Obvious and Not Obvious

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It’s nearing the end of the year and so it’s time for the proliferation of top ten lists and predictions for 2011. It’s always both enjoyable and, often, more than a little irritating. I just read a piece in Campus Technology, “5 Higher Ed Tech Trends To Watch in 2011,” by Bridget McCrea. Most of the list is boring and very predictable– cloud and mobile technology dominate– until you get to the very last item: “A Retreat from Technology Overload is Imminent.” It’s an intriguing idea, I think, although the shape of the retreat is debatable.

Arguably, what we are seeing is a bifurcation of the use of communication technologies along class lines. It’s an emerging picture that’s both hazy and complex. On the one hand there’s the emergence of technologies that are either so expensive or so time consuming to master– the I-PAD and many so-called new media technologies might be good examples– that they are difficult to implement outside of elite settings. This sort of bifurcation is aided by the increasing cost of education, of course.

On the other hand there’s some indication that elite institutions may be retreating from new communication technologies. If we wanted to be optimistic, we can hope that this is becuase they’ve realized that certain kinds of learning– particularly those associated with social capital– are facilitated by face to face interaction. If we want to be cynical, we might suspect that these institutions are attempting to strengthen their brand identification by creating a sharper contrast with the ever growing use of technology elsewhere.

The community colleges and for profit schools continue their embrace of educational technologies such as the internet, and continue to serve working class and poor communities increasingly ignored by the elite institutions. Meanwhile, the elite schools seem to be racing away from even the middle classes. In this sort of environment, the use of technology in the classroom may eventually become a sign of a lesser education, rather than the mark of innovative experimentation. Now that’s a trend worth watching.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Class Struggle

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It’s a cliche by now to say that Americans don’t discuss or really understand class. It’s more accurate, though, to say that those Americans who profess to have some understanding of American society and economics don’t understand class. It’s a cliche, but it’s still true: class is almost invisible here in the United States, at least in official discourse.

Of course, if you are one of the many getting poorer– or the millions without insurance or unemployed– you know class all too well. Class, as Marx famously said, is always a class struggle for working people, a kind of ongoing, constant battle to keep yourself afloat. Lots of people in the U.S. seemed to believe that by creating a large, affluent middle class we ended this struggle for good.

We haven’t, of course, and we are paying a high price for our complacency. We’ve reached a point, in fact, where the only way we can get the most basic kinds of social support– unemployment insurance, even a temporary raise in our wages– is by paying off the rich. We get a tiny 2% break in taxes and another year of unemployment insurance. The rich get billions.

So the Chronicle of Higher Education’s statistical portrait of the undergraduate population ought to be much less of a surprise. As it turns out, just as wages have declined, and the costs of college have been increasingly shifted to the individual, fewer and fewer students “live on leafy campuses and party hard—many others are commuters, full-time workers, and parents.”

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Silos

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There was a point– I think in the late 1070s– when I realized that events and ideas and concerns seem to come in waves. If I remember correctly, I was struck then by a wave of explosions in grain silos. There seemed to be a period, perhaps over a year or more, when the things exploded one after the other. More recently, I’ve been struck by a what looks like an endless string of mining disasters. My students might call this sort of thing ironic, but it’s really happenstance.

Happenstance isn’t meaningless. So when I start seeing patterns, I pay attention. Most recently, as the last few posts would suggest, there’s been a suite of stories discussing the market, and the market’s relationship to education. Obviously, as a teacher in propitiatory education, this is a subject that I find relevant. Educators tend to see themselves as existing in a space or even a world separate from commerce, of course, even though the separation is apparent rather than real.

Still, education is supposed to give a student some distance from commerce, a perspective that puts the profit motive, with its short term thinking and often brutal self-interest, into a larger perspective. A market ideology would like us to believe, at some level, that the market epitomizes human nature and, as such, should be an object of veneration if not worship. It doesn’t, of course, any more than, say, a game of football sums up human nature.

Still, as Marx noted, exchange or trade is too deeply rooted in human culture to disappear anytime soon. Educators may not want to be business people, and we may believe that the market risks corruption, but we can’t ignore it. That’s why I like this piece on the University College London’s so-called technology transfer program. I think it shows that, with careful thought, the profit and not-for-profit motives can peacefully co-exist. It’s difficult but it’s possible.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional

Another Market Fable

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Market irrationality’s darkest side is the way it so often so violently kills the geese that’s laid its golden eggs. The financial folks keep reinventing ways of making absurd amounts of money because their most successful inventions, derivatives being the most recent example, tend to explode. This time, too, due to another market innovation– the interlocking global capital markets– the self-destruction has led to a continuing world wide meltdown, from Iceland to Portugal.

In the wake of all of this we must be developing a whole slew of new aphorisms that all say something like, “when the banks mess up, the poor pay the bills.” Of course, there’s really nothing new in that at all. This, I think, ought to be the context through which we think about net-neutrality in general and Tim Berners-Lee’s recent piece, “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,” first published in the Scientific American.

Berner’ persuasively suggests that we are reaching an important turning point. If we kill the goose we won’t get any more eggs. It’s not too complicated, in the end, although the ramifications might be very completed as well as damaging. “The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth,” Berners says, is universality.” If it’s not universal; it’s not the web. If it’s not the web, (digital communications) innovation slows to a crawl or stops altogether.

Posted in: Economics, Professional