One Step Forward, Two Back

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It’s a kind of Republican two-step that’s come to dominate our culture. We take one step forward by proposing to widen access to higher education via an expanded online community college (in this case, in Nevada).   What happens? The republican mind-set, ever ready to milk the government teat, argues that the new or expanded system ought to be out-sourced. We can’t get past our market fetish and to begin to think about the public good.

It keeps happening, too, despite the every growing pile of evidence that as long as we socialize costs and privatize profits we will all continue to grow poorer and poorer as the money pools among an increasingly small group. Increasingly, the Bush years have come to be called the “lost decade“– a full ten years of stagnation and violence, all rooted in the narrow narcissism of the private profit motive.  It used to be simply called greed.

Posted in: Writing

It’s the marketing, stupid!

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I’ve said before that we– those of us who love computers and new communication technologies and who adapted them early and often– have often been very wrong in our initial assumptions. In the late 1990s we thought that multitasking was a technologically enhanced way to work and learn and play. As it turns out, brains don’t work or play or learn that way at all.

Or, rather, brains can work and learn and play that way, but only by severely limiting the quality of work or play or learning. It’s probably fine to have the radio on the background as you write, but you can’t email with one hand while answering questions in an online classroom with the other; both email and forum postings will be littered with errors at best. Focus matters.

We also believed that our students were increasingly what we called “digital natives” who would not struggle to learn these new technologies in the way we had. This begs some interesting questions. Here’s how one writer, Arthur Goldstuck, puts it:

How is it possible that the typical child is so much more adept at using gadgets than the typical adult? How did we come to stereotype the neighbour’s 12-year-old son as the expert who will sort out our computers, cellphones and TV programming? (“The Myth of the Digital Native“)

In my experience, this idea never held water. At first, I did meet  at least some students, mostly boys, who were fascinated with computers and so knew a lot about them. Very quickly, though, it became clear that students’ interests were very different from my own as a college teacher. I knew about the web and .html, they knew about My Space and video games. Facebook didn’t change that at all.

Goldstuck argues that the difference is developmental. At 15 you are more capable of learning than at, say, 50. That may be true. I think he’s also missing the obvious: a lot of the difference has to do with marketing. Young people, who are arguably more vulnerable to ads, are interested in certain technologies because that’s what they have been sold. That may not help education at all.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Language, Professional

Competition

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We all know that trouble– to use a polite euphemism– is on its way to the for-profit colleges as the impact of the new regulations slowly come into focus. My school seems to be thriving, but I have heard stories about sudden lay offs and reduced course loads. The new regulations may well be profoundly disruptive; there could be more layoffs and even some schools might close down. Birth can be a bloody mess; market economies focus on profits first, and people second.

Capitalism, as Marx said, is both violently creative and violently destructive, and the birth of contemporary online education is no exception. We can only hope that the machinations of the market as it absorbs change, along with the labor problems and the student debt that plague all of higher education, eventually helps to create, “intellectually rigorous e-classes so animated and interactive that students can’t help but excel.”  So far, I think, this is still more promise than reality.

Still, that’s one reporter’s description of the goals of the University of California’s new program (“UC investing millions in new cyber studies program“). For-profits can’t survive without regulations because we need them to build credibility.  We succeeded so far because we provided access unavailable anywhere else.  That’s changing, and more and more we’ll have to compete with schools, like the California system, solely on the basis of the quality of our programs.

Posted in: Professional