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Ditching the Laptops: What are the implications for computer-assisted pedagogies?

Link: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times.

This is a secondary-school level problem, but supposedly it propagates out to the post-secondary schools as well. I've taught in laptop programs for many years, and encountered at one time or another every issue raised in the article below.

The question is: are these obstacles enough to justify ditching the programs? And perhaps a bigger issue (one for a great academic study in a secondary school setting): WHAT is causing the biggest roadblock? I mean, is there a McLuhan-esque cognitive ratio shift going on in the classrooms, or are the one-to-one laptops simply the wrong technological tool at the wrong time? Is it a flawed tool, or is the pedagogical model itself flawed?

The kids appear to be doing precisely what we knew kids would do. And technophobic teachers are also doing precisely what we knew they would do. But my mom taught third graders with Apple II's in the 1980s, and had them programming in Logos, making books, doing all kinds of really neat stuff. She was so pissed in the 1990s when they took the machines out of her classroom and made the students take "computer classes."

I think that's when the problems started. The the teachers who were coming up with neat projects (self-selected, integrated) to incorporate them into regular classrooms were taken out of the loop (or else roped into teaching those "how-to" classes), and then moved into separate (segregated, if you will) "computer classrooms" (not integrated with other class topics). THEN administrators tried to re-integrate computers into ALL classrooms (one-to-one laptops). You completely lose control of pedagogical innovation, and try to make the laptops into just another classroom tool, like a piece of chalk.

Obviously, some teachers will respond better to technology in the classroom than others, so there are also issues in HOW the programs are being evaluated. Are they studying the programs across the board, or looking at the cool things that are being done?

That said, I've done such an evaluation of a university laptop program, a pilot I participated in, with original student research. I have mixed feelings about the entire endeavor, related to some issues I raised in this CNN.com column. I'm not saying these are definitive takes on the project, but I'm highly suspicious of the evaluations reported below, of the methods by which the programs are judged, as well as the methods by which the programs were implemented. I suspect both were flawed, and ditching the programs risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Meaning, I DON'T like the way the programs were set up in the first place. I'd say they were set up to fail. And while I would not teach with laptops exactly as I have in the past (I still don't want the machines on and part of the process 100% of the time, nor do I want to DENY ACCESS in the classroom either, for specific projects), I don't think schools are going about this the right way at all.

Link: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times.

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops

Narayan Mahon for The New York Times

John Gabriel, 18, left, Jeff Hendel, 17, and Mary Grace Van Ness, 17, used a school-issued laptop for fun during lunch at Liverpool High.

By WINNIE HU

Published: May 4, 2007

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Liverpool’s turnabout comes as more and more school districts nationwide continue to bring laptops into the classroom.

[...]

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

[I don't know about you, but I don't give a lot of credence to most of what has come out of the current administration's Department of Education, esp. under the current secretary. The programs (No Child Left Behind), the secretly paid shills masquerading as journalists, and other agendas (like Neal Bush's computer educational materials being foisted on Katrina victims) all tend to leave the department with about as much credibility as FEMA, or the Department of Justice, or even NASA or the Department of Interior, where scientists' work is doctored for a political agenda.

So I don't see the study above as something I'd set total stock in. My guess is that this administration is just looking for a handy excuse to deny funding for some project to low income and minority school districts. I mean, if the tech project money is taken away, I doubt it would be replaced with anything else, for those districts. Unless there were some rabid right-wing "faith-based" outfit looking to seize control of it and start doing Chuck Colson-style indoctrination or something.]

[...]

Two years ago, school officials in Broward County, Fla., the sixth-largest district in the country, shelved a $275 million proposal to issue laptops to each of their more than 260,000 students after re-evaluating the costs of a pilot project. The district, which paid $7.2 million to lease 6,000 laptops for the pilot at four schools, was spending more than $100,000 a year for repairs to screens and keyboards that are not covered by warranties. “It’s cost prohibitive, so we have actually moved away from it,” said Vijay Sonty, chief information officer for the district, whose enrollment is 37 percent black, 31 percent white and 25 percent Hispanic.

Here in Liverpool, parents have long criticized the cost of the laptop program: about $300,000 a year from the state, plus individual student leases of $25 a month, or $900 from 10th to 12th grades, for the take-home privilege.

“I feel like I was ripped off,” said Richard Ferrante, explaining that his son, Peter, used his laptop to become a master at the Super Mario Brothers video game. “And every time I write my check for school taxes, I get mad all over again.”

Students like Eddie McCarthy, 18, a Liverpool senior, said his laptop made him “a lot better at typing,” as he used it to take notes in class, but not a better student. “I think it’s better to wait and buy one for college,” he said.

[...]

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

In one of the largest ongoing studies, the Texas Center for Educational Research, a nonprofit group, has so far found no overall difference on state test scores between 21 middle schools where students received laptops in 2004, and 21 schools where they did not, though some data suggest that high-achieving students with laptops may perform better in math than their counterparts without. When six of the schools in the study that do not have laptops were given the option of getting them this year, they opted against.

Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom” (Teachers College Press, 2006), also found no evidence that laptops increased state test scores in a study of 10 schools in California and Maine from 2003 to 2005. Two of the schools, including Rea Elementary, have since eliminated the laptops.

[Yeah, if that's the sole measure of success, "increase test scores"? Good god, I could drill and skill any class to death and increase test scores in two weeks, if that's all they want from education. Such teaching is merely indoctrination, and it produces good little robots. I'll give this guy credit, tho. He understands the study is limited.]

But Mr. Warschauer, who supports laptop programs, said schools like Liverpool might be giving up too soon because it takes time to train teachers to use the new technology and integrate it into their classes. For instance, he pointed to students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online.

“Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research,” he said. “If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.”

[...]

 

Human Subjects Review Boards gone mad?

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

I ran into this kind of ridiculousness in grad school as well. The thing is, my study was massively attentive to research ethics, and I went far beyond whatever ethical requirements a review board might make, because the theoretical frame of my study took a strong position against the exploitation that comes with colonialist thinking, even with scholarly "territories."

But even so, I ducked out on the Human Subjects review with one quick trick. It may not have been the best solution, and, as the absurd issues pointed up in the article below highlight, the Review Board probably could have still taken an insanity pill and come after me.

Basically, even though I was technically conducting an ethnography in cyberspace, I chose to ONLY collect texts that would have otherwise existed in the public domain, a linguistic fiction that worked because communication in cyberspace domains is a hybrid of both published texts and live communication.

The article below accurately points out, such restrictions certainly limit the kinds of findings that can come from any research. To my end, I still did "informal" research, and just removed it from any connection to my formal data-gathering process, through forming personal and private relationships in the group I was studying, but keeping them out of the study. But they surely did inform my larger breadth of knowledge on my subject.

Another reason why this is just nuts occurred to me when working back in the field of journalism the last five years.

Since the journalistic enterprise is not constructed as formal "research," journalists can do many more things to gather information from human subjects than academic researchers can. How does this affect how knowledge is made, how truths are constructed, when academic censorship becomes a major influence in the social construction of that knowledge?

Journalists operate with a Jeffersonian epistemology of sorts, where the supposedly free flow of ideas helps them arrive at the best-guess contingent truths. Yet, by default, because academics stay in their disciplinary walled gardens and rarely participate in public knowledge-making as public intellectuals, the journalistic research methods construct more of our common truths than anything else, simply because academics have ceded the Commons to them.

Meanwhile, Human Subjects Review Boards seem to have morphed into Cotton Mather and the good folk of Salem, Massachusetts, seeing evil lurking in every nuance and human interaction, every specter, every hint of a specter.

And do you know why? It's because I've been coming into their homes in the night, during their dreams, and pinching them, over and over. Pinch, pinch.

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 28, 2007

Ever since the gross mistreatment of poor black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to light three decades ago, the federal government has required ethics panels to protect people from being used as human lab rats in biomedical studies. Yet now, faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone. 

Photo by Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

Bernadette McCauley, a historian who was temporarily banned by an ethics panel from doing any research.

The panels, known as Institutional Review Boards, are required at all institutions that receive research money from any one of 17 federal agencies and are charged with signing off in advance on almost all studies that involve a living person, whether a former president of the United States or your own grandmother. This results, critics say, in unnecessary and sometimes absurd demands.

Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.”

“It drives historians crazy,” said Joshua Freeman, the director of the City University’s graduate history program. “It’s a medical model, it’s inappropriate and ignorant.” One student currently waiting for a board to approve his study of a strike in the 1970s, Mr. Freeman said, had to submit a list of questions he was going to ask workers and union officials, file signed consent forms, describe the locked location where he would keep all his notes, take a test to certify he understood the standards.

Review boards, first created in 1974, were initially restricted to biomedical research. In 1981 the regulations were revised to cover all research that involves “human subjects” and is designed to contribute to “generalizable knowledge.”

Yet precisely how to interpret these rules has largely been left to each review board — 5,564 in all. And while the regulations apply specifically to research that gets federal dollars, many colleges use Institutional Review Boards to monitor all research, no matter where the funds come from. This system of helter-skelter enforcement, critics say, has no meaningful oversight and no appeal process.

[...]

But to many faculty and graduate students, review boards are like a blister that gets worse with every step. Those outside of the hard sciences say the legitimate concerns over ethics and safety are largely irrelevant to most of their research.

According to a stack of reports, symposiums and studies by academic associations and scholars, the system’s “mission creep” is having a pernicious and widespread effect on humanities and social science research. Legal scholars also argue the boards violate the First Amendment.

The growing number of complaints in recent years apparently stems from an overall crackdown after a series of medical-research blunders beginning with the death of an 18-year-old in a gene-therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

[...]

In the past year, discussions about what some call the “I.R.B. wars” have sprung up in specialty publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education, conferences, scholarly journals and blogs. Although research proposals are rarely rejected, scholars argue that the requested changes in the wording of questions and consent forms can alter the nature of the study and scare off participants.

Bernadette McCauley, a historian at Hunter College, said she ran into trouble a couple of years ago when she tried to help students working with the Museum of the City of New York on an exhibition about Washington Heights. She asked if a few nuns who had grown up in that neighborhood and whom she knew from her research would talk to the students. And that, Ms. McCauley said, was “when things went haywire.”

The review board discovered the request and lambasted Ms. McCauley for failing to consult with it, she said. The board also demanded proof that previous research for a completed book did not use any archival material involving living people and banned her from doing any research.

Michael Arena, the director of communications at City University, said in an e-mail message that Ms. McCauley initially refused to send in a “brief description” of her research so that board members could determine whether federal regulations covered her work. Ms. McCauley hired a lawyer and after six months of negotiations, the board agreed that her research was exempt.

[...]

Ms. Dougherty, an associate professor of communications at Missouri, said review boards were needed because “historically, social science has done things abhorrent to human subjects.” Unfortunately the current process “obliterates a lot of research,” she said, because untenured faculty and graduate students on a timetable cannot afford to spend months waiting for approval. So, for example, “instead of talking to people who are victims of violence, you might look at newspaper articles,” she said, echoing a common complaint that the requirements cause academics to steer clear of controversial topics. Research decisions “should be guided by science,” she said, “not whether or not it’s going to get through the board.”

Ms. Dougherty said she was willing to speak openly, unlike many graduate students and faculty, because she had tenure.

[...]

Mr. Schwetz said there was no chance that some subjects like oral history and journalism would be altogether excluded from review, as some academic organizations have urged. “If we were just to say, ‘Assume you don’t have to take them before an I.R.B.,’ I think we would regret that,” he said. But he said the new guidelines “will give a lot of examples and will give more guidance on how to make the decision on what is research and what is not.”

Some critics fault the universities, placing blame either with overzealous panels or with university administrations that have not done enough to differentiate between research that receives federal money and research that does not.

Mr. Freeman of City University said that within the humanities “most faculty members don’t know these rules exist.” He added, “If they in fact followed these rules, the whole I.R.B. system would grind to a halt.”

 

Having some fun with Stanley Fish on the NYTimes Blog

Link: Stanley Fish - Think Again - Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses - Opinion - TimesSelect - New York Times Blog.

I must confess: an evil streak came over me just the other day. Maybe it was all those planets in Scorpio, Mars in Scorpio, and then Mercury rolling retrograde.

The real reason is that the New York Times left the barn door open and the cows got out.

I am vehemently boycotting all the content on TimesSelect, you see. I hate that firewall and the price, and what it does to the quality of the debate in the public commons of the Internet. I ranted on this topic a bit in a recent post on my other blog. I mean, truly, I can't live without Frank Rich, and if I could have Frank, I'd want Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert too. My life is messed up without them in it, and it is all the Times's fault.

So, the Times offered me a free week to play in the TimesSelect playground, that walled garden that I find to be a purely evil place where Rich and Herbert and Krugman are being held prisoner, and there's no one to rescue them. (Thank goodness they didn't trap David Pogue, or I might have to storm the castle!)

I knew I should never have entered  the rich kids' private playground, but I couldn't resist. And wouldn't you know it, they're keeping Stanley Fish in there too! You know, the noted academic and dean and distinguished professor? His provocative writings have shaped a great deal of recent theory in academia. He's associated with reader-response theories, interpretive communities, and anti-foundationalism.

Which is why, in private company, over a few beers, I like to pick on him. That's a safe thing to do, usually. Anti-foundationalism is such an easy target, sort of like the Star Trek time-travel paradoxes. Just a few quick moves, and everyone is all tied in knots.

Turns out there are some other academics, or former academics, or academic defenders, playing in TimesSelect too, either because they got a free week like I did, or maybe they like that elitist feeling of being a paid subscriber to TimesSelect. Pooh on that. E-vile, I'm telling you. TimesSelect is a sign of the apocalypse!

So it doesn't do me much good to quote too much of Stanley Fish's blog post, "Always Academicize," spinning off Frederick Jameson's "Always Historicize" maxim of a number of years ago. There's really no comparison between the two, because Jameson was making an academic argument, and Fish is just throwing out a quick hit blog post to the pseudo-masses behind the TimesSelect firewall.

He's also jumping off another post he did on a related topic in October, which I guess generated a bunch of sound and fury from pointy-headed people in the comments area as well. I wouldn't know about that, because technically, TimesSelect wasn't free to me at the time he wrote that piece, so I shouldn't be responsible for taking those argument threads into full consideration anyway, right?

Right now there are 104 comments on this Stanley Fish post. My anonymous comment is #39. I posted semi-anonymously because grad school conditioned me well. I figured I'd come off as a Fish dilettante, and some real Fish scholar would show up and wipe the floor with me.

Looks like some of them showed up and half-way liked what I had to say, tho. I had too much fun writing it to let the little piece rot in some secret TimeSelect walled garden blog comments field, so I've got a wild hair to share it, along with a few of the other commenters I admire. I also save it here for no other reason than because I don't know when my free week runs out, and I won't be able to access my own writing. Oh dear.

It raises some fun issues to think about, even if there is no way I can take Fish's thesis in the main blog text seriously, ever. It's just absurd, on the face of it. But that's OK, because there isn't a text in this class.

I'll just quote a bit of it here, to give you the gist, and then put my rant down below. I mean, how often do you get to do an academic-style flame on Stanley Fish, you know? It was just too much fun, and maybe I didn't embarrass myself after all.

Ah hell, I probably did.

Link: Stanley Fish - Think Again - Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses - Allison Arieff - Opinion - TimesSelect - New York Times Blog.

November 5, 2006,  10:00 pm

Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses

By Stanley Fish

In my post of October 22, I argued that college and university teachers should not take it upon themselves to cure the ills of the world, but should instead do the job they are trained and paid to do — the job, first, of introducing students to areas of knowledge they were not acquainted with before, and second, of equipping those same students with the analytic skills that will enable them to assess and evaluate the materials they are asked to read. I made the further point that the moment an instructor tries to do something more, he or she has crossed a line and ventured into territory that belongs properly to some other enterprise. It doesn’t matter whether the line is crossed by someone on the left who wants to enroll students in a progressive agenda dedicated to the redress of injustice, or by someone on the right who is concerned that students be taught to be patriotic, God-fearing, family oriented, and respectful of tradition. To be sure, the redress of injustice and the inculcation of patriotic and family values are worthy activities, but they are not academic activities, and they are not activities academics have the credentials to perform. Academics are not legislators, or political leaders or therapists or ministers; they are academics, and as academics they have contracted to do only one thing – to discuss whatever subject is introduced into the classroom in academic terms.

And what are academic terms? The list is long and includes looking into a history of a topic, studying and mastering the technical language that comes along with it, examining the controversies that have grown up around it and surveying the most significant contributions to its development. The list of academic terms would, however, not include coming to a resolution about a political or moral issue raised by the materials under discussion. This does not mean that political and moral questions are banned from the classroom, but that they should be regarded as objects of study – Where did they come from? How have they been answered at different times in different cultures? – rather than as invitations to take a vote (that’s what you do at the ballot box) or make a life decision (that’s what you do in the private recesses of your heart). No subject is out of bounds; what is out of bounds is using it as an occasion to move students in some political or ideological direction. The imperative, as I said in the earlier post, is to “academicize” the subject; that is, to remove it from whatever context of urgency it inhabits in the world and insert it into a context of academic urgency where the question being asked is not “What is the right thing to do?” but “Is this account of the matter attentive to the complexity of the issue?” [emphasis mine...cb] 

Those who commented on the post raised many sharp and helpful objections to it. Some of those objections give me the opportunity to make my point again. I happily plead guilty to not asking the question Dr. James Cook would have me (and all teachers) ask when a “social/political” issue comes up in the classroom: “Does silence contribute to the victory of people who espouse values akin to those of Hitler?” The question confuses and conflates political silence – you decide not to speak up as a citizen against what you consider an outrage – with an academic silence that is neither culpable nor praiseworthy because it goes without saying if you understand the nature of academic work. When, as a teacher, you are silent about your ethical and political commitments, you are not making a positive choice – Should I or shouldn’t I? is not an academic question — but simply performing your pedagogical role.

[...]

In fact, my stance is aggressively ethical: it demands that we take the ethics of the classroom – everything that belongs to pedagogy including preparation, giving assignments, grading papers, keeping discussions on point, etc.– seriously and not allow the scene of instruction to become a scene of indoctrination. Were the ethics appropriate to the classroom no different from the ethics appropriate to the arena of political action or the ethics of democratic citizenry, there would be nothing distinctive about the academic experience – it would be politics by another name – and no reason for anyone to support the enterprise. For if its politics you want, you might as well get right to it and skip the entire academic apparatus entirely.

My argument, then, rests on the conviction that academic work is unlike other forms of work — if it isn’t, it has no shape of its own and no claim on our attention — and that fidelity to it demands respect for its difference, a difference defined by its removal from the decision-making pressures of the larger world. And that finally may be the point underlying the objections to my position: in a world so beset with problems, some of my critics seem to be asking, is it either possible or desirable to remain aloof from the fray? Thus Fred Moramarco declares, “It’s clearly not easy to ‘just do your job’ where genocide, aggression, moral superiority, and hatred of opposing views are ordinary, everyday occurrences.”

[...]

Of course, there will also be excitement in your class if you give it over to a discussion of what your students think about this or that hot-button issue. Lots of people will talk, and the talk will be heated, and everyone will go away feeling satisfied. But the satisfaction will be temporary as will its effects, for the long-lasting pleasure of learning something will have been sacrificed to the ephemeral pleasure of exchanging uninformed opinions. You can glorify that exercise in self-indulgence by calling it interactive learning or engaged learning or ethical learning, but in the end it will be nothing more than a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And here is my response to Dr Fish:
(I call him Mr. Fish in my post because that was NYTimes style, or appeared so. Later I realized I was speaking in affected Times Stylebook style, and he should have been Dr. My apologies, Dr. Fish.)

•   39.  
  November 6th, 2006 12:15 pm    

  I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around Mr. Fish’s position here, as I know him to be a prominent academic anti-foundationalist. So I’m trying to figure out how his advocacy of a particular classroom practice jives with anti-foundationalism.

  If academicizing things means teaching things that you don’t practice, that is problematic to me. Mr. Fish’s thesis above appears to advocate a number of foundational values. Perhaps he teaches foundational anti-foundationalism.

  The bigger problem, I think, rests in Mr. Fish’s assumption that there is ANYTHING, any discourse, any position, any field of study, that is NOT political, in that it advocates certain positions and points of view with certain consequences, and as such, it excludes other interpretations, or it refutes those other interpretations with rigorous argumentation, or it simply contains a political slant or bias by non-deliberate selective focus– the way some things make it on the syllabus and others do not, just because of semester time limits.

  One of the deepest characterizations of postmodernism is that it exposes the political tilt of EVERYTHING, which is why postmodernists so strongly advocate anti-foundationalism.

  Postmodernism assumes radical critique. It seeks to expose the deep structural biases of the keys to the kingdom, by looking at how rhetorical frames created the Western culture that created the very idea of logic and a syllogism on which most Western logic is based.

  A classroom cannot focus on traditional academic pursuits without adopting a political position favoring the Western culture frame of logic, a foundationalist assumption.

  And that’s the problem with postmodernism. In deconstructing deep foundations, it becomes a DE FACTO CONSERVATIVE movement in that all forms of advocacy for change (or critique) break down, leading to the net effect of NO CHANGE, a conservative position.

  You get so lost in the crumbling foundations, you can never justifiably advocate anything.

  So it appears above that Mr. Fish is promoting a conservative political position, and presuming to tell other foundationalists (on the right, left, or middle) who advocate political positions in response to the logical conclusions of social or hard science studies that they should only engage in intellectual exercises and not take action for change, or even discuss what action could be taken for change.

  Change is evidently not on the curriculum. The status quo is. Even if logic reveals the house is on fire, or that it is raining outside. Mr. Fish would tell us that calling in a fire alarm or opening an umbrella is a political act that has no place in intellectual instruction.

  My response to his taking this foundationalist position is to say that telling us NOT to teach students to open an umbrella when it is raining (or to take steps when hard science studies reveal that global warming will cause dire consequences) is itself a highly CONSERVATIVE political position, and to take such a stance in the classroom is to bring politics into that space.

  — Posted by C.B.

And here are a few pithy and valuable bits that were also posted by other commenters, which will soon be lost to posterity forever so long as TimesSelect is restricted access.

You know, as I go through and re-read these (and you will see a theme emerging, as I picked along my favorite angle), I was just struck by how many smart people are out there running around, thinking wonderful thoughts, and expressing them with eloquence and creativity, with no apparent reward or reason, just for the joy of doing it (I am struck too by De Certeau's "la perrique," "the wig," which I've written of before).

But most importantly, what I see in the comments below, what stirs me about the comments below to the point that I want to SAVE these words, these thoughts, this dialogue, is that they are thrashing around with an idea that is about as close to first principles (or foundations) as things get for committed teachers and scholars, people who are driven to do this work for reasons other than professional and career advancement. People who are passionately "other-directed" and can't live in a world where these humanistic (and to some extent Enlightenment) values cut through artificial surfaces and spin, through disciplinary boundaries and institutionalized social constructs, not because there's a capital "T" Truth we're seeking, but precisely because there isn't, and it's still a Grail Quest anyway.

Most of the commenters below are so riled up (like myself as well) because they're really close to where Dr. Fish is coming from, but his conclusions seem so utterly wrong for our common starting point that it appears he is deliberately ignoring the fact that he's doing the very thing he's condemning, out of a lack of self-reflexivity. It feels almost maddening.

But the comments below say it far better than I could. I'll put my favorite bits in bold. More than anything, I love the passion with which they speak. We're drinking this Kool-Aid together, we all are. Kumbayah.

• 7. November 6th, 2006  7:22 am    

  I thought the discussion about your first ‘academicizing’ column was truly interesting and I read a good part of it. Unfortunately your reply is not. There is general agreement among most of your critics that striving for as objective a view as possible of any matter is a central part of the academic mission. Harvard states just that by simply putting ‘veritas’ into its seal. So most of the critics don’t argue that we should instead give the classroom over to polemic debate or exchanges of uninformed opinions as you seem to imply with your line of defense. Rather, one essential issue raised was that there are certain truths that are by nature political. Banning those from the classroom would be as much a sin against the academic mission as demagoguery or cheap polemicizing. This criticism is plain and simple, but you fail to address it.
  
  The other is more philosophical: that it’s impossible to position yourself outside of political or moral or ethical questions because no matter how impartial a position you try to assume, it constitutes a political/moral/ethical position in its own right. This second criticism you even brush off saying it’s a piece of cake.
  
  My assessment would be: your reply is not at the level of the (academic) debate you started. From someone so fond of academicizing that’s a bit disappointing.
  
  — Posted by Leonardo Montecervo

• 9.  November 6th, 2006 7:54 am       
  

  The problem with people who have dealt with fiction all of their lives is that they tend to become the most perfectly self-deceived. The classroom is the most highly politized place in the world, nor can it be otherwise. Be aware of your assumptions, your values, and admit them. State them baldly. Ask your students to do the same. Then let the games begin. What is the game? Well, you have total policy-making power. You are the ultimate despotic politico. Start play and watch what happens, but do not ever delude yourself so totally that you truly begin to believe that you are above politics. You as professor are the purest intellectual incarnation of it. If you set the agenda, define the terms, conceptualize the problem, then you are a politico. It cannot be otherwise. Do not take that charge lightly.

  — Posted by J. Landrum Kelly, Jr., Ph.D.

•  
  14. November 6th, 2006 8:36 am    
     
  Stanley Fish is a critic whose work I respect, but here seems to have forgotten that “arguing about whether Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_ or whether John Rawls is correctly classified as a Neo-Kantian” means that the instructor has selected those texts and framed those arguments. Are those choices apolitical? I would answer that they are not. Another fine critic, Kenneth Burke, said it best: “Whenever you find a doctrine of ‘nonpolitical’ esthetics affirmed with fervor, look for its politics.”

  — Posted by Peter Gardner

•  
  15. November 6th, 2006 8:44 am    
     
  Stanley Fish’s classrooms must exist in some utopia of neutral knowledge, with teachers instruments or dispensers of pure or unbiased knowledge to thirsty, uncommitted minds. But even the name for what we do, professors, intimates a commitment. For what do we profess?

  The illusion of an enlightening neutrality that Fish maintains falls apart as soon as we begin to write a syllabus. We select some texts for our students to read, but not others; we choose some topics to discuss and present some opposing views -but not just any topic and not just any view. The decision to teach Milton’s epic poem and encourage a discussion of whether or not Satan is the hero of the poem, to use Fish’s own example and area of scholarly expertise, already puts an ideological load on the boat we are floating. Milton himself was fiercely independent, an old-world republican (just explaining the difference of old-world from new involves an interpretive stance), and to read his poem is to be surprised by this independence of mind. Would we not have to make some decisions in how we teach this poem were we, say, confronted by a student who wanted to argue that Milton was secretly a royalist rather than secretly of the devil’s party as the romantics claimed?

  To my mind, the best teachers identify their own situatedness, their own ideology, and how it may influence - and limit - their own views of things. They ‘fess up to what they profess, without proselytizing for it or denying that they have a position. No - the less acknowledged an ideology, the more blinding it is. We need to show students how to be their own gadfly, as Socrates encouraged his interlocutors, by showing them how we are our own.
  

  — Posted by anthony dimatteo

•  
  17.  November 6th, 2006  9:11 am    
     
  Even though Fish is trying to obfuscate and confuse the issue, let’s make one thing clear: he knows very well that complaints about a “politicized” class room will be made even if, for example, a teacher in a class on the history of the Middle East, just “sticks to the facts” (witness his mention of Campus Watch in the original post). Fish agrees that teaching “facts” is politicizing - in his view, such a thing as objective facts do not exist; claiming they do is showing preference for one interpretation over another based on a supposed external standard of objectivity, hence un-academic.
  

  This is a fundamental philosophical distinction, not a question of (un)professional behavior.

  Fish’s understanding of what constitutes academic work demonstrates how reactionary extreme forms of postmodern relativism - like those espoused by Fish - really are, in effect if not in intent. Make no mistake: in a world where truth is simply a matter of competing interpretation, the powerful have the upper hand.

  — Posted by Christian Haesemeyer

• 29.  
  November 6th, 2006 9:33 am    
     
  I suppose I was too subtle in my first set of comments. But Dr. Fish’s “response to the responses” allows me an opportunity to be less timid.

  Dr. Fish oversimplifies his subject. He ignores countless years of scholarly analysis of the complex web of politics that surround and undergird nearly everything in the scholarly enterprise. There are politics, both explicit and implicit, in the choice of books for classroom study, an academic issue according to Dr. Fish, and there are politics that shape how many and what kinds of resources that same classroom has at its disposal, which are “real world” issues, like salary, desks, audio-visual equipment, etc.

  There are politics that ground Dr. Fish’s view that the academy is separate from the “real world.” He avoids or erases his own politics by arguing that any engagement with our collective or individual citizenship in the real world will end badly, our best bet is that we will “know you’re doing your job if you have no comeback at all to the charge that, aside from the pleasures it offers you and your students, the academic study of materials and problems is absolutely useless.”

  All objects and activities have latent usefulness, and many have explicit usefulness. Maintaining an “head-in-the-sand” approach to these questions is, ironically, a less useful act than acknowledging and negotiating the politics that surround our work. The Ivory Tower has never been secure from the ravages of politics. However, it has been, from time to time, a bastion of intellectual honesty and accountability. We are intellectually useful because we demand of ourselves and our students a high level of intellectual accountability, though not all political persuasions would agree how useful an independent, intellectually curious, engaged citizenry actually is.

  It is a political act to advocate for intellectual accountability, especially when such accountability seems absent from our current politics. Further, it is a political act to advocate for intellectual accountability within a sub-set of any given disciplinary boundaries. One need not see the world through Dr. Fish’s binaries of left and right, political or academic, to realize that his lines are porous.

  Dr. Fish is failing to do his job if he cannot or does not examine the web of money, politics, and other “real world” forces that encourage, limit, or constrain his academic enterprises, or more to the point, the academic work of his less well known colleagues, like Byzantine Studies or Classics. Our job is to be intellectually accountable, engaged, and rigorous in our work, which inevitably forces us to be accountable to, engaged in, and leaders in the real world.

    — Posted by Michael M. O'Hara Ph.D.
•  
  31. November 6th, 2006 10:47 am    
     
  Stanley Fish writes, “aside from the pleasures it offers you and your students, the academic study of materials and problems is absolutely useless.”

  The kind of classroom Fish describes, one in which the students are, among other things, never made aware of the political predilections of their instructor, is the kind of classroom that I was running at the end of my career as an all-but-unpaid adjunct “professor” of English. But I do not believe that what I was doing was without any purpose except pleasure. For one thing, there was little pleasure to be had in an environment in which the salaries of professors such as Fish are subsidized by the labor of adjuncts.

  But more to the point, unlike Fish, I believed and continue to believe in truth.

  I believe that in the midst of a discussion by two young people on the topic, “Is it worthwhile to go to college?” I was in the right when I said, “Yes, it’s worthwhile because the point of going to college is to learn to distinguish between truth and hogwash and few people learn that anywhere else.”

  I did not add that the distinction should have been taught to them in high school, that high schools have failed and continue to fail to teach anything at all, including the most important thing.

  In the English 102 courses I was continually given because no one else wanted them (since they involve more work than most tenured professors willingly accept), I taught students to distinguish between facts and gradations of facts, between expert opinions based on facts and analysis, and unsupported opinions that actually constituted arguments from authority. I made it clear that the research paper that was the object of the course was to be based on a close analysis of texts written by people of divergent points of view.

  I said, “If you have made your mind up about abortion, you may not write about abortion.”

  I said, “If you have made your mind up about the death penalty, you may not write about the death penalty.”

  I demanded intellectual honesty. I demanded a true reading, not just cut and paste quotation, of texts cited in papers.

  I now realize that it was my demand for intellectual honesty that brought me down in flames. This was prior to the year 2000, prior to a judge’s telling the citizens of the United States that the President they were going to have was not the one they had voted for, and they should “get over it.”

  But these students were born and raised in a culture of lies, in which they understood that whatever career they chose—including and especially the teaching of English—they would be forced to compromise their ideals, to say they thought things they didn’t think, to profess belief in goals that would, in the dark night of their souls, disgust them, and to kiss up a lot.

  These were students raised by people who once smoked, snorted and dropped, and, in the 1990’s, sat on fat couches in their half-million dollar houses, telling the kids to “just say no.”

  These were students raised by people who skinny-dipped and engaged in free love, and, in the 1990’s, carted them to expansive houses of worship in overpriced, gas-guzzling SUV’s.

  These were students raised by people who said they didn’t want to pay higher taxes, as they grew enormously fat, swilling four-dollar coffee drinks in front of their computers.

  These were students raised by people who wanted them to read, but who never read much of anything themselves, except light entertainment and information they needed in order to make more money.

  I told students they would look at an issue from various sides, then and only then formulating a belief about that issue, and supporting it with facts and the opinions of experts who had analyzed the facts.

  Because college teaching has become a popularity contest, in which students are allowed to publicly post their opinions of a professor, anonymously and without any support whatsoever, they ran me out. What I asked them to do “was, like, too much work”, as more than one student wrote.

  Yes, Professor, at the end of the semester, any student whose only encounter with your thinking has been in the classroom should not be able to answer these questions: “How does Fish feel about abortion?” “What is Fish’s stance on the death penalty?” “What does Fish think of Bush?” “Is Fish a religious man?”

  If they can answer those kinds of questions, they will work to please you and get better grades, not to find the truth.

  The object of this activity is not pleasing you. It’s about recognizing that there is a difference between truth, or its “best available version” as Carl Bernstein called it, and hogwash.

  The means, especially in the classroom of a master, may be pleasurable. But the end is political, always has been, and always will be. It is especially political in these times.

  — Posted by L. A. Marland of Austin, Texas

•  
  40. November 6th, 2006 12:25 pm    

  If Prof Fish applied the analytical reasoning he so passionately advocates to his own position, he would realize that it is itself eminently political and susceptible to the very criticisms he aims at those he accuses of insufficient ‘academicization’.

  For one thing, he draws a distinction between the academy, where dispassionate inquiry is supposed to occur, from the rest of society, where anything goes. In reality, sound analytical reasoning skills are required in just about every walk of life and the academy is and has always been a locus not only for training the intellect, but also for imparting such mundane occupational skills as law, medicine, accounting, engineering, etc.

  Perhaps more importantly, it is a transparently political process that leads to the systematic exclusion of those from less privileged backgrounds from entry to the academy in the first place, and from the kind of academic life that he seems to glorify. That a few counterexamples exist to this general principle is actually further evidence of how political the process actually is, as it endeavors to cover its tracks.

  Decisions about how knowledge of the universe is divided up into ‘disciplines’ is intensely political, as is the segmentation into courses. Reality is not so neat. What is the analytical process that distinguishes a literary work from, say, a technical work? May a technical treatise not possess literary merit?

  The nature of the academic process he describes, where ‘professors’ impart information and analytical skills to students and students impart, if anything, frustration or satisfaction to their professor, is thoroughly political, and Professor Fish betrays his commitment to a particular model of society by assuming that this is not subject to question.

  The idea that university teachers can - whether they are unique in the respect, as Prof Fish suggests, or not - divorce their academic life entirely from their life as a whole is profoundly political and demands support from evidence and argument, which he declines to provide.

  Finally, when professors refuse to divulge their political positions, as Professor Fish enjoins them to do, the true outcome is dishonesty and unfairness to students. By restricting his criticism to those who articulate their views Prof Fish establishes that he is firmly on the side of the status quo. What goes without saying is never contentious and doesn’t drive the thought police into a frenzy. So those who sneak their views in surreptitiously, whether because they are accomplished propagandists, or more likely, because they have, like Stanley Fish himself, never bothered to question their own cherished assumptions, are off the hook.

  — Posted by Cikarmak
•  
  49. November 6th, 2006 2:01 pm    
     
  How does his a-political position apply to courses like those I teach whose academic subject is expressly argumentative rhetoric? An intrinsic element of such courses is the tradition of Socratic opposition to sophistical attempts to make the weaker argument appear the stronger one. That is, students should learn to distinguish sound arguments from unsound ones, especially those that resort to fallacious reasoning, factitious evidence, and outright lies–often deliberately produced by propaganda agencies including government officials and spin doctors, think tanks, lobbies, public relations and advertising agents. These are the very stuff of the dominant rhetoric of politics and mass media, so don’t academic discourse and making political judgments converge in their study?  

  — Posted by Donald Lazere

•  
  54. November 6th, 2006 2:48 pm    
     
  Where I take issue with Mr. Fish’s idea of “academic purity” (or puritanicism) is that it is more theoretical than practical.

  Higher education in the US today is increasingly influenced and polluted by corporate/capitalist forces, and these forces generally have a predictable (rightward-leaning) political position.

  Sanitizing the classroom of any political tone whatsoever, in my view, would in today’s society largely cede the development of students political thoughts to the influence of the economically powerful entities which increasingly influence staffing, curriculum, admissions policies, research and development at their university of choice - not to mention increasingly funding the whole student experience as governmental support continues to erode. I don’t see that as a better alternative.

  Lastly, my sense is that more often than not, academics are by definition liberal because the fundamental basis of questioning the existing body of knowledge flies in the face of what conservatism essentially stands for: social stasis. To decry “liberal bias” in these institutions (and insist on some sort of theoretical utopian objectivism) is like complaining that a man’s body is “polluted by female estrogen”. It’s just the nature of the beast.

  — Posted by Phil Koenig
•  
  56. November 6th, 2006 2:54 pm    
     
  Regarding C.B.’s commment (38.): my impression is that Fish’s anti-foundationalism is precisely what informs his advocacy of what he calls academicizing. Reading the original post, I understand that “academicizing” a la Fish is a process that rejects the very notion of objectivity, or empiricism, or, generally, of foundational beliefs; it turns the classroom into a space where competing interpretations (which, as far as I can ascertain, are the basic objects of study - it is not that they interpret some underlying truth or observation, but rather, they are all there is) are analyzed in what I consider to be a formal manner (e.g., “how coherent are they?” is a legitimate question in that classroom, but “is there any truth in them?” is not).

  I completely agree with C.B.’s conclusion, though: the approach advocated by Fish is, in effect, upholding the power structure currently in place. In fact, any approach that claims to remove the political pressure on academia by its very nature has to support that power structure, because the reactionary critique of “politicized classrooms” is based on the perception that the academic endeavour undermines it much more than on any specific complaints (as Francois Cornilliat remarks).

  And Ari: “distasteful, insulting, heated”? I’ll try to keep it down in the future…
  
  — Posted by Christian Haesemeyer

•  
  66. November 6th, 2006 7:55 pm    
     
  I will make fish a trade.  I’ll swap the politics out of my classroom when he gives me the corporate media.

  Politically democratic people are driven into the academy because it’s a good place to hide and make better survival money. It’s easy and cheap for him to say we should academicize. But he’s just taking a political position.

  I understand that this weakens the academic community, but I don’t think we have much of an alternative at the moment.

  — Posted by Evan
•  
  74. November 6th, 2006 10:08 pm    
     
  I sincerely hope that everyone who cares about this debate has read, or will take the time to read, “The Glass Bead Game” by Hermann Hesse and think about it in context of the questions raised here. On all sides, you’ll learn a lot from this gratifying work of the novelist’s art which lampoons - albeit subtly - academics and the academic world.  

  — Posted by Christopher Carter Sanderson

•  
  76. November 6th, 2006 10:37 pm    
     
  As a teacher, I understand Dr. Fish’s frustration with over-arching ideologies in the liberal arts, but it’s important to say this: Dr. Fish is essentially a right-wing apologist.

  In a vacuum, it is possible to argue that there is a risk that critical analysis and logical thinking could be under-emphasized in the presence of a liberal agenda, but consider this: all of the hard sciences, social sciences and humanities stand as a damning confrontation to the advance of absolutism and militarism in Western society. In short, the academic space is a moral space, a last stand against the dehumanizing force of purely predatory capitalism, a force that has no place for academics. Academics are under attack.

  For instance, in order to justify the teaching of psychology, you must first justify that statistical and critical analysis of human behavior has a value equal to or greater than the value of taking the same funds that would be allocated towards psychological research and spending those funds, instead, on military outreach and technology. At present, the vast majority of our fund-allocating politicians would prefer that Americans spend their money on military technology, firming up their political futures and expanding that infrastructure. By choosing to be an academic, psychologist or English teacher, rather than a military fundraiser, you are taking a risky ideological stand, and your mission is only preserved if you can maintain a type of morally-based critical analysis that preserves a space for liberal inquiry. Dismiss the liberal arts as over-priced and purely academic and higher education becomes nothing more than learning how to program computers and build bombs.

  My students would prefer to discuss the war in Iraq along the lines of what interests them: high-tech vehicles, powerful weapons and ghoulish human destruction. Introduce critical thinking into that body of knowledge and all you get is comparison of a Black Hawk helicopter and laser-guided missile . . . which is more deadly? Which is more fun? The historical premises of the situation hold no interest to them until the matter becomes politically oriented.

  Academics are essentially the activity of the individual mind. In today’s world individual critique is under attack, disparaged by our politicians as unpatriotic and weak, and therefore, academics are under attack. Fail to realize that or advocate a neutral point of view and your goal as a teacher is simply planned obsolescence.

  — Posted by William H. Payne, M.A.
•  
  81. November 7th, 2006 1:16 am    
     
  The problem with keeping opinions out of the classroom is that there is no theory free data. A philosopher of science named Hanson pointed this out in the 1950s. So whatever we teach embodies or expresses or supports some view or other. I think it makes more sense to present both sides of an issue and then examine them in light of values that we hold. For example, there are some strong reasons for opposing torture. I have not problem expressing an opinion opposing torture. If you do, I feel you may be a moral cripple. The germ of truth in what you say is that teachers should not abuse their power over students by insisting that students agree. So it helps to make clear that you are not infallible and that other opinions could be right and yours wrong. But I think to abjure ethical positions is to abjure our basic human responsibilities to choose and act. We really have no choice. Even sitting down and shutting up is a position. Getting up and saying anything is one too. Better to be up front and promote the dialogue. As the bronze plaque at my university (Wisconsin) says, “Whatever may be the limits that trammel inquiry elsewhere, the great State University of Wisconsin must ever encourage that endless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth may be found.”

  — Posted by Max Kummerow

•  
  83. November 7th, 2006 2:19 am    
     
  Let’s assume for a moment that what classical scholars tell us about most of the surviving works of Aristotle is correct, namely that they represent more or less notes generated out of the pedagogical situation at the Lyceum in 4th century BCE Athens.

  Let’s now consider the Nichomachean Ethics. The most casual perusal of this work reveals that Aristotle very much has a material – and not merely some meta-ethical – agenda going in the Nichomachean Ethics. He really does think – and argue for the fact – that some modes of human behavior are superior to others.

  Hmm.

  It would seem that on his value neutral classroom model, if Mr. Fish were the Dean of the Lyceum, to be consistent he would have to take Aristotle aside and let him know in no uncertain terms that there will not be a Nichomachean Ethics II taught next semester.

  Why? Well isn’t it obvious that the benighted Stagirite has pretty clearly violated many of the Fish norms for proper academic treatment of a subject?

  Let’s also try not to focus too much on the fact that Dean’ Fish’s norms, poked at with just a modicum of critical scrutiny, reveal themselves to be more in the nature of somewhat arbitrary and fairly ahistorical obiter dicta than critically grounded principles. Thus, when you note that if the span of pedagogical history from the ancient Greeks to the present were a 24 hour clock, the Fish view of the role of material — indeed advocated — values in the classroom would put us somewhere a bit after 11:00. And that’s PM, Dean Fish.

  I’m not saying that Aristotle had it all right. I would just like to get a bit clearer on why, at least on my understanding of Mr. Fish, he did get it right enough when he decided to teach the Nichomachean Ethics the way he apparently did.

  And when Mr. Fish has tired of trying to spin Aristotle back into the orbit of his own view of the nature of true pedagogy, I have a few questions I’d like to ask him about Plato and Socrates – at least Plato’s Socrates.

  In a proleptic mood, let me quickly add that there are few Platonic scholars today who would seriously try to maintain that the so-called early, aporetic dialogues (don’t even bother getting into, say, The Republic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, etc., etc.) are principally values neutral exercises in teaching critical logical skills, rather than attempts critically to ground some very material choices as far as values are concerned. I offer this implied argument from authority caution about the Platonic corpus not because I think an argument from authority – Mr. Fish’s, mine, or anybody else’s – is the best form of argument. It is not. But just in case he has been too busy to reacquaint himself with Plato – not mention Aristotle – Mr. Fish might want to do himself a favor and accept that this is the current state of the scholarship, a state that is pretty much consistent with what it has been for the past 2400 or so years.

  Of course, time has marched on, and our concept of the proper relationship between values and pedagogy is something which, if it had not changed over the course of 2400 years, probably should have. But the issue is not whether it has changed. It’s a question of how much it has changed and, indeed, how much it ought to have changed. And also whether such changes, however great or small, have changed the basic center of gravity in the “liberal” arts from what it very clearly used to be, at least among some reasonably well-established sectors of the “curriculum.”

  — Posted by Ed Reno

•  
  99. November 7th, 2006 3:26 pm    
     
  Being disturbed by an earlier Fish article, I searched the Internet and found his article “Why we built the Ivory Tower.” The first paragraph gave three rules for success in Academia: “Do your job; don’t do anyone else’s job; don’t let anyone else do your job.” That is a powerful self-protective mechanism for faculty; turf, turf and turf. Indeed, faculty embrace these rules; Inside your turf you’re unchallengable; you don’t challenge any one else; and you don’t let anyone else challenge you. Unfortunately, it’s not so good for the student. It divides knowledge up into ever-smaller non-commicating package, making it exceedingly difficult to deal with the world as a whole.

  In short, Fish’s view of academia protects the academics from outside criticism, even within the university, at the expense of teaching the students how to think when confronted with a multi-faceted problem. Good for the academics; bad for the rest of us.

  Roger Bacon once said “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” Pity that academics today do not.

  — Posted by Dr. William Siler

     

Smart Kid, Smart Teacher

A high school student did this terrific independent study, and I just LOVE the questions below that came out of it. Most excellent. Should note, also, as Ben does below, that he worked with a really extraordinary teacher, so I've gotta put a link and a shout-out to that teacher's blog too: Jesse Berrett teaching at San Francisco University High School.

Kudos, y'all! And I may be emailing for the whole document of your research as well. Fascinating stuff. I'm especially fond of the second bullet point below.

Is the “wisdom of crowds” always better than the opinion of one, and if so, how does that wisdom get “mined” on the web?

This bullet point also makes my socks roll up and down too!

Is objectivity in media “a view from nowhere”? In covering any controversial story, the media tends to simply let whoever has been defined as "the sides" dictate their beliefs and just do an "X said, but then Y said" story.

Link: Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Results of Independent Study on Blogs, Journalism, and Media.

Ben Casnocha: Results of Independent Study on Blogs, Journalism, and Media

From September-December (first semester) I embarked on an academic study on blogging and the intersection of journalism, media, and the 'net through my school's Independent Study program. I thus received academic credit for this work (I know, I was elated too!). My faculty sponsor was Jesse Berrett - he's the chair of our History department but well versed in a broad range of topics including popular culture and internet stuff. As a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and others on the side, and armed with a handy dandy PhD from Cal, he brought a healthy dose of skeptical perspective I needed. (His own blog is, for now, brief reviews of books he reads - all genres and types - and pictures of his baby. In 2004 he read 254 books, and he reflects on that year of reading here.)

Excerpts from the results of our research and work follows. If you'd like the whole document, email me.

Questions discussed:

• Do all conversations lead somewhere? How effective are conversations with many talking compared with one person lecturing?
• Is the “wisdom of crowds” always better than the opinion of one, and if so, how does that wisdom get “mined” on the web?
• What process do people go through to change an opinion? Are opinioned-blogs and the ensuing spirited conversations changing anyone’s opinion? How often do blogs (or any conversation for that matter) go beyond “I think this” and “I think this.”
• What role do blogs have besides the obvious one of being a watchdog/critic of mainstream media?
• What is the future of “hyperlocal journalism” where neighbors and community members write local stories in an online format?
• Is objectivity in media “a view from nowhere”? In covering any controversial story, the media tends to simply let whoever has been defined as "the sides" dictate their beliefs and just do an "X said, but then Y said" story.
• What are the limits/constraints of the blogging form versus the future possibilities?
• Does a lack of referees on the web tends to support an everyone-has-his-own-truth world where “truth” is up for grabs? Is it realistic to hope for a higher-up authority to separate truth from fiction either on the web or offline? How does the increasing lack of trust in institutions in America affect this?

[...]

Here's another good observation:

There seems to be a “truth” coalescing about blogs in mainstream media, which is that they are usually good watchdogs, but tend to be prey to all sorts of crazy rumors, speculations, and conspiracies. Thus, “the jury is out.” This may not be true, but this is the account that most major papers run whenever there’s a story covering aspects of blogging—a couple good things, a couple bad things. In essence the “they say X, these others say Y” story.

One venture capitalist blogger I read a few days ago said that his bet for the “the next big thing” is around an emerging “architecture of participation” or as he put it, “the revolution of the ants.” Everyone getting into the action. The participatory nature of blogs versus the one-way lecture of mainstream media is crystallized for me every time I read a column in the New York Times or Chronicle that I want to talk to someone about. I may agree or disagree or want to learn more. How can I scratch that itch? I can write a blog post linking to the column with my thoughts and solicit feedback or read others who have blogged about that column.

[...]

I like that, "revolution of ants." Granular. Cumulative. Asymmetrical. I just find myself nodding through this whole thing, yes, yes, yes. Vulcan mind meld, dude! I wish I wrote this well when I was in high school.

Blogs At Their Worst

“One of the biggest criticisms of blogs is that so many are self-absorbed tripe. No doubt, most are only interesting only to the writer, plus some family and friends,” writes Dan Gillmor in We the Media. He goes on to say that’s no reason to dismiss the genre, but it does raise an important question: does society need a lot more people voicing opinions or thoughts and does that create more produce intellectual, cultural, moral, etc. progress? I mentioned in the “best” section that my blog gives me a voice. It would be arrogant to argue that my voice needs to be heard, but not that nut-job propaganda-spreading conspiracy-theorist. The leading bloggers and pioneers in this field seem to agree that there should be virtually no restrictions or exclusivity in the blogosphere with a bet being placed on the notion that the best blogs will bubble to the top through links.

[...]

Do blogs promote an opinion-first, evidence-later trend in our society? Jay Rosen sees a new trend unrelated to blogs pertaining to information-gathering: first get opinions, then analysis, then hard news. One could extend this trend to people first expressing opinions, then maybe finding some articulate analysis to back up their opinions, and possibly some real data supporting their points. It is easy to blog an opinion or rant. A good footnoter is also a good linker, hence the emphasis by respected bloggers to link to sources or other sites to back up posts. But without some sort of “authority” deciding what has some foundation versus simple crazy rants, the blogesphere can house bundles of unsubstantiated opinions.

[...]

This bit of background on the InsiderHigherEd.com site is enlightening

Now I understand why the content on this site has that easy way of catching my attention. It hooks into the same appeal I found in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, a fix I could really only afford for four months in the fall as I also eyeballed the job ads.

I've been getting that fix from Inside Higher Ed now too, and I may find myself turning to it more and more. This WashPo article is a bit dated, but I'm betting a lot of people didn't know where that site materialized from (academics are notorious for living inside a cave when it comes to news items)

Link: Inside Higher Ed Emphasizes Online Focus (washingtonpost.com).

Start-Up

Inside Higher Ed Emphasizes Online Focus

By Annys Shin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 7, 2005; Page E05

Two years ago, Kathlene Collins, a veteran of the Chronicle of Higher Education's recruitment advertising department, stepped down. A few weeks later, editor Scott Jaschik and managing editor Doug Lederman followed her out the door. "We realized we and the Chronicle had different visions for the direction of the publication and the company, and that it was in all our best interests for us to go our separate ways," Lederman said.

After they left the Chronicle, a prestigious District-based weekly publication, the three said they started working on a new online publication about higher education. "We realized we loved the market. And we worked really well together and wanted to find a way to do that," Lederman said.

The three raised seed money from a variety of sources including friends, family and angel investors to build Inside Higher Ed. The test version of the site, at insidehighered.com, offers a sampling of news stories and a promise that its job listings are "coming soon."

Academic institutions were among the early adopters of the Internet and remain among the most wired of places. Yet for years, the two major outlets covering higher education were the Chronicle and the now-defunct Lingua Franca, both best-known as print publications.

[...]

But Jaschik, Lederman and Collins said the Chronicle's $82.50-a-year subscription price was out of reach for many in higher education, especially graduate students. They sought to reach a broader audience, Jaschik said.   

Jaschik and his partners are selling advertising. But they hope their main revenue will come from selling a suite of services to recruiters who list jobs on the Web site.

Job seekers can go onto the site free to file their curriculum vitae in a résumé bank, along with letters of recommendation and cover letters. They can also send material to prospective employers electronically. For the cost of posting an ad on the site, recruiters can take advantage of software developed for Inside Higher Ed and licensed by Interfolio, a District document-management company, that helps them handle the flow of applications for various positions.

[...]

HigherEdJobs.com offers no content other than its listings. Collins of Inside Higher Ed said the key for recruiters is getting the attention of people who aren't actively looking for new jobs. It will be up to Jaschik and Lederman to come up with content that will turn Inside Higher Ed into a destination and draw people to job listings they might not otherwise have checked out.

Jaschik and Lederman have been busy
posting fresh stories on the site daily. Blog-style commentary is in
the works. "Part of the excitement of Web-based journalism is you can
change it with relative ease, and we will," Jaschik said.

Here's some sidebar poop that was in a box as well:

Name: Inside Higher Ed

Location: Washington

Big idea: Creating an online community for academics with news
and information plus advanced tools to help colleges and potential
employees find one another.

Founded: 2005

Web site:www.insidehighered.com

Who's in charge: Scott Jaschik, editor; Doug Lederman, editor; Kathlene Collins, publisher.

Funding: Jaschik, Lederman and Collins said they raised money to build the site from private sources including friends, family and angel investors.

Employees: Three full time; four part time. Projected staff of more than 20 within a year.

Partners: Interfolio, a District document management company designed the recruitment software.

Big-name clients: The founders say advertisers include
TIAA-CREF, starting in April, and numerous colleges with job
advertising, starting within weeks.

Origin of company name: "We want everyone in academe to feel that they have the inside scoop on what's going on, and the inside track on the best professional opportunities," Jaschik said.

 

An incredible story, and incredible twist, and worse?

The Nightline story tonight had me just rolling. Talk about outside-the-box teaching and active learning, hands-on, with aspects of engineering and technical writing, not to mention professional oral presentations at a national competition... and add to that that these are high school kids from Arizona that beat a team at MIT, and the entire team is made up of undocumented Mexican immigrants!

And can I just say that Arizona congressman is a turd? He opens his mouth and you just want to throw up. I know that sounds harsh, but he should be embarrassed to be standing up in front of people and sounding like such an idiot. I still gotta go find some quotes from him, so you can see for yourself.

The whole thing is just incredible.

For information about La Vida Robot Scholarship Fund to benefit Cristian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Luis Aranda, and Oscar Vazquez, visit: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/donate.html or send a check payable to "Phoenix Union Partnership - La Vida Robot Scholarship" at:

Phoenix Union Partnership - La Vida Robot Scholarship
Phoenix Union High School District - Attn: Jodie Baker
4502 N. Central, Room 5
Phoenix, AZ 85012

Link: Valley high school robotics team on 'Nightline' tonight.

Valley high school robotics team on 'Nightline' tonight

Mel Melendez The Arizona Republic May. 27, 2005 11:00 AM

Carl Hayden High School's Falcons Robotics Team will be featured tonight on ABC News' Nightline.

The team generated much buzz last year when the four-member team comprised of Mexican immigrants beat out powerhouse universities, including MIT, in a national underwater robotics competition in California. The win netted the the students much media publicity, prompting a scholarship fund for them and movie offers.

Two of the original four team members, Cristian Arcega and Lorenzo Santillán are still on the team and will be part of the Nightline segment airing tonight at 10:30 p.m. The piece was filmed weeks before the student engineers won the Engineering Inspiration Award at the international For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Championship in Atlanta last month(April). They'll defend their national underwater robotics team title next month.

Link: Wired 13.04: La Vida Robot.

La Vida Robot

How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship.

By Joshua Davis
April 2005 issue

The winter rain makes a mess of West Phoenix. It turns dirt yards into mud and forms reefs of garbage in the streets. Junk food wrappers, diapers, and Spanish-language porn are swept into the gutters. On West Roosevelt Avenue, security guards, two squad cars, and a handful of cops watch teenagers file into the local high school. A sign reads: Carl Hayden Community High School: The Pride's Inside.

There certainly isn't a lot of pride on the outside. The school buildings are mostly drab, late '50s-era boxes. The front lawn is nothing but brown scrub and patches of dirt. The class photos beside the principal's office tell the story of the past four decades. In 1965, the students were nearly all white, wearing blazers, ties, and long skirts. Now the school is 92 percent Hispanic. Drooping, baggy jeans and XXXL hoodies are the norm.

The school PA system crackles, and an upbeat female voice fills the bustling linoleum-lined hallways. "Anger management class will begin in five minutes," says the voice from the administration building. "All referrals must report immediately."

Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It's a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

Josh Davis, nice writing. I can see why ABC News didn't hesitate to pick this story up. This bit above just gave me chills, and it isn't often I can't tear myself away from TV news package segments (although at my own job I'm learning a new appreciation of them lately).

You know what else this true story reminds me of, right? William Gibson and the motif of the "Lo Teks," in "Johnny Memnonic" (the story, not the movie).

In sharp contrast, this Nightline story just held up writ large the ridiculous programming after it, Entertainment Tonight and BS about American Idol, for the absurd farce that it is. These Arizona kids are REAL stars.

It was the end of June. Lorenzo Santillan, 16, sat in the front seat of the school van and looked out at the migrant farmworkers in the fields along Interstate 10. Lorenzo's face still had its baby fat, but he'd recently sprouted a mustache and had taken to wearing a fistful of gold rings, a gold chain, and a gold medallion of the Virgin Mary pierced through the upper part of his left ear. The bling wasn't fooling anyone. His mother had been fired from her job as a hotel maid, and his father had trouble paying the rent as a gardener. They were on the verge of eviction for nonpayment of rent. He could see himself having to quit school to work in those fields.

"What's a PWM cable?" The sharp question from the van's driver, Allan Cameron, snapped Lorenzo out of his reverie. Cameron was the computer science teacher sponsoring Carl Hayden's robotics program. At 59, he had a neatly trimmed white beard, unkempt brown hair, and more energy than most men half his age. Together with his fellow science teacher Fredi Lajvardi, Cameron had put up flyers around the school a few months earlier, offering to sponsor anyone interested in competing in the third annual Marine Advanced Technology Education Center's Remotely Operated Vehicle Competition. Lorenzo was one of the first to show up to the after-school meeting last spring.

Cameron hadn't expected many students to be interested, particularly not a kid like Lorenzo, who was failing most of his classes and perpetually looked like he was about to fall asleep. But Lorenzo didn't have much else to do after school. He didn't want to walk around the streets. He had tried that - he'd been a member of WBP 8th Street, a westside gang. When his friends started to get arrested for theft, he dropped out. He didn't want to go to jail.

That's why he decided to come to Cameron's meeting.

"PWM," Lorenzo replied automatically from the van's passenger seat. "Pulse width modulation. Esto controls analog circuits with digital output."

[...]

Oscar Vazquez was a born leader. A senior, he'd been in ROTC since ninth grade and was planning on a career in the military. But when he called to schedule a recruitment meeting at the end of his junior year, the officer in charge told him he was ineligible for military service. Because he was undocumented - his parents had brought him to the US from Mexico when he was 12 - he couldn't join, wouldn't get any scholarships, and had to start figuring out what else to do with his life. Oscar felt aimless until he heard about the robot club from Ledge, who was teaching his senior biology seminar. Maybe, he thought, engineering could offer him a future.

ROTC had trained Oscar well: He knew how to motivate people. He made sure that everyone was in the room and focused when he phoned Frank Szwankowski, who sold industrial and scientific thermometers at Omega Engineering in Stamford, Connecticut. Szwankowski knew as much about thermometer applications as anyone in the US. All day long, he talked to military contractors, industrial engineers, and environmental consultants. So he was momentarily confused when he heard Oscar's high-pitched Mexican accent on the other end of the line. The 17-year-old kid from the desert wanted advice on how to build a military-grade underwater ROV.

This was the second call Szwankowski had received from amateur roboticists in less than a month. A few weeks earlier, some college oceanic engineering students had called and said they were entering the national underwater ROV championships. Oscar said that his team, too, was competing and needed to learn as much as it could from the experts. Szwankowski was impressed. The other kids had simply asked him what they wanted and hung up. Oscar spent 45 minutes on the phone digging deeper and deeper into thermometer physics.

Oscar began by explaining that his high school team was taking on college students from around the US. He introduced his teammates: Cristian, the brainiac; Lorenzo, the vato loco who had a surprising aptitude for mechanics; and 18-year-old Luis Aranda, the fourth member of the crew. At 5'10" and 250 pounds, Luis looked like Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He was the tether man, responsible for the pickup and release of what would be a 100-pound robot.

Szwankowski was impressed by Oscar. He launched into an in-depth explanation of the technology, offering details as if he were letting them in on a little secret. "What you really want," he confided, "is a thermocouple with a cold junction compensator." He went over the specifications of the device and then paused. "You know," he said, "I think you can beat those guys from MIT. Because none of them know what I know about thermometers."

"You hear that?" Oscar said triumphantly when they hung up. He looked at each team member pointedly. "We got people believing in us, so now we got to believe in ourselves."

Oscar helped persuade a handful of local businesses to donate money to the team. They raised a total of about $800. Now it was up to Cristian and Lorenzo to figure out what to do with the newfound resources. They began by sending Luis to Home Depot to buy PVC pipe. Despite the donations, they were still on a tight budget. Cristian would have to keep dreaming about glass syntactic flotation foam; PVC pipe was the best they could afford.

But PVC had benefits. The air inside the pipe would create buoyancy as well as provide a waterproof housing for wiring. Cristian calculated the volume of air inside the pipes and realized immediately that they'd need ballast. He proposed housing the battery system on board, in a heavy waterproof case.

It was a bold idea. If they didn't have to run a power line down to the bot, their tether could be much thinner, making the bot more mobile. Since the competition required that their bot run through a series of seven exploration tasks - from taking depth measurements to locating and retrieving acoustic pingers - mobility was key. Most of the other teams wouldn't even consider putting their power supplies in the water. A leak could take the whole system down. But if they couldn't figure out how to waterproof their case, Cristian argued, then they shouldn't be in an underwater contest.

While other teams machined and welded metal frames, the guys broke out the rubber glue and began assembling the PVC pipe. They did the whole thing in one night, got high on the pungent fumes, and dubbed their new creation Stinky. Lorenzo painted it garish shades of blue, red, and yellow to designate the functionality of specific pipes. Every inch of PVC had a clear purpose. It was the type of machine only an engineer would describe as beautiful.

PVC pipe and a waterproof briefcase. And they used a camera to take pictures of measurements by pointing it down at a regular old Stanley tape measure. I'm loving it. Lo Tek brilliance.

Carl Hayden Community High School doesn't have a swimming pool, so one weekend in May, after about six weeks of work in the classroom, the team took Stinky to a scuba training pool in downtown Phoenix for its baptism. Luis hefted the machine up and gently placed it in the water. They powered it up. Cristian had hacked together off-the-shelf joysticks, a motherboard, motors, and an array of onboard finger-sized video cameras, which now sent flickering images to black-and-white monitors on a folding picnic table. Using five small electric trolling motors, the robot could spin and tilt in any direction. To move smoothly, two drivers had to coordinate their commands. The first thing they did was smash the robot into a wall.

"This is good, this is good," Oscar kept repeating, buying himself a few seconds to come up with a positive spin. "Did you see how hard it hit the wall? This thing's got power. Once we figure out how to drive it, we'll be the fastest team there."

By early June, as the contest neared, the team had the hang of it. Stinky now buzzed through the water, dodging all obstacles. The drivers, Cristian and Oscar, could make the bot hover, spin in place, and angle up or down. They could send enough power to Stinky's small engines to pull Luis around the pool. They felt like they had a good shot at not placing last.

[...]

Even though Lorenzo had never heard of MIT, the team from Cambridge scared him, too. There were 12 of them - six ocean-engineering students, four mechanical engineers, and two computer science majors. Their robot was small, densely packed, and had a large ExxonMobil sticker emblazoned on the side. The largest corporation in the US had kicked in $5,000. Other donations brought the MIT team's total budget to $11,000.

As Luis hoisted Stinky to the edge of the practice side of the pool, Cristian heard repressed snickering. It didn't give him a good feeling. He was proud of his robot, but he could see that it looked like a Geo Metro compared with the Lexuses and BMWs around the pool. He had thought that Lorenzo's paint job was nice. Now it just looked clownish.

Things got worse when Luis lowered Stinky into the water. They noticed that the controls worked only intermittently. When they brought Stinky back onto the pool deck, there were a few drops of water in the waterproof briefcase that housed the control system. The case must have warped on the trip from Arizona in the back of Ledge's truck. If the water had touched any of the controls, the system would have shorted out and simply stopped working. Cristian knew that they were faced with two serious problems: bad wiring and a leak.

Oscar sketched out the situation. They'd have to resolder every wire going into the main controller in the next 12 hours. And they would either have to fix the leak or find something absorbent to keep moisture away from the onboard circuitry.

An image from television flashed through Lorenzo's mind. "Absorbent?" he asked. "Like a tampon?"

[...]

Someone had to be well rested for the contest, so Cristian and Luis slept that night. Oscar and Lorenzo stayed up resoldering the entire control system. It was nerve-racking work. The wires were slightly thicker than a human hair, and there were 50 of them. If the soldering iron got too close to a wire, it would melt and there'd be no time to rip the PVC and cable housing apart to fix it. One broken wire would destroy the whole system, forcing them to withdraw from the contest.

By 2 in the morning, Oscar's eyesight was blurring, but he kept at it. Lorenzo held the wires in place while Oscar lowered the soldering gun. He dropped one last dab of alloy on the connection and sat back. Lorenzo flipped the power switch. Everything appeared to work again.

[...]

When Luis lowered Stinky into the water for their run, Lorenzo prayed to the Virgin Mary. He prayed that the tampons would work but then wondered if the Virgin got her period and whether it was appropriate for him to be praying to her about tampons. He tried to think of a different saint to pray to but couldn't come up with an appropriate one. The whir of Stinky's propellers brought him back to the task at hand, extracting a water sample from a submerged container.

The task was to withdraw 500 milliliters of fluid from the container 12 feet below the surface. Its only opening was a small, half-inch pipe fitted with a one-way valve. Though the Carl Hayden team didn't know it, MIT had designed an innovative system of bladders and pumps to carry out this task. MIT's robot was supposed to land on the container, create a seal, and pump out the fluid. On three test runs in Boston, the system worked fast and flawlessly.

MIT's ROV motored smoothly down and quickly located the 5-gallon drum inside the plastic submarine mock-up at the bottom of the pool. But as the robot approached the container, its protruding mechanical arm hit a piece of the submarine frame, blocking it from going farther. They tried a different angle but still couldn't reach the drum. The bot wasn't small enough to slip past the gap in the frame, making their pump system useless. There was nothing they could do - they had to move on to the next assignment.

When Stinky entered the water, it careened wildly as it dived toward the bottom. Luis stood at the pool's edge, paying out the tether cable. From the control tent, Cristian, Oscar, and Lorenzo monitored Stinky's descent on their videoscreens.

"Vámonos, Cristian, this is it!" Oscar said, pushing his control too far forward. They were nervous and overcompensated for each other's joystick movements, causing Stinky to veer off course. They settled down and knocked off the first two tasks. When they reached the submarine, they saw the drum and tried to steady the robot. Stinky had a bent copper proboscis, a bilge pump, and a dime-store balloon. They had to fit their long, quarter-inch-wide sampling tube into a half-inch pipe and then fill the balloon for exactly 20 seconds to get 500 milliliters. They had practiced dozen of times at the scuba pool in Phoenix, and it had taken them, on average, 10 minutes to stab the proboscis into the narrow tube. Now they had 30 minutes total to complete all seven tasks on the checklist.

It was up to Oscar and Cristian. They re-adjusted their grip on the joysticks and leaned into the monitors. Stinky hovered in front of the submarine framing that had frustrated the MIT team. Because Stinky's copper pipe was 18 inches long, it was able to reach the drum. The control tent was silent. Now that they were focused on the mission, both pilots relaxed and made almost imperceptibly small movements with their joysticks. Oscar tapped the control forward while Cristian gave a short backward blast on the vertical propellers. As Stinky floated forward a half inch, its rear raised up and the sampling pipe sank perfectly into the drum.

"Díos mío," Oscar whispered, not fully believing what he saw.

He looked at Lorenzo, who had already activated the pump and was counting out 20 seconds in a decidedly unscientific way.

"Uno, dos, tres, quatro …"

And having taken my engineering students to professional conferences, I have to say, this exchange below just cracked me up. (We used PowerPoint)

Tom Swean was the gruff 58-year-old head of the Navy's Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems program. He developed million-dollar autonomous underwater robots for the SEALs at the Office of Naval Research. He was not used to dealing with Mexican-American teenagers sporting gold chains, fake diamond rings, and patchy, adolescent mustaches.

The Carl Hayden team stood nervously in front of him. He stared sullenly at them. This was the engineering review - professionals in underwater engineering evaluated all the ROVs, scored each team's technical documentation, and grilled students about their designs. The results counted for more than half of the total possible points in the contest.

"How'd you make the laser range finder work?" Swean growled. MIT had admitted earlier that a laser would have been the most accurate way to measure distance underwater, but they'd concluded that it would have been difficult to implement.

"We used a helium neon laser, captured its phase shift with a photo sensor, and manually corrected by 30 percent to account for the index of refraction," Cristian answered rapidly, keyed up on adrenaline. Cameron had peppered them with questions on the drive to Santa Barbara, and Cristian was ready.

Swean raised a bushy, graying eyebrow. He asked about motor speed, and Lorenzo sketched out their combination of controllers and spike relays. Oscar answered the question about signal interference in the tether by describing how they'd experimented with a 15-meter cable before jumping up to one that was 33 meters.

"You're very comfortable with the metric system," Swean observed.

"I grew up in Mexico, sir," Oscar said.

Swean nodded. He eyed their rudimentary flip chart.

"Why don't you have a PowerPoint display?" he asked.

"PowerPoint is a distraction," Cristian replied. "People use it when they don't know what to say."

"And you know what to say?"

"Yes, sir."

In the lobby outside the review room, Cameron and Ledge waited anxiously for the kids. They expected them to come out shaken, but all four were smiling - convinced that they had answered Swean's questions perfectly. Cameron glanced nervously at Ledge. The kids were too confident. They couldn't have done that well.

Still, both teachers were in a good mood. They had learned that the team placed third out of 11 in the seven underwater exercises. Only MIT and Cape Fear Community College from North Carolina had done better. The overall winner would be determined by combining those results with the engineering interview and a review of each group's technical manual. Even if they did poorly on the interview, they were now positive that they hadn't placed last.

[...]

The first award was a surprise: a judge's special prize that wasn't listed in the program. Bryce Merrill, the bearded, middle-aged recruiting manager for Oceaneering International, an industrial ROV design firm, was the announcer. He explained that the judges created this spontaneously to honor special achievement. He stood behind a podium on the temporary stage and glanced down at his notes. The contestants sat crowded around a dozen tables. Carl Hayden High School, he said, was that special team.

The guys trotted up to the stage, forcing smiles. It seemed obvious that this was a condescending pat on the back, as if to say, "A for effort!" They didn't want to be "special" - they wanted third. It signaled to them that they'd missed it.

They returned to their seats, and Cameron and Ledge shook their hands.

"Good job, guys," Ledge said, trying to sound pleased. "You did well. They probably gave you that for the tampon."

After a few small prizes were handed out (Terrific Tether Management, Perfect Pickup Tool), Merrill moved on to the final awards: Design Elegance, Technical Report, and Overall Winner. The MIT students shifted in their seats and stretched their legs. While they had been forced to skip the fluid sampling, they had completed more underwater tasks overall than Carl Hayden or Cape Fear. The Cape Fear team sat across the room, fidgeted with their napkins, and tried not to look nervous. The students from Monterey Peninsula College looked straight ahead. They placed fourth behind Carl Hayden in the underwater trials. They were the most likely third-place finishers. The guys from Phoenix glanced back at the buffet table and wondered if they could get more cake before the ceremony ended.

Then Merrill leaned into the microphone and said that the ROV named Stinky had captured the design award.

"What did he just say?" Lorenzo asked.

"Oh my God!" Ledge shouted. "Stand up!"

Before they could sit down again, Merrill told them that they had won the technical writing award.

"Us illiterate people from the desert?" Lorenzo thought. He looked at Cristian, who had been responsible for a large part of the writing. Cristian was beaming. To his analytical mind, there was no possibility that his team - a bunch of ESL students - could produce a better written report than kids from one of the country's top engineering schools.

They had just won two of the most important awards. All that was left was the grand prize.

[...]

"And the overall winner for the Marine Technology ROV championship," Merrill continued, looking up at the crowd, "goes to Carl Hayden High School of Phoenix, Arizona!"

Cameron and Ledge ... hope to see all four kids go to college before they quit teaching, which means they're likely to keep working for a long time. Since the teenagers are undocumented, they don't qualify for federal loans. And though they've lived in Arizona for an average of 11 years, they would still have to pay out-of-state tuition, which can be as much as three times the in-state cost. They can't afford it.

[...]

I know I took a lot of the story there, but it is just too rich and wonderful not to spread around.

Ooh, I still gotta go to the ABC site and find those godawful quotes from the Arizona congressman. Doesn't look like ABC has that stuff up yet.

Link: ABC News: How Stinky Beat M.I.T. .

Link: Stinky the Robot, Four Kids And a Brief Whiff of Success.

Oh, and Nightline says the story about the kids has been optioned by Warner Bros to be made into a movie.

Learning about StoryCorps

Mostly here I want to pull together a collection of links. I'm still processing, synthesizing, circling around and around what it is about this project that just intrigues me so much. But for now, I'm reading and listening to the material at all these links, and I just wanted to share the pointers and a bit of an introduction. I hope I'll have a whole lot to say about this project in the future. I'm still overwhelmed in thinking about it, it sounds so remarkable and tremendous.

I sure do wish it's home page wasn't that orangey palette. It gives me a headache, and I love this project too much to want to have a headache on its page, esp after a long day at work, when my brain isn't really firing on all its cylinders.

Link: About - StoryCorps.

StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record each others' stories in sound.

We're here to help you interview your grandmother, your uncle, the lady who's worked at the luncheonette down the block for as long as you can remember—anyone whose story you want to hear and preserve.

To start, we'll be building soundproof recording booths across the country, called StoryBooths. You can use these StoryBooths to record broadcast-quality interviews with the help of a trained facilitator. Our first StoryBooths opened in New York City's Grand Central Terminal on October 23, 2003, and the oral historian Studs Terkel gave a rousing speech (MP3, 3:52 min.), which captures the heart of the project.

[...]

Since we want to make sure your story lives on for generations to come, we'll also add your interview to the StoryCorps Archive, housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which we hope will become nothing less than an oral history of America. (See the press release on the Library of Congress Web site.)

Our vision

We've modeled StoryCorps—in spirit and in scope—after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, through which oral-history interviews with everyday Americans across the country were recorded. These recordings remain the single most important collection of American voices gathered to date. We hope that StoryCorps will build and expand on that work, becoming a WPA for the 21st Century.

To us, StoryCorps celebrates our shared humanity and collective identity. It captures and defines the stories that bond us. We've found that the process of interviewing a friend, neighbor, or family member can have a profound impact on both the interviewer and interviewee. We've seen people change, friendships grow, families walk away feeling closer, understanding each other better. Listening, after all, is an act of love.

A StoryCorps interview is an opportunity to ask the questions that never get asked because the occasion never arises. How did you come to this country? How did you and mom meet? How did Uncle Harry get the nickname "Twinkles?"

Here's a link to the day the founder, David Isay, was ABC News "Person of the Week."

Link: ABC News: Person of the Week: David Isay.

May 20, 2005 — Radio documentary producer David Isay has been documenting the lives of ordinary Americans for the past 20 years.

"I'm inspired by real life," he said. "When you talk to the people who are serving you coffee at the local luncheonette or the people who shine your shoes, those are the stories that matter. They are so much more interesting than the stories that we're inundated with all the time."

[...]

"It's actually a very simple idea," said Isay, explaining how the project works. "You bring your mother, your grandmother, anyone you want to our booth. You go in the booth, and the door shuts, and it's kind of this magical sacred space. For 40 minutes you sit across the table, and you talk about the big questions in life. At the end of the 40 minutes, the CDs stop rolling and one goes to you and the second stays with us and becomes part of the archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress."

On Thursday, Isay kicked off StoryCorps' nationwide launch at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Two StoryCorps buses will wind their way across the country, collecting the details of people's lives. Isay is hoping to conduct more than 250,000 interviews over the next couple of years.

[...]

"In so many instances when people come into the booth, one of the people in the booth start to cry." Isay said. "And I think it's because to bring your grandparent to the booth and to say, 'I care about you enough to hear what you have to say to sit here for 40 minutes and really listen to what you have to say,' is really a profound thing.

And here, for your own listening, is a link to the NRP Morning Edition story about it.

Link: NPR : Recording America's Stories, One at a Time.

StoryCorps: Recording America

Recording America's Stories, One at a Time

by Renée Montagne

Morning Edition, May 18, 2005 · Its subjects have ranged from births to deaths to first kisses. And now an oral history project is taking to America's highways. The StoryCorps program, begun in a booth in New York's Grand Central Terminal, will travel to record the stories of everyday Americans, using two Airstream trailers as recording studios.

May 27, 2005 in Art, Fiction, Literacies, Oral Cultures, Stories of Favorite Teachers, Voice, Weblogs, Writing 101 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 12, 2005

Requiring student blogs in classrooms...

Link: bgblogging: The Second Wave of Classroom Bloggers.

Barbara Ganley has this interesting take on how blogging changes students' experience in the classroom. I'm someone who saw these effects with classroom use of chat space, listservs, bulletin boards (to a lesser extent) and webbed research projects since the early 1990s, long before WebCT and Blackboard killed off any life in these interfaces.

These days I'm less likely to see something unique in what interactivity and computer-assisted pedagogies can do for classroom communities, but I want to keep tabs on this nonetheless.

One thing I see below is troubling. SHOULD a classroom, wittingly or unwittingly, be creating a digital divide where some groups of students get a far richer learning experience than others? What Ganley reports is notable, but also troubling. As teachers, we need to look reflexively at what it means when this sort of thing happens, to see if it is a class, gender, racial, or even a technophobic divide, and if we are in any way contributing to it.

Here's the bit I'm referring to:

April 02, 2005

The Second Wave of Classroom Bloggers

[...]

Interesting. And something I see, too, in both my spring classes--the students who blog confidently and read the blogs get more out of the course than the students who don't. But I'm okay with that and see it as a decision the students have to make for themselves, and I shape the class discussion around what is discussed on the blog. I teach to the highest possible level.

The bloggers gain confidence as writers and critical readers; they feel more ownership of the course -- like Dennis's [Dennis Jerz] bloggers, they take over the class, and this is exactly what I am after. This morning --and yes, it is Saturday and so I find it remarkable that a student is on the MOTHERBLOG so early-- a student put out an invitation to the whole class to play writing games this evening. Students don't often discover this intense a community within a first-level course filled with majors and non-majors. But as they take to the blogging, as they commit to it and actually race to their blogs every day to see who has posted, who has responded, they find this learning community becomes their social community to some extent as well, and they want to continue the work in their own way, together, without ME. In fact, my goal is for them only to need me to introduce topics and writers, history and possibilities--to open the tool box, as it were and say, here you go, what will you do with these? And then let them work together to explore the lessons.

And so I think it is an important moment when the bloggers take over the class. If we help the students--all of them, the newbies and the majors--to see themselves as experts and apprentices to one another, each having something valuable to offer and to gain from the learning collaborative, we will minimize the digital and discipline divides in our classrooms. The veteran bloggers can show the others how blogging enriches the learning experience and inspire their classmates to excellence.

Am I reading this incorrectly? What do you think?

April 12, 2005 in Literacies, Oral Cultures, Service Learning, Stories of Favorite Teachers, Teaching, Voice, Weblogs, Writing 101 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2004

Wired News: A MacGyver for the Third World

Here's a story of an amazing teacher. I just love the people who end up getting these MacArthur "genius" grants. The entire approach Amy Smith uses, and involves her students in, just blows my mind. Kudos to her!

Wired News: A MacGyver for the Third World

Mechanical engineer Amy Smith, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology instructor, joined the MacArthur fellowship fold last week, receiving the so-called "genius award" and a colossal cash prize. Her award-winning feat? Using old technology in fresh ways to improve the lives of entire communities.

The MacArthur committee seeks dedication to original, creative pursuits that could affect the future. Smith's anonymous nominator probably didn't have a very tough sell. Smith has a stable of oldfangled technologies that she has reconfigured and applied to underdeveloped areas around the world. Her solutions -- including new grain-processing techniques, alternative cooking fuels and water-quality tests -- sound like answers to problems that should have been solved a century ago. To Smith, that's the point.

[...]

Alternative fuels are one way to cultivate that change. Smith recently created some simple, effective methods to make charcoal from agricultural waste. The first method she developed after visiting Haiti was simple: First, the juice is squeezed from the widely grown sugar cane. Next, the remaining fibers, called bagasse, are sealed inside a 55-gallon drum. After the bagasse carbonizes from lack of oxygen, it is combined with a cassava-root porridge to bind it. Voilà: charcoal that can be used to cook, and manufactured as a business enterprise.

This new charcoal source can save lives in Haiti, where thousands die annually from massive flooding associated with the country's almost total deforestation. Until Smith began developing this alternative source of charcoal, Haitians had been forced to use trees as their sole source of cooking fuel.

Smith hopes other countries will benefit from local variations on her charcoal production method.

"We are adapting it for India, where the problem is the use of cow dung for cooking fuel," Smith said. "It's so abundant, but it also produces a lot of smoke. Breathing indoor cooking fumes is the No. 1 cause of children's death in the world. So if you can produce a cleaner-burning fuel, then you impact public health and the environment, as well."

The next phase for Smith and her graduate-student team is to create a press to improve the briquette's density. She expects it to be simply designed and created with the local environs in mind -- something akin to the grain mill she also produced, which reduces the daily labor of grinding grain from four hours to just a few minutes.

Smith has said that a motorized hammer mill could grind grain into flour in a minute, but its flour screen is expensive and usually can't be built locally in rural areas. So two weeks ago she built a screenless mill prototype for one-fourth the cost of a conventional mill.

[...]

Smith and her students have worked on an array of simple solutions to basic problems in the underdeveloped regions of the world: a water-testing kit that costs $20 instead of the usual $1,000, a phase-change incubator that tests for microorganisms in water supplies, peanut shellers and early-warning systems for flooding.

Shawn Frayne, one of Smith's former engineering students, likes a solution to a water problem that was making people ill in Honduras.

"A village in Honduras was getting over-chlorinated water because their chlorination tank did not have a way of controlling the flow of chlorine into the stream water," Frayne said. "So, Amy and her students solved the problem using the parts of a toilet tank. That's not a connection most people would make.

"The coolest thing is, she solved it on the spot. What's more, her solution not only works, but it is something that can easily be understood and repaired by people in that village, which means that it can be kept functioning long after Amy and her students have left," Frayne said.

[...]

October 11, 2004 in Research Access, Science, Service Learning, Stories of Favorite Teachers | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 09, 2004

BBC News: Deconstruction icon Derrida dies

Deconstruction icon Derrida dies

Jacques Derrida, one of France's most famous philosophers, has died at the age of 74, it has been announced.

Derrida died in a Paris hospital on Friday night, news agency AFP reported. He suffered from pancreatic cancer.

The Algerian-born philosopher is best known for his "deconstruction theory" - unpicking the way text is put together in order to reveal its hidden meanings.

Fellow academics have charged that Derrida's writings "deny distinction between reality and fiction".

Derrida is one of the most influential philosophers of the late 20th Century.

[...]

He was so influential that last year a film was made about his life - a biographical documentary.

At one point, wandering through Derrida's library, one of the filmmakers asks him: "Have you read all the books in here?"

"No," he replies impishly, "only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully".

October 9, 2004 in Postmodernity, Stories of Favorite Teachers | Permalink | Comments (0)