Empower Citizens with Fiscal Cliff Data

Speaker of the House John Boehner said on Sunday, “I don’t think anyone quite understands” how to resolve the current U.S. federal budget crisis.  Well, here’s an idea.

            In his new book, Citizenship:  How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government (Penguin, 2013), Gavin Newsom argues that, in the Information Society, we need to connect citizens to government in new ways, by giving them access to government data so that they can better participate in solving public problems.  The result is more of a bottoms-up than top-down approach to governance.   The problem with today’s federal government is that it is paralyzed by radical ideology and conflicting loyalties.  There is no constructive conversation, making good top-down government decisions almost impossible around important issues.  So, let’s try a bottoms-up approach.

            A first step is to have transparent data.  What, in detail, is the problem?  What, in detail, have the various parties—the Administration, Congressional Republications, Congressional Democrats, various non-governmental interest groups—proposed?   We need to be able to put all of the different solutions side by side with each other and with the budget itself to understand the options.  Then, we—and by “we” I mean the citizenry—need to be able to look at the impact of different options and, perhaps, suggest our own solutions.

            The problem is that we are not, at this point, getting good information, either from government directly or from the news media.   Or, at minimum, dependable information is not easy to find.  Confirming and organizing the data so that people can attempt their own understanding of the problem, evaluate the various solutions that have been proposed, and suggest their own improvements would be a great contribution that any one of the national news outlets could make.  It would go much further toward creating public understanding than the constant point-counterpoint panels of political hacks and hired guns.

            The Fall 2012 update of The Federal Government’s Long-Term Fiscal Outlook makes clear that simple solutions—the kind we’ve been hearing about in the press—are not going to work.  It notes, for example: “Discretionary spending limits alone do not address the fundamental imbalance between estimated revenue and spending, which is driven largely by the aging of the population and rising health care costs” (GAO-13-148SP).  As a public, we need to develop an expectation that the solution will be complex, but that we will need to understand that complexity so that we can evaluate what our elected representatives propose as solutions.  Having the data and some structure for thinking about options—and then being encouraged to delve into the material to find possible solutions—could be very helpful in the long run.

            This would make a great project for CNN or another of the major national news outlets that lays claim to objectivity.  What a way to empower voters to help their government.

OERs: A National Strategy

Over the past few years, the idea of Open Educational Resources (OERs) has taken its place in the mainstream of the new online global distance education movement.   This posting will explore the 
potential for OERs to help address important educational needs in the United States.

            The Hewlett Foundation, which has funded several OER innovations over the past few years, defines Open Educational Resources this way:

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

Internationally, the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO have launched an initiative “to increase the understanding of OERs by educational decision makers within governments and institutions, and to encourage the incorporation of the concept of OERs into their policies and strategies.” 

            In the United States, there are a variety of OER initiatives.  However, none have risen to the level of national strategic priority.   The opportunity is ripe to apply OERs in our public school system and in the process, to create new creative partnerships between higher education institutions and schools to help students meet critical learning needs.  

            It is not unlike the situation in the 1960s, when the baby boom generation was straining the resources of our public schools at a time when there was a growing demand for high school graduates to be able to move onto college.   Then, a nascent public television system—organized originally at the state and regional level—began to produce and broadcast television programs specifically designed to be used by teachers in the classroom.  Today, online media provide a new platform not only to deliver content, but to engage both teachers and students in learning communities around critical skill needs.

The Need

            Many states have moved toward standards-based testing for students in key curriculum areas.  The one that area that seems to be most in need of support is STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.    Schools vary widely in their ability to support teachers as they adjust their curricula to the new standards.  Given the importance of state standards in this environment, the OER initiative would naturally be structured within individual states, with colleges and universities developing materials for use by nearby school districts.   At the same time, producers can easily network to share content (where the content meets state standards and needs) and to coordinate delivery.

The Model

Here is how an OER initiative might work:

            The project would begin by one or more higher education institutions in a State collaborating with the Department of Education and with some selected school districts to identify specific standards that have proven to be the most problematic for schools around the state.  Participating institutions would then develop OERs that address these standards.  These could take multiple forms:

• digitized video lectures, demonstrations, or experiments
•  problems to be solved by individual students or collaboratively by groups of students
•  elements from online college credit courses
•  collections of existing online resources that teachers and students could use to gain experience in finding information, evaluating it, and using it to solve problems or create innovations.

            The OERs would be housed a central online “You-Tube”-type environment, along with downloadable teacher guides, lesson plans, quizzes, assignment ideas, etc.  

            Ideally, a K-12 OER initiative would be complemented by online learning communities—MOOCS—that would address two related needs:  (1) one that teachers could join to learn about how to use the OER collection and, equally important, to share their experiences as a community on how to implement them in the classroom, and (2) a MOOC for students to help them supplement their classroom learning or, possibly, earn high school credit.  Ideally, both of these could also be structured so that teachers would be able to earn graduate credit and students would be able to simultaneously earn high school and college credit.

The Long View

            As noted earlier, it is easy to draw comparisons between the OER initiative described above and the early days of educational television.   It might be helpful to look at that comparison in more detail to get a longer view of what might happen if a truly strategic OER initiative were to be organized around K12 needs.

            In the 1960s, educational television was a statewide and regional affairs.   Most stations had an “Instructional Television” coordinator and a formal relationship with school districts in their service areas.  The daytime schedule was devoted specifically to television programs that had been selected by teachers and broadcast for use in classrooms.  In Pennsylvania, where I worked, the State Department of Education funded the acquisition of programs for broadcast to the schools, as well as the production of new programs that met otherwise unmet needs.  Regional networks—the Eastern Educational Network and the Southern Educational Communications Association as examples—were collaboratives where stations could share local productions and group-purchase programs that would be broadcast in multiple viewing areas.  

            With the arrival of (1) the national Public Broadcasting Service and (2) satellite delivery of educational/public television programming, production and distribution became a nationally coordinated affair.  Programs like Sesame Street and The Electric Company arose to meet national needs.  Over time, however, this three-level system of national, regional, and local engagement faded as nonbroadcast technology—videocassettes and videodisc, cable television, etc.—bypassed the need for coordinated broadcast directly into school classrooms.

            Today, as we think about how to develop an effective system for production, delivery, and support of OERs to ensure that all students have effective access to learning resources that address strategic national needs, we should ask:  How might the lessons of educational television be used to help shape this new service?  It is impossible to predict.  However, we have already seen the emergence of several inter-state higher education collaborations—most notably the Great Plains IDEA and CIC’s CourseShare—that suggest the possibility that an OER initiative might help foster new kinds of academic communities for which, like the online environment itself, geography provides a focus but not a limitation.

A Lesson from Jane Addams

Back in 1919, at the end of the first World War, Jane Addams published an article called "Americanization" in the Publications of the American Sociological Society.  She focused on the different ways in which the idea of "Americanization" was perceived before the War and after it.  Before the war, she wrote,

"Americanism was then regarded as a great cultural task, and we eagerly sought to invent new instruments and methods with which to undertake it.  We believed that America could be best understood by the immigrants if we ourselves, Americans, made some sort of a connection with their past history and experiences."   

However, after the war, she notes, "there is not doubt that one finds in the United States the same manifestation of the world-wide tendency toward national dogmatism, the exaltation of blind patriotism above intelligent citizenship . . ."

There is a lesson here for our times, when our national politics on almost every front (including, still today, immigration) has become weighed down by dogmatism, leaving us little space to find the middle path that makes democracy work.  As Addams herself noted,

"When we confound doctrines with people, it shows that we understand neither one nor the other.  Many men, not otherwise stupid, when they consider a doctrine detestable, failing to understand that changes can be made only by enlightening people, feel that they suppress the doctrine itself when they denounce and punish its adherents."

 Too often, these days, our elected representatives feel themselves morally bound to adhere strictly to a dogmatic vision, either the one they campaigned on or the one held by the people who funded their elections.  As a result, we have seen a virtual paralysis of government.  American democracy is performed through argument and discussion, but ultimately achieved through negotiation and compromise--finding a common ground on which we can all agree to work together as a community. 

As a first step, we need to ask our elected representatives to see their colleagues not as adherents to a different dogma, but as fellow citizens.  In turn, they need to educate the public--and lobbyists--that their job is to advance the total community, not just their partisans.   One place where that job can be engaged is in the news media.  Too often, as has been said before in this blog, the news media serve to reinforce the differences in dogma rather than to help viewers find the middle ground where good policy can be developed.

We just began a new four-year political cycle.  Let's hope that Congress and the Administration can find a middle path and that the news media, rather than simply inviting the dogmatic extremists to butt heads on every issue, will foster a fair analysis that will help everyone educate themselves about what can truly be done to find common ground solutions.

More Memoirs

A while ago, I wrote a piece on "Reading Memoirs" that focused on remarkable memoirs by Joan Didion and Patti Smith.  This month, I want to focus on two memoirs by men.

The first is Along the Way, a dual memoir by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez that focuses on their father-son relationship over the years and, as well, their relationship as actors during the production of The Way.  It is enlightening to see these two talented men talk about themselves and each other, revealing their own weaknesses and regrets, strengths and hopes and discussing the impact that the other's strengths and weaknesses had on their lives:  grown fathers and sons talking about each other and themselves in a way one rarely experiences.  This is a powerful book about life, about acting, about relationships.

The second is Elsewhere, a memoir by novelist Richard Russo about his lifelong relationship with his troubled mother, from the day she decided to accompany him on his cross-country journey to college and the rest of her life, as she alternated between living near him and returning to her own home town.  As Russo (author of Nobody's Fool, Empire Falls, and Straight Man) writes, "What a next of thorns the past can be."  For me, having grown up, like Russo, with a single mother who never quite realized her dreams, Elsewhere was full of insights.

These are both powerful, personal, revelatory books by people whose work I admire greatly.  It is wonderful that they, like Didion and Smith, have been brave enough to share their experiences and insights with us. 

Teaching Citizenship

To say that, over the past few years, our federal government has failed to govern is an understatement.  Congress has become polarized by ideologues who see their role not as finding workable solutions to problems, but simply to stand by their ideologies at all costs.  Our representatives are beholden to corporations--who are NOT "people" as some have suggested and are NOT citizens--rather than to the voters who they were elected to represent. 

There are many reasons for this failure, but one that has not been discussed much is the fact that our children receive very little by way of civic education as part of the secondary school curriculum.  When I was in high school in the 1960s, one class in ninth grade was devoted to Pennsylvania History and Civics--an introduction to the Constitution and the structure of our federal government.  Then, in 12th grade, we had a full year of "Problems of Democracy," a course that looked at how the government worked to solve problems.   Sadly, it appears that many schools have dropped these requirements over the past generation.  As a result, fewer voters know what to demand of the people they elect to represent them.

So, I was delighted to learn that the Pennsylvania Department of Education will require a graduation exam in "Civics and Government" beginning in 2020, with the exam available to schools as early as 2016.  It seems like a long time to wait, but I am nevertheless happy that the Commonwealth has acted to ensure that all Pennsylvanians receive some level of citizenship education.

Now, then, it would be great to see our colleges and universities require a capstone general education course in all professional curricula that gives students a sense of what the citizenship responsibilities are of professionals in different fields. 

MOOCS and the Land Grant Mission

MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—have captured the imagination of many in higher education since several leading research universities began to offer their large lecture courses in this format.   At the most basic level, these courses enhance the lecture hall, providing video lectures with opportunities for interaction among students and between students and instructors.   In the process, they maintain the old notion that education is about knowledge transfer.  However, perhaps it is best to see these early MOOCs as just that:  early innovations with a new generation of online learning.

In the November 29, 2012 issue of Inside Higher Education, W. Joseph King and Michael Nanfito of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, make that case.  “The MOOC,” they write, “. . . is essential a high-tech extension of the traditional industrial age university lecture-hall experience.”  However, they add that one can look beyond MOOCs as a simple delivery mechanism and see its potential as a “connectivist” tool that gives institutions the ability to integrate four functions:

1.            Aggregation, allowing students to bring together different sources of knowledge provided within the course as well as beyond the course.

2.            Remixing information and ideas by communicating with peers about what they are learning.

3.            Repurposing information to create new knowledge.

4.            Feeding forward their learning by applying it to new situations and publishing the results.

“The key here,” they write, “is thinking of the MOOC not in the standard way, as asynchronous video lectures and course readings, but in the connectivist way . . . to provide participatory space.”

Embedding MOOCs in the Land Grant Mission

I would add that another key to ultimate success with this new model is to base it firmly in the institution’s mission.   Some of us can remember how, at the beginning of the online learning revolution, Fathom—a project that involved some of the same institutions as are now innovating with MOOCs—failed because the initiative simply was not within the institution’s core mission and culture.   Today, I would argue that institutions should not simply emulate what Harvard and others are doing with MOOCs but ask how this new generation of online learning can best extend their own missions. 

I have spent my entire career—from student to administrator—in land grant universities.  There are several ways that MOOCs can advance the land grant mission at a time when that mission is being challenged by radical changes in the society it serves.  Here are a few:

Revitalizing General Education – Like the big private research universities, our land grant universities offer large lecture sections for many of its general education courses.  Obviously, MOOCs have the potential to make these courses more engaging and relevant.  However, they also hold potential for transforming general education from a discipline-based distribution curriculum to a more comprehensive interdisciplinary curriculum by providing a “participatory space” where faculty from multiple disciplines can share ideas around common themes and encourage students to create new knowledge to address major societal problems.  When I was an undergraduate at Penn State in the 1960s, the general education curriculum included interdisciplinary core courses in the humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, and physical sciences, as well as innovative Science, Technology, and Society courses that focused on the interaction of disciplines around major social issues.  MOOCs could support this approach at scale for large, multi-campus institutions like Penn State and other land grants.

Extending the Impact of Research and Technology Transfer --  MOOCs offer a particularly powerful way for research faculty to connect with the communities that can most benefit from applying their research.  Imagine videos or other media that present the results of research, combined with the ability for individuals in the community (whether it be industry, business, government policy makers, other educational sectors, health care, etc.) to explore the impact on their own practices and to share ideas among each other as well as with the faculty researchers in order to identify new practices that effectively build on new research. 

Re-Imagining Cooperative Extension – Cooperative Extension was created during the Industrial Revolution to ensure that American agriculture would keep pace with industrialization and urbanization.  The idea was to distribute expertise to the county level, so that academic specialists could work directly with farmers in their fields.  Cooperative Extension remains essential to quickly translating agriculture and environmental research into effective practice.  MOOCs could greatly facilitate the university’s ability to bring practice communities around agricultural research and issues (new strands of plant and animal diseases, the impact of climate change, etc.) to greatly enhance the ability of agriculture and environmental resource professionals to respond to new needs.

Continuing Education and Outreach – Just as MOOCs offer new opportunities to create change communities around agriculture and technology transfer, they can be used to better empower relationships with other community stakeholders normally managed through the university’s continuing education or outreach function.  Examples:  small business development centers, urban renewal centers, teacher in-service programs, etc.  One of the great advantages of MOOCs in this environment is that geography is no longer a restraint; these online programs can create communities of people who share common problems or common environments, even though they are separated by geography, government boundaries, etc.

Institutional Collaboration – Our land grant universities have already shown great willingness to work with each other across state boundaries to improve the resources available to their in-state clientele.  A good early example is the American Distance Education Consortium, which encourages sharing of Extension resources across states.  Similarly, the CIC’s CourseShare initiative is using online learning to aggregate student audiences for courses in rarely taught languages and other specialties, while the Great Plains Inter-institutional Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) allows large state universities in the Midwest to offer graduate programs that share expertise from multiples institution.  MOOCs can be used to enhance these relationships and build new ones where two or more institutions share a commitment to a distributed clientele.

In the long run, the initial use of MOOCs to open access to large lecture courses may or may not transform undergraduate education.  However, it is clear that this new generation of online learning has the potential to help transform our institutions to meet the needs of individuals and communities in the new knowledge economy.

Reference

King, W. Joseph, and Nanfito, Michael.  “To MOOC or Not To MOOC?”  Inside Higher Education, November 29, 2012.  http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/29/essay-challenges-posed-moocs-liberal

Richard Alley and James Kasting: Global Warming

The following editorial by Richard Alley and James Kasting makes a solid case that we need to begin planning NOW in order to avoid the extreme changes that will otherwise come about due to global warming.   They use the analogy of planning for retirement:  it can be disastrous if we start too late.

The printed version in the Centre Daily Times included a graph that illustrates how average world temperaturs have increased dramatically since the 1980s.  I recall the summer of 1988, when global warming became apparent for the first time to most of the public.   For my generation, 1980 is not very far away, but it is a generation ago.  We've lost a full generation in planning to avoid global warming.  This fall, hurricane Sandy demonstrated what global warming can mean to our highly populated coastal cities.  We are losing time and, while we dally, the energy industry is pushing us toward fracking to get more fossil fuel rather than investing in green energy.

One implication is that we can no longer let short-term profit-seeking interests dominate policy discussions about what is becoming a public safety issue.  Let's get the oil companies out of the policy room and demand that our elected officials do their job with our interests--not private interests--in mind.

We have already lost a generation.  Let's be sure our grandchildren do not look back on us with dismay over our selfishness.
 
We must move toward a cleaner environment | Opinion | CentreDaily.com