Some lovely WPA propaganda.

And to think we knew her before she made it big.

Our pal Music for Deckchairs has been named one of Australia’s Top Ten Social Media Influencers by the Guardian. To top things off, she’s also in Sweden this week. [I want to go to Sweden! Of course, it's pretty hard to name a place in the world where I don't want to go.] While in Sweden, she’s writing about holding class through video conferencing:

But there’s something about the strange warping of distance and time that occurs when you can see someone sitting in a room on the other side of the country or the world, and you know that they’ve organised themselves to be there when you are. It’s not that different from the small jolt of simultaneity that happens when you catch someone on skype or, 15 years ago, when I taught out in the wilds of IRC.

What moves people about co-presence in time is just that: presence. The other person is there, awake, breathing, thinking, doing stuff, responding, exactly when you are. This is the here-and-now of being human at all that somehow can survive without co-location, and it can even survive when the other person can’t be seen or heard, but simply writes to you when you are sitting there waiting to hear from them.

While I’m tempted to make apropos pop-cultural references to the Buggles and the best Debbie Harry movie of all time, I really can’t muster up the energy because I don’t find MfD’s comments in the least bit incorrect or threatening. As I explained in a quick comment at her place, this stuff is far too expensive to catch on in America. I’ll elaborate here.

Earlier this year, when I was actually considering an online/distance education overload in order to raise some extra money to send my child through college with as little debt as possible, this was the kind of course that our people wanted me to do. It would have scheduled real time meetings with me in Pueblo and students literally all over the world. I was told that they had spared no expense with the technology, and I’d have all the help I’d need to make it work. This wasn’t going to be like Skype, where you can’t see past right in front of the computer screen. This was going to be the real deal.

“Can the students talk to each other?,” I asked. They said no, and that’s why I did too.

Class by video has so many real advantages. Real time conversation is probably the most obvious one, but as long as students can’t talk to each other it’s still inferior to face-to-face interaction. Is anybody going to bother throwing Coke cans at one another if they’re not in the same room? Ironically, the kind of direct interaction I’m looking for here has got to be easier and cheaper when everyone’s logging into a computer platform together, but it appears that real interactive video networking is too expensive as of yet (otherwise we’d have bought the technology to do so).

Even supposing students can get by using cheap web cams, the cost of turning every university classroom into a studio has got to be astronomical. In my place, they’re looking towards one studio with each professor getting their scheduled hour one after another. What happens when they all want 7PM in the evening? What happens when all the students want 7PM in the evening? How many studios does a tele-university need to have? In short, there are no economies of scale here, which is precisely why I predict it will never catch on in American higher ed.

On a related note, Natalia Cecire dropped in here with a long comment on the post I based on her excellent discussion of what I called the Digital Humanities backlash. This is the part of that which really crystalizes the very few differences that I have with Australia’s new social media superstar:

One very useful point that you raise is the distinction between DH and “online education”; one is an area of inquiry; the other is a business “solution.”

Private or public, the entire point of online education in the United States is to make it possible for universities to do more with less. In the for-profit sector, the savings go to the stockholder. In the traditional bricks and mortar sector, the savings go for whatever the administration wants (which is often more bricks and mortar, or perhaps just a climbing wall for the student rec center). Where they don’t go is more investment in instruction, which if you ask me is precisely the problem.

More power to all the Australians and the Swedes who choose to do distance education right, but I have no hope that will ever happen here. In the American context techno-skepticism with respect to online education is not just a self-interested job protection philosophy, I also think it’s the side of the angels.

The Digital Humanities backlash.

All of a sudden, I’m starting to pick up signs of a digital humanities backlash. That’s a shame because there’s a big difference between digital humanities and online education since faculty can seemingly control the first thing, but not necessarily the second. The digital humanities help us do what we already do better. Online education…well, since I don’t feel like linking to my entire archive for the last three months, let’s just say I’m not convinced it helps us do anything.

Nonetheless, it appears that both these technologically-driven phenomena have employment implications, as Natalia Cicere describes here:

So it seems quite natural that there should be wariness and resistance to the growing presence of digital humanities. Perhaps there is some bitterness that you might get your new Americanist only on condition that her work involves a Google Maps mashup, because it was easy to persuade people that your department needed a new “digital humanist,” whatever the hell that is, and it was not easy to persuade people that you needed somebody to teach Faulkner.

The situation is not improved by the confrontational attitudes of certain factions of the digital humanities establishment (such as it is), which are occasionally prone to snotty comments about how innovative DH is and how tired and intellectually bankrupt everybody else’s work is. (Not so often, I find—but even a little is enough to be a problem.) Under those circumstances, DH seems clubby and not liberating; not a way of advocating the humanities but an attack on it, and specifically on the worth of that Faulkner seminar that you teach, and that non-digital research that you do. Why, an established scholar might reasonably ask, should I even deal with this “digital humanities” nonsense? Shouldn’t I just keep teaching my Faulkner seminar, because somebody ought to do it, for Christ’s sake?

She’s not suggesting that anyone ignore the digital humanities, but it appears as if the impact of this technology on our profession is a lot more important than those people whose eyes glaze over at its very mention seem to think. Take, for instance, this:

By 2025 all academic jobs will be in DH. MT @nowviskie: 10-yr growth of PhD-level DH jobs, internationally & per capita is.gd/ujgFTl—
Dan Cohen (@dancohen) September 25, 2011

I don’t think Dan Cohen is intending to be self-important there (since DH is what he does). He’s just describing how he sees the future. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is totally irrelevant. What’s important is that that would be a huge change from the way things are done today, and we all need to be prepared for the changes it brings.

The Postal Service is apparently going to go bankrupt soon. Its effective demise is apparently inevitable, but do we want it to disappear tomorrow (or by 2025 for that matter)? Suppose you want to continue to teach your Faulkner seminar the same way that you always teach it. Is there anything necessarily wrong with that? Not necessarily, assuming that you’re a good teacher. However, if almost everyone else’s seminars go digital somehow, there will be serious pressure on those people who don’t do this sort of thing to start doing it.

Just because the digital humanities offer a different way to teach history does not mean that the old ways are necessarily bad. The key is to keep the process in the hands of professors rather than the people who administer their departments since I hope we’ll all agree that technology should be a tool rather than a club.

The Humanities: They’re good for what ails you!

This is from part of the summary of an interview with Clayton Christensen and Henry J. Eyring about their entrant into the higher-education-is-dying book sweepstakes:

In particular, the book advocates that colleges and universities embrace online education. It argues that online technology makes a college or university vastly more attractive to a wide subset of students. It gives many people a second chance at learning – i.e. those who cannot afford a traditional college education, those who do not have the flexibility to take part in a full plate of coursework, and late bloomers or dropouts who have fallen behind and now have the chance to catch up. But online learning doesn’t just offer cheaper education for the masses. It improves the student learning experience across the spectrum by allowing students to learn at their own pace and on their own timetable.

[Emphasis added.]

That’s not just “MBA thinking,” it’s snake oil salesmanship. I see no studies to back that up, and fully expect if there are any they used multiple choice questions to get to that conclusion. More importantly, letting people learn at their own pace allows them to drop out at their own pace and pay a lot more money for that privilege, as Historiann has repeatedly reminded us.

Of course, the whole point of students learning at their own pace is that they won’t need professors at all then and that saves a lot of money (which can then be diverted to other uses that have nothing to do with education). Our students certainly won’t need tenured professors who will apparently be going the way of the dodo in our online future. These are Christensen and Eyring’s own words:

[T]he activities being performed by the tenured professor must be consistent with the mission of the institution, which for most institutions is likely to be narrower than the mission of a large research university. Most professors will need to spend the majority of their time teaching. A school that generates the bulk of its revenues via tuition will be able to afford some time for faculty research. However, that research will need to have relevance to the student learning experience, and it won’t be the driving factor in tenure decisions; teaching quality will be. Tenure based primarily on publications isn’t a sustainable model for most institutions.

Anybody else find those two points a tad contradictory? Students can learn at their own pace online, but great teaching is the only way that professors can get tenure. Wouldn’t great teaching mean that everyone can keep up with the professor? More importantly, who gets to decide what constitutes great teaching? It’s obvious if Forbes had asked these guys, they would have said the students because that’s the only way that a university’s business model would be “sustainable.” If humanists let the value of our jobs get defined solely in economic terms we are all doomed. It’s already happening to social studies at the secondary school level. It will happen to us too.

To prevent that from happening, I say we in the humanities should sell ourselves the same way Lydia Pinkham sold her snake oil. How about this for a slogan: “The Humanities: They’re good for what ails you!” Record low SAT scores? The Humanities teaches literacy! Literacy is good for that! You say your teachers are terrible? Well, get them out of those touchy-feely education programs and teach them some literacy! And by literacy, I don’t mean any of that civic literacy stuff that justified the soon-to-be-deceased Teaching American History grant program, I mean literacy as in reading and writing literacy. So what if there are more Chinese people learning English than there are people in America. It’s your first language! You can compete against that. Besides, just like Lydia Pinkham, we have real alcohol. Let’s see online education try to beat that!

If only I was entirely joking.

1, 2, 3, 4…What am I fighting for?

Notorious do-gooder that I am, I recently agreed to chair a committee for one of two searches going on in my department this year.* That means I get to go to the AHA in Chicago. In January. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr.

The good thing about this is that I’ll only be interviewing candidates for one day, and I’ll actually get to go see some panels during the other. Thanks to John Fea, I knew exactly where to find the program so that I could figure out which day I wanted to push for my own professional development.

Here’s where I underwent a small crisis in priorities. On Friday, there’s a panel about online teaching that I would love to see just so that I could better inform the ongoing critique I offer in this space. On Saturday, there’s a panel on using digital humanities in the classroom – something I might actually do myself someday.

OK, it’s not that much of a dilemma because there’s also a faculty working conditions panel on Saturday too, but I think I would have picked Saturday for professional development even if the session count was 1 to 1. The reason is that I actually prefer being positive to negative, and I’m as excited about the new digital future as anyone as long as I have control of what I use and when I use it. [Maybe those two Saturday panels are more related than I thought.]

Control. That’s what I’m fighting for, and as a matter of fact I do give a damn. So, MfD, if you want share a digital map of childhood memories online or have an author drop in via Skype, I say go for it! Just make sure it’s my right to pick what technology I think works best for the way I want to teach and that it’s my prerogative to control my own classroom, whether it’s online or otherwise.

PS Of course, the 2013 AHA is going to be in place I’d actually like to go, New Orleans. [If for no other reason so that I can go back here and I know my wife would actually come with me for this one.] Unfortunately, the chances of my department hiring anyone in 2012-2013 is about zero so I’m going to need a different excuse in order to go. Therefore, if anybody wants to collaborate on some kind of tech-oriented panel, drop me a line at the e-mail to the right and let’s see what we can figure out in response to this.

* And yes I did suggest Skype interviews to our illustrious department chair. He wasn’t biting.

Samuel Bowles, Our New West, 1869.

I picked this off the shelves of the Western Museum of Mining and Industry last night before I heard a talk by Philip Dray about his excellent history of American labor, There Is Power in a Union, newly out in paperback. I can’t wait to give it a closer look.

By the way, if you’re in Colorado, you can here me talk about another book I kind of like at the WMMI, which is just north of Colorado Springs, on November 3rd at 7PM.

The “Love Boat” analogy is a joke, but the sentiment is serious.

I realize this blog has been something of a bummer lately, but you need to realize that I have colleagues who are far, far more depressed about the future than I am. I had a talk with an old hand around here over the weekend who insisted that he’d never want to be young again because their future is so bleak. He claims there are more people in China studying English than there are Americans, which I agree is a scary thought if true, but he also helped me recognize a possible way out of the humanities professor’s dilemma.

“If we define ourselves solely as teachers, we’ll be gone in twenty years,” my depressed colleague explained. I think there’s something to that. Scholarship is what separates tenure track from disposable labor. It’s the hardest row to hoe for tenure in the first place and therefore a sign of a university’s relative prestige. It’s also something which cannot be easily outsourced to China or elsewhere.

At the same time though, as I pointed out during that conversation, define ourselves solely as scholars and a new online teaching structure will be built up by going around us. “Oh, they’re too busy with all that deep thinking to learn about new technology,” your average administrator will say. “Let’s hire unemployed Ph.D.s to teach five classes at a time and nothing else. Then we can run the university any way we like. [Insert Snidely Whiplash laugh here.]” That’s the logical extension of the adjunctification of academia that’s been going on for decades now. Online education will just accelerate this process unless we tenured folks can make a good case for why what we do is better.

Perhaps the solution is to walk the fine line between teaching and scholarship more explicitly than most of us do. Stop reading your PowerPoint slides and teach what you study, or at the very least, explain how what you study affects your understanding of whatever it is you teach. Conveniently, I can use yesterday’s brutal blog-beating by Historiann of some tech dude at IHE to explain precisely what I mean.

He’s upset that historians don’t teach more narratives. Historiann wonders why anyone reading a narrative history needs an historian around at all:

Kim is probably right that a synthetic work aimed at a popular audience probably won’t be on a whole lot of college and university syllabi. But why should books aimed at a general audience be taught by professional historians, when students might instead read a more challenging book with a professor on hand to guide them through it? Students are perfectly free at any point of their college or post-collegiate lives to pick up a book like 1493 and read and enjoy it, just as Kim did.

Quite frankly, I don’t think I need to show my students how to read a book like 1493 or celebratory biographies of the so-called “Founding Fathers” by David McCullough. (I think I personally might die of boredom–and my number-one criteria for selecting books for my syllabi is whether or not *I* think they’re exciting or interesting and can stand to read them again.)

[Emphasis is mine.]

I actually have some sympathy with the tech dude on this one as I use a fair number of narrative works in class. Perhaps that’s because there are better narrative works available for modern U.S. history than there are for the Colonial Era. [David McCullough, for instance, is much better to my mind when writing about Teddy Roosevelt than he is about John Adams. Daniel Okrent's Last Call is both serious history and an absolute joy to read. I'll teach it for the first time in a few weeks.]

To my mind though, the key part of that smackdown is the part about having the professor there to guide students through the work. It’s our responsibility to explain to them why what they’re reading is actually interesting and our scholarship is what makes that possible. Like Julie your Cruise Director, we need to make sure they’re having as much fun studying history as we are teaching it.

A good teacher can also lead group activities that are both educational and interesting, not to mention virtually impossible to do online. When my wife was in college, she used to cook dishes from every country she studied in her world history courses and bring them into class. When I first heard David McCullough speak, I specifically remember him talking about how important it is to learn to read aloud. Just try doing that online!

If we don’t make a good case for our own usefulness, the value we have by being there in the room to help students learn, their vacation dollars will go elsewhere. If that happens, we’ll never be able to afford our own vacations again.

Will college professors go the way of the milkman?

I have been a Natalie Merchant fan since I first saw 10,000 Maniacs in college. In the old days, when I still went to concerts, I saw them more often than I did any other band (even after their shows were overran by teenage girls in peasant dresses). I pre-ordered the first Natalie Merchant album in seven years before it came out last year (rather than download the tracks) so that I could read the liner notes, and have had it in my car ever since. It’s two discs of the work of mostly obscure poets put to music, so there is actually a lot of interesting stuff to learn there.

This is my favorite track on the album:

The poet is Eleanor Farjeon, well-known in English places, but not in America. As Merchant notes, poetry aside, perhaps the most endearing thing she ever did was to turn down the title Dame of the British Empire with the line, “I do not wish to become different from the milkman.” Words to live by if I’ve ever encountered them.

They seem particularly useful to us academics, as we (myself included, of course) tend to greatly overrate our own usefulness. So many of us assume that whatever we’re interested in will be interesting to others, even if it isn’t. [See here for an important variation on this phenomenon.] I’ve also seen far too many examples of academics who assume that they’re somehow different than other working people just because they have a Ph.D.

We had time, and somehow we found the resources to study something for seven-odd years. This does not make us immune to the same rules of employment that blue collar workers face, like technological unemployment or the inevitable class struggle between employer and employee. This post by Tenured Radical about her computer troubles from over the weekend reminded me of Henry George’s complaint that industrial workers had been reduced to “mere feeders of machines.”

At the same time, there’s one way that I really do hope to be different from the milkman. Unlike milkmen, I hope my chosen profession continues to be practiced beyond a boutique existence long after my career has ended. If anyone has studied the demise of milkmen in America, I’d be interested in reading their work. If I had to guess though, I’d say that milkmen were probably victims of better refrigerated transport. It became cheaper to make milk on vast dairy farms and keep it cold for hundreds of miles than to squeeze it fresh and send it down the street. Yes, I know milk delivery is still a boutique operation in some places, but most people aren’t willing to pay that much more for a better product.

Will the college students of the future be willing to pay more for a better education? Will they even be able to pay more for a better education? Earlier this summer I wrote:

Seriously, the primary reason that I don’t go totally Luddite on this entire profession is that if given the opportunity, I don’t think the average bean counter is going to remake the university very well at all.

I still believe that, but now I’m afraid that the vast majority of both administrators and college students couldn’t care less. If I’m right, that should be enough to make you empathize with working people of all kinds. Especially milkmen.

Perhaps we can all double as psychiatrists, just like this milkman did.

Is it time for professors to start banning e-books in their classes?

UD has a link up this morning to an article about banning laptops in classrooms at Case Western which is actually about a lot more than banning laptops at Case Western. It’s about a clash of cultures:

“I feel as if every student should be in charge of his or her own learning,” Patel explained. “Every student should have the opportunity to take notes in the manner that is best for them, be it with a pencil and paper, iPad and stylus, or laptop computer.”

While many university community members may continue to disagree on the validity of technology in the classroom, the growing place technology has in our lives and society cannot be ignored.

I agree. And since it can’t be ignored, I think it’s time to ask whether they’re going to live in our culture or whether we’re going to have to live in their’s.

Ever since I saw my first textbook on a phone earlier this semester, I’ve been thinking a lot about the costs and benefits of electronic textbooks. On the one hand, if students can get an expensive textbook at a lower price, then that’s a good thing. I’m also sympathetic to the notion that students shouldn’t have to break their backs carrying thirty pounds of textbooks around campus.

However, I’m still increasingly convinced that the costs of e-texts significantly outweigh the benefits. The first cost is distraction. Earlier this week, I found out that my publisher has accepted my completed draft of a short text on late American industrialization with minor revisions (so look for Industrialization and the Transformation of America, 1865-1919 by yours truly coming next fall to a university bookstore near you). One of the revisions my editor wants is for me to put links into the electronic version, links to stable websites that reveal the source material or supplement the narrative. On one hand, it’s nice to know that interested people can find interesting resources inspired by my text. On the other hand, surfing in the middle of the book is going to kill the narrative arc of the whole thing.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if students are reading it at home, but if you actually teach your texts (like I do in upper level classes) this could be the end of the world, not because I expect students to read the whole text during the fifty minute period but because their phones or their iPads can do the same things that laptops do. Students can check Facebook or shop for shoes as easily on a tablet computer as they can on a laptop. Think about it: if you ban laptops in class already, banning e-textbook readers is the next logical step.

We historians also should have a problem with footnotes: not in teh text, but in our papers. I’ve covered this one before, but it bears repeating: at the moment, many e-texts don’t have page numbers, which means they can’t be cited with the precision that our profession demands. But there’s also the problem of platform consolidation. Currently, e-textbook companies have to adapt their work for multiple platforms: Android, Windows, etc. What happens if e-books all get page numbers, but the pages numbers end up being different in different versions of the same text? Just try checking for plagiarism then!

I’ll offer one exception to this ban e-textbook rule though: If you don’t actually teach the textbook you assign, then it really doesn’t matter how they students read it, does it? According to a recent PIRG survey, 70% of students have not bought a textbook because they thought it was too expensive. How they can pass the class without the textbook is a mystery to me, but then again, I’m a historian. I don’t assign a traditional survey text anymore, and all my papers and discussions are based on what the students are supposed to read. The students who can pass the course without the textbook are probably enrolled with professors who read their PowerPoint slides and from the textbook verbatim during lectures anyways.*

* That last link is via UD again.

More paying students, fewer teachers to pay.

The new issue of the AAUP magazine Academe is out. It’s on the subject of “The Humanities,” and it’s very, very good. I might do some more blogging from it when I get my paper copy, but for now let me simply call your attention to this review of several recent titles in the “higher education is doomed” genre by Ellen Schrecker:

The readers of Academe need no reminder about the execrable working conditions and inadequate remuneration of the men and (mostly) women with contingent appointments. For Hacker and Dreifus, outrage is the only response: “It is immoral and unseemly to have a person teaching exactly the same class as an ensconced faculty member, but for one-sixth the pay.” (Emphasis in original.)

But it’s not the “ensconced” faculty member’s fault.

Thank you so much for that last part, Ellen. Perhaps it’s self-evident to all of us with tenure that we actually prefer more tenured colleagues to less (if for no other reason to spread the committee work around), so we don’t say that enough. It should also be self-evident that a better-paid professor is a happier professor and a happier professor can concentrate more on every aspect of their work, including teaching.

Of course, anyone who’s read Bousquet or any other higher education tomes by authors who actually know what they’re talking about can tell you that the growth of adjuncts in the academy dates from the 1970s. The online learning gold rush, however, is of much more recent vintage, and it should go without saying that the way it’s being done now isn’t exactly helping the cause of education either.

Nevertheless, it’s still nice to see someone say that too every once in a while, which is why Donald Eastman, the President of Eckerd College in Florida, is my new hero. Do yourself a favor and read his entire piece from the St. Petersburg Times after you finish reading this post. For now though, here’s a taste:

To be sure, online learning has its place. But for most students, it is a last resort. For those who have no other options, who cannot get to a classroom because of time or distance barriers, online instruction has to suffice, and thank goodness for it. Adult students who simply have neither the time nor the scheduling flexibility to attend classes are understandably the primary users of online course work.

Increasingly, however, public universities expect traditionally aged students to take online courses because of lack of space. This year the Florida Legislature passed the Digital Learning Now Act, which mandates that all high school students take at least one class online to graduate — as if high school students need to be required to use the Internet!

This is precisely why UD calls online education the “poor white trash” of academia. But since this has always been a labor blog, I want to talk about who’s teaching the classes rather than who’s taking them. While I know a few tenure track faculty who’ve taken the plunge into full online learning (often on the side to supplement their not quite stellar incomes), for the most part it’s the adjuncts who teach these kinds of courses. [The University of Phoenix, if I remember it right, is based on a model where EVERYONE is an adjunct.]

Seriously, who has the time to learn a new system when you have committees, research, shared governance issues and all your existing face-to-face classes to teach already? I’ve become an online education Quaker precisely because I’m so busy trying to be the best face-to-face teacher I can be, and because I like to leave as much of my work as possible at the office when I leave for the day. Nevertheless, I’m still concerned about how online education plays out around academia because I care about educational quality.

Leave online education entirely to administrators, the non-tenured and the non-tenurable and educational concerns will inevitably be squashed by the drive to save money during our new austerity. It won’t be sold as austerity, though. It will be sold as efficiency. [There's that "MBA thinking" again!] Check this out from some tech guy writing in IHE:

[A]ctively seek vendors as partners that can provide technology to “scale” any of your existing processes out of the classroom — marketing and communication, financial aid, student services, community building, and student success. Over the past 30 years or so, technology has been used within the existing educational model and within the operating framework of our institutions. Institutions need to look at technology differently — they need to see it as an opportunity to transform what they do and help them adapt.

“Scale” classroom teaching and you get hundreds of students enrolled in a single online class. More paying students, fewer teachers to pay. That’s our online future. A single adjunct overseeing hundreds of students taking multiple choice tests may be good for the bottom line, but it’s not good for education. And if we really care about education, that’s precisely the sort of thing that we all need to work to stop.