We’re all Outliers
We’re all Outliers.
I spent the first five years of my life living outside of the care of my mother. I was born in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco in 1965 to (now called) Hadiyah, who was a single, college-educated 24-year old hippie from Newark struggling at the time with various degrees of mental illness. My mom got it together sufficiently so that in 1970 she took me back into her care, and we moved to Bellingham.
From age five to 15 I lived with Hadiyah in Bellingham. It was not an easy time for us as a small family emotionally, financially or spiritually. Growing up as an only child, as my mother worked as a professional welder and then training women for non traditional manufacturing jobs, did not lend itself to feeling a part of the community. I was embarrassed, even humiliated by our situation. Free lunch tickets everyday in school followed by “shopping” at Fairhaven’s “Free Store” and even diving into the Goodwill donation box for second or third hand clothes was our financial reality. To make money I started mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, running errands and building other forms of businesses.
My big break in life came at 15 when I was–through luck, good fortune and I believe grace– appointed as a Congressional Page by our state’s senior United States Senator Warren G. Magnuson. If for some reason you’re interested, here’s the full story in more depth. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson picked me up, literally and figuratively, once Senator Magnuson left office.
I purchased a one way ticket to Washington, D.C. with my paper route money and left for Washington, D.C. on a Saturday. By Monday morning I was standing with my knees shaking on the floor of the United States Senate in a crisp page uniform.
In many ways it was that page uniform itself–white shirt, blue tie, blue suit, black shoes–that immediately changed my perception of myself.
Here I was a kid from a low income and emotionally troubled background sitting on the floor of the Senate next to the sons, daughters, nieces and friends of cabinet members, governors, CEOs and more. And no one knew the difference because I looked the same in my page uniform.
Despite being only 15 by a month, it took me five minutes to figure out that no one knew or really cared about my background or story. No one assumed anything other than that I was from the correct side of the tracks. I learned over the next three years that many of the kids came from equally tough backgrounds, but it was only through building personal relationships that such information slowly came out.
In the awkward teenage years, it wasn’t easy to get comfortable with myself and I used my interest and knowledge of politics, policy and a penchant for instantly memorizing names and faces quickly to my advantage. I could name all 535 Members of Congress by face, including their state, within a very short time. I learned parliamentary procedure and public policy, became friends with senators and senior staff directly, learned the history of the United States Capitol so I could give personal tours to VIPs, and worked very hard to stay out of trouble which I generally did.
The experience changed the course of my life. It gave me hope for a better life. I knew it was my ticket to success and I did everything possible to seize the opportunity.
Last night I closed the final chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s impressive book, “Outliers.” I simply cannot recommend this book enough. With raging force it took me back to my own personal journey in so many ways. It caused me to reflect all night long about the amazing opportunity–and the gift of life, love and meaning–that I have as a husband, father, entrepreneur and citizen legislator.
It helped remind me that I have been the beneficiary of access to opportunity. I had three mentors in my life–Jack O’Connor, Warren Featherstone Reid, and Melody Miller–who lifted me up. Who inspired me. Who believed in me. They opened doors at different times in my life.
Outliers is more than a book about success, failure or intelligence. It is about thinking and acting in ways that allow us to see opportunity. Read this blog entry about Outliers as Brian Donnelly explains the conviction behind the story better than my own words.
“Outliers, as Gladwell suggests, are often viewed as those rare individuals who, because of some magical set of conditions are able to achieve enormous success where many others either meet with failure or at best achieve mediocrity. By digging into real life stories- some about our popular success stories and many about seemingly “ordinary” people, the author ultimately makes the argument that while chance and “magical circumstances” do play a role in building success, there are other factors related to persistence and community support that can turn the tide for people, diverting them from a path towards failure to a trajectory of personal and professional success.”
I don’t romanticize my own story. It was, by and large, a dark emotional early journey. I only stopped having nightmares about the pain of my childhood in the summer of 1992, my 27th year. The reason that I am absolutely in love with Gladwell’s book is that it put into articulate, gracious words my own belief of why I’ve been successful: Access to opportunity, luck, hard work at the right time, the love and support of mentors and “10,000 hours of practice.”
There is not a day that goes by–ever–when I don’t stop and look up and reflect upon the good fortune of my personal journey. Wendy and the kids are the engine of the light in my life.
I’ve been thinking about the many ways in which our public policy should more thoughtfully integrate social, cultural and other dynamics at play as Gladwell articulates.
How do we open the door to access to opportunity for everyone?
And I’ve been thinking about how my own story, as uncomfortable as it is to share with you directly, is in many ways an Outlier story in that I had access to so much opportunity through those who believed in me.
I want all young people to see the subtly of that small opening in the doorway…and to seize it.
I would very much like to hear from you about issues, ideas, thoughts and insights if you’ve had a chance to read the book. If you haven’t, get on it
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Want government reform? Idea #2: Rethink the roles of cities, counties and the state
In my periodic look at government reform, I offer a second specific suggestion: Let’s courageously ask the structural question of what level of government should deliver what type of services given today’s reality. In essence our current model of the basic relationship between cities, counties, special taxing districts such as ports and the state has been virtually unchanged for decades.
Now, it’s time for a radical rethinking of the relationship between the various levels of government. That means more than just the City of Seattle, King County and the State of Washington, it means the interconnected relationship between different levels of government from top to bottom.
Why? Because the city, county and state have different operational and financial roles. They have different core competencies. It’s time to question those roles from a systems perspective and to ponder who should be doing what for the benefit of taxpayers, citizens and government’s ability to delivery.
Given that the state holds the power to grant taxation authority to different levels of government, we need to approach the core question in a fresh way. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everything is inherently broken or inefficient, it just means that it’s been a long time since we’ve conducted a sort of ‘zero based performance assessment’ of our system of delivering public services.
We have created hundreds of taxing districts, special taxing authorities, and dedicated funds, and yet we hardly seem to be able to keep track of them. We need a performance audit of sorts of our own distribution of taxing authority not simply to get a handle on who is charging what, but to ask together what model makes the most sense in today’s world.
Last year I asked the state Department of Revenue if we could create a simple, elegant website where a person could enter their home or business address and EVERY tax they paid–and the direct public services they received for it–would be delivered easily on one page. The data doesn’t exist in one place (county auditors, state, etc.) and would be expensive and complex to develop. That tells me that we have become so decentralized in our management of our taxing authority that we’re losing clarity. And it tells us that our IT systems are stuck in yesterday’s era without simple interoperabillity.
For example on the service delivery side: Today there is a Seattle Office of Civil Rights, a King County Office of Civil Rights, and a state Human Rights Commission. The problem surfaces when you look deeper at what the three offices do. A majority of grievance cases filed in Washington state come from King County, according to my recollection. A majority of cases filed in King County come from Seattle.
Simply, the data suggests we should probably have a Seattle area regional office, paid by shared resources but accountable to one entity, to handle all civil rights cases that are filed in this region and save the duplication of services across three levels of government.
In essence, we could probably be smarter financially and operationally by working together in a more structured way. In yesterday’s world every level of government needed to show how seriously it took a given issue by creating an organizational structure or a program. In today’s world we need government to focus on quality, cost, value, efficiency and effectiveness because the stakes matter to real people living real lives.
I don’t believe that today’s political debate is really about taxes alone. I think it’s really about a more nuanced questioning by the public of the value of public sector service delivery. The public is demanding higher quality services and products at a better price in literally every area of life. From Costco to Starbucks to Restoration Hardware, you can see it in the product lines. In government, it comes out in public discussions about quality of services.
People want to see and touch a sense of value, purpose and meaning….from business, government, religious affiliations and every other institution in their lives.
The largest special taxing district in my district is actually the Port of Seattle. They have both substantial taxing authority and a major role to play in regional economic development. The port is vital to my district’s economic health on every level. Still, from a systems perspective, despite my personal and political support for the current elected and appointed leadership, It’s hard not to wonder whether the state may have, in fact, granted too much taxing authority to the Port with too little transparency relative to other levels of government. I’m not suggesting it is fundamentally broken but I do question whether it’s been too long that the Legislature has conducted a serious review of port districts around the state relative to performance and value and role.
David Brewster of Crosscut raised many related structural questions in a Friday post here. Are we entering a time when Seattle–and her generous taxpayers–will effectively ‘go it alone’ or is it a time for a robust regional approach to our challenges?
Brewster asks, in effect, whether its realistic in today’s polarized environment for progressive Seattle and more conservative surrounding areas to design and build a common agenda–and choose to execute upon it. Good question. We have so many regional bodies and entities–some with their own taxing authority such as Sound Transit–some with strategic oversight and access to federal money such as Puget Sound Regional Council and Puget Sound Partnership.
I can’t help but to ponder whether all of these separate entities–many with their own purse strings– have the unintended consequence of taking the pressure off of elected officials to move outside of their immediate comfort zones to build a more strategic regional agenda.
If we had fewer such special organizations, would we have a more coordinated approach to regional thinking and action plans? Tough call and I could probably make the case either way.
Yet clearly we are at risk of balkanizing our own regional issues. But let’s be serious….from a systems perspective, are the interests of Tukwila or Shoreline or even Bellevue really that radically different than Seattle? Of course not. We sink or swim together.
On some level, my sense is that King County should be the major player in regional thinking.
Over at King County our friends must face the cold hard reality that their critical areas of regional purview– transportation, land use, waste treatment, law enforcement–may in fact be at odds with the old fashioned idea that people living in unincorporated areas of King County can realistically expect a level of service enjoyed in urban communities. It’s not realistic. County Executive Dow Constantine and Deputy Executive Fred Jarrett have clearly embarked on a systems analysis of the structural challenges facing King County. I applaud their conviction and their work, but they can’t do it alone. They need both local governments and Olympia’s help.
In that spirit of candor, let’s ask: Is it fair and appropriate for taxpayers in my Seattle district to pay substantial King County taxes that pay not only for regional services that benefit everyone, but continue the old model of providing direct service delivery in unincorporated King County? Where you choose to live matters–and there are consequences and implications– and it’s not realistic to assume that city taxpayers should continue to subsidize direct services in unincorporated areas to such an extent.
We as the Legislature are, I suggest, inevitably going to look to local and county governments for more direct, hands-on service delivery–with more flexible taxing authority– as one strategy of reducing the scope of state government.
It’s time for a radical rethinking of how we deliver taxing authority to local governments. We must venture into the politically dangerous area where we begin to question old assumptions about what type of services can be delivered where.
Yet let’s acknowledge that our state budget deficit means that we have little option but to consider changing the taxing authority we provide to local governments and shift to a model where additional service obligations rest at the local level. I don’t know how quickly or how far this idea will ultimately go but it seems to me that we have little choice but to explore those serious questions.
Local government officials face the cold hard reality of balanced budget obligations and the burden of governing. We share that burden in Olympia. We are in this together and this is not something we can alone. Only through our partnership with local governments can we examine these tough issues.
I call upon the Governor to assemble a policy working group of legislators, county executives and mayors from across the state and engage in a meaningful, serious and substantive policy analysis and review of who delivers what services–and ask the question of what is the right model for today’s world.
Who should do what?
What lessons have we learned from our current model regarding what works and what does not? Where do local and county governments excel and where do they struggle? What is the most valuable, helpful and useful role for Olympia to support a more coordinated approach to service delivery across cities, counties and regions? And as a teachable moment: What are best practices from around the nation that make sense in today’s world regardless of the political reform it would require here at home?
And, specifically, should we shift more taxing authority and service delivery obligations to local governments and provide less funds directly from Olympia?
Do we have too many or too few local and special taxing districts? Should we provide reform the very nature of how cities, counties and the state interoperate in our collective efforts to serve the public?
We are one state, one Washington, and we need to care for one another. We need to support a statewide system of education, transportation and other vital public and human infrastructure. Yet we also live in a changing world that requires genuine and deep thought about tomorrow’s challenges.
Like most of you, I have very few hard answers but I can’t help but feel these are important questions.
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Last week’s post that open education resources are a fantastic opportunity for the type of ‘systems’ reform we’re looking for in government has brought a robust national debate home. It opened a healthy, vigorous and dynamic dialogue between a national leader and a professor here in Washington.
In response to my first post, I was pleased that Shoreline Community College Professor Amy Kinsel, a 36th District constituent and higher education leader, took the time to write a thoughtful, engaging response.
Now David Wiley, a national leader in the open educational resources movement and someone whom I quoted at length in my original post, has published his own direct reply to Professor Kinsel’s rebuttal. It goes without saying that this is the sort of courageous honesty in our policy dialogue that we need in state government, and I offer my deepest thanks to both Kinsel and Wiley for engaging directly via this blog’s forum.
Why is this important?
Because it goes to the heart and soul of our value system about education. And it goes to the core of how we elect to spend huge sums of money in K-12 and higher education.
I so deeply appreciate the sense of engagement, the dialogue, the depth of discussion and the willingness of folks to raise the central question here in Washington: Should we embark upon a bold open educational resources policy here in our state in 2011? Should we take a close look at K-12 first and then reflect upon the implications for higher education?
And, of course: If taxpayers fund a project, doesn’t the public have some fundamental right to expect open access to that information?
Specifically, do you think Washington should join this cause? Is it now our time?
I’d like to engage in this dialogue together.
Interestingly, I happened to meet with Seattle Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson last week. She casually mentioned that one of the reasons the district wanted a supplemental levy from Seattle taxpayers was to fund new textbooks for students. I mentioned to her the importance of looking at open educational resources and she said she’d look into it. Given California’s lead in this area, and many other districts’ progress, I can’t help but think Seattle is ideally suited to embrace this endeavor. But why isnt’ our state a stronger leader in this area already? Why are we so far behind? Why are we failing to provide local school districts, as well as higher education as an institution, with a roadmap for how open educational resources can revolutionize both the quality and access to course material?
Higher education is different on some level and yet the larger systems challenges remain. If nothing, we need a robust approach to these challenging issues.
A vigorous open education resources strategy and execution plan could save us tens of millions of dollars. Let’s embrace the opportunity of this crisis. I intend to continue to explore this issue in great depth between now and the 2011 legislative session.
What’s your view? Will you engage with me?
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Thoughtful, forceful pushback over L&I’s 773 laptops
The driving passion of my work in the Legislature is a belief that we need courageous honesty in our policies, our politics and our approach to transparency in state government. And we desperately need bold systems thinking.
You can argue whether my recent friendly elbow at the state Department of Labor & Industries for seeking and receiving an OFM exemption for $1.8 million to ‘lease’ 773 laptops fit any of those criteria.
I admit that my post last week came across as tongue and cheek with a bit of a flippant attitude. Microsoft, a company that I firmly support as a vital part of our state economy and that has backed me politically in the past, made a vigorous case and firm defense to me that I appeared to criticize their company for inadvertently implying that they were essentially price gauging the public. I don’t have a similarly close relationship with Texas-based Dell or I suspect they would have called me out directly for the same criticism. That certainly wasn’t my intent and I graciously accept and genuinely appreciate the forceful pushback from both L&I and Microsoft.
One of the central reasons that I work so hard to make this blog meaningful is that the job of a citizen legislator is to push, prod and agitate for transparency and open access to a more public dialogue about state government. I hope that my blog posts play a small role in that important, larger work. State government is far too hidden from view in many cases and I think it’s important to question how the institutional infrastructure of government works. Or doesn’t.
So, upon reflection, what was my larger goal in last week’s post? To make the case that we need a radical shift in thinking about how we provide technology to our 100,000 state employees and the citizens we serve. While it may not have appeared so, my thinking in the original pst was less about one purchase and more about how our state agencies relate to the state Department of Information Services, whether the Information Services Board oversees technology strategy and spending or is at great risk of being a rubber stamp, and how we can prod agencies to spend less on technology while receiving better services.
And my biggest point of all: The State of Washington is being crushed in costs because of the lack of a real, truly coordinated, comprehensive technology plan. We have a lot of reports, studies, commissions and task force reports–and many consultant assessments–but we have nothing that could be seriously considered a real technology plan.
And for what it’s worth, I didn’t run for office to be the IT guy (I’m not even an engineer!). l ran for office to send foster youth to college and to try and open the door of access to opportunity to education for everyone. That’s made harder when we spend $2 billion a biennium on technology with no statewide oversight, management or meaningful enterprise-wide accountability.
In that deeper spirit, I asked L&I for a specific response with sufficient detail to educate me and others about what they were really up to.
Here is their thoughtful and much appreciated response that shows L&I’s conviction on the issue.
(Beginning of L&I email response)
Hello Representative Carlyle,
Thank you for taking the time to discuss our computer needs for L&I field staff with our CIO, Christy Ridout, and me. I appreciate your invitation to provide feedback on statements made in your blog. Since there were many complicated topics covered in your blog, I thought it would be helpful to call out the key points being made and respond to each.
· ‘Browser-based device’, e.g. iPad, with the right ‘light’ back end applications could provide more long-term functionality…
o L&I shares a similar vision, however, the technology, infrastructure, and applications are not in place to execute the vision today. L&I continues to work toward that goal and has been actively migrating outdated, legacy applications to more modern service-oriented systems that can be accessed via Web browsers. This work continues as funding is made available, but it will be years before the vision is fully realized.
o L&I has tested several different computing devices for our inspectors, auditors, and other mobile workers, e.g. tablet PCs, netbooks, and personal digital assistants (PDAs). None of these alternative devices met the business needs of our users or the technical requirements for secure, manageable, enterprise-class computing. Today, only a proven, full-featured laptop PC can meet the business, security, technical, and ergonomic requirements needed to efficiently conduct agency business.
· “Client side” solutions don’t necessarily meet user needs.
o L&I agrees with this statement 100%. However, it is equally true that Web-based solutions do not necessarily meet all user needs. Business, technology, and security requirements demand that we support both types of applications for at least the useful lifetime of these laptop computers.
· The agency should be considering building the technology on the back end servers so users don’t need full laptops.
o This is the strategy that L&I is currently pursuing. It is called the “Phased Replacement of Legacy Systems (PRLS)”. This is a multi-biennial plan to replace outdated applications (some more than 25 yrs old) with modern service-oriented systems. We are incrementally working towards these goals as the legislature approves funding. Unfortunately, work has progressed slower than desired because of equipment, contracting, and hiring freezes. In addition, we halted all efforts to build out the necessary server infrastructure based on plans for state-wide IT consolidation and shared services.
· For less cost you could arguably purchase wireless connectivity so that your mobile workforce could secure access to the back end information while in the field.
o For reasons noted above, this approach does not meet the business or technical needs of the agency. However, a quick cost estimate was completed. The resulting figure exceeds the total cost of ownership for the leased laptops L&I plans to obtain.
773 iPads = $386,500.00
25% breakage rate = $96,625.00
3G data service for 4 yrs life of device = $927,600.00
Installation and configuration = $193,250.00
TOTAL to deploy iPads = $2.98 Million (does not include cost of rebuilding all applications, email gateways, security mitigation, etc.)
· It [wireless] might not work in every single corner of the state 100% of the time, but it would in a vast majority of areas at a considerable cost savings.
o Wireless phone coverage is fairly good in the state, but 3G data service is far more limited. Field inspectors routinely go to areas outside of wireless coverage areas. Quite often they cannot get service on the I-5 corridor once they enter a building, factory, construction site, etc.
· Lack of creativity and innovation in the use of technology that should have been more boldly examined and debated inside and outside their agency.
o L&I has already updated several applications to Web-based systems and hosts others on remote access servers. Many of our field staff regularly use 3G wireless to access these applications when service is available. Those workers that cannot tolerate communication outages have mobile versions of the applications that are designed to cache data and synchronize with the servers once they enter a wireless coverage area. But to accomplish this, a full featured laptop computer is required. Limited function devices, like Netbooks and iPads, do not work in these situations. These systems are quite innovative, highly secure, and deliver efficient, uninterrupted productivity.
· Appears to have paid too much ($2,328 /laptop) – “…received literally and figuratively no discount whatsoever”.
o The laptops have not been purchased. The exemption from the freeze is the first step in a long process of review and approval. L&I leases equipment through the DIS lease program. Once all approvals are received and we are ready to move forward, DIS will negotiate with the vendor community to receive the best price possible.
o The dollar amount being quoted is an estimate that covers the four year life of the equipment.
o The laptops are commercial grade as they are used primarily in the field.
· Purchased a “boat load” of Microsoft software that may not be needed and is, “clearly at odds with a long term technology strategy”.
o The laptops will have the Microsoft software installed that the staff need to do their jobs. This software is licensed through an enterprise agreement negotiated by the Department of Information Services.
o The long term strategy will not be realized within the operational lifetime of these laptops. Therefore, the agency’s standard office productivity software is still required on each computer.
Carole J. Washburn
Deputy Director for Operations
Department of Labor and Industries
(End of L&I email)
I deeply appreciate Carole’s direct pushback and forceful defense of L&I’s approach. We can agree or (continue to) disagree on one or more points, and I maintain without reservation that we need a stronger push toward using technology more effectively and in a much more coordinated fashion across state government. Yet, more than anything, I love seeing such convincing evidence that state agencies are pushing hard to think about how they use technology–and how they spend taxpayer money.
As always, your thoughts and comments are more than welcome as well.
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Guest Post: An educator’s response to my open access pitch
Professor Amy Kinsel
When it comes to many curriculum, management, labor, financing and other issues in higher education I often look to my thoughtful and highly qualified constituent, Professor Amy Kinsel, for hands-on insight. Amy is a professor of History at Shoreline Community College as well as past president of the faculty senate. More than any one position, she holds a genuine ‘systems thinking’ approach to higher education, something we share and an idea that is essential to our state’s long term success. She’s both a strong supporter of two and four year institutions as well as a person who has taught me a great deal about creative ways to approach shared resources such as library infrastructure.
This week Amy had some particularly sharp thoughts about my post on open access to higher education through open course materials.
I invited her to outline her thinking in a blog post response. I am more than pleased to post it here and hope you’ll share any additional thoughts you may have either directly or publicly in the comment section.
If you’d like to make a guest post on an issue that has engaged your thinking, please reach out to me.
(Beginning of Kinsel post)
As a community college instructor and “passionate advocate of higher education and lifelong learning” (to borrow your phrase), I read with interest your August 12, 2010 blog post, “Want government reform? Open access to higher education.” I find much to agree with in your call for open access to higher education, yet I also have some concerns.
Unfettered access to information is one of the intellectual tenets of higher education. You call for open access to information online. I agree that Washington state students should have greater access to the educational resources they need online. As it stands now, Washington’s community and technical college students do not enjoy the same access to online resources as do students attending Washington’s four-year universities. Online resources such as e-books, digitized articles and documents, and scholarly journals and databases that are available to students at the University of Washington are not available to my students at Shoreline Community College. Providing these expanded online library resources to all the college and university students in the state would end what you call “artificial restrictions and limits” on access to information that is as essential to the educational success of my transfer students at Shoreline Community College as it is to the freshmen and sophomores attending the University of Washington across town. More radically, I believe that expanded online library resources should be made freely available to all Washington state residents who wish to access them, not just to college and university students.
As you note, access to information is powerful, and government-supported institutions should not be in the business of restricting access to information. However, equal and open access to information is only a part of what is necessary to provide educational opportunity for everyone. You write, “We need to educate more people to higher levels.” But will educating more people to higher levels happen simply through opening the spigot of information and letting it flow?
As an experienced educator, I know first-hand that education does not consist primarily of the transfer of information from books or professors to students. Access to information alone does not equal education. This is something I remind my students of all the time. I tell them at the beginning of each quarter that my job as their teacher is not to pour information into their brains and hope that some of it will swim around in there and morph into thinking. I tell them that my job is to help them learn how to think critically by asking questions, analyzing information, and expressing their own ideas about that information. My purpose is not to get students to memorize and regurgitate what they read. It is to get students to analyze what they read. The bulk of the learning in my classes takes place through assignments, in my case written assignments, that help students develop analytical skills. Merely knowing ideas and information is not enough. Developing the abilities to locate and evaluate resources, ask questions, analyze information, and reach conclusions are the higher-level cognitive skills that I grade students on and that employers are looking for.
In addition to open access to information, you call for additional investment in online instruction. This raises the question of how successfully online courses deliver education that is centered on developing higher-level analytical skills. I teach fully online courses that I believe are highly successful at developing these skills. I am confident that students who successfully complete one of my online courses have learned the critical thinking skills I aim to teach them. But surprisingly, some of what makes these courses successful are the very things that David Wiley of Brigham Young University, whose article on open education you post, criticizes. I’ll give my educator’s perspective on three issues that Wiley discusses: the high cost of textbooks, the restrictive practices of course management systems, and the potential to increase educational capacity through online instruction.
First, Wiley doesn’t like proprietary textbooks and advocates for open-source textbooks, presumably because of cost rather than an aversion to textbooks. For any introductory college course that presents a great deal of material that is new to students, assigning a pedagogically-sound textbook is essential to student success. This is especially true in an online course where reading is the primary method for conveying this material to students. Like most educators, if I could find a good well-written open-source textbook, I would assign it. Yet high-quality open-source textbooks don’t exist in many disciplines, particularly in politically-contentious fields like History. Until pedagogically-sound open-source texts are available in our disciplines, faculty like me will continue to assign commercially-published textbooks.
These can be a lot less expensive than many people think. In fact, using open-source texts may not be the best way to get around the high cost of commercial textbooks while still assigning challenging pedagogically-appropriate books. Making sure students are able to sell used books back to the bookstore every quarter results in tremendous cost savings and in my view is the best way to keep student costs down. This year, if students who register for a U.S. History survey course at Shoreline buy used textbooks and sell them back to the bookstore, they will have an effective cost for a commercial text with full-color illustrations and maps and online study aids of $27.26. Because this textbook covers the entire three-quarter U.S. History survey curriculum, students who enroll in all three U.S. History courses, buy a used textbook, and sell it back to the bookstore will have an effective textbook cost of $9.09 per quarter. With a cost-effective commercial textbook option like this, I don’t need to ask my students to use a second- or third-rate open-source text.
Second, Wiley doesn’t like commercial learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard. It’s true that these are profit-making ventures and colleges pay fees to use them. If the cost of these systems is Wiley’s main concern, there are open-source alternatives available. Here’s a recent article about colleges that have moved from commercial LMSs to open source systems: Moving to an Open Source LMS: 3 Stories.
Wiley’s primary objection to LMSs seems not to be their cost, however. He complains that the LMSs are guilty of “hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all student-contributed course content at the end of the term.” Wiley asserts that this “conceal-restrict-withhold-delete strategy is not a way to build a thriving community of learning.” On this point, I disagree. Yes, passwords in Blackboard restrict access to each classroom to students who are enrolled in the class, and student information and student postings are inaccessible to students after the end of the quarter. But why is this wrong? The online class disappears just like a face-to-face class ceases to exist when the instructor and the students no longer meet. What’s more, the “conceal-restrict-withhold-delete” process that Wiley criticizes is necessary and desirable for a number of good reasons that include student privacy rights and the responsibility of the instructor to create a safe learning environment for students. Frankly, I don’t see how a different approach would be consistent with federal law and with appropriate classroom pedagogy.
The Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protects students’ privacy rights to their educational records, including information about the courses they take, their grades and transcripts, and the work they create in class. Students may share their own personal information and classroom work as they see fit, but a college may not. Not only would doing so be illegal, it would not help students learn. In a “thriving community of learning,” students explore ideas, voice opinions, and try out arguments. All of these things are a bit scary and ought to be done in a classroom environment that feels safe to the students. Students need to feel confident and secure in their classrooms in order to risk stretching their minds by asking the “dumb” questions that show they are thinking or voicing the “weird” ideas that show they are learning. What sort of freedom of expression and thought would students engage in if they were worried that anyone in the blogosphere could see their names and read what they wrote forever? I’d have at least half or even more of the class opting out of posting online if they thought their posts would be open to the world.
Third, Wiley conceives of online instruction as easily and cheaply expandable. This differs significantly from the reality of my online teaching experience. Wiley’s contention that online teaching can be easily scaled up “to satisfy rapidly increasing popular demand” for higher education would be plausible if education really did consist of transferring information from textbooks and faculty to students. But since an education worthy of the name consists of learning, not information transfer, I submit that Wiley is wrong to suggest that online instruction is a cheap solution to higher education’s capacity and funding shortfalls. Certainly, there are no physical barriers to adding as many students as possible to the online courses I teach. But as a practical matter, making a course open to all comers will mean there are far too many students in the online classroom for critical thinking skills to be developed.
If I were responsible not for 25-30 students per online class but 60 or even 100 students, I would need to change how I teach. I could not assign analytical papers that I’d have to read and comment on, I could not field student questions, I could not read or reply individually to student posts, and I could not ask students to write essay exam questions that told me how well students understood important concepts and were able to apply critical thinking skills. Instead, my “teaching” would consist of pushing information out to students, not knowing whether they were critically engaged with the material, and relying on automatically-graded multiple-choice tests that assessed the students’ ability to repeat information from their textbooks. In addition to losing out on the development of critical thinking skills, students in this “open” course would have little opportunity to interact with me or their fellow students and would be unlikely to form a “community of learning.” Scaling up my course in this way might “educate” more people and be more “efficient” than the small classes I currently teach, but I have to wonder how well educated students in a larger online class would really be and whether many of them would even stick around to the end of the quarter to complete the course.
My online course for the upcoming fall quarter is U.S. Immigration History. This course meets a general education requirement and immigration is a hot topic right now. Although fall classes do not begin for another month, there are currently 25 students enrolled in the course with 15 students on the waiting list. With additional budget cuts looming for community and technical colleges, the college won’t be able to open another section of this course to accommodate those 15 waiting students and the 10 others who would quickly fill the class if a second online section were made available. Adding another online section is technically easy, but assigning me to teach another online course would mean assigning someone else—most likely an adjunct faculty member—to teach one of the face-to-face U.S. History courses that is currently on my fall schedule. This year the college has no money to do that.
Online education is a useful tool for reaching out to students, but it requires adequate funding. In this necessary discussion of how to make good on the core value of providing access to educational opportunity for everyone, I would first carefully examine how Washington’s colleges and universities are funded and look for ways to stabilize this funding. The current system of ever-declining state support and ever-increasing tuition rates is not sustainable and is already failing to make educational opportunities available for all students. Until we tackle the funding problem, talk of reaching additional students through online instruction will not result in additional capacity, additional access, or additional opportunity. I’d love to teach a second online class this fall, but even a dedicated public servant like me can’t do it for free.
(End of Kinsel post).
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Financial literacy for kids is not an elective in life.
It’s a paramount job of parents to teach financial literacy to your kids. Still, we all know that every few years there is legislation, a handful of speeches and pilot project funding to teach financial literacy to young people. In today’s world of highly complex financial systems, we all need help learning the ropes.
Many of the financial literacy efforts have been helpful and well intended but overall our state’s approach to teaching kids financial skills and ultimately a sense of personal fiscal discipline is weak at best. While this is an area we know parents must always lead, we also know that many parents themselves don’t have good financial skills.
Let’s wake up and recognize that it’s time to ensure kids have a much richer appreciation for the role, importance and subtly of financial skills.
What is debt? What is a mortgage and an appropriate debt load? How and why do you build credit? What happens when you don’t know how to use a credit card responsibly?
The federal government has built a website to teach kids financial skills. A number of private foundations have done the same. Here’s a handful of sites here, here and here. There are arguably hundreds of strong programs around the country. There are books for parents, websites for kids, pamphlets for teens and much more. We have the materials, let’s focus on the task at hand.
I’d like to see a coordinated effort by our state to get serious about teaching young people how to be responsible managers of their own money. I also happen to know another legislator who shares a passion for this issue, House Speaker Frank Chopp, who has long advocated a more aggressive approach to teaching responsible money management.
I believe now is the time and this is the year.
The financial crisis happened not only because financial institutions took ruthless advantage of people, it happened because regular folks didn’t know and appreciate the true implications and risk associated with variable rate mortgages, credit card debt, payday loans, equity lines of credit and much more. Let’s acknowledge that rebuilding our economy requires addressing the core challenges we face as a society. Parents who don’t know what a variable rate mortgage is can’t teach kids what they mean.
Maybe I’m dreaming but I don’t think we need a new department, agency or large program. We don’t need a formal curriculum approved by the state Board of Education. We need some really smart, dedicated and thoughtful education professionals to reach out to the most effective websites in the nation in this area and to distribute those sites to educators to incorporate them into their teaching in ways that work for educators on the ground.
Financial literacy for teenagers could, for example, be a piece of math education, especially since kids learn in experiential ways in math and science in dramatic ways. You don’t necessarily nneed to overlay a new curriculum or model, you could weld the pieces together in meaningful ways. I know of many teachers who are passionate about this issue and work hard to incorporate this learning into their daily work in the classroom. Let’s empower their success at a broader level.
A little journey back: I remember my own 8th grade class in Bellingham when we ‘played the stock market.’ I was really, really good at the project…until the teacher announced the Stock Market Crash and I lost all my assets. (It’s made me a conservative investor ever since!)
I would appreciate your thoughts about how we could better teach kids financial literacy, and ideas you might have for legislation in this area next year.
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Why does college cost so much?
This Forbes article is making the rounds of legislators and offers some thoughtful insight. We all know that the unrelenting increase in the cost of higher education is extremely painful for students, families and governments alike, but it’s interesting to read this valuable perspective that adds depth to the dialogue.
I readily accept the gentle but genuine critique that I have a tendency to aggressively push, prod and agitate against institutional bureaucracies that I feel often seem to lose their connection to real people living real lives. I also hope that I’m seen as a passionate advocate for a world class education system from early learning through K-12 and higher education. Yet I believe in tough love in the most gracious sense of the term. We must push ourselves to seize the opportunity of this crisis by reforming our systems and approaches.
The time for meaningful systems reform in higher education is now, when we can seize the opportunity of this crisis by working together, and not when the pressure relents and the status quo returns.
This article is an important, humble reminder to me, and to many others, that there are compelling (and legitimate) reasons why it costs a lot of money to create a civically-engaged, educated community of citizens. Education is not free. And it is our moral obligation as a society.
As we go into the toughest budget season in generations in Olympia, I feel more strongly than ever that we must have the courageous honesty to acknowledge that higher education cannot sustain the continued attacks without suffering extraordinary harm to students, families and the institutions themselves.
Why does college cost so much? What do you think? I’m sorry to repost another long article but this one is worth the read.
(Beginning of article)
Why Does College Cost So Much?
By Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman.
At this time of year many rising high school seniors are visiting college campuses, trying to determine which schools interest them. Their parents are busy figuring out what they will have to pay.
Here are three salient facts about tuition and fees. Over the last 30 years, the average sticker price at public and private American universities has accelerated upward. Since 1981 the list price level of tuition and fees has risen sixfold while the consumer price index has only increased two-and-a-half times. This fact is well-known, and it fuels much of the talk about a crisis in higher education.
The other two facts are less well known. The average family bill for a college education has been increasing faster than the overall inflation rate for much of the past century, so rising inflation-adjusted college tuition is not a new issue. And lastly, higher education is not alone. There is a set of important industries with price behavior that is remarkably similar to what college students and their families have experienced.
In a forthcoming book we attempt to explain all three of these facts in a way that ties higher education to the broader development of the economy.
Most of what is written about rising college costs places primary blame on a dysfunctional university system. The culprits are things like wasteful prestige games among elite schools, gold plating of amenities for students and a lax workplace culture that breeds both inefficiency and a stiff resistance to innovation.
Like many large organizations, American universities could be made more efficient, but our review of the evidence convinces us that the primary forces that are driving up costs are not to be found by scouring the account books of colleges for examples of waste. For starters, the dysfunction stories have trouble explaining why inflation-adjusted college costs were flat or falling for over a decade in the 1970s and early ’80s, or why the rate of cost increases is so high today, but was not nearly as high in the ’60s, when baby boomers began flooding into school.
Instead of holding up a magnifying glass to the industry, we take an aerial view. The view from above shows us different things. Rising college costs are an important byproduct of broad economic forces that have reshaped the entire economy, and in particular of the technological progress that has so dramatically raised living standards over time.
Our technology story rests on three strong pillars. First, like many personal services, including much of health care, the law and banking, higher education remains essentially an artisanal industry. These are industries in which technological progress has not reduced the number of labor hours needed to “produce” the service. By contrast, labor productivity in basic manufacturing has soared, and this is why the cost of a year of college has gone up compared with the purchase price of a basic car or a basket of groceries.
Students interacting directly with professors and other students in small groups remain a benchmark of quality in education. Ask any family if they want their son or daughter to learn in small group seminars taught by tenured professors, or if they prefer giant impersonal lectures or online chat rooms monitored by adjunct teachers who answer lots of e-mail questions.
Secondly, higher education shares with many other personal services a reliance on an extremely highly educated labor force. Starting in the late 1970s, the cost of hiring highly educated people began a sustained rise. This has driven up costs in any industry that cannot easily shed expensive labor.
Lastly, technological change affects higher education directly. But unlike steel or autos, where the primary impact of new techniques is to reduce the amount of labor or energy it takes to make the product, new technology in higher education tends to change what we do and how we do it. Colleges must offer an education that gives students the tools they need to succeed in the modern economy. The contemporary chemistry student, for instance, needs to be familiar with current laboratory tools, and they are more expensive than the chalk-and-test-tube world of the past. As in modern medicine, there is a standard of care that higher education must meet, and that standard is set in the labor market that hires our graduates.
Our story of rising cost is devoid of bad people making bad decisions. This means that there are no simple fixes, like price controls, that would not also reduce the quality of the education we offer.
Yet there are indeed significant problems to solve in American higher education. As the national income distribution has skewed toward those with ever more years of schooling, children from families with wage earners that are less well-educated find a college education, especially from a selective four-year institution, harder to afford. This is a problem for our financial aid system, and that system is part of the problem. It is needlessly complex, and it increasingly fails to provide access to many students who could succeed in college. We need to streamline this system and rewrite the funding relationship between public universities and their state sponsors.
Two final thoughts. First, a productive approach to solving the real problems of higher education requires a ratcheting down of the rhetoric. And secondly, we need to fix what can be fixed. Overheated rhetoric about the supposed ills of higher education often leads to counterproductive policy ideas that confuse symptoms with causes and which over-estimate what government can do.
David H. Feldman is a professor of economics and public policy at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Robert B. Archibald is chancellor professor of economics at the College of William and Mary. Their book Why Does College Cost So Much? will be published by Oxford University Press this fall.
(End of article)
I look forward to reading the book and learning much more.
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Tough economy? I’ll take 773 new laptops for $1.8 million.
Obsolete before the box is open?
The Department of Labor & Industries can’t be an easy agency to manage and I don’t have anything other than appreciation for the complex work that their investigators must deliver to employers, employees, citizens and taxpayers. And I can’t, of course, judge what tools they need to perform their tasks. But I do strongly question the agency’s judgement in securing an exemption from the Governor’s spending limits for $1.8 million to purchase 773 brand new, fully loaded Dell computers with a boat load of software when those tools are clearly at odds with a long term technology strategy.
Simply, I would argue that the laptops are obsolete from day one in terms of being divorced from the agency’s long term strategic need to move away from old fashioned ‘client side’ solutions that require massive support and don’t necessarily meet user needs.
In non technology terms, that means the agency should clearly be considering building the technology on the back end, server side of the picture, instead of forcing all of their employees and investigators and other employees to carry around fully loaded laptops that break down frequently and don’t necessarily have the capability to meet their application needs. Each of the 773 computers needs its own expensive maintenance agreement, support system, upgrades and more. It’s a ton of work and this effectively guarantees a heavy burden for the IT support staff for another five years in the frozen model of yesterday.
Strategically I’d be willing to bet that an iPad, or other such ‘browser based device’ with the right ‘light’ back end applications could actually provide more long-term functionality and efficiency than a clunky laptop with all of the agency’s software running that will need a ton of burdensome support. And for less cost you could arguably purchase wireless connectivity so that your mobile workforce could secure access to the back end information while in the field. It might not work in every single corner of the state 100% of the time, but it would in a vast majority of areas at a considerable cost savings.
To their genuine and noble credit the L&I folks graciously acknowledged as much in a conference call with me recently, but they also said it was, in essence, simply too hard to change the ship’s course despite their long term desire to move in this technology direction. So why give in to yesterday’s approach?
It’s hard politically because we make it hard to question old models, systems, infrastructure, vendors and approaches. We are so attached to yesterday’s technology because, as the proverbial cliche says, no one ever gets fired for buying IBM. But in today’s world we need new thinking.
I mention this not only because the Information Services Board (ISB) doesn’t yet oversee or analyze ‘non risk’ projects such as this, for some strange reason, and so no one has vetted the idea other than the agency that stands to benefit from the purchase.
This is just one more reason we need an independent statewide CIO with accountability and authority to make more strategic investments in technology.
This is just one more reason we need to hold ISB more accountable for the management of our technology dollar. From a $268 million state data center to a $1.8 million purchase of laptops, I can’t help but wonder when we’re going to get serious–really serious–about holding ourselves accountable.
Let’s be clear: L&I has made a standard technology decision to buy regular laptops off the shelf with new software. Perhaps you wouldn’t really expect them to do anything other than that during normal times. But I have more faith in our public employees than that. The problem is that we as the state’s board of directors are not forcing agencies to engage in the much harder work of making systems changes to their internal business processes that would necessitate a robust look at their employees’ real needs.
We are, as is our state’s trend and history, often looking for a very expensive technology answer to what is in many ways a business process problem.
I am by no means interested in telling L&I that they are technically wrong or misguided even if I was certain of it, which I’m not. I can however respectfully suggest without reservation that their $1.8 million exemption request exhibits an extraordinary lack of creativity and innovation in the use of technology that should have been more boldly examined and debated inside and outside their agency.
The objection here is not that a legitimate agency has legitimate technology needs. My larger objection is that our institutional infrastructure too often doesn’t push back to question old assumptions.
We spend $1 billion a year on technology in our state with little enterprise wide management, oversight or coordination. We are making great strides thanks to legislative efforts and a growing interest at the executive level but this example of spending $1.8 million for a questionable approach at best is a symbolic representation of what is wrong with our state’s strategic direction and management in this area.
While I have a sucker punch uncomfortable feeling in the stomach about this questionable purchase, I can’t help but think it’s even more unsettling that we bought 773 computers with a massive amount of software that may not even be necessary and seem–on the surface at least–to have received literally and figuratively no discount whatsoever.
Your partner in service
Reuven.
Want government reform? Open access to higher education
As the Governor roams the state with a dignified task force of state leaders reaching out to citizens about the budget crisis, and shows strong leadership in exploring tough budget options, I can’t help but think it’s also an appropriate time for individual incumbent legislators (and frankly new candidates) to begin to outline specific suggestions and proposals ourselves.
Simply, it is not acceptable for all of us to retreat into generic claims of support for generic ideas about government reform. We need to talk about real issues in meaningful ways even when it opens the door to shallow political attacks. The public is hungry for a deeper, more engaged and meaningful dialogue about the fundamental public policy issues of our time.
My hope on this blog is to begin to outline a series of actual ideas–some of them admittedly modest in scope–to improve the quality and efficiency of state government. Many of the larger, more systematic and comprehensive ideas are, of course, under serious policy and financial analysis by legislative and gubernatorial staff. We should talk about specific ideas openly just as we must being to talk more courageously about the lack of equity and wisdom in our tax system, our educational system, our health care delivery system and more.
For me as a passionate advocate of higher education and lifelong learning, it would be impossible not to begin with the fundamental philosophical idea that information that is designed, developed and distributed through the generosity of public tax dollars should be accessible to the public without artificial restrictions and limits. This idea is not new. See the ‘open education policy’ section of the cape town declaration. Or guideline #5 in the Southern Regional Educational Board’s recent report: an expectation of sharing. Or the Washington State Community and Technical College’s new open licensing policy.
I refer, of course, to the open education resources movement in higher education.
Yes it’s a movement and yes it has detractors and advocates. Yes it requires a leap of faith that the web has fundamentally changed our world’s view of the power of information for the better and, yes, it requires a belief in the common good over proprietary financial interests.
How much would it ‘save’ taxpayers and students to move forward with a bold K-20 open content strategy in Washington? It’s impossible to know but consider this: proprietary college textbooks alone cost students in Washington tens of millions a year and in many cases the state need grant pays much of the bill. The number of students graduating with modest debt is decreasing while higher education costs rise faster than inflation year after year. And what of the textbook costs for K-12? Can we learn from what California’s Governor has led in K-12 open textbooks?
But of course it’s not just about money, it’s about the core value of access to opportunity for everyone.
Our national needs are radically changing and our bureaucracies, systems and structures are understandably terrified by the challenges. We need to educate more people to higher levels not only through traditionally more, extremely expensive “high demand” static slots paid by taxpayers but through radical approaches to access to information.
The cost of ONE building on ONE college campus that serves about 3,000 students today is about $30 million. Imagine what a $30 million investment in e-learning applications and services could deliver for the hundreds of thousands of college students in every corner of our state from small towns to the big city? The answer, of course, isn’t solely old bricks and mortar versus on distance learning strategies, it is “yes and…”. It is both.
The “open movement” is upon us
David Wiley of Brigham Young University provides one of the best overall descriptions of the ‘Open’ movement I’ve seen in a while. The full article is linked here, to help convey the power of the idea. While I have blogged on this topic many times, and Washington State is moving forward in many meaningful ways, I wanted to convey Wiley’s important insight directly.
Please read it.
My public policy goal in 2011 and beyond is to ensure that Washington is fully engaged in this movement, leads the effort where it makes sense and tackles the challenges of opening the doors of access to higher education in new and profound ways.
Government reform is a buzzword but we can radically change how we open the doors of access to higher education by making information available in new, bold and creative ways.
(Beginning of David Wiley article)
The word OPEN is receiving a lot of attention in education circles. Openness in higher education has been discussed recently by writers in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, EDUCAUSE Review, and EQ, among other publications.
In January 2010, The Horizon Report, produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), declared that open content will “reach mainstream use” in higher education within the next twelve months.
But what does that mean? What is this open we keep hearing about?
For over a decade, open has been used as an adjective to modify a variety of nouns that describe teaching and learning materials. For example, open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks are all part of the current higher education discourse. In this context, the adjective open indicates that these textbooks and other teaching and learning resources are provided for free under a copyright license that grants a user permission to engage in the “4R” activities:
• Reuse: the right to reuse the content in its unaltered/verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)
• Revise: the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix: the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
Although the modified nouns (content, resources, courseware, textbooks) differ from one another, the actions that operationalize the concept of openness are the same. They are acts of generosity, sharing, and giving.
The Role of Openness
For the authors of content, resources, courseware, or textbooks, being open is about overcoming the inner two-year-old who constantly screams: “Mine! You can’t have it! It’s MINE!” Unfortunately, modern law and college/university policy tend to enable this bad behavior, allowing us to shout “Mine!” ever more loudly, to stomp our feet with ever less self-control, and to hit each other with ever harder and sharper toys. Throughout our tantrums, society soothingly whispers that unbridled selfishness is a natural and therefore appropriate feeling. Regrettably, some educators and administrators have allowed themselves to be swayed by the siren song: “It’s OK. Be stingy with your lecture notes. Don’t share your slides. They’re yours. Sue those students who posted their class notes online. It’s legal. Go ahead.” By contrast, the idea of openness reminds us of what we knew intuitively before society gave us permission to act monstrously toward one another.
I’m frequently asked: “What is the appropriate role of openness in education?” I find the question to be deeply troubling and insidious. The question implies that openness might play any of several roles in the educational enterprise—a core or a peripheral role, a large or a small role. The question subtly distracts people from seeing that openness is the sole means by which education is effected. If a teacher is not sharing what he or she knows, there is no education happening.
In fact, those educators who share the most thoroughly of themselves with the greatest proportion of their students are the ones we deem successful. Does every single student come out of a class in possession of the knowledge and skills the teacher tried to share? In other words, is the teacher a successful sharer? If so, then the teacher is a successful educator. If attempts at sharing fail, then the teacher is a poor educator. Education is sharing. Education is about being open.
How Sharing Is Changed by New Technology
Knowledge has the magical property of being nonrivalrous—meaning that teachers can share their expertise without losing it. As Thomas Jefferson stated in his famous comparison of knowledge and fire: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” If teachers had to make the sacrifice of unlearning an idea in order to share it with their students, the progress of society would be slow indeed.
However, whereas knowledge can be given without being given away, external expressions of knowledge cannot. When the book I need is missing from the university library shelves, I can’t read it until someone returns it. When my wife gets to the newspaper in the morning before I do, I have to wait. At least that’s the way the world worked until a few years ago. The Internet now makes it possible for digital expressions of knowledge to have the same magical, nonrivalrous quality as knowledge itself. While I’m waiting for that book to be put back on the shelf, a hundred thousand people are reading the online version of the book simultaneously. While I’m waiting for my wife to finish reading the newspaper, a million people are reading the CNN.com website simultaneously. For the first time in the history of humanity, external expressions of what we know are on an equal footing with knowledge itself. Like the flame of Franklin’s candle, both ideas and their expressions can now be given without being given away.
This ability to give expressions of knowledge without giving them away provides us with an unprecedented capacity to share—and thus an unprecedented ability to educate.4
A Lesson from History
Technology never appears on stage alone. Technology always plays opposite its nemesis: policy. And the pair have quite the stormy history.
The 15th century saw what many have argued to be the greatest technological advance of the millennium: Gutenberg’s combination of metallic movable type with the printing press. In contrast to this new capability to produce books, leaflets, and other expressions quickly and inexpensively, the 15th century also saw restrictions on the distribution of information—restrictions that make a global DMCA (or even the pending ACTA) seem like a parade of rainbow sparkle ponies.
Gutenberg’s masterwork was a 42-line-per-page edition of the Bible in Latin, yet the common people of the time remained desperate for access to a vernacular edition of the scriptures they could actually read. Rather than utilize the new capabilities afforded by the printing press to provide meaningful access to the word of God, the church instead used the efficiencies of the press to ramp up production of indulgences (papers that could be purchased in order to have one’s sins or the sins of a deceased ancestor forgiven), while effecting policies outlawing the possession or memorization of the scriptures in the vernacular. For example, 15th-century English law read: “Whosoever reads the Scriptures in the mother tongue, shall forfeit land, cattle, life, and goods from their heirs forever, and so be condemned for heretics to God, enemies to the crown, and most arrant traitors to the land.” Thirty-nine people were hanged for violation of this law during the first year it was in force.5 Capability plus demand had produced a thriving underground market—in this case, a market for pirated Bibles.
Applying the Lesson to Today
The collision of powerful new information technology, outdated policy, and overwhelming demand in the 15th century contributed significantly to the series of major historical events we now call the Reformation. Today, even as new media and technology provide mind-boggling capabilities for sharing and education, we occasionally still run into outdated policies and ways of thinking. Information technology is sometimes turned against itself and is made to conceal, restrict, withhold, and delete. For example, a course management system like Blackboard theoretically has the potential to greatly improve educators’ capacity to share. Instead, many CMSs take the approach of hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all student-contributed course content at the end of the term. If Facebook worked like Blackboard, every fifteen weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, and unsubscribe you from all your groups. The conceal-restrict-withhold-delete strategy is not a way to build a thriving community of learning.
In another example of outdated thinking, in 2008 a Florida professor began legal proceedings against the owner of a company that sells students’ notes, claiming that students’ notes taken during his lecture were derivative works that infringed on his copyright.6 If we continue down this path, faculty will soon be asking students to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) before registering for classes—as if the contents of the periodic table, the rules of choral arranging, or the law of supply and demand were some kind of trade secrets. What is the impact on learning when teachers knowingly withhold, conceal, and restrict access to knowledge or its representations? Conversely, what is the comparative impact on learning when teachers share, give, and are generous with access to knowledge and its representations? Perhaps most important, what is our primary interest as educators: facilitating student learning or commercializing what we know? If our primary interest is facilitating student learning, then education is our field. If commercializing what we know is our primary interest, then we shouldn’t be educators.
Even though evidence of outdated thinking is all around us in higher education, demand for education continues to grow at an unbelievable rate. There are currently around 120 million students in higher education worldwide. In the coming decades, experts estimate an increase of an additional 150 million students in the world’s poorest countries—more than doubling the number of students seeking higher education worldwide. In India alone, two new universities would have to be built and opened each week over the next twenty-five years to meet demand.7 And while this demand is growing, higher education’s funding is shrinking.
In short, higher education finds itself using radical new technology in backward ways, reinforcing outdated ways of thinking with law and institutional policy, and remaining unable to satisfy rapidly increasing popular demand. Sound familiar? Higher education appears to be pitched on the edge of its own Reformation.
Which brings us back to openness. To some degree, higher education has lost its way. As institutions and as individuals, we seem to have forgotten the core values of education: sharing, giving, and generosity. Like the frog in the famous parable, we have unwittingly allowed the water around us to be brought slowly to a boil while we sit in a pot of selfishness, restriction, concealment, and withholding. And to the degree that we have deserted the principle of openness, learning has suffered.
New media and technology have a critical role to play in the future of education. But regardless of the potential they may show in their audition, new media and technology will get to act only those parts in which we cast them. From my perspective, the only legitimate role for new media and technology in education is to increase our capacity to be generous with one another. Because the more open we are, the better education will be.”
David Wiley (david.wiley@byu.edu) is an Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology in the David O. McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University.”
(end of Wiley article)
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
Seattle Schools schedules classes on Christmas. Sort of.
As a Jewish American, I naturally don’t really expect the Seattle Public School District’s calendar to be finely attuned or even particularly sensitive to my family’s personal religious preferences. Yet I do find it personally and professionally disappointing that this year’s second day of classes falls on Rosh Hashana, the second holiest day in all of Judaism.
It’s a day that even the most secular, non observant of Jews celebrate to say nothing of those of us who treasure the importance of this rich holiday in our tradition. It is a day that sees public and private schools and virtually every other institution in large cities from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles closed. And it’s a day that even a cursory glance at any calendar would have easily prevented.
It’s effectively like scheduling school on Christmas, figuratively of course, something that would rightfully cause a parental riot among majority Christians to say nothing of make national headlines. But understandably given the numbers the entire school year is scheduled around major Christian holidays so the analogy is lost. Sort of.
So what is Rosh Hashana and why is it so important to the Jewish people? It is about beginning life anew. To forgive ourselves and others, to reflect and to move on. To dream.
Here is a small piece of what Rosh Hashana means to me. I’m sorry I don’t know how to embed this particular video but here’s the link to Aish’s Dare to Dream video that I appreciate. I hope you don’t mind me taking this opportunity to share it with you.
Of course, I recognize it’s not logistically feasible to take all religions into consideration and to manage a calendar around every tradition. But as a Jew, a minority of less than 1.4 percent of the U.S. population, and about one half of one percent in Washington state, it gets tiring of always being on the losing end of the “sorry we can’t accomodate everyone” line.
As is often the case with such things in life, it’s not necessarily that they do it, it would just be nice to have them at least recognize that they are doing it. Minorities come in all shapes and sizes and a vibrant, engaged, healthy and connected sense of our own diversity is our society’s greatest strength.
And so my children will once again miss the second day of school. But they will be learning nonetheless.
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
