I have a new favorite museum in America. It used to be the National Museum of American History, but I really think they’ve shot themselves in the foot in the course of remodeling and I’ll never forgive them for destroying their bookstore. The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, however, keeps getting better every time I see it.
I went back last Friday while I was in Detroit for the North American Labor History Conference. You go to the Henry Ford for the cars and their collection really is quite amazing.
1914 Model “T” Touring Car
1931 Duesenberg Model “J”
When I first went during the 90s, the museum just had lines and lines of cars with almost no explanation. Now, the cars are not only explained, they have some of the best computer enhancements to any museum exhibit that I have ever seen.
For example, there’s a station where you can simulate driving a Model “T’ as if it were a driving game. What it does is illustrate all the steps you have to take to get a Model “T” running and moving forward, including getting out of the car at one point. I knew all these things, but I never quite realized how hard it was until I played the game. Now I’ll never forget.
The museum’s “Driving America” exhibit, however, is a lot more than just cars:
Traffic Light, c. 1920.
McDonald’s Sign, c. 1950s.
It really is the social history of the car as well, which I find much more interesting than just car after car. The film in the middle of the exhibit was particularly good. To paraphrase one of the curators in that film, he said, “In order for a new technology to take hold, people have to be convinced to do something in an entirely different way.” That was really easy when cars became relatively cheap.
It also seems quite clear that I have completely geeked out when I get excited over a McCormick Reaper and early steam engines. But then again, look at what I’ve been publishing lately.
McCormick Reaper, c. 1850.
Newcomen Engine, c. 1760.
PS You should all order that book one way or another as I’ve pitched writing a prequel to that book to the same publisher, and they’re looking at how early sales and requests go before deciding whether they’re going to give me a contract.
At Nick Carr’s recommendation, I spent a good part of my last weekend of Spring Break reading Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. It’s an amazing piece of work, highlighting the historical cycling between openness and monopolistic control in radio, television, telephones, film and, of course, the Internet. I was incredibly impressed despite having read two other amazing books on communications technology relatively recently: The Information and Network Nation. [The current issue of the always terrific Lapham's Quarterly is on the same subject.]
Dedicated blogger that I am, I spent the whole time reading Wu thinking, “What are the ramifications of these concepts for education technology?” It was so useful to learn about the Kronos effect (the tendency of large companies to eat up smaller companies in order to forestall technological innovation which threatens their monopoly position) at just about the time Blackboard decided to buy out a couple of open source rivals. And thanks to Wu, I now think I finally understand what net neutrality is.
For my purposes though, I want to quote a very ordinary paragraph from Wu about the early film industry (p. 89, w/o the footnotes] and then explain why I think it’s actually really important for those of us in academia:
[William W.] Hodkinson [the founder of Paramount Pictures] believed in what is sometimes called craft, or authorial filmaking, wherein one creator did nearly everything, writing, directing, producing, and casting his own film. He was, in fact, among the original backers of a tradition that we identify now with directors like the Coen brothers, Peter Jackson, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola. In contrast [Adolph] Zukor [who took over from Hodkinson at Paramount] saw not craft but the latest methods of production as the true stock in trade. He would come to promote the “central producer” model, concentrating most of the decision-making authority in the producer rather than the director. With streamlined production and virtually guaranteed audiences, films could be grander and more elaborate than ever. It was a new idea for a cultural industry: there was no need to settle for the meagre profits of the nineteenth-century model still ruling the stage: with the twentieth-century methods of production, one could have a balance sheet to match.
That’s right, I’m not saying that professors are like Woody Allen because we’re all neurotic (although I certainly am). I’m saying that we are all Woody Allen because we are all auteurs. Our classes are a reflection of our visions. We write the script. We get to cast the books. We control what the audience sees and hears. I’d argue that this is by far the most satisfying aspect of working in academia because no matter how helpless the new age of austerity makes us feel, at least we can control our own classrooms.
Teaching online threatens that kind of control. For example, the university’s choice of an LMS determines what our students see and hear. In fact, it controls the entire nature of our interactions. More importantly, if Lasell College can tell professors exactly what parts of the LMS they must use, whatever control we have left is totally at the mercy of our employers. And while this post from Audrey Watters is a little bit over my head, the questions she suggests that administrations might start asking scare me to death because all the data that electronIc classrooms can provide might actually answer them:
What are students reading? What are they buying at the bookstore? What are they checking out of the library? How much time are they spending on course materials? How often do they interact with other students? What does that interaction entail? How often do they interact with faculty? What does that interaction entail? How do students respond to feedback? How’s attendance? How are grades — not just at the end of the term, but in an ongoing and real-time basis? What classes do students want to take? What classes should they take? What classes should the university offer? Can it build a recommendation engine to help make suggestions to students? What faculty should it hire? And what are those faculty doing?
While the privacy concerns she raises here certainly bother me, what scares me even more is the prospect of higher education being totally commodified. This would be triumph of commerce over art. While market forces certainly affect traditional education too, this level of commodification would be completely impossible in an all face-to-face world.
On the other hand, if there’s a lesson in Wu’s book it’s that technological walled gardens never last. Perhaps there’s another kind of online education, one that might make me want to rethink my attitude towards the whole practice. Imagine a world where professors could still be auteurs in their own electronic classrooms. They get to pick the LMS. They get to pick what bells and whistles they’ll use in class and can import new ones from outside the LMS if the ones on the Internet at large are better. They control the nature of the interactions between themselves and their students and can decide for themselves how and whether those interactions will be recorded.
Recent visitors to this blog should recognize that my interest in educational technology didn’t come out of left field. For instance, I made fun of a book titled DIY U almost from the very first moment that I read about it. It must be out in paperback now because the author is recycling a big chunk of it in Utne Reader.
Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age, but the author’s arguments actually seem less awful than they did the last time I read them. Perhaps it’s the extraordinary awfulness of the stuff that I’ve been reading over the last few months. Perhaps it’s the author’s obvious enthusiasm for the educational technology future. She clearly believes that these developments will help the students of the future learn better.
I still don’t. Looking at my previous post on this book, it seems that this is the exact same paragraph that got me all riled up months ago:
Technology upsets the traditional hierarchies and categories of education. It can put the learner at the center of the educational process. Increasingly, this means students will decide what they want to learn, and when, where, and with whom; and they will learn by doing. Functions that have long hung together, like research and teaching, learning and assessment, or content, skills, accreditation, and socialization, can be delivered separately.
OK, but just because you CAN deliver them separately doesn’t necessarily mean that you SHOULD deliver them separately. Take the obvious pairing here of content and skills. Perhaps you can teach my discipline adequately online if you believe, as Harry Truman did, that history is just one damn fact after another. Make the students read something, then give them a multiple choice test on the content they just read. Voila! You’ve taught your students history. That’s the popular perspective of people who think that a college education is about nothing besides getting a credential.
I happen to believe otherwise. I’ve come to look at historical facts as a means to an end – actually a means to many ends, namely developing a skill set that helps students better understand the world around them today, not just the dead world of the past. That’s why I’m so smitten with whatever the opposite of the coverage model of history survey classes happens to be.
This ProfHacker post calls it “uncoverage.” I’m not sure I like that name, but nonetheless I really couldn’t agree with these sentiments more:
[D]epth and breadth should not be pitted against each other. In fact, breadth is a key component of uncoverage, the weft to the warp of understanding. Breadth means connecting disparate ideas, finding news ways to represent what is uncovered, and extending one’s conceptual reach to the implications of the material.
Taken together, depth and breadth mean moving away from the prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretations that go hand-in-hand with coverage.
Teach content and skills separately and you’ll be lucky if you get readily digestible interpretations and prepackaged observations. I suspect students will do nothing but spit back one damned fact after another. It’s no coincidence that Henry Adams was a historian first and a memoirist second.
Do people in other disciplines think like Adams too or are we historians special?
Brendan Gill is amazed by the fax machine (p. 112):
“In recent years, part of the twenty-second floor, which is the top floor of the building, has been given to a facsimile transmitting system, by means of which a copy hurtles back and forth all but instantaneously between our office and the Donnelly Press, in Chicago, where the magazine is printed. I would like to describe in precise detail the extraordinary process that makes it possible for me to make any number of fiddling little changes in my galleys as late as two o’clock on a Monday afternoon and have the finished magazine in my hands late the following morning, but I am totally incapable of doing so.”
I wonder how much one of those things cost when Gill published those words in 1975.
Gina Barreca at Brainstorm tipped me off to an interesting column by “Female Science Professor” about what professors do all day. Here’s the part that speaks to me most as a tenured humanist:
After tenure, our service commitments ramp up, and we serve on committees at our own university and beyond. Some of us edit journals and hold other positions in professional organizations. And we spend a lot of time advising students and other researchers, helping them reach their career goals. Most of us are busier after tenure than we were before. Universities get what they pay for: hard-working faculty members.
Yup. If you’ve been around enough to know a thing about the institution where you work, you want to try to make it a better place. Tenure is not a magical ticket that gives you permission to be an asshole for the next thirty years.
Barreca, however, carries this point an interesting direction that I didn’t see in female Science Professor’s original column:
When I started as an assistant professor 23 years ago, there was more help available for faculty. For example, an administrative assistant would photocopy the exams or make copies of articles for graduate students, and another might be assigned the responsibility of typing letters of recommendation written by faculty for both undergraduate and graduate students, not to mention making sure they were sent to the correct addresses.
In those days (can you hear the old-lady voice?) we were not expected to handle our own enrollments/permission numbers either, and I admit that I have not yet mastered the process even after years of attempting to wrestle Peoplesoft (our electronic system) to the ground.
Word processing has turned what used to be called “secretaries” into a dying profession everywhere, including academia. In academia, however, the professors haven’t exactly seen any of the benefits. This fact in no way justifies being mean to your administrative assistant for any reason. [See earlier sentence about how not to behave when you have tenure.] What it does mean though is that we should always notice where the benefits of technology flow, along with the extra work.
Stupid disposable cameras! Every picture I took at the Henry Ford Museum came out so bad I can’t post it here (except for an 1880 Grand Rapids Refrigerator Company icebox for some reason, and that’s only going to interest me). And yes, I was using the flash.
Lucky for me, the image I wanted most also happened to be on Flickr:
To me, that’s the perfect illustration of industrialization. You can’t depict an entire assembly line but the principle is all here in simplified form. You’re just following the parts, rather than the labor.
Besides, it’s not as if raw materials went in on one side of Highland Park plant and the final product came out the other, which raises the question of how the more complicated parts were built. Then it was at the out buildings. Now it’s Mexico or China. Having been on the Rouge Tour as well on Saturday I can report that they still make cars essentially the same way, only the number of parts in an “exploded” Ford F-150 would be too many to all hang on strings.
You really are missing a lot if you don’t read Boing Boing. Today, they just made my refrigerator research much easier by informing me that the entire archives of the magazine Popular Science are now online thanks to Google Books. That’s 137 years worth of issues, including the post-1923 copyrighted stuff. What makes this particularly useful is that currently you can hardly get anything from Scientific American online, even the pre-1923 stuff is blocked on Google Books.
At the moment, all you can do on their site is browse by keyword. However, following the advice of the commentators there, I started browsing by issue straight from Google Books and found refrigerators galore, like the one above.
I’m told the product they’re making is a crank shaft. The beauty of the film though is the coordination needed to turn the molten steel. Would there have been men surrounding the hammer if someone wasn’t filming them?
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