Brainstorm in Progress: New York Times

Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts

Sunday, July 22, 2012

The Real Trouble With Online Education

An editorial piece in the New York Times on July 19th by Mark Edmundson attempts to tell us about "The Trouble with Online Education." Despite the fact that the author does not appear to have taken or taught an online class, and despite not having any listed credentials in the field of education, online teaching and learning, or instructional design, Edmundson, and apparently the editors of the New York Times, feel he is qualified to to make the pronouncement that online courses are not "real" courses.

He asks "can online education ever be education of the very best sort?" In that loaded Gatsbyesque question, does he mean the kind of education the 1% can get at the Ivy Leagues? No, most online classes that I know of or have experienced were not small settings where we sat with a professor in big leather chairs sipping sherry. Not everyone can afford such an education and maybe that is why some folks seem to be threatened by online learning - the barbarians are at the gates! Online classes are classes of a different sort. And here is my real problem with this article: the author does not know what happens in an online class so he assumes it is not what happens in a face-to-face class and this is just wrong.

Edmundson describes face-to-face classes as places where there is engagement, dialog and the inadvertent creation of academic community "the students will always be running into others who are also enrolled" (I am presuming in the halls or the cafeteria - do his students not work or have families?). But the fact is, I have taken face-to-face classes at colleges (U.C. Berkeley, for instance) where the professor had no time for undergrads, directed all questions to the tutors, and did nothing to foster community. Conversely, I took an online course in 2008 from the University of Manitoba (George Siemens and Stephen Downes MOOC "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge") and I am still in touch with students I met there - in fact, we are basically continuing what we learned in online communities. We are still engaged with one another. What instructor wouldn't want that? In the "very best sort" of online classes, this community and engagement is deliberately built into the courses, and the research says that student engagement is the number one factor in the success of online courses. That said, I did take an online class that was poorly run: the teacher would go days without connecting with the course, the feedback on assignments was minimal and late, and there was little direction. My point is that the teaching modality does not matter if the teacher is engaged.

There seems to be a lot of this going around, there were blog postings I read through the Chronicle of Higher Ed from Siva Vaidhaynathan and Joshua Kim's posting in Inside Higher Ed that both gave negative evaluations of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Classes) despite the authors having no experience with MOOCs or online classes. I addressed those issues in my posting "Why MOOCs Work" but I feel that there is a larger issue here. If you read the three articles together, all contra elearning, they all have this alarmist ring to them that somehow online education is a watering down of face-to-face education. You get a real sense that if the world now accepts online education as it seems that it does, and accepts badges and portfolios in place of traditional certification, that it will detract from the value of the precious face-to-face college. You know the college - the one with the tuition that has risen faster than the price of inflation, faster than the costs of healthcare, and the $250 textbooks.

Edmundson claims that "Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor." There are too many kinds of online classes out there for this to be true: there are full online courses that include Skype sessions with teachers and tutors; there are hybrid courses; there are classes that are more self-directed; and there are MOOCs; I could go on. What constitutes an online class can be as individual as the instructor who teaches it.

He claims that "It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue." Again, he is basing this on courses that are filmed and canned but that is NOT the most common teaching modality in online education. Most online classes include discussion forums and students now are using social media and networks such as Twitter and Facebook to engage with one another, with their instructors and experts in their field of study. A glance at the research at sites like Educause would give him an idea about what is happening.

He says that instructors can't gauge the nuances of a class online. If online instructors engage their online class with online discussion forums and chat, they can gauge what is happening. In fact, in some of my online English classes I got to know some of my students better than my face-to-face classes because the students will often seek out that engagement, and socialize a lot online, to make that human connection online.

All of this points to an appalling lack of knowledge about what constitutes online learning. I can't believe that a college professor would accept similar judgements from a student with nothing to back them up but what "seems." All three authors, Edmundson, Vaidhaynathan, and Kim, evoke what "seems" as evidence. It is not like the research is hard to find. There have been hundreds of studies that show that there is no significant difference between the outcomes and success rates between online and face-to-face learning. All Edmundson would have to do is to take a look at WCET's "No Significant Difference" webpage to find a collection of the research that goes back a hundred years. Or to look at any recent study like the one reported in The American Interest called "New Study: Online Classes Just as Good."

The real trouble with online education right now is that online education is currently being defined in unfavorable ways by those who feel threatened by it. Online education is not the same as face-to-face education. Just as you should not believe the hype behind anything "new" (even if it just new to the press) - don't be dissuaded by those who are so embedded in the old paradigm and have so much to gain by its persistence that you miss out on some great teaching and learning opportunities.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Facebook and My 1000 Closest Friends

This is an article I wrote for the Times Standard "Tech Beat' column for May 11, 2012:

I have read a few claims recently about the detrimental effects of the Internet. The most recent one came from the New York Times in the article “The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle, a professor from MIT, who says that the Internet is making our relationships with one another superficial. Her idea is that we are mistaking our “likes” on Facebook as real conversation and our “friends” online as real friends. I think this argument comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of online communication.

Turkle says that for the past 15 years she has studied connective technologies and talked to “hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged in lives.” She relies primarily on anecdotes, and one of my favorite quotes from economist Roger Brinner says that “the plural of anecdote is not data.” A collection of subjective experiences does not make them objective. Anecdotal evidence is of limited usefulness; it can provide case studies and be the starting point for research, but it is generally considered as weak evidence.

Turkle says that the little devices we carry around with us are so powerful “they change not only what we do but who we are.” I basically agree with this. I don't particularly think this is negative. People write less. Last year the post office closed 3,700 locations. Some of this was due to expanded retail marketing, but much of it is because email and texting make most letter writing superfluous. Does this mean that somehow our correspondence is less meaningful?

I have hundreds of anecdotes of my own. Let's take my community college cafeteria in 1984. There were no cell phones. There was no email. The college library had a non-networked computer lab with TRS 80s. Our only hope was to actually talk to somebody face to face. I would go into the cafeteria, buy a cup of coffee, sit down at the table, and ask the nearest girl “What classes are you taking?” or “What's your major?” with what I hoped would pass for something not quite entirely unlike sincerity. One might suspect that, even though I was trying to start up a conversation, I may not have been really all that interested in what classes they were taking or what their major might have been. Needless to say, my intent was to have a conversation. More often than not, the “conversation” stopped there. But once in a great while it led to more coffee elsewhere.

Today, I have 879 friends on Facebook, but let's take a closer look. I do not expect birthday cards from 875 of them. I originally started using Facebook because many educators and instructional designers I met at education conferences (both face-to-face and online) were using it to share materials, links, and contact information. This accounts for at least 300 of my “friends.” About 200 of my “friends” are literary journals, editors, and literary agents. They never call or come over for dinner, yet I follow them on Facebook because I write and want to keep up with what is going on in the literary world.

A little over a hundred friends on Facebook are family. Some I see often, and many of them I have never met. Some of these distant cousins live in Ireland. We will be using Facebook to plan a birthday/family reunion this December when my father turns 80 and my little brother turns 50. There is nothing superficial about that.

You might have friends at your local service organization, temple, or church. But what happens when you go to that weekly meeting? Do you have a deep conversation? Maybe not, but you probably know that if you need help, you have a community to fall back on when things are tough. Or you might be willing to lend a hand to someone who is in need. It might be something simple like a lift to the hospital on a Monday morning or a chore that an older person might find difficult to do. When you meet those people, you might just smile and nod. The “like” in Facebook is that smile and nod.

Social networks can be superficial, and yet over and over again, we see that when there is trouble, those friends in social networks can have a major impact. I am thinking here of the Arab Spring and the communications networks that sprang up out of Twitter to change the face of the Arab world forever. Maybe the technology has allowed us to see the superficial surface of human communication frozen in time in the social network, but that is not how we should be judging technology because most people seem to be using to enhance their connections with one another rather than trivialize them.

Geoff Cain is a member of the Redwood Technology Consortium and director of distance education at College of the Redwoods. Contact him at geoff-cain@redwoods.edu<

Thursday, August 19, 2010

How Open Source Changes Business Models

Image via WikipediaOne great thing that open source does is change how businesses work. Open textbooks are a great example. The publishers are doing a little too late in their attempt to fix the financial issues around textbook costs and the high cost of education. The New York Times reported earlier this year that trade and textbook publisher Macmillan is following the lead of open source publishers like Wikibooks, and is offering lower cost, editable textbooks online through their service DynamicBooks. They have disguised themselves well as an open source publisher. There is nothing on the website that would lead one to believe they are connected with Macmillan. There is the press release section in the "About us" menu item where you will find press releases and stories touting their idea as "ground-breaking" and "innovative" as if following the lead of open source is somehow a new idea. They are not really an open source option, of course: "Ms. Clancy of Macmillan said the publisher reserved the right to 'remove anything that is considered offensive or plagiarism,' and would rely on students, parents and other instructors to help monitor changes." That is really big of them to watch over us like that - in open source texts it is called "peer review" and instructors/authors are pretty good at citing their sources and not being concerned about offending others (that is called "academic freedom" for the instructors and "cognitive dissonance" for the students). On the plus side, Macmillan gets to take advantage of one part of the open source model and that is breaking out of the two year cycle for correcting mistakes in textbooks. In the end, book publishers need to make profits; educators facilitate learning. With the economy in the state that it is in, those are two diametrically opposed goals.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Just Another Cell in the Brain?: The Internet and Education

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, Robert Wright, journalist and author of various books including The Evolution of God and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, penned an op-ed in the New York Times in which he contemplates the Internet in all its ubiquitous (albeit Big Brotherish) glory. Wright suggests:

"...technology is weaving humans into electronic webs that resemble big brains — corporations, online hobby groups, far-flung N.G.O.s. And I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism..."

While Wright's rhetoric seems a bit Huxley-esque, his message in a nutshell is that the overall social impact of the Internet won't necessarily be a sinister one. Nor does Wright kowtow to technology extremists who praise the Internet as if it's the Second Coming.

While it can be difficult to see what, exactly, is so great about being another cell in a cosmic, web-like superbrain, Wright makes a compelling case that stands in stark contrast to Internet denouncements that have recently been proferred by the likes of Nicholas Carr, author of the now-infamous article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (as well as an accompanying book just out--The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains)

Wright argues that while sure, we waste a lot of time on the Internet, these temporal inefficiencies are negligible when we compare them to the incredible social efficiencies that enable any user, anywhere at any time to connect with like-minded people and to disseminate, search for, and digest information on just about anything.

For education as a whole, the implications of these efficiencies cannot be overemphasized. While some are hesitant to embrace the open education movement, let us conceptually stand for a moment at the intersection of education and the Internet. Imagine a library that is so vast, it defies mapping, a digital, ethereal, tangled web of people and information that, when properly channeled, has the ability to make self-education a reality for anyone who is willing to learn?

It is these things that we should consider before we write off the technology that some have too readily dismissed. Of course, with every technological blessing, there will be roadblocks, and with the Internet, it's minefields of frivolous distraction. But not all distractions are created equally, and sometimes it is precisely distraction that will lead to new fields of inquiry.

After all, perhaps the ultimate goal of education is to foster a passion for continued learning that extends beyond formal schooling, no matter what the subject. And no one can deny that the Internet is perhaps the one medium that has most furthered this goal for the greatest amount of people globally.

This guest post is contributed by Kate Cunningham, who writes on the topics of online university rankings. She welcomes your questions and comments at her email Id: cn.kate1@gmail.com.