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May 14, 2013
The Walled Kindergarten
The inevitability of corporate content controls on MOOCs
Last week, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) president Robert Meister sent an open letter entitled "Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University?" to MOOC provider Coursera's CEO, Daphne Koller. The CUCFA has published the letter, which is sly, scathing, and deeply entertaining ...
May 5, 2013
Work With Me on Tinkering Platforms
I need undergrads interested in electronics looking for summer work
Under the aegis of the Georgia Tech branch of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, my PhD student Tom Jenkins and I have spent the year thinking about and making what we call "tinkering platforms"—those simple hardware prototyping systems like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and so forth. Our ...
March 13, 2013
A Lesson in Offloading
The logic of California higher education funding
Today California announced the introduction of legislation to require schools to accept credit for certain online courses, including those offered by MOOC providers like Udacity and Coursera. Let's review the logic of this process. Massively cut funding to California public education. Simultaneously, reduce public receipts, in part by offering massive ...
January 27, 2013
Two Billionaires on the University
Two conveniently juxtaposable views on universities today, from two billionaires. First, Michael Bloomberg made a $350 million commitment to his alma mater Johns Hopkins, which he credits with establishing his future as a leader. The contribution brings his total philanthropy to Johns Hopkins to $1.1 billion. In addition to funding ...
January 26, 2013
The Cost of Fees
Would I be doing what I do now had I been subject to today's University of California graduate tuition and fees? Probably not.
My graduate school experience was unusual, at least for someone pursuing a humanities PhD. While I did teach some, for much of the time I was in grad school I was also working in the technology and entertainment industries. In part this is because I was an immovable ass who ...
January 25, 2013
Open, New, Experimental, Aspirational
The rhetoric of "The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age"
The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age is a new document authored and signed by twelve scholars, technologists, and entrepreneurs including Duke professor and author Cathy Davidson, organizational technologist John Seely Brown, and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun. It's been making the rounds among those of ...
January 21, 2013
The Microethics of Informal University-Corporate Partnerships
What are universities giving away when we host hackathons, game jams, and the like?
Everyone knows that creativity and productivity are increasingly given away for free these days, particularly when it comes to technology products and services. For example: we contribute to the business of companies like Google and Facebook by giving them our data to resell, and we contribute to the business of ...
January 16, 2013
Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Solved Online
With funding tight, the state of California has turned to Udacity to provide MOOCs for students enrolled in remedial courses. But what is lost when public education is privatized?
January 5, 2013
Educational Hucksterism
Or, MOOCs are not an Educational Technology
My colleague Mark Guzdial argues that MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how learning works. In the post, Mark argues that MOOCs misconstrue educational practice, mistaking lectures and rote-exercises for the central activities of classes in higher education. Reading Mark's post I found myself reflecting on a seemingly unrelated article ...
December 7, 2012
The McDonald's of Higher Ed
Nigel Thrift wrote a somewhat mind-bending article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about the Cheesecake Factorization of higher education. You should read the whole thing, but here's a choice excerpt: What I think we will see is this same chain model gradually taking over higher education. There will still ...
November 24, 2012
Senior Associate Vice Provost of Something
On the top-heaviness of universities
An article in Business Week has been making the rounds this holiday weekend, The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio. It's about the top-heaviness of universities and the growth of senior and executive administration. The "money quote," so to speak, is this: At universities nationwide, employment of administrators jumped 60 percent from 1993 ...
November 8, 2012
Opener Than Thou
On MOOCs and Openness
In his keynote at the recent Educase conference, Internet zealot Clay Shirky made the case that MOOCs are not provocative because they are massive, but because they are open—except they are not really that open. So, I'm no big fan of Shirky's fanatical obsession with Internet openness, but he's right ...
July 25, 2012
Academia Still Isn't So Bad
On Terran Lane's "On Leaving Academia"
Over the last day or so, many of my Facebook friends have been posting UNM CS professor Terran Lane's reflections on leaving academia for a job at Google. It's worth a read, and raises some very valid points about the troubles with academia—pay, funding, job security, incentives, isolationism, work/life balance ...
July 23, 2012
The Rhetoric of MOOCs
On massiveness, students, and flipped classrooms
The annual Computing Research Association conference is taking place this week at Snowbird in Utah, and one of today's plenaries is about online eduction and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Reading the description of the session, I noticed two common positions on MOOCs that I think are rhetorically effective yet ...
July 18, 2012
MOOCs are Marketing
The question is, can they be more?
Earlier this week, Georgia Tech and eleven other higher education institutions announced their participation in Coursera, a company that hosts online courses. Reactions have been predictably dramatic, as exemplified by Jordan Weissman's panegyric in the Atlantic, titled The Single Most Important Experiment in Higher Education. I'll spare observations on the ...
June 21, 2012
Academia.edu Finders Fees
Is this ethical?
Yesterday I received the following email from Academia.edu, a social network for academics to share research papers. Hi Ian, We noticed that you are following the Computer Science research interest on Academia.edu. We wanted to mention that we are hiring software engineers at Academia.edu, and if you know any current ...
December 11, 2011
A New Philosophy for the 21st Century
Briggle and Frodeman in the Chronicle
Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman have written an excellent article for the Chronicle, A New Philosophy for the 21st Century. A stupid subscription is required, frustratingly, so let me excerpt some of the good bits for you here [update: here's a PDF]: It is time to reclaim the public role ...
October 15, 2011
Pearly Pixie Services Inc
A tooth fairy tool for parents
When your kids lose teeth, they may be inclined to write extensive letters to the tooth fairy, making specific requests or posing questions. While this is an endearing act to be sure, you'll want to stop short of penning a false reply. Instead, see this as an opportunity to educate ...
July 24, 2011
A Sorrow Blind to Itself
On Bad Writing and Isolationism in the Humanities
In Friday's New York Times, the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer wrote a scathing indictment of academic writing. An Academic Author's Unintentional Masterpiece takes aim at the well-known art historian Michael Fried, but it could easily have been written about almost any scholar in the humanities, veteran or novice, successful ...
March 9, 2011
Getting Real
On the Digital Humanities
Each year, the organizers of the Day of Digital Humanities ask participants the question, "How do you define the digital humanities?" Recently I browsed the many responses scholars have offered over the years. They vary widely, from simple ("Humanities by digital means") to definitive ("The application of information, computing, and ...
