Dear Commons Community,

For those of us who have been following the Olympics, once we get beyond our favorite athletes or sports,  we cannot help but be impressed at the organization, the venues, and the overall quality of the Games.  Roger Cohen in his New York Times column today comments on the importance of the success of the Olympic Games on the British mindset:

“The startling shift in Britain over the past couple of Olympic weeks from despondency to delight, as if the 541 members of “Team GB” had injected a depression-dispelling elixir into the bloodstream of the Brits. The mood swing has been whiplash-inducing…

The gloom gluttons were in overdrive in the weeks before the Olympics. Security personnel were rubbish. Strikes would paralyze the city. Olympic lanes would produce bottlenecks stretching to Brighton. Terrorists would wreak havoc. Dark clouds over a wintry London presaged a fiasco. The Guardian’s front page screamed: “What could go wrong?”

Nothing has. It has all been so perfect. Of course it has.

The sun has shone. Never has it been easier to get to work. The streets of central London are empty while up at the Olympic Park happy crowds throng. One of them was Brian Duffy, a 34-year-old investment banker (even bankers are being spared their daily dose of vitriol), who told me: “Everyone is taking a break, a break from their worries, from recession, from negativity, and just getting behind this.”

In addition, British athletes have done astonishingly well in the Games themselves having racked up 22 gold medals and 48 medals as of yesterday.  In fact,  Britain has recorded its finest performance since 1908.

Cohen also raises the question as to how long the good feelings will last.

“The euphoria won’t last, of course. Taf Pilgrim, strolling with his pregnant wife, said, “Hopefully the good feelings will endure a bit.” If the slogan of these Olympics — “inspire a generation” — is to mean anything, they will have to. But I wonder.

I can already see the stories on the white elephant of a stadium, the cost of it all, the terrible Olympics hangover, the suffering shopkeepers of central London denied regular summer tourism, the cynical politicians posturing to claim credit — a great autumnal binge of renewed British despondency.

Until then, enjoy this. As the Olympics mood whiplash demonstrates, there are many reasons for optimism. In truth the lesson of Britain’s bout of bipolarity is that we are lonely. That is the problem with modernity. When we come together, rediscover community, the feeling is as good as an adrenalin rush.”

All in all, I would say it has been a jolly good show.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dan Rather, former CBS news anchorman, has an op-ed in the New York Daily News, commenting on the state of the press.   He starts on the premise that the news business is currently in a crisis mainly because with so much online content available on the Internet, traditional news companies have not figured out how to utilize the new technology in a way that is financially feasible.  In simpler terms, people are not buying newspapers or watching the network news as much as they used to and instead log on to the Huffington Post and other freely available news outlets.  Specifically Rather comments:

“Now all that information (and so much more) is available instantaneously online. In many ways, that’s a good thing, but newspaper subscribers (and the advertisers who wanted to reach them) underwrote investigative reports, foreign bureaus and a host of other journalistic ventures that, in the new media landscape, do not get anywhere near the attention they deserve.

And when government functions as mundane as school board meetings or zoning board hearings take place without the press watching, it is a certain recipe for ineffectualness and even corruption. Regardless of your political beliefs, this is something we should worry about.

Similar trends are at work in radio and television. For the first 20 to 25 years I spent at CBS News (from 1962 to the mid-1980s), the network prided itself on at least occasionally airing serious documentaries in prime time. This was done as a public service with no expectation of high ratings.

Yet once founder William S. Paley began to fade from control and the network was sold and resold several times in the name of consolidation, the practice of making room for documentaries in the tradition of Edward R. Murrow ceased.

The reasoning most often went as follows: “We’ll get killed in the ratings and demographics; it will too seriously dent our profits.” Any suggestions that we should continue doing them in the public — not the corporate — interest were dismissed.

These days, media outlets like the one that employed me have gone through decades of mergers and acquisitions, so that only a few corporate behemoths are now in charge of a frighteningly high percentage of what was once a dynamic marketplace.

By my estimate, and that of some others who have analyzed the situation, no more than six conglomerates now control more than 80% of the true national distribution of news in America. And for many if not all of these media companies, news is only one (usually small) parcel of their business.”

Rather’s optimistic conclusion:

“I believe that today’s media reality provides opportunities for new avenues of reporting. Journalists are no longer restricted to minutes on a broadcast or words on a page. The Internet allows for real breadth.

In addition, citizen journalism can be an effective new tool for the digitally minded news outlet. Working on a new investigation? Have an update on a previous one? Put it out there on Facebook, Twitter or a news website. With the added value of instant feedback and potential tips from the public, investigations can go in directions that before would either be impossible or take much more legwork.

However media companies adapt to evolutions in technology, quality journalism will always start with a publisher or ownership with guts. People at the top must believe that news is a public service and does not exist solely to gain ratings or go viral. News value must always supersede all else.

Models may emerge in the future based on non-profits, wealthy benefactors and, hopefully, some means to monetize online content.

In the meantime, members of the public must become active citizens and voice their opinions about what they see, read or hear on the news. Subscribe to news outlets practicing serious journalism, visit their websites and write letters to corporate leadership recognizing the type of reporting you want to see more of. The health of our democracy requires it.”

Good advice!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I would like to call your attention to the 18th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning which will be held on October 10-12, 2012, at Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort – Lake Buena Vista, Florida.  The theme this year is At A Crossroads: Online Education in a Complex World.   The keynote address will be delivered by Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity and Director of Google X.   His presentation will center on the rise of MOOCs and their potential to create incredible opportunities for mass participation and collaboration in education.

In my opinion, the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning is the premier forum for approaching the complex issues and opportunities that face all concerned with the role of technology in supporting education.

The early bird registration ends this Friday.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Wade Page, an Army veteran and a rock singer whose bands specialized in the lyrics of hate, has been identified as the gunman who took the lives of six people and wounded three others when he opened fire with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., the police said. Officers then shot him to death.   The New York Times is painting a picture of a individual who had deep problems about race, minorities and “others”.

“To some who track the movements of white supremacist groups, the violence was not a total surprise. Mr. Page, 40, had long been among the hundreds of names on the radar of organizations monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of his ties to the white supremacist movement and his role as the leader of a white-power band called End Apathy. The authorities have said they are treating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Mr. Page had come to the center’s attention a decade ago because of his affiliation with rock bands known for lyrics that push far past the boundaries of tolerance.

“The music that comes from these bands is incredibly violent, and it talks about murdering Jews, black people, gay people and a whole host of other enemies,” Mr. Potok said. He added that in 2000, Mr. Page tried to buy unspecified goods from the National Alliance, which Mr. Potok described as a neo-Nazi organization that at the time was one of the country’s best organized and best financed hate groups…

But Mr. Potok said the center had not passed any information about Mr. Page to law enforcement.

“We were not looking at this guy as anything special until today,” he said. “He was one of thousands. We were just keeping an eye on him.”

Although little known among music fans, a steady subculture of racist and anti-Semitic rock bands has existed on the margins of punk and heavy metal in Europe and the United States since at least the 1970s. Hate groups sometimes use some of the bands and their record labels for fund-raising and recruiting, according to the law center and the Anti-Defamation League.

In an interview posted on the Web site of the record company Label56, Mr. Page mentioned going to Hammerfest, an annual white-supremacist festival well known to civil rights advocates. He also said he played in various neo-Nazi bands, including Blue Eyed Devils, whose song “White Victory” includes the lines: “Now I’ll fight for my race and nation/Sieg Heil!” The company removed the interview from its site on Monday.”

According to the SITE Monitoring Service, which follows white supremacist trends, Mr. Page had an extensive presence on Hammerskin and other white nationalist Web sites, including Stormfront, where he favored the names of his bands as user names and “frequently included white supremacist symbolism” in his postings. He concluded one posting with “88,” a number frequently used by neo-Nazis and skinheads to mean “Heil, Hitler,” according to SITE. (H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.) He also used “14,” the number of words in the rallying slogan of the white supremacist movement. “

Hate, violence, tragedy.  When will we learn?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Seven people were killed at a Sikh Temple in suburban Milwaukee yesterday.  Lunch was being prepared as congregants were arriving for Sunday services when an armed man stepped through the door and started firing.  Early reports indicate that the gunman was a lone white male and that the police said they were treating this as “a domestic terrorist-type incident.”  The gunman was killed by police responding to the incident.

The Chicago Tribune reported that:

“Tattoos on the body of the slain gunman and certain biographical details have led the FBI to classify the incident that way [as domestic terrorism], according to a White House administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

He would not say if the gunman is believed to belong to a hate group or some other violent group, as the investigation that was handed to the FBI on Sunday afternoon, is still unfolding.

But federal officials cautioned against thinking that a concrete link to a domestic terrorism group or hate group had been established. “We don’t know much about the motive at this point,” said a federal law enforcement official who had been briefed on the early planning for the case.”

Information on the identities of the dead were being withheld but indications are that several priests were killed in the attack.

President Barack Obama issued the following statement:

“Michelle and I were deeply saddened to learn of the shooting that tragically took so many lives in Wisconsin. At this difficult time, the people of Oak Creek must know that the American people have them in our thoughts and prayers, and our hearts go out to the families and friends of those who were killed and wounded. My Administration will provide whatever support is necessary to the officials who are responding to this tragic shooting and moving forward with an investigation. As we mourn this loss which took place at a house of worship, we are reminded how much our country has been enriched by Sikhs, who are a part of our broader American family.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a piece on the new common core requirements for K-12 education.  The Common Core curriculum standards have been promoted that their focus on critical thinking will benefit students. While that remains to be seen, areas that are certain to benefit from more uniform educational standards is the online learning and testing industries.  The Times piece specifically comments:

“Even as critics sound alarms about the increasing privatization of public education, the Common Core promises to raise the e-learning industry to new levels by offering opportunities for more education products, including tests, and making it easier and less expensive for companies to develop them…

And the very thing that attracted so many states to adopt the Common Core – the widespread standardization of learning goals, as well as the opportunity to do more creative teaching – can also turn it into a windfall for e-learning companies.

Industry leaders said they expected an increased need for basic learning materials to free up teachers to focus on the deeper-level thinking associated with Common Core. At the same time, content experts and developers can focus more on creating courses that address those new goals…

According to NextUp Research, the research arm of Global Silicon Valley Corp., the e-learning market in the United States is expected to grow to $6.8 billion by 2015, up from $2.9 billion in 2010.”

There are also downsides to the electronic approach.

“emphasizing the uniformity of Common Core seems to some to undercut the standards’ strongest selling point: its flexibility. John Ewing, president of Math for America, said that the math standards were “stunning,” and that he was concerned what the software developers will do with them.

“The idea,” Mr. Ewing said, “is to teach the teachers to look at the standards, unravel them, interpret them, and tackle the hard questions. But these e-learning companies are going to convert those nice standards into a mechanized presentation.”

“Roland Legiardi-Laura, a co-founder of the Power Writers literacy program, said that the Common Core was a “test factory wrapped up in a Tootsie Roll outer shell…[and] that standardization and increased reliance on technology would further erode the relationship between teachers and students. He said that this relationship was vital to a child’s success, and should not be mediated “through electronic screens and 0s and 1s.”

I support the idea of a common core to a certain extent but as indicated in the article, flexibility is key and I am afraid that too many of the electronic presentations will indeed by very mechanistic and teach to a test or other  simplistic assessment.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is making another call for greater regulation of for-profit colleges and universities.  Following on the heels of its editorial last week, today’s editorial cites the following developments as evidence of an industry preying on people more so than helping them.

“The last several weeks have not been particularly restful for the lucrative for-profit education industry.

A federal judge upheld the Department of Education’s right to regulate unscrupulous for-profit schools that leave students with big debts and valueless credentials.

A Senate committee released a blistering report showing that many of these schools pocket huge profits, even though most students leave without degrees.

A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that people who started in programs awarding an associate degree — a big slice of the student population — reaped significant economic rewards with degrees from public and nonprofit institutions. Those with degrees or certificates from for-profits did not.

This is all sobering news. The for-profit sector is growing rapidly and now consumes about one-fourth of all federal education loans and grants. It is essential that the federal government tighten its rules to make sure that taxpayers — not to mention the students themselves — get their money’s worth.”

How aggressive the federal government will pursue this depends entirely upon who is elected in November.  If President Barack Obama is re-elected, we can expect tougher scrutiny and attempts at oversight by the U.S. Department of Education.  If Mitt Romney is elected, we will see a complete hands-off attitude and let the market reign.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Gabrielle Douglas became the first African- American woman to win the Olympics all-around gymnastics title.  Read her story or as the New York Times described her journey to Olympics immortality.

“..she had to pack up her bedroom in Virginia Beach, where she lived with her mother, two sisters and brother. She had to say goodbye to her two dogs, who used to sleep in her bed, and bid farewell to the beach, where she loved to ride… waves on her boogie board.

But it was time to take the leap, however heartbreaking and awkward it would be. Even at 14, Douglas knew that.

So off she went about 1,200 miles to West Des Moines, Iowa, to train with a coach from China and live with a white family she had never met. Douglas remembers thinking when she arrived that she must be the only black person in the state.”

Yesterday on the Olympics stage, she was the undisputed gold medal champion.

Tony

Dear Commons Colleagues,

The Huffington Post is reporting that a psychiatrist treating James Holmes warned colleagues on a University of Colorado safety committee before the Aurora shooting that her patient might be a threat to others, station KMGH revealed today.

“Dr. Lynne Fenton discussed Holmes with several members of the Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment team in June, about six weeks before he allegedly killed 12 people and wounded 58 in a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.” The team assesses possible on-campus threats.

Despite Fenton’s fears that Holmes might be dangerous, the university didn’t take any action after the 24-year-old suddenly dropped out of a Ph.D neuroscience program on June 10, ABC News said.

Holmes quit the University of Colorado on June 7 shortly after failing an oral exam. That same day he purchased an assault rifle.

The university committee reviewing possible threats never contacted the Aurora police, KMGH reported.

On July 20, the day of the shooting, Holmes sent a notebook to Fenton. The contents of the notebook are disputed and his attorneys have argued that it should be kept confidential because of doctor-patient privileges.

Prosecutors charged Holmes on Monday with 142 crimes. The charges include 24 counts of first-degree murder — one count of murder with deliberation and one count of murder with extreme indifference for each of the slain victims.

The revelation that Fenton suspected Holmes had the potential to harm others was reminiscent of the 2007 attack at Virginia Tech, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Virginia Tech was faulted for not acting upon warning signs reported by an English professor about Seung-Hui Cho, the student who killed 33 people, including himself, during a 2007 rampage.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A colleague on the Sloan-C LISTSERV passed on the url ( http://epic2020.org/ ) for two videos, EPIC 2020 and The Breaking Point, that foresee a major transformation of higher education based on the large-scale use of online learning as the main vehicle for instruction.  EPIC 2020 is a dramatization about education during the balance of the decade.  The Breaking Point is about actual events in 2012 that are defining new models for education that will make the traditional system of higher education obsolete.    MOOCs, gaming, e-books  and open source content are among the learning technologies referenced and demonstrated.

Tony