A Lesson from Abigail Adams

I'm reading David McCullough's fine John Adams (2001), a biography of our second President.  In it, he describes when Adams was sent to Paris during the Revolution to help negotiate peace.  Adams invited his son, John Quincy Adams, to go with him.  John Quincy was reluctant, wanting instead to prepare for his entry into college.  However, Abigail Adams encouraged him to go, likening his travels to, as McCullough reports it, "a river that increases its volume the farther it flows from its source." (p. 226).  She goes on to tell her son:

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live.  It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.  The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.  Great necessities call out great virtues.  When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman." (ibid.)

 Of course, John Quincy Adams went on to become President himself.

Abigail Adams' advice suggests education itself should actively engage the learner in problems that give the learner experience in "contending with difficulties."  The large, passive lecture--be it in a campus lecture hall or a MOOC--does little to give students the opportunity to experience knowledge directly as a solution to a problem.  Both on campus and online we should encourage a problem-centered, inquiry-oriented approach to instruction that actively engages the student in confronting problems, seeking out information to inform action, and then applying knowledge to solve the problem, in the process identifying principles that can be generalized from the specific problem.

Technology gives us the means to offer this kind of learning at the scale we need in order to properly meet the needs of our students and the society in which they live.

Boomer Music

The other day, I was driving home from the grocery store when the local radio station--which specializes in hits from the 60s, 70s, and 80s--announced "Baby, I Need Your Lovin'" by the Four Tops, noting that it dated from 1964.

As I listened to this great oldie ("Baby, I need your lovin', GOT to have all your lovin'") it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I have been listening to the same music for the past half century.   I have some newer favorites--Jason Mraz, Jack Johnson, and others who have hit the scene at various mileposts along that 50-year highway--the music from my youth is still just as fresh and full of life as it was when I first heard it.  Maybe more so.

Why, though, is it still being played regularly on the radio?  When I was a boy in the 60s, my mother occasionally listened to old records (she had a good collection of 78s) from the thirties and forties, but I had no recollection of her regularly listening to music from 1915 or even 1925.  I heard a lot of old 1940s swing (Vaughn Monroe was one of her favorites) and the Ink Spots and Eddie Arnold, but nothing as old to her as I hear today on the radio.  I have to think that today's focus on the real oldies is a cultural phenomenon

So, why is there still a mass market for music a half-century old?  One factor, certainly, is that we Baby Boomers are a big generation.  We have market clout, even as we begin to retire.  Is there more than that?  Is the music somehow indicative of a cultural shift that started in the 1960s and gathered steam in the 1970s?  There may be something to that. 

Regardless, I am glad to still be able to hear "my" music out there in public.  Keeps one young and tapping one's toe, glad for car air conditioning so I can keep the windows up and the radio loud.

Investing in Geographic Diversity

Investing in geographic diversity on college campuses - The Washington Post

Writing in the Washington Post, social scientist Danielle Allen argues that colleges should take steps to ensure geographic diversity among its student body.  She notes the distinction between "bonding ties" that connect people of similar backgrounds and "bridging ties" that link people from different "social spaces" and goes on to explain:

Since the 1970s, scholars have been aware that bridging ties are especially powerful for generating knowledge transmission; more recently, scholars have argued that teams and communities that emphasize bridging ties and learn how to communicate across their differences outperform more homogenous teams and communities in the development and deployment of useful knowledge.

 Clearly, colleges have an opportunity to create bridging ties by purposefully mixing students both at the campus level and at the course level.

For those of us involved in online learning, the opportunities to integrate bridging ties into instructional design are even greater.  We can easily build geographic diversity into team assignments, for instance.  Even in cases where we ask students to develop projects within the context of their local job or community, geographically bridged communities can help bring new ideas into the student's local context.

Within our traditional campus curricula, we can use online technologies to bring into our classrooms students from other institutions--whether they be from different parts of our country or from different continents--to ensure a more diverse discussion, creating mutual benefits for the students at both institutions.

Dr. Allen's article is a reminder that, in today's world, the "distances" involved in in distance education are not something just to be overcome, but to be used to create a more powerful learning environment.

Hutchins and Dewey: Lessons for Education in a Material Society

An item in the news this week caught my attention.  As the Washington Post reported it,  Apple, now one of the largest corporations in the world, used a series offshore "entities" to avoid paying U.S. taxes on billions of dollars that it earned overseas.  While this kind of thing is fairly common among U.S. corporations, the Apple example was unprecedented because the overseas "entities" had no staff and no physical presence, according to Senate staffers.  Apple responded by saying that it paid all of the taxes due to the U.S., and that what it was doing was perfectly legal.  The real question, both sides seem to agree, is whether it should be legal.  What should be the obligation of a corporation to the society in which it operates?

The debate illustrates a dilemma that has become very visible in today's society:  What is the role of government in a democratic society?  Corporations have become increasingly powerful forces in our governmental processes these days.  The Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations unlimited ability to finance political campaigns is one example.  Apple's ability to legally hide otherwise taxable income from the citizens of the U.S. is another.  There seems to be a growing tension between social responsibility and material greed, a tension that could undermine the basic social contract on which democracy rests.

These are not new tensions.   In April 1941--as Europe was already at war and months before the U.S. joined in--University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins gave a series of lectures that were later collected in a book, Education for Freedom.  He noted the increasing materialism of American society, what he described as the doctrine "that material goods are an end in themselves" (p. 40) and that "the state is valuable if it helps to maximize profits, but is apparently to have little part in economic life beyond this and beyond fulfilling functions which are too big or too unprofitable for private enterprise” (p. 41).   What he said seventy years ago sounds awfully current today.

Hutchins, who had already established himself as an advocate for higher education reform, was alarmed by the broader, moral implications.  He wrote:

The state is not an end in itself, but a means to the virtue and intelligence, that is the happiness, of the citizens. It is held together by justice, through which it cares for the common good.  The common good, in fact, is little but justice most broadly conceived:  peace, order, and an equitable distribution of economic goods. Since the state is charged with responsibility for the common good, and since the production and distribution of material goods are one aspect of the common good, the economic order must be subordinate to the political order (p. 45).

The implication, he said,  is that “every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic, criteria” (p. 46).   The individual's ability to assert moral power is critical, according to Hutchins.  "If we can no nothing about society," he said,  "if we can have only opinion about it, and if one man’s opinion is as good as another’s, then we may decide to get what we irrationally want by the use of irrational means, namely force” (p.31).

The move toward materialism had very direct implications for higher education, in Hutchins' view.   ". . .The aim of education is wisdom and goodness," he wrote, adding, "Studies that do not bring us closer to this goal have no place in a university .  .  . If you deny this proposition, you take the responsibility of asserting that a rational view of the universe and one's role in it is no better than an irrational one or none at all" (p. 26-27).  The implications for the curriculum were clear:  "If, then, we are to have standards of social criticism and social action, and if they are to be anything but emotional standards, they must result from philosophical and historical study and from the habit of straight thinking therein" (p. 29).

Hutchins' solution was an extension of the "Great Books" curriculum that he had proposed for Chicago in the 1930s.  It was that "education be concerned first of all with ideas, with principles, with the abiding and the permanent" (p. 57)--the "cultivation of intellectual virtues" that "can be accomplished through the communication of our intellectual tradition and through training in the intellectual disciplines" (p 60).  The vehicle he proposed was a two-year general education baccalaureate degree emphasizing study of

. . . the great thinkers of the past and present, scientific, historical, and philosophical.  It means a grasp of the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics; reading, writing, and figuring.  It does not, of course, mean the exclusion of contemporary materials.  They should be brought in daily to illustrate, confirm, or deny the ideas held by the writers under discussion" (ibid.).

John Dewey had explored similar terrain in his 1915 book, Democracy and Education, but emphasized the idea that education, while it may use materials from the past, is about the present.   Noting that "an individual can live only in the present," Dewey argued:

The study of past products will not help us understand the present, because the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they were the products.  A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise.  And the mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past (p.75).

 "The present, in short," Dewey added, "generates the problems which lead us to search the past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when we search" (p. 76).  This led Dewey to a "technical definition" of education:  "It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience" (ibid.).

What does this look backward mean as we look forward to the future of American higher education?  Two additional quotes from Hutchins may help to set the stage: 

"The American educational system will be engaged in the cultivation of whatever is honored in the United States" (p. 49).  

          and

"The alternatives before us are clear.  Either we must abandon the ideal of freedom or we must educate our people for freedom" (p. 17).

First, it is worth noting that, while some things have not changed, others have.  There are many reasons why education today has become so focused on material benefits--on preparing people for work.  Not the least is that we no longer live in a world of nation states, but instead in a global economy where technology has eliminated many geographic boundaries, so that competition for talent has never been greater.  American society needs a better trained workforce in order to compete for jobs at all levels.  That said, if Hutchins is correct that every act must be judged as a moral act, not an economic act, then we must also prepare our citizens for moral action in the increasingly complex culture in which the new work takes place.  How do we use the lessons of the past to inform present and future actions?  How do we educate people for freedom? 

A first step is to free the general education curriculum from the old discipline-centered "breadth and depth" distribution model that was adopted early in the Industrial Revolution.  Over the decades,  that system has come to be focused more on how the academic community defines itself and less on how the world itself works.

A second step is to replace the "breadth and depth" system with a highly interdisciplinary problem-centered curriculum that brings history, philosophy, and the social and physical sciences to bear on understanding the nature of today's society and the role of the individual in that society.  This curriculum must begin with a clear sense of purpose.  As Dewey suggested, it must use the experiences of the past and contextualize them around current problems to give students the ability to direct the course of their own subsequent experience.

A third step is to incorporate the social and, to use Hutchins' phrase, the moral purpose of the general education curriculum into the professional curriculum.  This can be done through research projects and problem-centered capstone experiences that require students to explore the social and moral implications of their new professional knowledge on the community around them.

For public institutions--land grant universities, state colleges and universities, community colleges--and private institutions that accept state/federal financial aid, the key step is to recognize our continuing obligation not only to individuals and their future employers, but to citizens in general, who have invested, through their taxes, in our mission.  Otherwise, the concerns of Hutchins and Dewey--that democracy will succumb to materialism--may well prove true.

References

Dewey, John.  Democracy and Education.  New York: The Free Press, 1966.
Hutchins, Robert M. Education for Freedom.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944.

Smelling a Memory

When I was in high school, back in the mid-1960s, I worked at Little Italy, a family-owned Italian restaurant in what is now Hermitage, Pa.  The restaurant was operated by a mother-daughter team.  Mrs. Combine, her daughter, JoAnne Bishop, and her son-in-law, Richard Bishop.  They had operated the restaurant in the Hickory Plaza for a while and then renovated a larger, stand-alone site on the corner of State Street and Dutch Lane.  I came on at the opening of the new site.  I was around 17 when I started as a busboy and had been promoted to short-order cook by the time I left at the age of 18.

Little Italy was a true family restaurant.   Other members of the Combine family operated restaurants nearby in West Middlesex, and it wasn't unusual for them to gather at Little Italy.  A booth near the kitchen was often occupied by friends and relatives, including the Bishops' young daughter.   As a high school student, it was great to be surrounded by an active and close family.

After I left, I lost touch with the family, although I have always had very fond memories of my days at Little Italy.  Just recently, I happened across an obituary for JoAnne Bishop in the Sharon Herald, our local paper.  It noted that the family had relocated to Las Vegas and that, later in life, JoAnne had authored her own blog--"I Smell a Memory."  Her daughter has since re-posted some of her mother's blog entries at http://blog.dot-two-dot.com/?tag=i-smell-a-memory .  In "I Smell a Memory," she recalls favorite holidays with her family and the food that she made to celebrate.  Then, she adds recipes.  It is a wonderful legacy.

Making the Most of MOOCs

The idea of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continues to attract attention in the education press and popular media.  As the idea evolves, we gradually are getting a better idea of where MOOCs might fit into the broader online learning environment and, indeed, what role they might play in the transformation of higher education as we adapt to the realities of life in a global information society.   In December, I posted some thoughts on where MOOCs might fit into the Land Grant mission.  Today, I want to look at them from a slightly different perspective.

There is one area where I want to be very clear:  The idea that a single MOOC should replace general education course taught at almost every college/university in the U.S. is misguided, at best.  This has been part of the MOOC discussion since the earliest courses came out.  It is an idea that has been around technology-based education since at least the 1980s, when PBS moved to satellite distribution and Walter Annenberg gave funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to create nationally distributed tele-courses, creating the idea that one great course with fantastic video lectures could ensure that every student got a good education in that topic.  But that's not how our educational system works.   We have more than 3,000 institution of higher education in the United States.  While many of them may use the same text to teach "Introduction to Sociology" or "Introduction to World History" or whatever, the strength of the system is that each institution has its own faculty members who teach the course using their own syllabus, each drawing on their own research and experience, and each responding to the individual needs and interests of their students, whether they be on campus or online.  This creates a kind of butterfly effect as students move into different classes and different majors, taking with them the nuances of their own experiences in these courses.   The resulting diversity is one of the strengths of the system.  We don't need--and, indeed, should avoid the homogenization of the curriculum by relying on MOOCs.

So, then, what do we need?   I see three areas where investment in MOOCs might have the greatest payoff for not just for the institutions that offer them, but for society in general.

The first of these I mentioned in my December 2012 posting on MOOCs:  MOOCs provide a powerful new tool for creating learning communities around research and technology transfer.  Over the years, I've seen the importance of academic conferences in disseminating the results of research and creating new discussions among researchers and between researchers and those who benefit from the results of their work.  Two great examples from Penn State's conferencing work in Outreach are (1) a series of conferences that brought together astronomers and statisticians and that eventually resulted in the creation of a new discipline, Astro-Statistics, and (2) the annual autism conference, which brings together a huge community of researchers, practitioners, and autistic children and their families.  MOOCs have great potential to more quickly and more broadly disseminate research findings and to create communities among diverse populations that have an interest in applying research.  It is a potentially powerful tool for academic outreach and engagement.

A second potential role is to build new pathways between higher education and schooling.  Currently in the U.S., about 39 percent of high school graduates go on to college.  The U.S. Department of Education has set a goal of increasing that to 60 percent by 2020--what they estimate the country will need to thrive in the information economy.  To get there, we will need to dramatically increase the percentage of high school students who are prepared to go to college.  MOOCs can help by providing a means by which higher education institutions can share content with high school teachers.  Imagine, for instance, a MOOC on high school chemistry.  Science Education faculty in our universities could develop video and computer-based instructional materials on critical science concepts at all K-12 levels.  These would be made available to teachers via a MOOC that would also contain sample lesson plans and other resources that the teachers would need.  Then, it would also serve as a meeting place where teachers could share their experiences in using the materials, get advice from both higher education faculty and peer teachers, and share materials that they have developed locally to contextualize the materials available via the MOOC.  The result:  a teaching community that would help even small, poor districts ensure that their students have access to high-quality learning.

We did this sort of thing back in the 1970s and 1980s through public television.  Penn State's public TV station worked with Dr. Paul Welliver in the University's College of Education to create "Science for the Seventies," a video series that captured key science concepts for elementary school students.  Dr. Welliver and his colleagues also tried to create a community of teachers who could share lesson plans, etc., but the lack of a medium for exchange made that difficult.  MOOCs offer a very fresh way to create this kind of teaching/sharing community to address important educational needs.

A third potential use of MOOCs relates to the new demographics of our world.  Today, Americans are living well into their 70s and 80s, but still retiring at 65 or earlier.  In his landmark book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin noted that now need to prepare older adults for life after work--ideally, a third act of life where experienced adults can apply their talents and experiences in the social sector,  helping improve life in their communities.   In this arena MOOCs offer an interesting opportunity to bring older adults together with social sector organizations and university faculty to help prepare them for productive after-retirement contributions.  As with the other applications, a key element is not just the transfer of knowledge, but the creation of communities.

I hope these three examples illustrate the true potential of MOOCs as tools for community-building and engagement around research, technology transfer, and cross-sector partnerships.

I Won't Give Up

Jason Mraz is one of my very favorite singer-songwriters these days.  It started with "I'm Yours," but his most recent album, Love Is a Four-Letter Word, has some great songs that capture a spirit that I haven't heard in popular music for a long time.

Right now, my favorite is "I Won't Give Up."     I was listening to it this morning--the day after the Boston Marathon bombing--and realized that it pretty much captures how I feel about our country these days.  Our country has become fascinated with violence, greed, and, ultimately, the stubborn ignorance of radical ideology.  These have been with us for many decades, but, today, they have clouded the great light of caring and community that is American democracy at its best.  Still, in the face of this ugliness, as Mraz says, "I won't give up."