Wikipedia Day

A quick event announcement. On Saturday, February 23 Wikimedia New York City is holding a 12th birthday party for Wikipedia. It will be held at my graduate program NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. That is an interesting place to visit if they allow a tour while you’re there. I won’t be able to make it unfortunately, but I hope some of you might be able to.

Best, Chris

Details:

Event Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Wikipedia_Day

Registration: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDJLZ2Fsemh5alczRFlidTBlUWRjWlE6MA

More than a MOOC (and probably longer)

The discussion about MOOCs brings in a lot more than just Massively Open Online Courses.  Actually, I would venture to say that MOOCs are NOT the issue.  A MOOC is just a platform, as Caufield so clearly articulated (here) “…the best way to think of a MOOC isn’t really as a class brought to your doorstep — it’s more a textbook with ambitions…”  To think that they are more than that misses what I think is a huge part of education (communication & relationships – more on that below), but MOOCs do force discussion of the problems in higher (and K-12) education today (i.e., cost, access, standardization, and what a college degree “is”) – and offer another option.

First, what would a MOOC decree be worth? – does a degree from Udacity hold the same marketplace value as one from a standard public university?  I doubt it –  a degree from Phoenix does not have the same weight as one from any state school. It isn’t cheaper for students if they have to go back to school to get another degree (or take more courses to get the accredited credit).

On the surface, MOOCs seem like a solution to the financial problems facing higher education.  Show thousands of students a series of recorded lectures, keep the documentation (tests, discussion boards), and that’s a wrap!  Oh, I mean, class!  Cheap will attract some, but only if that degree can get the job.  Otherwise, it will continue to attract people who are “just interested” – and that’s fine!

Secondly, Thomas notes that MOOCs could push the non-elite colleges into precarious positions, but only if a MOOC degree is valued as a public college. Higher education is a “hostage situation” for most people (Shirky’s term); it’s the stamp needed to get the job interview.  I am not arguing for or against this system, but until MOOC degrees are accredited and respected as standard ones, I don’t see the threat.

Colleges realize this and have responded with online courses.  The CUNY Online Bachelor’s is one of many examples of fully online programs – with the flexibility of MOOCs, but with full accreditation, but they are considerably more expensive (per class, Udacity = $150, CUNY = $920, Lansing Community College= $324.  So a bachelors is $6,000 at Udacity, $27,600 at CUNY, and $9,720 at LCC).  It’s not a solution – $27,600 is a lot of money for a student, and CUNY is under emormous financial pressure, but CUNY is a recognized and respected institution.  Which means I’ve said families should have to pay (per adult) for access in to job interviews (until government funding increases, Bustillos puts it perfectly, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?”).  That’s not something that I want to say, but find myself trapped into it.

There are many ways institutions can cut costs without operating without instructors, but the first step has to be reconciling admin and faculty goals (though this isn’t a post about that), and justifying why we exist at all.  It’s no surprise that high-stakes testing and MOOCs are appearing at the same time – a time when education is being distilled into a final exam…  This is a time when we must start articulating why education is valuable beyond memorizing facts and visiting chat rooms.

Education depends on communication and relationships.  Online courses allow both of these to be present and built – mediated by technology; instructors provide the scaffolding and framework (and redirection) that students need to navigate seemingly endless information. I would guess that the ratio of good teachers to mediocre (or bad) is about the same from face to face vs. online.  But, since student-centered teaching (which I correlate with “good” teaching) requires student-student, student-faculty AND faculty-student interactions, I’m not convinced MOOCs have the capacity to be student-centered.

Likewise, online programs (as opposed to MOOCs) have admissions requirements. Students have to justify why online is a good fit and why they want a degree.   They have to gain membership into a community and have their prior education validated, and show that they the skills necessary to keep up with course work.  Admissions also allows the institution to keep track of its students and validate all of the coursework for the degree.  The no-admissions policies can’t create the same community.  (This is not an endorsement for huge administrative staffs.)

I don’t have any funding solutions for higher education, but I know we can validate our existence by showing that the relationships, direction, and personalized communication make a difference in education, and link this to accreditation, MOOCs will have no more power than a good documentary.

(here are my thoughts on why MOOCs will not bring better education to Africa).

Response to Scheinfeldt’s “Third way”

Not sure if this is the kind of blogging we are doing on this site … but I had kind of a visceral reaction to Scheinfeld’s “Toward a Third Way: Rethinking Academic Employment” AND since I have trouble with blog-writing motivation I thought I’d channel some of my fiery reaction here.

Scheinfeldt raises an important point: the work done by digital humanists doesn’t fit with current models of academic employment. In particular, he is concerned with tenure – that most lauded, most prestigious form of academic employment. So, he asks: what are we (in the digital humanities) to do?

Instead of exploring the potentially democratizing effects of work in the digital humanities (the potential for de-commodification of knowledge, creating space for more people to access and produce/contribute to knowledge) he essentially argues that we need to surrender DH work to the market. He says he cringes when he realizes this is what he is arguing, but he argues it anyway. If only we could get rid of the conservative, stuffy job security tenure provides we could create an environment where those who excel at digital humanities work will rise to the top and convince everyone of their value. REALLY??

Scheinfeldt identifies real problems with tenure that really do need to be addressed, namely that the expectations for work which help you to achieve tenure are outdated, and that tenured positions are disappearing. He says – most Americans (“the 99%”) don’t have job security but are probably able to keep their jobs if they are good at them – why should academics think they’re special? This is soooo not the point. EVERYONE should have job security, and the University is one of those public institutions where a high degree of job security once existed. This makes it an important site of the struggle to defend job security as privatization and marketization encroach on all sorts of public institutions. To surrender to these forces would be a disservice to workers everywhere (not an act of solidarity, as Scheinfeldt perversely suggests). In the true style of a “third way“, he uses language familiar to the left (rejecting hierarchies! smashing conservatism!) while making fundamentally right-wing arguments.

There are, of course, important problems with the fact that only an elite crew of University workers get the type of job security that tenured faculty get. So the task should be to get that job security for everyone – to insist that DH “work” AND “scholarship” be paid on par with other faculty, to refuse to let universities rely on poorly paid insecure adjuncts (who Scheinfeldt is quick to distance himself from), to reject grant-to-grant funding models which infringe on the ability of workers to dictate the direction of their work. The production of knowledge suffers when it is surrendered to the market. And the “prestige” and “value” of DH work won’t come from convincing higher-ups to change their minds, it will come from winning demands for equal pay. Librarians don’t feel “depressed and embarrassed” because their positions are not prestigious, they feel that way because they are undervalued in pay (which also explains why their positions are not considered prestigious in case that is, in fact, felt to be the root of the problem). Just because the jobs of many prestigious Americans (Scheinfeldt cites lawyers) are vulnerable to losses suffered by the firm doesn’t mean theirs or anyone else’s should be. By this logic, we should all be joining the race to the lowest common denominator: no job security, and instead trying to work “creatively” with the scraps we are thrown (which Scheinfeldt insists we can and should do by trying to make grant-based funding, an inherently insecure form of funding, work for creating “relative” security. No thanks!).

Scheinfeldt characterizes the desire many have for tenure as an issue of people with PhD’s “flattering [their] biases and self-image.” I say it is much more complicated than this and has much more to do with a concern for material well-being (hello, we have debts!)(and so does everyone else!). Perhaps inadvertently, Scheinfeldt provides us with a great example of the potentially dangerous role DH could play in accelerating and intensifying the neoliberalization of Universities. I think we need to insist on imagining other ways to do things.

Workshops and Motivator Sign-Ups

Hi All:

Most of you have accepted the invitation to join the Commons group affiliated with this course (you should have all gotten an invite; if you haven’t, let us know). If you haven’t, please do so.

Remember, the group is private but the blog is public (though you can always pw protect a post). We intend to use the group functionality primarily for communications (so the email that you will have gotten directing you to this post will in the future instead be posted to the group forum– make sure your email options within the group are set appropriately so that you are not missing anything!) and the occasional posting of documents. It’s totally okay for there to be some overlap between what happens there and here. Just be aware of both spaces.

As soon as you can, please do the following to help get things going for the semester.

  • Go here to choose a class meeting for which you will be the “motivator.” Remember, to motivate means to write a provocative post at least two nights before we meet (remember to categorize appropriately!) and then to lead the discussion of the readings (or, in some cases, the activity we did during the previous week). First come, first served on that.
  • Visit here to choose which workshops you feel you would like to attend this semester. There’s a  lot of moving parts with these workshops, including coordinating with other classes, so bear with us as we nail things down. If you would like to see a workshop that is NOT on the list at that link, then just leave a comment on this post, and we’ll look into whether it’s feasible or not.
  • Visit here to give us a general sense of when you’re available for the workshops this semester.
  • Visit here and leave a brief bio and some links, which we will integrate into the page on a rolling basis.

I think that’s all; as always, holler (Luke and Chris) with any questions or concerns!

Welcome to Core II

ComputerLab
Progress!!

Welcome to the second core course of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program at the CUNY Grad Center. We’re looking forward to all the work that’s going to go into developing this space and your contributions to true progress in academic technology.

 

Photo Credits
Carol Highsmith, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011636019/
Kristina Hoeppner, http://www.flickr.com/photos/4nitsirk/5929948908/