It was long past time to update my site and I decided that ringing in a new year would be a good time for a refresh. I’ve been doing a bit of consulting lately, and would love to do more so I’ve added a section indicating what I can offer. Please take a look and let me know what you think.
I hope this year brings us all good things!
I am in this online course, an extension of a MOOC, called E-Learning 3.0, hosted by Stephen Downes. Over 10 weeks (12 if you count the warm-up) we look at the technical and social sides of where learning online (
Connectivism came about as a result of the environment. The web was maturing, and the web is based on nodes with anchors, links and targets to other nodes. Brain science (OK, neuroscience) was going great gangbusters with a new tool called FMRI, discovering all these links between neurons. I was reading Linked by Albert-Lazlo Barabasi. It was only natural that we try to apply these advances to learning (and by extension, to teaching, and finally to education).
Back to the present. In our 3rd week of #el30 we are looking at some highly technical roots of connectionism, mostly mathematical concepts that underlie how tech works, how we work with tech, and how we work with each other. Last week we talked about tree structures, which look like the sentence diagrams we wrote at kids when Chomsky was applied to everything. It also looks like the sports league championship diagrams.
But this week we move from trees to graphs. All trees are graphs (a subset), but graphs can be more like networks, with multiple connections in all directions, without–and this is crucial–a center. From there the thinking widens to neural networks and machine learning. Note again that these can be applied to networks of machines or of people. It is a way to look at the world, a way to see that the connections are just as important as the nodes of content. I can see how this can even get philosophical.
I don’t understand much of this. When I studied this stuff in the ’90s, about Speech Recognition, there was the Markov Model and not much else. It has blossomed as I have ignored it. My silly prediction that SR would be viable was premature by at least a decade. But now we have SR, many of us use it every day, and it is based on these ideas of graph theory. This is my corner of the connected part of this course. You can jump in any time.
I’m not exactly a newcomer to the D&D alignment chart. It’s been a major meme forever. Did I let that stop me from creating a chart of my own? Nope. After all, I’m a regular if not very skilled D&D player, and I love urban design. Two great tastes that taste great together! Chart below. […]
Michael B. Katz is a new discovery for me (h/t Roving Librarian). His scholarship on the history of public education in the U.S.is fascinating, troubling, and revelatory. I’m sure his conclusions are contested–whose aren’t?–but at times the clarity and forcefulness of his insights take my breath away.
“The Moral Crisis of the University,” reprinted in Katz’s last book, Reconstructing American Education (1987), is full of such insights. The essay doesn’t make for happy reading, but every time I read it I come away with a renewed understanding of what will be lost if higher education centered on the life of the mind and nurtured by a strong sense of civic obligation disappears. In many cases, this has already happened. The change Katz describes in 1987 has accelerated in ways that may go beyond his worst nightmare. Along with that acceleration, of course, is a great deal of business as usual, as there always is. We look here when the real erosion is happening there. It’s hard to know where to look, even when there are no distractions–and there are always distractions.
There’s an old joke about going broke, credited to Hemingway: Q: “How did you go bankrupt?” A: “Little by little, then all at once.” During the little by little stage, people who sound various alarms risk being called cranks, or worse. And it’s true: a premature or mischievous cultivation of outrage may damage or destroy what little semblance of community may be left.
And yet, the little by little becomes greater every year. Michael Katz gives me a way to see that. With that clarity also comes hope, the hope that recognizing problems really is the first step toward addressing them, managing them, perhaps even solving them.
Here, then, for Week 7 of Open Learning ’18, my last week as hub director, is some Michael Katz for us to consider together.
[W]hat is it exactly that makes a university distinct from other social institutions? [Robert Paul] Wolff offered a compelling definition based on a conception of the ideal university as a “community of learning.” The ideal university, he argued, should be “a community of persons united by collective understandings, by common and communal goals, by bonds of reciprocal obligation, and by a flow of sentiment which makes the preservation of the community an object of desire, not merely a matter of prudence or a command of duty.” Community implies a form of social obligation governed by principles different from those operative in the marketplace and state. Laws of of supply and demand lose priority; wage-labor is not the template for all human relations; the translation of individuals into commodities is resisted. The difficult task of defining common goals or acceptable activity is neither avoided nor deflected onto bureaucracy….
For all their problems, universities and their faculties remain immensely privileged. They retain a freedom of activity and expression not permitted in any other major social institution. There are two justifications for this privilege. One is that it is an essential condition of teaching and learning. The other is that universities have become the major source of moral and social criticism in modern life. They are the major site of whatever social conscience we have left…. If the legitimacy of universities rested only on their service to the marketplace and state, internal freedom would not be an issue. But their legitimacy rests, in fact, on something else: their integrity. Like all privileges, the freedom enjoyed by universities carries correlative responsibilities. In their case it is intellectual honesty and moral courage. Modern universities are the greatest centers of intellectual power in history. Without integrity, they can become little more than supermarkets with raw power for sale. This is the tendency in the modern history of the higher learning. It is what I call the moral crisis of the university.
I firmly believe that these large questions are essential foundations for any effective change or conservation in higher education. For always some new things must be invented, some things will benefit from change, and some things must be conserved. Some core principles must remain non-negotiable. I agree with Katz: tenured faculty in higher education are the last, best hope for addressing these large questions of common goals and acceptable activities.
It may not yet be too late.
I want to take a moment to emphasize the value of faculty development in an open environment. Both OpenLearning17 and OpenLearning18 provided opportunities to explore open pedagogy “in the open.” They also created a space for connecting with other faculty members and administrators with an interest in open education. I value my time in both OL17 and OL18—the topics I’ve explored, the people I’ve met— and I look forward to future iterations!
This post is going to be short and I hope sweet. The best faculty development opportunities I’ve experienced in my career haven’t been designed primarily (or explicitly?) for faculty development: Examples include UMW’s Faculty Academy, ELI Annual Conferences, at least in the early years, the SERC project, and OpenEd Conferences, to name just a few. What have they had in common? They were rich scholarly experiences, rather than training per se. That workshop on Excel may have taught me a few tricks with the software, but they didn’t fundamentally change the way I teach or think about teaching. The best faculty development opportunities were framed in a way that drew me in, that made me think the question they were exploring was interesting, even if I came in thinking the opposite. (I could name some of these, but I don’t wish to upset any of my friends. What you should remember is that I ended up in the right place.) These opportunities became intellectually compelling so that for a while (an hour, a day, a few days—whatever the length of the event) I forgot about real life and immersed myself in the problem at hand. And then, much to my surprise, I found myself thinking of ways this exploration could be applied to my teaching. In short, these activities were about scholarly learning rather than training.
That’s what I’ve found rewarding about #OpenLearning17-18. There were several topics in #OpenLearning17 that I didn’t think would interest me, but somehow I was carried along by the interest of my co-learners, and then found that I was interested as well. Part of it was the journey–the fact that I was studying a topic with a group of colleagues who, in the process, became friends. I wanted to contribute to our collective learning, so I had to take the process seriously. This is especially true in an open learning environment. Part of it was the conference effect–that what was happening was occurring outside of my normal work. That’s why going away, either literally or virtually, matters. With open learning, the colleagues I worked with included people I might never have had a chance to meet in real life. Yes, non-economists! 😉 That diversity (of place, of discipline) made the experience much richer for me. And it continues to do so.
David Wiley wrote a recent blog post that had me scratching my head. In the post, David argued that OER is in a feature of the resource, not who is providing it and whether the provider is offering it for free. This whole thing got me thinking about OER, commercial publishers and non-profit providers.
I know there are people who are opposed in principle to publishers who charge for their products in order to make a profit. I don’t have a problem with profit. If a chef opens a restaurant in my community and offers good food at a reasonable price, I am happy if they make a profit with the business, because that means they are likely to stay around. What I do have a problem with is excess profit. My favorite example, which some of you will remember, is Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster offered lousy service and charged too much. But they were the only game in town, so if you wanted to watch a video that night, you pretty much had to go to Blockbuster.
The first rule of economics is that nothing is produced for free; if it’s free to use, someone else is paying. This is not a moral judgment. Rather, it’s a fact of life. Everything (or almost everything) has a cost to produce. 
Leo Tolstoy gave up the copyright to his early novels, and adopted a peasant lifestyle. I can’t imagine what his family thought of that. Most of us are not like Tolstoy. We all need to provide for ourselves, and our families. When I helped write OpenStax’ Principles of Economics, I was paid a reasonable stipend to compensate me for the time. It didn’t make me rich, but it was enough. If I was one of those heroic authors, like my colleague Caitie Findlayson, who writes an open textbook without the support of any publisher, I would be able to do it only because I had the luxury of time as part of my professional responsibilities as a tenured faculty member. In other words, I would be implicitly compensated by my institution, but the cost would be the other scholarly work I wasn’t able to do in that time. There is always an opportunity cost. If I was working 9 to 5 somewhere, I wouldn’t be able to do the project at all.
OpenStax is a nonprofit organization. Where did they get the money to pay me, and to pay the other expenses of producing the book? The answer is grant funding. Grants are great, but they run out. Then what? How does OpenStax pay for the servers on which the book resides? How do they pay for updates and corrections? How do they pay for new editions? This is a perpetual challenge for non-profits. As far as I can tell, OpenStax has a four-pronged approach:
Do people criticize OpenStax because of their affiliation with Sapling who charges a fee for the book plus ancillaries? I may be wrong, but I don’t think so. Do they criticize OpenStax for openly allowing Sapling to use their open texts? I’ve not heard that criticism. Have people criticized Sapling for exploiting the open license of OpenStax? I haven’t heard that either.
The elephant in the room is commercial publishers who are beginning to offer OER wrapped in a package for a price. Traditional proponents of OER are rightly suspicious of commercial publishers who are new to the OER field. Commercial publishers have a long history of charging very high prices for textbooks, higher than can be justified by costs.
Take “Inclusive Access” for example. If you’re not familiar, Inclusive Access is a marketing venture by commercial publishers to rent digital texts to an entire class for a discounted price. Students are on the hook to their university for the bill, unless they opt out, so the “nudge” is in the wrong place. Inclusive Access strikes me as akin to OpenWashing. While the digital text is cheaper than a new print edition, at my school at least it’s not very cheap, coming in a bit under $100. It’s a pretty good deal for the commercial publishers, since the marginal cost of a digital copy is about zero. And Inclusive Access is certainly not OER since the access goes away at the end of the term.
When is it legitimate to charge for OER? Like any product, charging is appropriate if the product adds value, in this case to the OER. Sapling added value to OpenStax Principles of Economics because it offered a feature that OpenStax didn’t have. The problems & quizzes helped students learn better than just with the text alone. Similarly, Lumen Learning adds value in its Waymaker platform for the same reason.
Of course, one can argue that the value added isn’t worth the price. In the older model of commercial publishers, they charged for the book and then offered the ancillary products, including online quizzes and problems for free. But the package was pricey. Cengage is currently charging over $200 for their market leading Principles of Economics book. That price has come down from its original $385. Sapling charged about $40 for its product, which included OpenStax Principles of Economics. Lumen Learning charges $25 for its Waymaker Principles of Economics. Sapling struck me as a bargain for what it offered my students. Waymaker, which I’ve used for the last three years, is even better, especially since my own statistical analysis has shown that the average student does at least as well with Waymaker as with the previous commercial text I used. Perhaps more importantly, Waymaker seems to help weaker students more than stronger ones.
Commercial publishers have traditionally charged too high a price for their books two reasons: First, because they have a higher cost structure (due to their large sales force). Second, they have exploited their market power to charge more than a reasonable price for their products. 
Monopolies often fall when a technological improvement creates better alternatives. Thus, Netflix supplanted Blockbuster. Only when OER came on the scene did cracks appear in the commercial textbook oligopoly. (For non-economists, an oligopoly is an industry dominated by a small number of firms that exploit their joint monopoly power.) Newcomers like Sapling brought textbook prices down to under $50. And Lumen Learning brought them down to $25. Is $200 too much to ask a student to pay for a textbook? In my opinion it is, especially given the alternatives. Is $25 too much to ask? I’ve asked my students that question every semester that I’ve used Waymaker, and no student has ever said yes.
Lumen Learning deserves some kudos: For every course for which they offer their Waymaker value-added OER, they also offer a free version of the Waymaker content without the added features. This free version is openly licensed to include the 5Rs. It’s hard to ask more than that.
Disclosure: I’m the lead subject matter expert for Waymaker Principles of Economics and I’ve taught with Waymaker for the last three years.
Image credits:
OpenStax website
Image By Ilya Repin – ugFXC9F7-NWM9Q at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21854099
Image Netflix courtesy of Abhijit Bhaduri via flickr.com
In advocating for OER on my campus, I’ve run into many misconceptions. I’ve also found a few people in influential positions, with influential reputations, who are actively spreading these misconceptions. This FAQ is a useful document for addressing some of them.
OER help “to ensure that resources are up-to-date”
How up-to-date are commercial textbooks? There is an investment of time and money that goes into revisions and printing new editions, so publishers don’t want to do that any more than necessary. They also have a vested interest in eliminating the market for used books, so there is a financial benefit to updating editions frequently. Faculty can OER whenever they please, due to the Creative Commons permissions. Some may see this as a drawback, if they would rather have someone else be responsible for keeping materials current. I can see benefits to building the updating process into a course though. Students could look to current research, events and issues to see how they intersect with course subject matter, and be charged with proposing revisions. This type of an assignment would have them actively thinking about the relevance of what they’re learning, how they are learning it, and how to get ideas and concepts across to others. Students would gain experience in managing their own learning processes at the some time as they learn the course content.
“Can OER be high quality if it is free?”
Are commercial textbooks high quality because they’re expensive? What kind of review process do they actually go through? How do we rate quality anyway? What factors are considered important? What matters is student learning and student success. Writing, editing and design will have an impact on that. So will accessibility and cost. I imagine it is relatively easy to compare textbook A to textbook B and decide which is better based on content and presentation. It would be more difficult to determine if textbook A is $100 better than textbook B, or if students would derive $100 more of value from it. Due to CC permissions, OER can be modified to fit the needs of an institution, a department, an instructor, and a group of students. They can be continually modified to improve student success.
Sigh… So work got away from me so I didn’t get to participate as much as I would have liked so this is my attempt to catch up.
Week 2 we examined the Internet and how it relates to education and open access. I did the reading early and then didn’t have time to fully participate to get my questions answered. When I read and annotated the Tim Berners-Lee article I didn’t get the chance to respond to some of the questions I was asked about my comments, which deserve to be answered. As I read the article I was struck by the income bias. The article while very informative and enlightening, has a bias toward those who can afford access. Gardner Campbell noted my concerns and is I believe on the right track with inclusive access for all. Gardner also provided a link to Pew research showing the increase in usage of the internet. But as I looked through this data I was struck by how we are still biasing access with income and education. While general use has increased, lower income and education have just now reached the use point of higher income and education individuals were at 18 years ago. And home use of the internet via home broadband for low income is at 53% and low education at 34% verses high income and high education’s 93% and 91%. This is not taking into consideration location (data is provided). Also of note in that same research is that lower income and education individuals are more dependent on their smartphones for all their internet access. The internet has an inherent bias to those who can afford access, and I think it’s important to recognize that.
Week 3 we examined information literacy and open access. As a librarian who teaches a credit bearing research course, Facing the Frames just confined what I do. Although there are differences since my class is 16 weeks and we go into more then just information literacy (we also cover some aspects of writing), the concepts of teaching the student to analyze every aspect of what they are doing is important for librarians to understand and use in every aspect of what they do. Critical thinking and evaluation is the most important thing we teach. Which lead into Beyond Buttonology… I have to say I was surprised at this article, because I had thought that librarians had moved beyond teaching the mechanics already. Critical thinking and metacognition has always been emphasized where I have worked.
That’s my $0.02.
This article gave me a lot to think about as I filtered it through a professional and personal lens.
Just a few of the things in my brain at the end of Week 2. Have good weekend.
