Book Review 69: DIY U -- Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

There are two basic options the way I see it: fundamentally change the way higher education is delivered, or resign ourselves to never having enough of it.

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DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz is an interesting book that feels a bit uneven. It’s really two different books -- one on the history of higher education and the conditions that have led to crazy price increases, and one about the alternatives to traditional higher education. I think my main problem with the book is that way it’s split. I picked it up expecting the book to be primarily about how individuals can completely change our current higher education system to make it more affordable, equitable, and effective for the future of our economy by embracing new technology and ways of thinking. I thought it would be more about the Do-It-Yourself University and the tools, peopel and organization that make that possible, than it turned out to be. There's definitely some of that. The problem is that it takes too long to get there in the text.

It seems like the author spends too much time building a case for changes to the system. I don’t think she needs to do that for this book. While some of it is needed, that fact that the reader has chosen to read this book already indicates they are interested in learning about different approaches.

That said, the sections where she builds the case and goes over the history of the higher education is still interesting and worth reading.

With those expectations appropriately set I can recommend the book, especially for someone who is interested in how we got where we are today.

At its heart, the book is about the “Edupunk” movement:

"Edupunk is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions, and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission," is the opening salvo of his [Jim Groom’s] first e-mail to me.

"Higher education has become a given for most high school students in our culture, and the fact that they have to pay out the nose has become a kind of unquestioned necessity to secure a job. But as we are increasingly seeing with big media, newspapers, and the like—traditional modes of information distribution are being circumvented, and higher education is just as as vulnerable in this new landscape... There remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of how easy it is to publish, share, teach, and even apprentice one another outside of the traditional logic of institutions. "

What edupunk—DIY education, if you will—promises is an evolution from expensive institutions to expansive networks; it aims to fulfill the promise of universal education, but only by leaving the university behind. Educational futurist John Seely Brown talks about "open participatory learning ecosystems.'"' Alec Couros at the University of Saskatchewan calls my blend of news sources contacts on Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and e-mail a "personal learning network."

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I found the author’s discussion of the history of higher education to be quite interesting. I never gave much thought the idea that today’s most prestigious universities weren’t that way for most of their history.

Any college that trumpets its "centuries-long tradition of academic excellence," however, is lying. Colonial colleges were established long before high schools, so they often filled classes with barely literate fourteen- or fifteen year-olds. Throughout the nineteenth century, "Nowhere were really challenging intellectual demands being placed upon [students]," Rudolph states flatly, and as late as 1904, "Dean Briggs of Harvard announced his preference for moderate intelligence'," preferring well-mannered and well-rounded gentlemen to grinds. Along with low standards, there was "little emphasis on completing degrees" well into the nineteenth century, writes University of Kentucky historian John R.Theun in his 2004 book A History of American Higher Education, something of a sequel to Rudolph's work. Students felt free to leave after a year or two of classes. The current college dropout rate of nearly 50 percent is actually pretty good by historic standards. Only a handful of colleges have ever done better.

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It’s helpful to keep this in mind. Traditional higher education is the standard in our country by tradition. And yet that tradition is only decades -- not centuries -- old.

A university degree is typically considered the way to advance and make life better in our society. The author reports that today that’s not the case. A degree doesn’t help someone advance; it just prevents them from falling behind. She explains that the value of a degree has declined relative to the cost of obtaining one. She also quotes a sociologist who calls financial aid a form of welfare and income redistribution, which is an interesting way to look at it.

Unfortunately, education alone has been the program, more or less, since the 1970s. Stanford sociologist Mitchell Stevens has called federal higher-education aid America's most ambitious social welfare program. "We don't call it welfare—heaven forbid! That's one of the reasons it's so popular. But if you think of welfare as a means of redistributing social resources or public wealth, there's no question this is a primary method in the post-World War II era," Stevens says. "In the twentieth century the federal government worked systematically to allow as many people as possible to lead middle-class lives. Obama's proposal for a majority of Americans to get a degree by 2025 is only an extension of a fifty-year-long federal government commitment to feeding prosperity through access, by investing in campuses and putting money in college students' pockets in the form of grants and federally subsidized or guaranteed loans." This is Becker's human-capital theory at work: invest in our young people and they will yield a return both for themselves and for the nation at large.

The problem is that it hasn't worked. In the decades since a BA became the primary visa for entry into the middle class, the middle class has only gotten smaller. We often hear about the $1 million average lifetime income premium for a college diploma." But if you look at median incomes by education since 1970, there's no increasing return to a college degree to go with the increased cost. There's a steep decline in the incomes of less-educated workers combined with flat or declining income for more-educated workers. That is, the noncollege penalty is rising, not the college reward.

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One of the items that makes a degree so important is just that -- the degree. It’s that it signals that the holder has completed the education process. Any plan or alternative to the traditional system that does not include that BA is doomed to failure regardless of how much or little education participant receives in an alternative system.

The signaling hypothesis says that whatever work earns you the diploma doesn't really matter. College is nothing more than an elaborate and expensive mechanism for employers to identify the people who were smarter and harder workers and had all the social advantages in the first place, and those people then get the higher paying jobs. Now that it's illegal to discriminate in employment by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, judging people by where and how much they went to school is just about the only acceptable form of prejudice left.

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A popular alternative that always comes up in discussions about how to fix the higher education system is to rely on more Community College, Vo-Tech, Apprenticeship programs, alternatives. They cost less, can provide skills people can use right away, provide more practical education than many University programs, offer alternative structures, and may be better suited for those whose expertise is not academic.

It seems like this is a great solution. When surveyed, people generally agree that this a great idea -- for other people’s children. Not for their own.

Carnevale has worked in the House, in the Senate, and for the AFL-CIO. He was named by President Clinton to chair the National Commission on Employment Policy and by Bush the younger to work on a similar commission, and he's also advised President Obama. Under Clinton, Carnevale was caught up in the sticky politics of trying to advocate paths other than four-year college. Clinton signed the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities work-based learning and partnerships. But key provisions of the bill—including the use of the word 'apprenticeship"—were weakened in Congress. "We took it to the Hill and the people who care about poor people and minorities said to US, 'Look. There are two education systems in America: one where people go to college and live happily ever after and the other, where people don't, and struggle. The worst thing that can happen IS that we have two systems that work, because we all know who's going to be in the other one.'" In other words, explicit vocational tracking is a no-no even if the outcomes for poor people are better, because they enshrine social divisions in law, something Americans have always been wary wary of doing. "In the end the truth is the public rejected the idea," of school-to-work, says Carnevale. "In all the focus groups, we asked people: do you think everybody needs to go to college? Seventy to eighty percent said no. But what we forgot to ask, and asked a few years later, was, Should your kid go to college? Eighty-five percent said yes."

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The solution, the author suggests, is likely somewhere in between. Restructuring the system requires a mix of Universities, for-profit colleges, and personal learning networks. Online resources make more of this possible every day. Universities provide credibility and employ thousands of brilliant people and knowledge experts. They play a major role in credentialing students. The question about how to mix all these different resources together for maximum effectiveness and to drive costs down.

Cost cutting in public higher education, it should be clear, is a moral imperative. State and federal subsidies helped create the tuition monster, and state and federal governments can combat it I if they work in partnership with institutional leaders—not with across-the-board, feast-or-famine cuts, but with rational changes that focus on incentives for affordability and productivity Families and students have a role to play as well. They need to become more informed consumers who aren't afraid to ask tough questions about the value of their degree.

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The same is happening in education. Since 2001, a growing i movement, from MIT, Stanford, and hundreds of other universities worldwide to insurgent bloggers and entrepreneurs barely out of school themselves, is looking to social media to transform higher education. They're releasing educational content for free to the world and enlisting computers as tutors. Google has scanned and digitized seven million books. Wikipedia users have created the world's largest encyclopedia.YouTube Edu and iTunes U have made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free.

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Online education is becoming more of a possibility every day. Even though the web has been accessible by the general public for more than 15 years, we are still only beginning to understand how to use it. We continue to put lectures online and try to use existing pedagogies in online university education, but it’s similar to how people thought after the invention of automobiles when we still referred to them as horse-less carriages. It requires new ways of thinking about and presenting material. Done well, it can have a transformative effect.

Online classes like these are an example of what David Wiley at BYU calls the "polo parable."Think about playing polo with ponies on a field, versus water polo in a pool. "They're both called polo and at a high level they're both the same activity," he says. "But no person in their right mind would think you can take a playbook and run the same strategies as in the pool. The idea that you can take tried and true teaching methods from the classroom onto the Internet and see success boggles my mind."

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Gardner Campbell, an open-education figure who was responsible for hiring Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington and currently teaches at Baylor University, does Wiley one better. He's argued in presentations that on the scale of disruptive technologies, the Internet is more than the printing press, it's the alphabet. "It's a new way of thinking. It's a meta-tool."

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The author does talk about a number of possible solutions, including expanding for-profit schools (which face some of their own perception troubles), start-ups partnering with existing small schools to leverage their accreditation,  and more.

For-profit colleges have led the way in innovations like self-paced, all-online programs, assessment-based learning, and student-focused customer service. They have the advantage of focusing exclusively on learning. They are free from the slightest hint of snobbery. John Holt, in his radical 1976 critique Instead of Education, speaks approvingly of the Berlitz language school, which judges itself by how well it serves everyone who wants to study, not by how much it discriminates in choosing students. He calls schools like these "schools for do-ers, which help people explore the world as they choose."

Dave Clinefelter, the provost of Kaplan University, would agree. Kaplan U has grown out of the test-prep company in just seven years I to enroll 68,000 students in associate's, bachelor's and master's degree programs on seventy campuses and online."Traditional universities : at yardsticks like how many students you denied entry to, what your peers think of you, and where your faculty published," he says. "We don't care about any of that. We care what our students learn and whether they get a job in their field. We want to be the best university in the world and we want to be able to prove it to people."

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A company called Straighterline already offers an important version of this idea: accredited online college courses for $399 per course, which includes ten hours of one-on-one tutoring. But the course credit is granted by just four small, unknown, community and for-profit colleges. This approach is half a step away from really blowing things up. It would just take a few more prestigious institutions getting on board to change the way people feel about online on-demand education.

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A complete program of education isn’t about going to a school for one thing. It’s about pulling together all sorts of different educations elements to enhance the learner’s knowledge, while still working to address the signalling issue.

The way I look at it, a complete personal learning plan ought to have four parts: finding a goal and the credentials or skills needed, formal study, experiential education, and building a personal learning network. Crabapple was kind enough to serve as my model and explain how she did each part her own way. '

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She includes a lot of resources in the book, and again, there’s a lot of useful bits in there. In fact, the last 15% of the book is all resources, bibliography, and Index. The book feels to me like it’s a collection of alot of stuff, rather than a straightforward story or how to get there. Still, if these are topics that interest you, it may well be worth reading the book. I did learn things.

I guess my problem here is that while it certainly has a lot of good points and information, they way it’s put together means that I can only give it an unenthusiastic recommendation.


You can find more of my book review here.

Pawn Stars and business lessons

Have you seen Pawn Stars?  It's basically a white-trash Antiques Road Show, but is oddly fascinating.

It's a reality show about a pawn shop in Las Vegas.  The folks on the show primarily come into the store to sell their items rather than pawn them. People sell family heirlooms, garage sale finds, and assorted things they have lying around the house.

There are reasons to watch it beyond the normal reality show train wreck -- the business lessons.  There are key things to learn about negotiation.

Don't name your price first.

When Rick buys anything from the customer, he always starts the negotiation by saying, "How much to do you want for it?" The customer names his price, and then Rick proceeds to talk them down.  Even if it was a price Rick was prepared to pay, he uses that as the benchmark to talk them down. The customer is never going to get the price they name.

Know the value of your item.  

Many times Rick has to bring in an expert to appraise and item because he's not familiar with it.  In some of those cases, the customer has an idea of the value, but is often wrong.  The only expert involved is the one Rick brings in.  Sometimes they're both surprised by the response.  Other times Rick might not even need and expert, but the customer has no idea what he even wants for the item.  Throughout most of the exchanges, the customer is at a disadvantage, and Rick controls the negotiation.  If you don't know they value of your item, there's no way you can be sure your're getting a good deal.

Be prepared to walk away.

Most of the time customers aren't in a position to say no.  Rick will often say no to a customer if he doesn't think he can sell an item.  Many of the customers are not willing to walkaway with  nothing. They will take as little at 10% of what they wanted sometimes.  If you can't walk away, you can't get a good deal.

Understand what your negotiating partner wants.

Rick almost always understands what his customers really need. They either need to quickly get money or they need to get stuff out of their house. His customers don't always understand Rick's needs.  Rick will tell customer what he claims he needs.  He needs to buy the item, at a low enough price to resell it. Based on the prices he cites, he expects to make 75% to 100% markup on the items he buys. And he expects items will often take a while to sell.  Customers are surprised at this, and they are not prepared to negotiate accordingly.  Whether or not that's a reasonable margin  may be a point to argue, but if the customer doesn't understand that, they are not as prepared.

There's a lot to learn about negotiating in this show. You can also learn some interesting things about the trinkets people bring in to sell.  And, of course, it's just plain good entertainment.

Are you a fan of the show? What lessons do you think viewers can learn from it?

Education and Redesign

I attended a panel discussion on how technology cna improve education and decrease complaints from kids that they are bored in school. It seemed like a good topic, but the dicussion didn't go all that well.

The panelists agreed that we have problems. Schools are designed with a factory mentality of standardizing education by the age of the child, with the goal being they obtain a certain amount of educational knowledge and skill based on a certain number of days in the seat at school.  Another panelist said the problem isn't that the school system is broken; it's that it is working exactly the way it was designed.

Okay, I can get behind that.  So what do we do?

Well, there was very little discussion of technology.  Sure, there were some comparisons to the way web companies iterate, and there was a request that companies design products specifically for education instead of repurposing business products, but that was pretty much it.

There were some disucssions about class size, core learning requirements, and other tweaks.  But that's the problem.  They articulated a number of ways to improves the current system.  Some of them could be big and expensive, but they would just improve the current system.

In other words, they won't solve the problem.

The problem they articulated is that there is a fundamental flaw with the very structure of the education system in this country.  You don't fix that by improving the current model; you fix it by getting rid of the current model altogether and implementing something that works.

There was a core disconnect between the problem they cited and the solutions they proposed.

I was waiting for one person to offer an alternative model.  Or at least explain how technology will make the big difference, since that was ostensibly the reason we were there.  But no one did.

This is a discussion that has been going on for years, and we are still calling for a new model without actually seeing on.

I suppose folks avoid talking about actual solutions like a new model because it will quickly be ripped apart in the press, the state house, and the local school boards.  If you can't implement an awesome plan, and I believe the varied politics will prevent that implementation, then why throw a carreer away advocating a plan?

It's much easier to carefully articualte the problem.

A Wall of Books Part 05: Amazon Kindle

Three years ago, we set out to design and build an entirely new class of device—a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle.

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Amazon.com just announced their new e-Book reader, the Kindle.

It's an intriguing product, that has me torn. The "War on Paper" side of me thinks it's about time we saw a compelling e-Book solution. The "Book Whore" side of me can't imagine giving up my precious tomes.

The Kindle website had plenty of detail and comments from authors extolling the virtues of the Kindle. It's and impressive site.

The prouduct does some interesting thing. It uses digital paper which has a completely different look than a laptop or PDA screen. I've seen these displays on the Sony e-Book reader and it is impressive technology. It's designed to be as clear as paper even in full sun.

The Kindle also includes built-in Sprint EVDO that you don't pay for. It's used to buy e-Books from Amazon, or to download subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, or blogs. There is not monthly or one time charge for the online service. Presumably, Sprint get a piece of the sale when you buy something from Amazon, or subscribe to a magazine or blog through the Kindle. The benefit here, though, is that you can get a new book in a couple minutes anytime you happen to be on the Sprint network.

You can also annotate content on your Kindle, and apparently access those annotations on your PC. I like the idea of this feature a lot. When I read books and review them for this blog, I mark passages while I read, then I have to transcribe them into a word processor, then trim them down, and finally incorporate them into my content. The Kindle could make this easier.

But I like holding my books. And I like seeing them on the shelf. And I like the look of the covers and the feel in my hands. At the same time, if I could have a simple, light weight, and small device in my bag, that would simplify things, too.

So I'm torn on the question of using it for books.

Magazines, however, have a much stronger appeal. When I finish reading a magazine, I throw it out. I already read several magazines on my Tablet PC, so switching to the Kindle would be easy.

The problem with magazines, though, is that the Kindle doesn't do color. The smaller screen is great for text, but graphics intensive magazines like Wired wouldn't translate well onto the Kindle screen. For more text focused magazines, like the Atlantic Monthly, it would be a great choice.

It also supports newspaper subscriptions. If I regularly read a news paper front to back, this would be a great option. It will also automatically download subscriptions as soon as the issues come out. If I had a subway or train commute, this would be a great feature.

The biggest problem, though, may be the price point. It's $400. That's a bit much for my taste right now, especially since I would have to buy content for it, too, and it still wouldn't stop me from buying books.

I would be interested if Amazon combined this with a book purchase. For example, if when you purchased the paper based book you had the option of buy the electronic version as well, for just a dollar or two more. Then it's more compelling.

For now, though, I would find it most useful for my transitory reading. And I don't do enough of that to justify the cost.

Beyond my use, though, I do see tremendous potential for success.

The college text book market has struggled with electronic content for years. They don't want to offer all their books in electronic format because students could put it on multiple PCs. So they continue to charge outlandish prices for text books student might only need for a few months.

A product like the Kindle makes electronic text books simpler to implement. Instead of selling a CD student might copy onto multiple PCs, or offering a file on line that might be copied several times, students can purchase the book through Amazon and it will be available only to their Kindle. It would still be backed up on Amazon's servers, but this might be the way to address text book companies' concerns about piracy. If you can't get the book out of that Kindle, it's easier to make sure each student buys their own.

School text books will ultimately drive the adoption of e-Book technology. The launch of the Kindle may not be the event that does it, though. I've been predicting a lawsuit for a while though, that may boost the e-Book industry.

Kids in grade school and high school are carrying heavy loads. It's not uncommon for kids to have 20-40 pound of books on their backs. That may not be a big deal to an adult, but some of these kids may only weigh 50-100 pounds. Those text books represent a significant percentage of a kid's body weight. Someone will get injured and sue the schools and text book makers. Similar suits will pop up, possibly reaching class action status.

And the e-Book, in whatever flavor it's in at that point, will be the solution.

I applaud Amazon for the Kindle. It's a great step forward. I'm just not sure it's the step I want to take yet.

Amero to get New Trial

Back in January, I posted the story about Julie Amero, a substitute teacher and novice computer user who was being railroaded into a potential 40 year prison sentence by the state of CT over some pornographic images that appeared on her classroom computer.

Her conviction and sentence appeared to have more to do with a school district trying to cover up its own technological incompetence and officials determined to appear tough on pedophiles, regardless of whether or not there are any actual pedophiles involved in the case.

It looks like cooler heads have prevailed in swell of fierce push back from the Internet community and the public at large.

From the Seattle PI:

Teacher gets new trial on classroom porn
By STEPHANIE REITZ
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

NEW LONDON, Conn. -- A judge granted a new trial Wednesday for a former substitute teacher convicted of allowing students to view pornography on a classroom computer.

Prosecutors did not oppose the defense motion for a new trial for Julie Amero, 40, who had faced up to 40 years in prison after her January conviction. Prosecutors had argued that Amero visited the sites, then failed to shield children from seeing the images.

The computer was sent to a state laboratory after the trial, and the judge said Wednesday that those findings may contradict evidence presented by the state computer expert.

"The jury may have relied, at least in part, on that faulty information," said Judge Hillary B. Strackbein, who granted the request for a new trial.

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Based on what I've read of this case, the prosecutor should just drop the ridiculous charges altogether. But for now, not opposing the new trial is at least a start.

Apparently, College has Gotten too Cheap

Students today have so much stuff, they are abandoning dumpsters full at the end of school.

There are some interesting aspects to the volume of stuff college kids discard.

Some find anthropological significance in the mixture of the odd and humdrum.

A typical catch might include "hula hoops, dishes, a can opener, a couple of condoms and notebook paper," said Kim Yarbray, environmental sustainability coordinator at Guilford College, also in North Carolina. She sees it as a kind of symbol of the intersecting stages of life of college students: childhood playfulness, adolescent experimentation, the first tools for adults who must work and take care of themselves.

"Their whole life is right there," she said. "You can just see it in the things they choose to discard."

But mostly it's just an amazing volume of stuff they spend money on and then just get rid of some summer time.

Full Article here.

DAVIDSON, North Carolina (AP) -- With 1,700 students, Davidson College may be small. But you'd never know it when you see the stuff students leave behind at the end of the year.

In a large room at a fraternity house, stacks of clothing, furniture, lamps and electronics were already piling up days ahead of last Sunday's graduation. Mixed in were odds and ends that could only wind up together in a college trash pile: a pair of giant Homer Simpson slippers; a collection of Pokemon cards; a batch of fashion disaster dresses you can only hope were costumes from a campus theme party called the Five Dollar Prom.

College students have more possessions than ever, and in the frenzy of finals, commencement and last-gasp partying before the end of the school year, little time is left for an orderly move. Purging is often easier than shipping or storing.

...

Davidson isn't the only college trying to put its student left-behinds to better use. Next Saturday, up to 10,000 people are expected to descend on Penn State's Beaver Stadium to pick their way through 62 tons of student detritus at the annual "Trash to Treasure" sale, which has raised more than $200,000 for the United Way. Boston College collects up to 100,000 items annually for dozens of community groups. In the 15 years since its program started, the University of Michigan has channeled 123 tons of "gently used" student gear back to the community.

Programs also have sprung up in recent years at numerous other schools, among them Tufts, Santa Clara University, the University of Colorado, Furman University and Carleton College in Minnesota. Sometimes, student environmental groups are the driving force. But many colleges like the idea, too -- at least more than paying to haul it all away.

...

Mostly, however, the left-behind items are the predictable, timeless staples of college life: casual clothes, low-grade furniture, countless unopened Ramen noodles. Penn State's sale features about 4,000 carpets, along with stacks of sweaters and T-shirts running down a row 100 feet long and 3 feet wide.