Towards a unified field theory of Internet charlatanism.

I’ve been working on a text about late American industrialization and its effects. It allows me to read in all sorts of areas of history which don’t usually go together like urban planning and Native American policy, since industrialization was an important enough phenomenon to worm itself into practically everything during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. One of my themes is that the wonders of cheap consumer goods helped people accept the wrenching changes going on around them. The more I think about it, the more I realize that an awful lot of people who are making money off the disruptive technological revolution of today aren’t leaving anything for anyone but themselves.

I could start back again on the subject of Kindles, but let’s do e-books in general instead. Here’s the poet Charles Simic on the subject of libraries:

“I heard some politician say recently that closing libraries is no big deal, since the kids now have the Internet to do their reading and school work. It’s not the same thing. As any teacher who recalls the time when students still went to libraries and read books could tell him, study and reflection come more naturally to someone bent over a book. Seeing others, too, absorbed in their reading, holding up or pressing down on different-looking books, some intimidating in their appearance, others inviting, makes one a participant in one of the oldest and most noble human activities.”

Of course, Simic knows that whatever politician he heard couldn’t care less about the quality of the reading experience. They only care about the money. The idea is for all the financial benefits of electronic books to flow towards government so that the government can cut rich people’s taxes more. Libraries are socialism to our new Tea Party overlords, so who cares what happens to them anyways?

Our new overlords are the same way about public schools. If you want an informative but depressing experience, start following NYU education professor Diane Ravitch on Twitter. The teachers of America are not happy campers. This one came across her feed a few days ago:

@DianeRavitch The corporate business model for Ed needs hourly PT employees proctoring computer labs where students do worksheet drill—
mark safranski (@zenpundit) May 28, 2011

Of course, where do you think all those worksheets will be delivered to students desks? From the cloud, of course, because storage costs money. Centralized production, undifferentiated content, conceived at the lowest common denominator and delivered at the lowest possible cost. Cut costs to taxpayers for the sake of lowering taxes, and let the kids rot for all the reformers care. They’ll see none of the benefits of this disruptive technology and pay the cost of its effects for the rest of their lives.

But at least they don’t have to pay the cost of students at for-profit colleges. I knew this already, but I continue to find it astonishing:

The average price of attendance, including tuition, books and living costs, for students enrolled full-time for a full year was highest at for-profit colleges after average grants were factored in. Students at for-profit colleges paid $30,900 on average in 2007-08, compared with $26,600 at private, non-profit colleges and $15,600 at public institutions.

Pay twice as much as a public college for a lousy education delivered over the Internet even though it costs them less to deliver it to you. If there really is an education bubble, that’s exactly where you’ll find it. The Walmart of higher education would price online courses less because that would be a better business decision, except for the fact that they have to keep up this fiction that online and face-to-face classes are of equal value. Most of them are not, but the American public has become so conditioned to believe that a college degree is just a piece of paper that they can’t seem to tell the difference anymore.

In the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the Fountain of Youth can only work if you take other people’s remaining years away from them. I’m thinking that’s kind of like what we have going here with the public sphere in America. Maybe when we’re all old, the youth of this country will get back at us by taking our Medicare away. Oh wait, they’re already working on that.

Isn’t Karma grand?

The Walmart of higher education will not be online.

“The price of college is going to fall, and the Internet is going to cause that fall. The rest of it is really difficult to figure out.”

So begins an article about the coming higher education revolution in the Atlantic that Historiann sent me since, you know, higher education is in crisis. [Cue scary music.] I think you can imagine the argument, but here’s a taste nonetheless:

Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education.

Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea?

It’s like Walmart, right? Stack the education high and sell it cheap! We’ll make millions! To be fair, there is a hint of the alternative point of view in the piece:

[Yale classics professor Diana E. E.] Kleiner reads from the same script, if more cautiously. “If the best economics teacher in the world creates a course that is better than any other, would there be merit in having that course be the only course?” she asks. “Maybe, but you would still need teachers. There’s no substitution for personal education.”

Maybe? The last time they tried to tried to to treat students like a bunch of raw material, Mario Savio and his pals took over the Chancellor’s office. Why does anyone think it’s going to go any better this time when they’re not even getting an education from Berkeley (except, of course, for those poor online suckers who actually will be getting an online education from Berkeley)?

The assumption that college is too expensive is certainly correct. The problem with this article is that it assumes that online education is the way to solve that problem. As I’ve noted before, it is possible to do some really interesting things with education online. However, if you’re just doing it to save money so that your university can keep more money for other things, your online courses are going to be awful. As a result, nobody will learn anything and they’ll all end up unemployed. The negative feedback loop will then lead to a real crisis in higher education, brought on by the people who thought they were saving it.

I have a dream of what a new, cheaper, face-to-face university education might look like: No sports. Cut the number of administrators in half. The President is not allowed to make any more than twice what the lowest paid faculty member in the business school takes home in salary. Run the book store as a co-op. No climbing walls. Spend the surplus every year on scholarships, and cost-of-living adjustments for faculty.

Too bad I’m don’t have a few million to spare for a start-up.

Kindles are for suckers.

I love Amazon.com. I really do. I remember when I lived in Walla Walla, Washington where the only book store was about the size of my apartment. Their long tail stopped me from being bored out of my head all year. Look inside the book? Great. Competition for iTunes? Great. The Kindle? Not so much.

I’ve been kind of ambivalent about the Kindle previously. As a devoted reader, I had the typical electronics lust for it that most people like me probably had when it first came out. Then I read this article by Nicholson Baker in the New Yorker, which made me wonder whether it was all worth the trouble. As time has passed, I have become actively hostile.

It’s not as if I hate all e-books. They’re good for research purposes, and I’ve sold a few myself but when the Kindle edition of my book came out, the publisher set the price at $27.95. They also raised the price of the hardback by $5.05. It’s the difference between the electronic and physical copy of the book that matters, I figured, not the cost of the book itself.

What sent me over the edge is when I saw that Amazon.com is charging more for the Kindle version of David McCullough’s new book than they are for the hardback (at least as of the moment that I’m writing this). This tells me that the pricing for Kindle editions has become totally untethered from economic reality, and that can’t be good for consumers. Certainly, it costs more to produce the physical book than it does to deliver the e-version. All the savings from an electronic edition of McCullough’s book are therefore flowing to Amazon rather than readers. Readers should demand better.

Instead, Amazon.com believes that their Kindle customers are willing to pay more for this fleeting edition than they are for the thing which is permanent. Indeed, since Amazon can delete books from your Kindle for a whole host of reasons, they’re fleeting even if you never get to the capacity of the machine. You’re just renting the right to read them. If you use your Kindle for almost everything you read, it will fill up eventually. What are you going to do with your extra books? Buy a new Kindle?

Books are an excellent technology that have served mankind for hundreds of years. Kindles, among other problems, seem to freeze up on a lot of people. They’re also going to be obsolete pretty soon so I don’t understand is why anyone would pay more for an electronic version of something that works better in the real world. Megan McCardle offers one explanation:

But I doubt that many of the kids starting school now will build up the same kind of personal reference system around print books, any more than most children of the 1920s bothered to learn how to hitch up a team properly. To them, print books will seem ponderous and slow–what we find serene and undistracting, they will find as annoying as making your own Jello out of calve’s feet and eggshells.

That’s it! Think of the children!!! Yet college students overwhelmingly prefer physical textbooks to electronic versions. Apparently, Florida is mandating that all textbooks in schools there be e-books by 2016. Are they doing that for the kids? Of course not. They’re doing that to save money. Those savings come from the difference between the price of the physical book and the price concession that the state can extract out of publishers. Amazon customers can do no such thing because they can’t demand bulk pricing. Amazon can pocket all the cost savings from the e-book versus the physical version.

Amazon should be giving their machines away for free. Instead, people pay for the privilege of renting books from them. Buy a Kindle and you’re just encouraging them to rip you off more. Yes, I know that a lot of people are encouraging them these days. We’ll see how they feel when their Kindles become dinosaurs. Physical books, on the other hand, will last longer than any particular operating system (as long as you don’t abuse them).

So don’t be a sucker, buy paper. Then you can really stick it to the man by loaning your book out for a while after you’ve finished reading it.

More mirrors on the ceiling, more pink champagne on ice.

Hotel California by the Eagles has been running through my head a lot lately. I think it’s been because I’ve been feeling kind of trapped in a professional sense [Shoot, just look at that picture of the Mad Hatter over on the right. If that wasn't a cry for help, I don't know what is.] I recognize that I’m a prisoner of my own device, and have no plans to run for the door anytime soon (although I know some excellent blogs by people who have and totally respect that decision). It’s just that if I’m going to be trapped doing what I’m doing for the foreseeable future, I want more mirrors on the ceiling, more pink champagne ice and less of the stuff that just makes me whiny.

As a result, I told my department chairman yesterday that I will not be teaching online anytime soon. It’s not as if I think that it’s inherently evil (various readers of this space have talked me out of that position), it’s just that I don’t have the time or the patience at the moment to do it in a manner in which I could be proud. For heaven’s sake, it would be an overload class anyway and I’m already overloaded (just with other things besides teaching). I didn’t write this in the note, but with all I’ve been writing about online education charlatans lately, it’s also that I really didn’t want to wake up some day soon and realize that I’d become one myself.

To top things off, I have a textbook to write this summer. It’s currently coming up on two years late (which was making me feel trapped), but the publisher was nice enough to recalibrate the due date ’til September, which I think is actually doable as I do have four chapters done already. I started working on Chapter Five this week and have had a wonderful time, especially the day I spent three hours reading William Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago! for the first time while looking for material. [Maybe someday I'll post what he has to say about professors. It's awfully prophetic.]

This blog certainly counts as one of those things that makes my job fun. While I write about my job rather than actually get paid for doing this, the skills I’ve developed in the course of during this endeavor have literally made me thousands of dollars and changed the way I research and teach. However, as most regular bloggers recognize, it can make you feel trapped too. Therefore, at least for the summer, I’m going to try going on an irregular schedule here as I work harder on other things.

I will post whenever I have something really good to share and definitely have time to write it up well. [If I can't get to the second part of that, I guess I'll just share it on Twitter.] So look for me to fill this space more like once a week for the next few months rather than the every weekday that I usually aim to reach.*

I fully expect regular weekday posting to resume in the fall as working on this blog is about the most fun I can have trying to avoid work when it is being forced upon me (which tends to happen at that time of year). For now though, since I have to work this summer anyways, I’m going to try to stick to the things about this job that I always enjoy.

* I’ve run into a bunch of people lately who don’t use RSS readers for their blog reading pleasure. If that’s you, then you should definitely sign up for a Google account and start using Google Reader immediately, including subscribing to this blog right here. Basically, these things stop you from having to visit every blog you like over and over again to see whether the author has written anything new. It will make your online time much more efficient.

The “higher education is dying” magnum opus of the week.

I know it’s only Monday, but I strongly suspect that this week’s “higher education is dying” magnum opus will turn out to be this article in IHE. While there is (as usual) much material here, I want to focus on the words of the noted “higher education is dying” talking head Richard Vedder:

“It is appalling to me. We have a two-class system in the American university,” said Richard Vedder, distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University. “We have an aristocratic elite — the tenured class and those who have a reasonable probability of being tenured. On the other hand, we have these adjuncts.”

This reliance on adjuncts, said Vedder, is in some cases an outgrowth of the increased institutional emphasis on research — part of the arms race to boost rankings and prestige. Research output is relatively easy to measure, he said (far more than teaching). More critically, he added, research creates revenue for the institution. “In their zeal to get all this money — research money — they’re paying more and more to full-time professors and giving them lower teaching loads,” he said. “That’s one dirty little secret we don’t want revealed: as teaching loads have fallen over the last half-century, we faced the little nagging problem that someone needs to teach the students.” (Vedder’s critique on teaching loads largely applies to more elite institutions — and wouldn’t make much sense to faculty at community colleges and access-oriented four-year institutions where 5-5 schedules are quite common.)

Wow, you know you’re in bad shape when the journal that interviews you feels the need to correct your ridiculous assertions immediately after quoting you. Nevertheless, I still don’t think that coda is enough to compensate for the gross stupidity of those remarks.

In most labor markets that I’m familiar with, the unwillingness of existing workers to accept speed-up conditions results in the employer hiring additional workers. Who gets to determine whether those additional workers will be adjunct or tenure track? Administrators. Who agreed to those cushy contracts in the first place? Administrators. Who (mostly) is shedding crocodile tears about a situation that they themselves created? Administrators.

No wonder most college presidents want to end tenure. They need a scapegoat to blame for the mess that they collectively created.

Online education charlatans assume that all students are self-motivated.

There is a big fat wet kiss to online education in the Cleveland Plain Dealer today. It’s filled with passages like this one:

Officials at area colleges said most faculty have embraced online learning. Many teach hybrid or blended courses, in which students spend some time in the classroom and the rest online. Some teach only online.

But here’s where I think they let a little truth slip in between the propaganda:

“It’s all on you,” [Sgt. Joshua] Falso said of the biggest difference between sitting in a classroom and taking a course online. “You have to buckle down and manage time correctly to do the tests and research papers.”

Folso is a 25-year old student from Cleveland, and I’m guessing that being in the Air Force has made him self-motivated. Still, reading him say that jogged my memory of a UD post from earlier this week which explained that Ohio is also at the forefront of a national push for online high schools. This is the part of that post which nobody in education should ever forget:

Turns out their graduation rates are pathetic. Dedicate two seconds of your brain power to the online experience as experienced by a fifteen-year-old and you’ll get there.

Now, I don’t think anyone is going to dispute my assertion that there are plenty of college students who are about as self-motivated as the average fifteen-year old. I don’t think anyone will dispute that direct supervision – the kind provided by face-to-face classes – can mitigate that problem. There’s a Tenured Radical post up today about here experiences with online learning. She seems to have had a lovely time with it, but then again she had two meetings a week with her students and they met with a teaching assistant outside of class. Unfortunately, as one of the comments on that Plain Dealer article explains:

As a university professor who has taught both online and ground classes, there is a tremendous difference between the two. Universities offer online classes not to educate, but to generate revenues and stay competitive with all the other schools offering online classes. Referring to online classes as hybrid or blended courses is just a means to attempt to legitamize them. There are some colleges that do not allow any scheduled classes or meetings for online classes – communication takes place via emails or posting on the online classroom.

So, in our continuing quest to define exactly what it takes to be an online education charlatan,* assuming that all students are self-motivated seems like a pretty good criterion. After all, you may think they’re doing their work, but there’s nothing to stop them from spending the whole day playing pool. Is it possible to teach boys band online?

* By the way, from now on everyone who uses the phrase “online education charlatan” must send me a nickel.

If for-profit colleges cared about education, students would get their tuition refunded when they showed up in class.

This article (via EduBubble) reminds me of a very old Saturday Night Live sketch where Dan Ackroyd as a dean of some kind tells the students on their first day of college to do what they want, just come back for Parent’s Day and graduation. I’d give my right arm to find that on Hulu. In the meantime, I’ll have to settle for laughs like this:

Ms. Howland-Justice said administrators would tell faculty members that they weren’t “fun” enough, that they should engage students through games like Bingo and Jeopardy. To encourage students to show up for class, the college would throw pizza parties and ice-cream socials, and hold raffles for i­Pods and gift cards.

I guess this is what happens when everyone except the students are responding to economic incentives.

A cheaper mousetrap is not necessarily a better one.

“Work flow platforms are enabling us to do for the service industry what Henry Ford did for manufacturing,” said Jerry Rao, the entrepreneur doing accounting work for Americans from India. “We are taking apart each task and sending it around to whomever can do it best, and because we do it in a virtual environment, people need not be physically adjacent to each other, and then we are reassembling all the pieces back together at headquarters [or some other remote site].”

That’s from Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and I though that line important enough to highlight it when I first read the book so many years ago. Now I see, as the Chronicle‘s special digital campus issue suggests, that higher education is being treated the same way.

At a conference last summer, Bill Gates predicted that “place-based activity in college will be five times less important than it is today.” Noting the ever-growing popularity of online learning, he predicted that “five years from now, on the Web­—for free—you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

“College, except for the parties,” Gates concluded, “needs to be less place-based.”

Via my new bloggy friend Music for Deckchairs, I see that someone writing in Australia (MFD didn’t leave a link so I went and found it myself), has carried Gates’ sentiments to the point of absurdity:

[T]he momentum towards online teaching, learning and collaboration is unstoppable. That will not necessarily undermine the value of, or demand for, face-to-face teaching and classroom interaction. Nor will free, open-access online courses replace the qualifications, grades and accreditation only universities can confer through rigorous assessment. But it does mean the blending of face-to-face teaching with extraordinary new digital tools, such as immersive 3D ”learning environments”, as well as the ability of motivated students to explore far beyond the courses they are enrolled in. The traditional lecture could, in fact, become an online multimedia package to be viewed at home or on a smart phone on the bus before class, so students can use their time on campus better to make sense of its contents.

Call me a Luddite, but I don’t think a college education where the professors are relegated to the role of intellectual ushers at an academic Disneyland is going to be very helpful to anyone because there’s always the nagging need to actually learn something.

Looking back on the history of industrialization, it’s easy to find examples of cheaper, inferior products crowding out hand-crafted ones – shoes, cigars, etc. Read The World Is Flat and it is easy to find examples of foreign services performed for less crowding out domestic ones – accounting, reading X-Rays, etc. Yet to this day, there are plenty of things that have not been industrialized. The hottest market in food today is for groceries that are less industrialized rather than more so.

Just because you can educate someone cheaper online does not mean that they’ll get a better education. Indeed, it doesn’t even mean they’ll get any education at all.

We’re actually under enormous pressure here to begin teaching online. As someone who is tech-savvy enough to blog (among other things), I’m near the front of the list of potential instructors. However, there is simply no way that I will ever run an online class which I think is inferior to the one I do face-to-face. Ever. If the people who want me to teach this way aren’t online education charlatans, they’ll cut me enough slack to develop something that will make us all proud. If they are (or perhaps they’re just conflicted), I’ll offer up some advice from Music for Deckchairs:

I spend enough time in committees with people who have been at the corporate Kool Aid, to recognise that anyone can fall for the sales pitch that online learning achieves miraculous levels of “student-centredness” and “authentic learning” and any number of other transformative experiences. Mostly, I think these people just need to spend more time working directly with students before they tell us how online anything will transform the challenges they face.

After all, it’s not as if the Chinese will be training their surplus teenagers to teach American history anytime soon. The world may be flat, but knowledge is still bumpy.

Way too much fun for someone like me.

So far, this is my favorite find from the Library of Congress’ new National Jukebox.

As if economists weren’t conservative enough already.

When I first heard about the Koch Brothers buying out the economics department at Florida State, I thought “Big deal.” After all, aren’t most business schools beholden enough to their corporate donors that they’d never hire liberals? The only difference here is that Kochs were being less subtle about it.

Then, thanks to Gin and Tacos, I hit a link to a local Florida paper writing on this story:

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it’s not happy with the faculty’s choice or if the hires don’t meet “objectives” set by Koch during annual evaluations.

David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty’s suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates.

Sixty percent of the economists floating around weren’t sufficiently free market enough to meet Koch’s “objectives?” Did all the rest list Paul Krugman as their role model? Getting a Ph.D. in economics is like a seven year boot camp in free market ideas, but Koch is apparently looking for the second coming of Ayn Rand. [Read the rest of that story if you want to see the role Rand plays in that department already.]

Judging from this article, it appears that the discipline of economics has come down to a division between the merely right, and the so far right you’ve turned the clock back to 1900:

“Bruce Benson, chairman of FSU’s economics department, said that of his staff of 30, six, including himself, would fall into Koch’s free-market camp.

The Kochs find, as I do, that a lot of regulation is actually detrimental and they’re convinced markets work relatively well when left alone,” he said.

Benson said his department had extensive discussion, but no vote, on the Koch agreement when it was signed in 2008.

If they had voted, the socialists would have won. Back to the same article:

He said the Koch grant has improved his department and guaranteed a diversity of opinion that’s beneficial to students.

“Students will ultimately choose,” he said. “If you believe strongly in something, you believe it can win the debate.”

That’s right, let the students vote with their feet. Become an Ayn Rand disciple or switch your major to sociology. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, the diversity of opinion in the economics department at FSU apparently runs the gamut from A to B.

Hopefully everyone will remember this story the next time someone tells you that academia is an exclusively liberal preserve.