Business Surpassing Education...Again?

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/opinion/wilkinson-jobs-act/index.html?eref=rss_latest&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_latest+%28RSS%3A+Most+Recent%29

Here's the quote that caught my attention:

We must enhance commercialization of research out of U.S. universities. One way to do this is to adopt a standardized licensing agreement for spinoffs. Another way is to make open-technology licensing a condition for universities to receive federal research dollars. Currently, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 requires faculty innovators to work through their own university technology licensing offices. This creates significant delays.

It seems as though crowdsourcing is a rough parallel to much of the work happening in academia. Of course, in the business world, such efforts involve money, not just ideas. The trouble facing academic circles is that ideas are cheap, and many are flat-out free.

In public education, things have changed to some extent. Used to be, when a teacher (say, 3rd grade) had a great idea, it would be passed informally around the campus. District meetings would result in sharing among campuses. Soon, "best practice" was in place by word of mouth. At some point, the term best practices became formalized. Suddenly, a good idea was a way to make money, especially if the idea could be linked to test scores in some way. Now we see entire careers launched over a good idea in public education.

It seems higher education is still in the informal stage, regarding new information. Wiki's are not money-making ideas. Collaboration tends to result in better teaching or learning or scholarship; however, it often has no direct monetary value attached to it. Faculty make their salary, and little else. Their work is documented in their dossiers, and it may lead to tenure or promotion. Other than that, this kind of work is expected. Great ideas are supposed to come from campuses.

The business world may change that.

Two Unhappy with This Appointment

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/23/jim-yong-kim-world-bank_n_1375040.html

I was just listening to the news at the top of the hour. I was just minding my own business. I didn't expect to hear something directly affecting my job: Mr. Jim Yong Kim (as Vanguard refers to him) is Barack Obama's choice as nominee for president of the world bank.

He is a Harvard-trained physician with a Ph. D. in anthropology to go with it. Still the financial group Vanguard is placing him in a list as Mr. and comparing him to another candidate, Dr. Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

The Korean-born Kim, 52, according toUSA Today represents a break from the financiers and bureaucrats who have run the World Bank. "For the first time in the bank's history, it will have a president whose life mission is what the bank aims for: the elimination of poverty . . . . It's a brash decision which breaks the standard practice of going with a banker or a political insider." Those words from a man some thought would be a good choice for the position, himself. Forbes magazine seemed to want him.

This frustrated me. Dr. Kim hasn't been responsive to my work recruiting him, but he was someone I felt we could talk to. His speeches online give me hope that this leader understands the value of liberal education. From the report, it sounded like I was the only one bothered by the appointment on the planet. Everybody seemed so happy and pleasantly surprised. It was a love fest of a news story.

Not surprisingly, Forbes found another one. Somebody at Harvard with economics degrees from BYU and MIT. Dr. Lant Pritchett. He calls the appointment "craven" and accuses the Obama Administration of caving to the left-wing. Dr. Lantt does claim credit for supporting Barack Obama's election in 2008...nothing in the article mentions his support in 2012.

I'd push a Utah/BYU/Romney connection here, but that would indicate "bias."

This is where you find pushback: people who have degrees in one thing and have held two (2) jobs. The point is specialization. It makes you an "expert." Unfortunately, the World Bank deals with complex issues, and such a specialized approach has produced failure in the past. Failure to the point where some have called for the U.S. to pull out of the World Bank, altogether.

Dr. Pritchett ends his Harvard biography with this:

[And nothing else. Some bios list non-family and non-professional accomplishments like climbing Everest or playing the cello making it seem as if all of the rest was just tossed off. I believe the only point of this is to make the rest of us, who collapse on the couch and watch Friends reruns at the end of the day, feel like slackers. I think getting the above done while being a husband and father to three children is plenty.]

I don't disagree. I just don't want someone like this running the World Bank.

Or Dartmouth.

Strategically Missing the Point

When people write blogs, they hope to get a half million hits and go viral. This has not been my experience. Nobody from one particular liberal arts college has read any of my previous posts. That's understood. My bad marketing. New plan for this LAC: put initial employment data online for everyone to see.

In May, the college will begin publishing employment and salary data for the class of 2011, building on it with every class. A spokeswoman for the Council of Independent Colleges said its president and researcher had never heard of a nonprofit, private college making such data public.Anderson knows the risks: "First, people might look at your data and not be impressed. The other risk, though, is that you have no data, and you're this black box where people dump $50,000 a year for four years."If I could pick one of those two risks, I'm going to take the first one."

I'm not naming the college, but suffice it to say the school just dropped from contention for any Henley family tuition money. It strikes me as a liberal arts college that has lost the key ideas behind the purpose of LAC's.

It all stems from the perspective of a father, I guess. What's the real purpose of higher education? Is it to prepare them for their first job at age 23...or their last job (not to mention all the ones in the middle)? This ignores what kind of mother, daughter, sister, voter, leader, and person I'm trying to create out of the 16-year-old clay I was given. It also ignores the 12-year-old son and my sick daughter of 11 years on the couch downstairs.

When I came out of college with a music education degree, my first job was at Dunn and Bradstreet (my student teaching supervising teacher got fired--bad taste in my mouth for teaching). I've held multiple jobs with multiple foci. My wife's job changes (significantly) every year...and she never leaves the elementary school she's working in. She's constantly getting more schooling to make up for her "focused" degree. My job at NITLE has shifted significantly in less than a year. My personality, a high school debate coach, other relationships, and sheer fear guide me through transitions.

If you have 4 years to prepare for a life that demands constant change, then where do you go? I think the answer is LACs, if you can afford them. This should be a priority. I think wedding rings should have precious metal in them, too. Meanwhile, a girl named Indigo prepares for her first on-campus concert in front of her peers--a chance to explore, become adventurous.

If we drop the purpose of higher education to job training for twenty-somethings, then LACs don't hold up. The smart move, then, becomes two years at a community college to get the "generals" out of the way. Then two years at a public in-state institution for the degree. Then the job. Done. Texas wants to offer degrees for $10,000, total. That's a savings of a quarter million if tuition rises. The Edpunks Guide...makes it even cheaper. Who needs integrated learning, undergraduate research, personal attention from PhD's, a community of learners...any of that? I used to have a button on my jacket that said, "I don't need college. Just the degree."

And that's what most 18-year-olds think. Except you have to work for another 45 years after college. And at age 25, you realize that you HATE accounting, or that you can't be a partner unless you can bring in business...and they fire you if you can't. Next thing you know, you're wearing a Statue of Liberty outfit, trying to get people to bring their income taxes to you instead of using Turbotax.

If only there were an integrated accounting-theatre course you had taken...

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work | Epicenter | Wired.com

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work | Epicenter | Wired.com.

via A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work | Epicenter | Wired.com.

NITLE News: CLIR and NITLE to Launch Digital Academic Publishing Program

NITLE News: CLIR and NITLE to Launch Digital Academic Publishing Program.

When I first started working at NITLE (the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education), one of the advantages of staying in the position was (and is) the tuition exchange program between liberal arts campuses throughout the nation. Sending my children to fantastic schools without the burden of tuition? That could be fantastic!

Then I had a conversation with my brother, who had just finished putting three kids of his own through college.

Tuition? That's maybe a third. "Then you got fees..." he told me. On top of that, books are..."ridiculous. I couldn't believe it."

The same is true with academic and scholarly research. To build my own website, using my own research examples, I ended up paying through the nose for the rights to my own writing. I wrote it. Then I paid for it. And I paid a lot.

Further investigation for my job revealed the thousands upon thousands of dollars that libraries pay for journals read by few, if any, faculty and staff. Forget about students reading those journals, especially undergraduate students. That's not really even a thought given to most of the very expensive journals.

Today, my employer (Southwestern University) and my actual employer (NITLE) are partnering with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to change all of that. Anvil Academic is going to offer a real alternative to the current juggernaut held on academic publishing by a very small group of publishers and groups.

This could change everything. I'm proud and grateful to be a part of such a transformation. Libraries, scholars, consumers, students, even taxpayers will see their lives change for the better over time. And it all started today.

Adrenaline...WAY better than caffeine!

Preparing for an Interconnected World: The Case for Liberal Education

[caption id="attachment_316" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Image from http://www.berkeleyromanians.org/"][/caption]

True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.

-Nikos Kazantzakis, poet and novelist (1883-1957)

As I write this, “our country” is working to encourage more and more students to attend college. Affordability is important. So is making sure we have people to fill positions in the job markets of the future (at least the immediate future). Thus, policymakers have strong opinions about how best to get students into colleges. Mostly, this involves a community college component to keep things cheap and a more lenient transition to larger state universities.

I beg to differ with this approach. I think Nikos would agree. His character, Zorba the Greek, would have never made it through this factory model. Yet the world is crying out for Zorbas. Unfortunately, the only place developing the world’s next Zorbas are liberal arts campuses.

Case in point, consider a recent newsletter I received in my Inbox. It had three major stories at the top:

• Students in one class held a competition involving recipes. All had to be created using foods that could be bought using food stamps. The winner made a tasty Mexican dish, and the recipe caught national attention.


• Another class was focusing on students learning how to start foundations and charitable organizations. Their class brought in experienced directors from around the philanthropic world.


• A third article discussed the work of three students in theatre. Over the summer, they had created their own theatre company, a type of self-service summer stock. They produced four shows, two of which were sold-out performances. Important: they spent the summer 200 miles from campus—it was their own initiative, hard work, and creativity.

These three stories have one thing in common: they deal with the actual work of undergraduate students. They have one less tangible thing in common: they demonstrate the success of this institution in encouraging students to become successful people.

Unlike the community colleges mentioned above, this institution is a liberal arts college. The students in the first two examples were not majoring in food science or sociology; they came from all different majors. The students in the third were theatre majors, but they also were given the emotional and academic safety of daring and doing. So…they did. In all three cases, this is significantly different from a cookie-cutter philosophy. It instead focuses on learning about the bigger picture, learning about how the world actually works.

Unlike large universities, smaller schools do not have a strong cadre of graduate students to make headlines. Although liberal arts colleges have fine faculty, they often focus on teaching undergraduate students. Big research projects don’t always come from small campuses, though it’s not unheard of. However, the star researchers do not necessarily make fine teachers, and many undergraduate students find themselves being taught by the graduate students. It can become misleading, in a way. Go to this huge school for a bachelor’s degree because of its stellar reputation—fueled by professors teaching graduate students.

If we are truly working to develop more creative, thoughtful leaders for our nation, it would behoove us to structure a curriculum that puts undergraduate students in situations where they make decisions that matter. It would help if we taught students less about course requirements, deadlines, and checklists--and more about:

• different ways of knowing things


• how to synthesize ideas, and


• created environments where undergraduate students were free to try things, learn new ideas, and make mistakes.

If we are looking to higher education to develop the next great leaders for the free world, the answer lies in liberal education. Right now, the unfortunate focus is on continuing a public school model everyone seems to agree doesn't fit this purpose.

Hopefully, leaders will lead. After all, many of them have a liberal arts education. If they do, we will see more of the model that works...and less of one doomed to long-term failure by its very design.

Stop Online Piracy: Tell Congress to Kill the Stop Online Piracy Act!

(Future Violation of SOPA, from http://sopastrike.com/strike)

The Stop Online Privacy--er--Piracy Act is making its way through Congress. SOPA. Today is a good day to stop Congress from, well, being themselves again.

One of the problems with our current governing bodies is that they really want to control things, to make them right. What's worse, they think they can legislate against all objectionable activity and handle any unintended back-door consequences through amendments. Ironically, it's the same group that talks about how government is too big. This same group will point to a health care bill or the tax code and tell you how many pages long it is. Then, they will turn around and draft bills that are even longer.

You never account for all the problems. Heck, you never account for all the idiots! "We're for freedom, as long as it's the right kind of freedom." I'm still holding out hope that one of the presidential candidates goes so far as to say those words. True entertainment is so hard to find...

Democracy is a good thing, but the problem with our government is that it is run by the kind of people who have enough money to do so. Congress is not a representative sample of this country. State legislators are similar. These are not people who blog, who send interesting photos from the internet to their friends, who share a song or short video with their families. Typically, they have "people" to do that for them.

The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) had a nationwide "impromptu discussion" on this topic as it was becoming a real threat, "Bad news for higher education: SOPA, discussed." Props to my colleagues at NITLE for seeing threats like this on the horizon. If you live in the higher education world, it's a good read from a good discussion:

Techne » Bad news for higher education: SOPA, discussed.

Wordpress is "censored" today. I thought my computer had a virus, but it seems Wordpress is helping Fight for the Future, an online advocacy group, make a point.

Point taken.

I hate online petitions, but this one is worth signing. Today. I wish this advocacy group, Fight for the Future, continued success in their efforts to alarm Americans. You can't base policy on, "Oh, I'm sure they wouldn't go that far..." It's pretty obvious from recent experience that they will. That should ring true no matter your political leanings.

Here is a screen shot of today's Wordpress front page:



I suppose posting this would be a violation of SOPA, as well. That would be ironic, but not surprising.

Congress needs to back off here, but America needs to act. I've learned that in politics, anyway, numbers matter most. This online petition has the potential to be the biggest in history. Hit this link, take 20 seconds, and tell people that you at least tried to stop this foolishness.

http://sopastrike.com/strike