutes an educational bubble. When universities find themselves having to contract, the outmoded tenure system will make that difficult.

But I also think that this will force some universities to rapidly innovate their way away from failure. It will be a painful process, but part of that process is figuring out what the real value and strengths of a university are. I think relying on the current hold on the credential is a very short-sighted approach.

In the medium term, one of the best solutions is the liberal arts college / research university hybrid. I also suspect that a successful model exists in universities and university towns merging. The walls of the university are coming down, and with them the distinction between student and faculty and worker. I suspect one model of the future university feels a bit more like a small town with a really good library and really good schools, and the four-year program leading to a slip of paper will slowly fade away.

Alex Reidâ€s post

Good? Bad?

My advisor one day related the story of a local news crew that came to interview him in his office. This would have been in the mid-1990s. The first question the reporter asked him was: “The Internet: Good? Or Bad?”

Technologies have politics, but the obvious answer to that obvious question is “Yes.” Just as when people ask about computers and learning, the answer is that technology can be a force for oppressive, ordered, adaptive multiple-choice “Computer Aided Teaching,” or it can be used to provide a platform for autonomous, participatory, authentic interaction. If there is a tendency, it is one that is largely reflective of existing structures of power. But that doesn’t mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. On the whole, I think computers provide more opportunities for learning than threats to it, but I’ll be the first to admit that outcome was neither predestined nor obvious. It still isn’t.

Are there dangers inherent to the very idea of badges? I think there are. I’ve written a bit about them in a recent article on the genealogy of badges. But just as I can find Herb Schillerâ€s work on the role of computer technology in cultural hegemony compelling, but still entertain its emancipatory possibilities, I can acknowledge that badges have a long and unfortunate past, and still recognize in them a potential tool for disrupting the currently dominant patterns of assessment in institutionalized settings, and building bridges between informal and formal learning environments.

Ultimately, what is so confusing to me is that I agree wholeheartedly with many of the critics of badges, and reach different conclusions. To look at how some badges have been used in the past and not be concerned about the ways they might be applied in the future would require a healthy amount of selective perception. I have no doubt that badges, badly applied, are dangerous. But so are table saws and genetic engineering. The question is whether they can also be used to positive ends.

Over the last year, I’ve used badges to such positive ends. My own experience suggests that they can be an effective way of improving and structuring peer learning communities and forms of authentic assessment. I know others have had similar successes. So, I will wholeheartedly agree with many of the critics: badges can be poorly employed. Indeed, I suspect they will be poorly employed. But the same can be said of just about any technology. The real question is if there is also some promise that they could represent an effective tool for opening up learning, and providing the leverage needed to create new forms of assessment.

Gold Stars

One of the main critiques of badges suggests that they represent extrinsic forms of motivation to the natural exclusion of intrinsic motivation. Mitch Resnick makes the case here:

I worry that students will focus on accumulating badges rather than making connections with the ideas and material associated with the badges – the same way that students too often focus on grades in a class rather than the material in the class, or the points in an educational game rather than the ideas in the game.

I worry about the same thing. I will note in passing that at worst, he is describing a situation that does no harm: replacing a scalar (A-F letter grades) with a system of extrinsic motivation that is more multidimensional. But the problem remains: if badges are being used chiefly as a way of motivating students, this is probably not going to end well.

And I will note that many educators I’ve met are excited about badges precisely because they see them as ways of motivating students. I think that if you had to limit the influences of using badges to three areas, they would be motivation, assessment, and credentialing. The first of these if often seen as the most important, and not just by the “bad” badgers, but by many who are actively a part of the community promoting learning badges.

(As an aside, I think there are important applications of badges beyond these “big three.” I think they can be used, for example, as a way for a community to collaboratively structure and restructure their view of how different forms of local knowledge are related and I think they can provide a neophyte a map of this knowledge, and an expert a way of tracing their learning autobiography over time. I suspect there are other implications as well.)

Perhaps my biggest frustration is the ways in which badges are automatically tied to gamification. I think there are ways that games can be used for learning, and I know that a lot of the discussion around badges comes from their use in computer games, but for a number of reasons I think the tie is unfortunate; not least, badges in games are often seen primarily as a way of motivating players to do something they would otherwise not do.

Badges and Assessment

The other way in which I worry about computer gaming badges as a model is the way they are awarded. I think that both learning informatics and “stealth assessment,” have their place, but if misapplied they can be very dangerous. My own application of badges puts formative assessment by actual humans (especially peers) at the core. Over time I have come to believe that the essential skill of the expert is an ability to assess. If someone can effectively determine whether something is “good”–a good fit, a good solution, aesthetically pleasing, interesting, etc.–she can then apply that to her own work. Only through this critical view can learning take place.

For me, badges provide a framework for engaging effectively in assessment within a learning community. This seems also to be true for Barry Joseph, who suggests some good and bad examples of badge use here. Can this kind of re-imagination of assessment happen outside of a “badge” construct? Certainly. But badges provide a way of structuring assessment that provides scaffolding without significant constraints. This is particularly true when the community is involved in the continual creation and revision of the badges and what they represent.

Boundary Objects

Badges provide the opportunity to represent knowledge and power within a learning community. Any such representation comes with a dash of danger. The physical structuring of communities: who gets to talk to whom and when, where people sit and stand, gaze–all these things are dangerous. But providing markers of knowledge is not inherently a bad thing, and particularly as learning communities move online and lose some of the social and cultural context, finding those who know something can be difficult.

This becomes even more difficult as people move from one learning community to another. Georg Simmel described the intersection of such social circles as the quintessential property of modern society. You choose your circles, and you have markers of standing that might travel with you to a certain degree. We know what these are: and the college degree is one of the most significant.

I went to graduate school with students who finished their undergraduate degrees at Evergreen State College, and have been on admissions committees that considered Evergreen transcripts in making admissions decisions. Evergreen provides narrative assessments of student work, and while I wholeheartedly stand by the practice–as a great divergence if not a model–it makes understanding a learning experience difficult for those outside the community. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a table of contents? A visual guide though a learning portfolio and narrative evaluation? A way of representing abilities and learning to those unfamiliar with the community in which occurred?

I came to badges because I was interested in alternative ways of indicating learning. I think that open resources and communities of learning are vitally important, but I know that universities will cling to the diploma as a source of tuition dollars and social capital. Badges represent one way of nibbling at the commodity of the college diploma.

Badges, if done badly, just become another commodity: a replacement of authentic learning with an powerful image. To me, badges when done well are nothing more than a pointer. In an era when storing and transmitting vast amounts of content is simple, there is no technical need for badges as a replacement. But as a way of structuring and organizing a personal narrative, and relating knowledge learned in one place to the ideas found in another, badges represent a bridge and a pointer.

This is one reason I strongly endorsed the inclusion of an “evidence” url in the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure schema. Of course, the OBI is not the only way of representing badges, nor does it intend to represent only learning badges–there is a danger here of confusing the medium and the message. Nonetheless, it does make for an easier exchange and presentation of badges, and importantly, a way of quickly finding the work that under-girds a personal learning history.

All the Cool Kids Are Doing It

Henry Jenkins provides one of the most compelling cases against badges I’ve seen, though it’s less a case against badges and more a case against the potential of a badgecopalypse, in which a single sort of badging system becomes ubiquitous and totalizing. Even if such a badge system followed more of the “good” patterns on Barry Joseph’s list than the “bad,” it would nonetheless create a space in which participation was largely expected and required.

Some of this comes of the groups that came together around the badge competition. If it were, like several years ago, something that a few people were experimenting with on the periphery, I suspect we would see little conversation. But when foundations and technologists, the Department of Education and NASA, all get behind a new way of doing something, I think it is appropriate to be concerned that it might obliterate other interesting approaches. I share Jenkins’ worry that interesting approaches might easily be cast aside by the DML Competition (though I will readily concede that may be because I was a loser“unfunded winner” in the competition) and hope that the projects that move forward do so with open, experimental eyes, allowing their various communities to help iteratively guide the application of badges to their own ends. I worry that by winnowing 500 applications to 30, we may have already begun to centralize what “counts” in approaches to badges. But perhaps the skeptical posts I’ve linked to here provide evidence of the contrary: that the competition has encouraged a healthy public dialog around alternative assessment, and badges represent a kind of “conversation piece.”

Ultimately, it is important that critical voices of approaches to badges remain at the core of the discussion. My greatest concern is that the perception that there are badge evangelists and skeptics is in fact true. I certainly think of myself as both, and I hope that others feel the same way.

The problem with ranking is that it suggests that excellence in teaching is a uni-dimensional construct, which I think even a cursory “gut-check” says is dead wrong. When I think back to my greatest teachers, they have little in common. One was cold, condescending, and frankly not a very nice human, but he was exacting in asking us to clearly express ourselves, and his approach led to a room full of students who could clearly state an argument, lead a discussion, and understand the effects of style on philosophical argument. Another was a little scattered, but brought us into his home and family, was passionate about the field, and taught us how important it was to care about our research subjects. Another had a bit of the trickster in him, and would challenge our assumptions by setting absurd situations. And I could name another half-dozen who were excellent teachers–but one of the things that made them excellent was the unique way in which they approached the process of learning.

And frankly, if you asked a number of my undergraduatepeers who the “best” teachers in our program were, there would certainly be some overlap, but it would be far from perfect. An essential question is “best for whom”? And just as our students are each unique, and we should approach them as whole people (the unfortunate fact is that we *do* rank them by grading them, but that doesn’t make the process right), we should approach faculty as… perhaps a box of chocolate. The diversity of backgrounds, styles, and approaches to teaching and learning are a strength, not a weakness. We shouldn’t all be striving to fit to the golden standard of the best among us.

Now, this is not an argument for absolute relativism: there are better and worse ways of fostering student learning. It is also not an argument against quantification or assessment: I think an essential tool for improving our teaching is operationalizing some of the abstruse concepts of “good teaching” to something measurable, and using qualitative AND quantitative assessments to help us develop as a group. But the problem with ranking faculty is that there isn’t a single scale for teaching effectiveness, nor even the three (or four, if you count “hotness”) that RateYourProfessor suggest, but dozens of different scales that we might be ranked on. And while some of us may be near the top of many of those scales, I doubt any of us are at the top of all of them.

What happened? Well, at least pedagogically, I was fine with it. To recap, I was concerned that students were more interested in grades than they were in the actual material. I speculated that replacing the grades with badges would at least move them from focusing on entirely arbitrary markers (letters) to markers that were more explicitly tied to learning objectives.

I still think grades suck, of course. Grades are grand for beef, and actually pretty handy for deciding what restaurants to avoid, but as a tool for learning I think they take away more than they add. Realistically, though, I can’t get away from grading on my own. Unless I can convince all my colleagues to move in that direction, my experiment threatens to be merely a distraction for students, or in the worst case, a good way for them to ignore my course. Purely in terms of learning outcomes, I think being able to get totally away from grades would be great. But that wasn’t the case here.

Not learning, but ranking

The main problem is that more than just the students see the grade. It acts–in fairly limited ways–as a reflection on their skill. Now, to my mind, we simply shouldn’t graduate students we can’t stand behind. I frankly would have no problem “advising out” those students who are not performing at an elite level. I think it would better serve both those who left and those who stayed. But that’s not a realistic option (at least not in that extreme a degree).

Without getting into details, since I can’t simply unilaterally make a course pass/not pass–which is at least closer to ungraded–I ended up saying you get either an A or an F. Really, I intended to give As to everyone, short of really utter non-completion. I think I can say, without naming names, that people got As who really weren’t doing graduate-level work. I was clear in my narrative summaries of their work that this was the case, but they still ended up with As. At least one of my fellow faculty members found this contrast to be wrong, and I can understand why.

Pass and Forget

Many of the courses in our online programs are taken serially, and so I don’t have to compete for attention with other courses. That wasn’t the case this summer, and I suspect that students paid more attention to the courses where they were still “fighting for a grade.”

A lot of the work on pass/not pass grading going back several decades looks at courses in similar contexts. Being the P/NP course in a world of graded courses means that for some students (generally those who are not already high-achievers) the time and effort will be put to the graded courses, as they are afforded a certain degree of prestige as well as attention from students simply because of their grades.

Don’t Picture an Elephant

My intention was to make students think less about grading, but because they needed to keep track of the number of points each badge was worth, and whether they had crossed a certain threshold, they ended up thinking more about it. For some, the idea that the grade would be either an A or an F, and nothing in-between, raised their anxiety level, even after I made clear that an “A” was granted for even minimal completion of work.

In the end, by doing something out of the ordinary, I ended up focusing students more on the grades and grading structures, not less.

The (Non) Solution

So, what’s a person who hates grades to do? I’ve always been considered a “hard grader.” Perhaps that’s why people have been so focused on grades in my classes. Clearly going the other way, and becoming the Oprah of As (You get an A! You get an A!) hasn’t worked out. Two possible alternatives:

Maybe the simple solution is to provide a grading rubric, but simply make it easy to get an A. That doesn’t seem like a good solution. It seems like it contributes to the “menace” of grade inflation. But if I don’t really care about grades, I’m not sure why I should care about their inflation. More importantly, although I don’t get the issue of people dwelling over an odd grading structure, I still have to contend with pulling attention away from courses with a stiffer climb up the grading ladder.

The other alternative is to go old-school. The course is graded on a curve. The top 20% of points-earners get an A, the next 40% get a B, the next 20% get a C, and the next 20% get a D or F. (Come on, you don’t really expect me to curve around a C, do you? I’m not that old.) Of course, this means that students are going head-to-head Paper Chase style, rather than cooperating and collaborating nicely. That sucks, but maybe it is what is needed to get folks to step up their game.

So, for next semester, I’m back to grading meany. A curve (and not a saving one) it is, at least in the course where I’m dictating the policy. That will be more familiar ground for me, and probably also for the students.

It’s no secret: one of the reasons I wanted to have kids is for the toys. It’s so much more socially acceptable (and fun) to buy Legos and light sabers for your kids. But the irony is that kids don’t want toys, they want the real thing. Sure, they’ll settle for the cardboard box fashioned to be a car, but if you turn your back and they have access to your keys, watch out!

My son loves the idea and the practice of vacuuming. I’m not sure why–perhaps because it is such an unusual and rare thing to see in our house. He’s not alone in that. I spoke with a janitor at the American Natural History Museum who noted that kids come from around the world to the museum and the they universally are drawn to his broom and dustpan. They think it is far more awesome than some stuffed black bear or 6,000-year-old dinosaur bones. (I got that right, right? Carbon dating is just Satan’s Tivo?)

And there is a whole market of vacuums for kids that “really suck”! And when I say really suck, I mean that they have some sort of weak sauce sucking mechanism that makes it seem like they are some kind of vacuum.

So, faced with the possibility of spending well over $100 on a toy Dyson, we did what any sane person would do, and bought our two-year-old a cordless vaccuum. He vacuums, and actually manages to help clean up the house.

Is it dangerous? It’s not like we are giving him his own blender or microwave, but yes, I’m sure somewhere on the box it says something like “not appropriate for children under 4.”

And even though he loves his toy power screwdriver, he runs around the house saying “screw everythiiiiing!” and attempting to do just that. So, it may be a year or two until we turn over a real power screwdriver. But we will, and probably not before he is all that much older.

Because in a world full of toys, the best ones are also tools.