Ensuring Quality in Cross-Border Inter-Institutional Collaborations

On June 20, 2011, I had the honor of keynoting a Policy Forum sponsored by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE).  Since its founding in the 1930s (when distance education focused on correspondence study), ICDE has been the single global organization of institutions and individuals involved in open and distance education using a wide range of technologies.   Its membership is truly international.   The policy forum focused on ICDE's role in ensuring quality as institutions collaborate to deliver distance education programs and resources across national borders.

The Policy Forum preceded the ICDE Standing Council of Presidents meeting, which focused on the role of distance education in the new economy.

It was great to be a part of this global dialog, which provided a look over the horizon at the future of higher education in a globalized information society.

From the Typewriter to the Cloud: The Impact of Technology on Writing

One of this year’s finds at the annual AAUW book sale at Penn State was “The Writer’s Chapbook,” a collection of reflections about writing by top authors, drawn from their interviews in “The Paris Review.”   Reading it the other day, I stumbled over several authors commenting on the impact of the typewriter on writing. 

The biographer Leon Edel talked about Henry James, who must have been one of the early adopters of this new technology.  Here’s what he said:  “He began dictating directly to the typewriter.  It’s a case of the medium being the message and with dictation he ran into longer sentences, and parenthetical remarks, and when he revised what he had dictated he tended to add further flourishes.  In the old days, when he wrote in longhand he was much briefer and crisper, but now he luxuriated in fine phrases and he was exquisitely baroque.”

Conrad Aiken, noting that he never used a carbon copy “because that made me self-conscious,” wrote, “I can remember discussing the effect of the typewriter on our work with Tom Eliot because he was moving to the typewriter about the time I was.  And I remember our agreeing that it made for a slight change of style in the prose-that you tended to use more periodic sentences, a little shorter, and a rather choppier style—and that one must be careful about that . . . But that was a passing phase only.  We both soon discovered that we were just as free to let the style throw itself into the air as we had been writing manually.”

I suspect it is too bad that Henry James dictated rather than take to the keyboard himself. 

These couple of examples also made me wonder:  how has word processing changed style over the past two decades?  One imagines that the ability for infinite self-correction should free the imagination and allow writers to be more spontaneous, on one hand, and more precise on the other hand.  Then, add the Internet as a publishing environment.  I have to think that the ability to immediately publish one’s thoughts would lead to shorter pieces more focused on the immediacy of insight rather than on long, complexly woven pieces—a tendency reinforced by the limitations on length imposed by Twitter.  However, there is also the inevitable temptation to constantly revisit and revise—to not let good enough alone in this environment.  This suggests the need for a new artistic ethos:  that the writer, having written, must move on.   But it also raises a question about the relationship between writer and reader and how readers engage with the writer in the creative process.   In this new environment, is writing about the finished product or does the reader gain artistic insight in the process itself?

Worth exploring more.  Any thoughts?

If 60 Is the New 18 . . . --Higher Education for the "New" Adult

In the May 15, 2011 issue of Newsweek, Susan Cheever wrote, “If 50 is the new 30, 60-ish is in many ways a new kind of 18.  We are coming of old age in a way that parallels our first coming of age.  As we head for 60 we know that statistically we are old.  But we don’t feel old, and we may even be more physically active than we were at 18 when we had never heard of Core Fusion or Bikram Yoga.”   She adds, “We joke about being carded when we ask for the senior rate. Our desire to obey the rules can fall away. Life is suddenly very short and very precious. We are coming to the end of this wonderful ride. Now is the time! If we are not going to speak out and act out at 60, when will we?”

Cheever was writing about the marital woes of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  However, her comment raises a different question for those of us interested in the intersection of education and society:  How do our educational institutions prepare people to be productive citizens, professionals, and individuals when, for most, life will extend well beyond the traditional “three score and ten”?  

Just as our educational system itself was designed for an agricultural and industrial society, it also assumes that the goal is to prepare young people for a single career.   Now, a generation into the Information Revolution, as we adapt our institutions to the needs of this new society, we also need to figure out how best to prepare our citizenry for a live that has a much longer—and more active—third act, one that (as Jeremy Rifkin suggested in The End of Work) could allow mature adults who are past their parenting roles to engage in new ways with their community and the broader society. 

 Certainly, this could be one aspect of revitalizing the general education curriculum:  helping undergraduate students develop a sense of themselves as citizens of both a civil and a professional community.  And, certainly, this could be a sub-goal of a new societal expectation—a nonmilitary kind of Selective Service (perhaps integrating Vista, Peace Corps, and related services)—that young people would complete a year of public service before they enter the adult workforce—to prepare them, as they enter the workforce, to think about what role they might play in society after their working years are over. 

While those ideas may be dramatic enough—difficult enough to get our institutions and our state and federal governments to envision and implement—we should ask:  What else can we do to prepare adults for an active, service-oriented third act?  If Rifkin’s ideas come to pass, employers may well want to work with colleges/universities to prepare their mid-career staff for an effective transition to public service in order to make headroom for younger employees.   We may even want to envision a new kind of degree or certificate that helps adults prepare for the transition. 

It will take time for a very different view of higher education’s role in society to catch hold. It is worth thinking about now.  What do you think?

Memorial Day Flowers

This morning, we drove to the little village of Burnside, Pennsylvania, to put flowers on the graves of Karen's grandparents and great-grandparents for Memorial Day.  It was a quiet drive on a Sunday morning through the rural Central Pennsylvania countryside, much of it following the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.  This has been a wet spring, and it was threatening to rain later in the day, so we were in a hurry to get the job done.

The cemetery had been mowed earlier in the week, possibly for the first time this spring.  It was a rough mowing, and one of our first tasks was to clear away the clippings.  Another family was there--a local couple whose parents knew Karen's grandmother well.  They came prepared with a grass rake (the husband was on the cutting crew, it turns out) and they lent it to us to clear our graves.  Then, we planted a total of 8 geraniums and a more than a dozen ageratims at four graves.

Heading home, we saw a young couple rafting on the Susquehanna and another man fishing in the middle of the stream.  It was nice to drive through the small towns--Mahaffey, Curwensville, Grampian--and enjoy a Sunday drive.  We got home without any serious rain and in time for Sunday brunch. 

Later this week, I will head to Hermitage to put flowers on my family's graves.  That is a bit less involved, since the cemetery does not allow live flowers.  But I look forward to it every year, nevertheless.

I suspect that this Memorial Day tradition is one that is already fading, but I do enjoy it.  It is nice to feel connected, even briefly,  to family and community this way.

Being an Adult Student

On May 13, I was honored and delighted to give some remarks at the induction ceremony for Penn State's chapter of Alpha Sigma Lambda, the honorary society for adult learners.  Most of my career has been focused on creating access for adult learners through continuing and distance education, so I was especially pleased that my colleagues invited me back to meet with this year's inductees on graduation weekend.  Here are my remarks:

Let me add my welcome to the inductees who are able to be with us tonight and those who are not with us.   I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to see the progress that Alpha Sigma Lambda has made over the past few years and the growth in adult learners here at Penn State.   For you, it is an incredible personal achievement—only those of us who have been adult learners know just how powerful this experience can be—but it also gives me a great deal of professional satisfaction, as someone who has spent many years advocating and organizing continuing and distance education programs, to see how the adult learner has moved into the mainstream of Penn State. 

            I recently interviewed Karen Cator, the director of educational technology for the U.S. Department of Education.  She noted that the Administration has set a goal of increasing the percentage of high school graduates who go on to earn a college degree from the current 39% to 60% by the year 2020.  That means greatly increasing the number of high school graduates who are prepared to enter college, but it also means doing a much better job of serving high school grads who have already entered the workforce and started their families.   In short, we are about to enter an era where the traditional boundaries between higher education and K-12 education and between higher education and the workplace will be blurred and where helping adult learners will be central to the societal strategy of creating and sustaining the talent that our communities need to compete in the information society.  So, tonight, we are celebrating both your personal achievement and your role as a pioneer in a new era of adult learning. 

            For me, this is an exciting development because, like you, I have been an adult student, too.   We can argue over when one starts to be an adult, but I thought of myself as an adult learner from pretty early on.  I had not originally thought I would be able to go to college, but I got the chance when Penn State opened a campus—the Shenango Campus—in my home community.  That meant that I could live at home, work at night, and go to college during the day.  I had started working at our local Arby’s while still in high school.  By the time I started at Penn State, I was working as a shift manager, and, for one summer, travelled to Denver to open two new restaurants there.   I thought that might be my future.  So, when I knew I would be coming to State College to finish my baccalaureate, I suggested to the company that they open a store here and I could manage it while I finished my undergrad degree.  They, in their wisdom, told me—this was in 1968—that they had done the research and there was no market for fast food in State College! 

            It was, for me, a fortunate market research mistake.  When I got here I needed a job, and a fellow student at East Halls suggested that, since I was a journalism major (I later switched to English), I should go across the street to Wagner Building and get a job at the university’s public TV station—what is now WPSU-TV—writing press releases.   As it turned out, they didn’t have any writing jobs, but they did hire me as a part-time production assistant.  I learned all about television production during those two years—running camera, doing lighting and audio, painting sets—we did just about everything—and, when I graduated, they hired me as a full time production assistant.  I had something that few of my fellow English students had when we graduated in 1970:  a union job with benefits.

            Eventually, I moved out of the studio and into Programming where, first, I did on-air promotion.  Then, a couple of years after graduation, I became the public information director for the station.  Finally, I got to write press releases!  And handle all sorts of other PR and publications work.   When I decided to work on a master’s degree, my first thought was to get a Master’s in Journalism, since I was working in both television and in public information.   I talked with the Department Head, who told me—much to my surprise—that I didn’t need a master’s in journalism, since by then I had several years of good professional experience under my belt.  His advice—some of the best I got in my education—was to get a degree, but get it in something I loved.  So, I got my master’s in English, too. 

            In those days, our philosophy in public broadcasting was that the role of public information was to create an informed viewer—the first step in engaging the viewer in our programs.  Over time, we developed other kinds of engagement:  providing supplementary materials for local shows (for instance, for our “TV Quarterbacks” show with Joe Paterno, I interviewed all the coaches and did a poster on the roles of the different positions), organizing community activities with local social service organizations, sending faculty out to libraries to discuss programs, and, ultimately, organizing credit and noncredit courses around our programs.  We also produced programs designed specifically for use in K-12 classrooms.  Eventually, these were all gathered into a “Viewer Services” unit, which I was asked to head.   Then, in the early 1980s, we combined WPSU with our on-campus instructional media group, and I focused exclusively on instructional activities as Director of Instructional Media. 

            It was an exciting period of technical innovation.  In a very short period of time, we moved from being able to serve only our 29-country broadcast area to having a statewide educational cable TV channel and, starting in the late 1970s, experimenting with satellite delivery throughout the Appalachian region.  By the 1980s, we were offering national live satellite teleconferences.  Our very first satellite conference gave nuclear science faculty around the country their first chance to look at video from the damaged core inside the Three Mile Island nuclear plant.  By the mid 1980s, we were using videoconferencing to extend a master’s degree in education from University Park to campuses in Western Pennsylvania and were producing video courses for national delivery through PBS.  At the same time—while the World Wide Web was not yet upon us—we were experimenting with creating digital content and simulations on videodisc.

            Throughout this period, our emphasis as an organization was not on a particular technology, but on how we could use various technologies to extend access to education both for young people and for adults in both formal and informal settings, in groups and individually.   

            By this time, I had decided that I wanted to stay in higher education.  That meant getting a doctorate, so I enrolled part-time—taking one course per semester—in the doctoral program in Higher Education (we didn’t have a separate program in Adult Education at that time).   The first course I took was a survey of American higher education, and I decided during that course that I would focus my research on the topic of general education.  For most of us, general education is the “distribution” component of an undergraduate education—the stuff we need to take before we get to our major courses.  Over the years, however, general education has meant many things to many people.  I decided to write a history of general education, which brought me into a circle of educational philosophers from John Dewey to Robert Hutchins and, by extension, pioneering social educators like Jane Addams.  It was quite a wonderful journey on its own.  It was also, on hindsight, nice to be able to work on the cutting edge of technology during the day, but, at night, be able to retreat into a century of philosophy and educational innovation.  My advisor, Hans Flexner, took me under his wing and encouraged me to develop my dissertation into a book, which eventually was published by Teachers College Press at Columbia University.

            The interesting thing is that the two parts of my life were never quite separated.  What we were doing with technology in both K-12 and higher education was, it turned out, simply a part of the next phase of educational innovation, the history of which I had been studying in my doctoral program.   The two perspectives worked pretty well together, as things turned out.   My doctoral work gave me a new perspective on the role of what we were by then calling “distance education”—a perspective I might not have developed if I had specialized in an area closer to my daily work environment.  I was able to focus not so much on technology or public media per se, but on the social drivers that were stimulating innovation and on the broader implications for universities.  This became very helpful when we launched the World Campus.

            So, if there is one lesson that I can pass along from my experience as an adult learner, it is the advice that the Journalism Department Head gave me back in the 1970s and which I discovered again as I researched the history of general education:  Study what you love and then apply that to your work.

            The way higher education is structured, we have a tendency, as we advance in education, to become ever more narrow in our scope.  We move from a very general high school education to an undergraduate education where we start, typically, by becoming generally acquainted with a lot of different disciplines (introductory biology, college algebra, surveys of American history and English literature, introductions to psychology and sociology), etc.  in our first two years to a strong focus on one discipline in our junior and senior years.   When we move on to graduate school, we tend to narrow our focus even further within our own discipline.  By the time we get to a doctoral program, we are encouraged to specialize even further.

            This is not a practical approach for us adult learners.  Because we already have experience as workers, as heads of families, and as citizens who are involved in many ways in our communities, the challenge for us is not necessarily to specialize—I acknowledge that we all need a focus in our work—but to develop a new dimension, a new facet to our lives that puts our personal and professional experiences into a new context and that allows us to bring all of our experiences and knowledge to new situations. 

            This is especially important today.  In many ways, the Information Society is also the Innovation Society.  Things are changing pretty quickly out there, and our employers—regardless of the field—need people who can innovate on the front lines to help our organizations be competitive in this new society.

            So, let me leave you with this idea.  As you move ahead and continue your education after this weekend’s graduations, look for opportunities not only to develop specialized knowledge and skills, but also to expand your horizons, to add new perspectives that will allow you to be successful in the unknown territory that lies ahead.

            Congratulations, again, and my thanks to Dr.  Rubba for inviting me to join you tonight.

Water wars? Thirsty, energy-short China stirs fear - World news - World environment - msnbc.com

Water wars? Thirsty, energy-short China stirs fear - World news - World environment - msnbc.com

Here is an MSNBC report on a long-term issue that may drive international affairs in the coming decade more than the issues that are in the press these days.

Engagement: A Vision for the Land Grant Mission in the Information Era

In the opening pages of The Americans: The Democratic Experience, Daniel Boorstin describes the national spirit in which the land grant university developed:

The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades, but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air – so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent, but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again; a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.

            Higher education has been part of that ongoing revolution, as human society made the final shift from an agrarian culture to an industrial culture and from a culture based in hereditary aristocracy to one based in democracy.  These transformations began in the late 1800s, gathered momentum in the mid and late 19^th century, and reached their full power in the first half of the 20^th century.   The transformation of higher education was, in part, a response to these broader societal changes and, ultimately, a stimulus for further change. 

Educating for Democratization and Industrialization

            The land grant university can be understood as a response to both democratization and industrialization.  Boorstin describes one of the early advocates for the land grant concept—Jonathan Turner of Illinois—who argued for “A State University for the Industrial Classes.”

All civilized society [Turner noted] was “necessarily divided into two distinct cooperative, not antagonistic, classes”; the “professional” class (doctors, lawyers, men of letters, and preachers) comprised only about 5 percent of the people, while the “industrial” class included all the rest. . . . To build a true democracy, Turner proclaimed, the industrial classes must also have their universities, at least one in each state. . . .The new universities would teach agriculture, manufacturing processes, and bookkeeping; they would provide experimental farms and orchards and herds of stock; and they would be “open to all classes of students above a fixed age, and for any length of time.”  (p. 483)

            The land grant university gave the “industrial classes” the opportunity to gain a higher education and fill new professional roles as engineers, scientists, and educators in an industrializing society.  At the same time, the land grant university responded to a significant issue in society:  how to maintain the pace of industrialization in light of massive immigration and urbanization that were essential to new industries.  The land grant university became a center for research into agricultural productivity and, through the Cooperative Extension Service, took its findings directly to farmers in their fields.  This transformed agriculture and ensured that the growing cities would be able to feed their burgeoning populations.  At the same time, land grant institutions—along with state-owned “normal” schools—provided public school teachers to staff a critical workforce development need:  to ensure that immigrants were acculturated to American life and that more could graduate from high school and move on to higher education. 

The Need for a New Covenant

           

            Two centuries after the first inklings of the democratic and industrial revolutions, we find ourselves a generation into a new transformation—the Information Revolution—and a vastly different set of social needs.  Some comparisons illustrate the need for refreshing our vision of the role of the land grant university:

·      Where the Industrial Revolution was concerned with immigration, the Information Revolution is concerned with globalization; people no longer need to come to the United States to participate in its economy.

·      Where urbanization drove industrialization and public policy in the 19^th century, the trend at the beginning of the 21^st century is ex-urbanization, as technology makes it possible for people to live in geographically dispersed professional communities. 

·      While the need for engineers, business professionals, and new social professionals (educators, health care professionals, etc.) drove higher education in the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution requires a larger, more diverse cadre of “knowledge workers” with some level of higher education and the ability to adapt easily to rapid change; the emphasis is less on specific professional training than on innovation.

            A variety of specific societal issues have emerged in the national awareness as signs of change.  Global warming, globalization of the economy, health care access and quality are only a few examples.  Most of these are already being addressed in our institutions.  However, we might also ask whether there are more subtle, underlying needs that should drive innovation in the land grant institution.

            It is becoming increasingly clear that one area where we may see profound change is the workplace itself.  A May 14, 2009, Time Magazine report on “The Future of Work” noted:

Ten years ago, Facebook didn't exist. Ten years before that, we didn't have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won't look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world.

            As early as 2001, a National Academies of Science report, Building a Workforce for the Knowledge Economy, reporting on the “tightness” of the available workforce among trained information technology professionals, noted:

. . . because the underlying information technologies change so rapidly, there is concern that the labor market does not work as efficiently in this arena as economic theory would predict—i.e., that rising wages will not relieve the tightness, at least not “in time.” (p. xiii).

            One reason why labor market ideas created during the industrial period might not work in the information era is that jobs will be distributed well beyond national borders.  Another is that much work is increasingly automated, requiring less intensive human activity.   The number of “jobless recoveries” that we’ve seen in the past few economic turndowns might be one signal of a trend toward a less intensive workforce.  A trend like this could threaten basic democratic foundations of our society by creating a permanent underclass of under-employed workers.  Such a trend would require a significant social policy change to ensure that all Americans were able to support themselves and their families.

             Several social policy options could be envisioned.  For example, instead of having fewer people with jobs, social policy could be directed at having all people work fewer years, somewhat easing entry of young people into the job market.  One way to achieve this goal would be to make national service part of an early retirement system, making room more quickly for younger workers to come into the workforce during the years when they need money to raise their families and allowing older workers to move into volunteer or social-service work through a kind of national pre-retirement service system after their children are raised, allowing them to apply the lessons learned during their working days to the problems facing their communities.

            What, then, are the implications for the land grant university?

Engaging Society

           

            The first step is to re-envision the land grant mission to engage the new society that it serves.   Given the diverse—and often competing—cultures that have evolved in our institutions, the land grant mission must co-exist with other powerful missions.  Over the past century—and especially during the transitional period since World War II—the land grant university has been transformed.  Our land grant universities are now comprehensive research universities.  Their impact—and source of funding for research—often reaches well beyond their state boundaries.  The institutional culture has become more diverse in the process. 

            The comprehensive research university is typically seen as having three components:  teaching, research, and service.  The land-grant mission is often viewed as part of the service component.  There may a tendency, therefore, to isolate the land grant mission from the other competing goals.  That, in my view, would be a mistake.  The land grant mission must be seen as the means by which the university engages with the community across all three components:  Engaged teaching, engaged research, and engaged service.   The land grant mission is thus infused throughout the university.  That said, however, there must also be a champion for this mission within the university leadership.  Typically, that role falls to the Vice President for Extension or Outreach, which typically works on the financial and political periphery of the institution.  In the Information Age land grant university, leadership for the land grant mission should be positioned so that it can champion engagement across all three dimensions of the mission.  Each land grant university has a somewhat different set of cultural and political issues, so there is no single organizational solution.  Nevertheless, finding the right place for the leader who will champion the land grant mission in the diverse culture of our institutions is essential.

            It also is clear that, in the Information Society, the land grant mission must push the boundaries of the institution in at least two directions.   First, higher education needs to engage better with the K-12 segment, helping to improve access to courses that high school graduates will need in order to get into college and, especially, to majors that are important in the Information economy.  This engagement should blur the old boundaries between K-12 and higher education and could lead to accelerated degrees and other innovations at a scale needed to create and maintain the new workforce.  Second, higher education needs to take a lead in creating post-retirement skills for older adults, preparing them to play new roles in their communities after retirement.   Thirdly, higher education needs to build new collaborative relationships—new forms of engagement among universities, communities, and employers that encompass all three dimensions of the higher education mission:  engaged teaching to create and maintain a competitive workforce; engaged research to help businesses, farms, and other employers innovate and stay competitive; and engaged service support communities and families in this new social era.