Dear Commons Community,

This was the second day of the Sloan-C Conference here in Orlando.  The highlight of the day for me was the keynote address by Sebastian Thrun, long time research professor at Stanford University and more recently, founder of Udacity.  His presentation, Democratizing Higher Education, focused on how he took his Stanford graduate level class online, made it tuition free and ended up with 160,000 students enrolled world-wide.  Underlying this class was a teaching model that emphasized student engagement, and problem solving.

His pedagogical approach is well-familiar to those of us who have experience teaching online but the scale of his course is most impressive.  His work has done a great deal to launch the MOOC phenomenon that a number of private colleges and universities are considering.

Thrun recently created Udacity, an online university, which offers college-level courses free of charge. With a dozen courses underway, Udacity presently has had over 800,000 student course enrollments.

During the question period, I asked him why he did not establish a center at Stanford rather than create his own private university.  His response was that Stanford or any university for that matter did not have the flexibility and nimbleness to launch such a radically different approach to teaching and learning.  He also emphasized that Udacity was probably best suited for adult and life-long learning rather than full-degree programs.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As I indicated  earlier this week, I am at the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning in Orlando. The highlight of the day was the plenary panel session, Evolution or Revolution:  What’s Happening with Traditional Online Learning? featuring:

• Jeff Young (The Chronicle of Higher Education, US) – Panel Moderator
• Jose Cruz (The Education Trust, US)
• Alan Drimmer (University of Phoenix, US)
• Jack Wilson (University of Massachusetts, US)

Also good to see CUNY colleagues, Alyson Vogel, Jennifer Sparrow and Susan Ko at the conference.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Justin Hollander, an assistant professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University and the author of Sunburnt Cities: The Great Recession, Depopulation and Urban Planning in the American Sunbelt, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, questioning the move in education away from paper to digital content.  Entitled Long Live Paper, he makes the case in response to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s speech last week that:

“…declared a war on paper textbooks. “Over the next few years,” he said in a speech at the National Press Club, “textbooks should be obsolete.” In their place would come a variety of digital-learning technologies, like e-readers and multimedia Web sites.”

In addition to referencing reading specialists and their concerns about all-digital content, Hollander  states:

“As both a teacher who uses paper textbooks and a student of urban history, I can’t help but wonder what parallels exist between my own field and this sudden, wholesale abandonment of the technology of paper.

For example, when cars began to fill America’s driveways, and new highways were laid across the land, the first thing cities did was encourage the dismantling of our train systems. Streetcar lines were torn up. A result, for many cities, was to rip apart the urban core and run highways through it, which only accelerated the flow of residents, commerce and investment to the suburbs.

But in recent years, new streetcar lines have been built or old systems extended in places like Pittsburgh, Jersey City and Phoenix. They are casting aside a newer technology in favor of an older one.

In other words, we shouldn’t jump at a new technology simply because it has advantages; only time and study will reveal its disadvantages and show the value of what we’ve left behind…”

His conclusion:

“The digitization of information offers important benefits, including instant transmission, easy searchability and broad distribution. But before we shred the last of the paper textbooks, let us pause and remember those old streetcars, and how great it would be if we still had them around.”

Those of us who have lived in New York City,  remember well how the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the 1950s forced people to move out of their homes and destroyed the neighborhoods where they had lived for several generations. It was built in the name of progress so that cars could move from Long Island to New Jersey and vice versa and  to hell with the residents of the Bronx. Hollander’s comparison provides food for thought.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

If you are not familiar with this case, USA Today has a cover story of Fisher v. the University of Texas that will be heard by the United States Supreme Court starting tomorrow.   It is likely that the decision of the Court will minimally change how affirmative action in student admissions is implemented throughout higher education.

The central argument centers on Abigail Fisher, who contends that her application for admission to the University of Texas-Austin in 2008 was rejected because of her skin color: white.  In its deliberations, the Court will surely revisit its Sweatt v. Painter decision of 1950 that centered on Herman Sweatt who

“.. had sued the university and its president, Theophilus Painter, for denying him admission to the University of Texas Law School in 1946 because, as Painter pointed out at the time, “of the fact that he is a negro.”  The Court’s decision ordered the University of Texas to admit Sweatt and set precedents for a number of discrimination cases including Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The Fisher case will be seen at a different time and by justices who lean to the right.  As USA Today describes it:

“The court has taken a turn to the right since its last ruling upholding affirmative action in 2003. Five justices are on record opposing the practice. That could mean defeat for the university — and, possibly, a sweeping declaration that racial preferences are unconstitutional, not only at public universities but also at private schools such as Harvard and Yale because they receive federal funds.”

In sum, this is an important decision that can have huge ramifications not just for higher education but for affirmative action programs in general.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was a travel day.  I am attending the 18th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning in Orlando, Florida.  This year’s theme is:  At A Crossroads: Online Education in a Complex World.  Among the speakers will be:

Sebastian Trun, former research professor at Standford, he founded Udacity, a new online university, which offers university-level courses free of charge.  He is well-known for being a major catalyst for the MOOC movement when he took his Stanford graduate level class online in 2011, and 160,000 students signed up.

José L. Cruz, Vice President for Higher Education Policy and Practice at The Education Trust. José is the former vice president for student affairs of the University of Puerto Rico System (UPR), where he oversaw admissions, financial aid, and student-life programs.  He was one of the primary authors of the study, Subprime Opportunity:  The Unfulfilled Promise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities.

Arfon Smith, Director of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and Technical Lead of the web-based citizen zcience platform Zooniverse.  The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them.

It should be a lot of fun.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last Friday the latest unemployment reports were released and showed that the first time since the Great Recession, unemployment had dipped below 8.0%.   A number of politicos questioned these numbers.  Paul Krugman in his New York Times column, reviewed the procedures used for calculating unemployment and answers the question:   Is the U.S. employment picture getting better? Yes, it is.

Furthermore, he states:

“If anyone had doubts about the madness that has spread through a large part of the American political spectrum, the reaction to Friday’s better-than expected report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should have settled the issue. For the immediate response of many on the right — and we’re not just talking fringe figures — was to cry conspiracy.

Leading the charge of what were quickly dubbed the “B.L.S. truthers” was none other than Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who posted an assertion on Twitter that the books had been cooked to help President Obama’s re-election campaign. His claim was quickly picked up by right-wing pundits and media personalities…

… the methods the bureau uses are public — and anyone familiar with the data understands that they are “noisy,” that especially good (or bad) months will be reported now and then as a simple consequence of statistical randomness. And that in turn means that you shouldn’t put much weight on any one month’s report.”

His conclusion;

“The furor over Friday’s report revealed a political movement that is rooting for American failure, so obsessed with taking down Mr. Obama that good news for the nation’s long-suffering workers drives its members into a blind rage. It also revealed a movement that lives in an intellectual bubble, dealing with uncomfortable reality — whether that reality involves polls or economic data — not just by denying the facts, but by spinning wild conspiracy theories.

It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.”

Go Paul!!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ginia Bellafante has a New York Times article on the need for pre-K for all children but especially those of the poor and minorities.  Here is an excerpt;

“Earlier in the year when I met Steven F. Wilson, founder of a network of charter schools that serve poor and largely black communities in Brooklyn, I asked him what he considered the greatest challenge on the first day of kindergarten each year. He answered, without a second’s hesitation: “Word deficit.” As it happens, in the ’80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty. This resulted in a gap of more than 32 million words by the time the children reached the age of 4.

This issue, though seemingly crucial, has been obscured in the recently intensified debate over the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, the multiple-choice exam used as the sole metric for entrance into some of New York City’s elite public high schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

Thousands of students in the city are in the throes of preparing for the test to be administered the last weekend of this month. Two weeks ago, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, along with other organizations, filed a federal civil rights complaint challenging the single-score admissions process as perilously narrow and arguing that it negatively affected black and Hispanic children, who are grossly underrepresented in these schools, so long considered forceful agents of mobility…

And yet, all of this focus on the test — which examines reading comprehension, math skills, the ability to reason logically — suggests a myopia of its own. Expanding the ranks of poor black and Hispanic children in the top high schools would seem to require infinitely more backtracking. Consider that Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Brooklyn, one of the major pipelines to top public high schools, last year had a student population that was 0.52 percent black…

a review of Paul Tough’s new book, “How Children Succeed,” there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success. Schools have an enormously hard time pushing through the deficiencies with which many children arrive.”

All of this would seem to argue for a system in which we spent ever more of our energies and money on early, preschool education rather than less.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The latest unemployment figures came out yesterday and showed that the unemployment rate in this country dipped below 8.0 percent for the first time since the Great Recession.  Predictably, President Obama and his supporters have pointed to this as indicative of the improvement in the economy and that his policies are working.  Just as predictably, Mitt Romney and his supporters such as Rush Limbaugh have raised questions about the unemployment numbers mainly arguing that many Americans have stopped looking for work.  However, various news media  reported that Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric and corporate poster boy, went so far as to question the veracity of the unemployment figures and tweeted:  “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”

Sorry Mr. Welch but as someone whose company has done everything possible to avoid paying taxes and in fact paid no taxes in 2010, and whose company polluted the Hudson River for decades and denied same should not be making spurious claims about the President’s veracity.  In fact, you should just quietly go away or maybe enter a monastery and do penance for the how you and your company have abused our country and our precious planet.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Coming off the first presidential debate and what most observers have determined was a significant win for his candidacy, Mitt Romney last night admitted on Fox News that his disparaging remarks about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes were “completely wrong”.   The Huffington Post reports:

“The original remarks, secretly recorded during a fundraiser in May and posted online in September by the magazine Mother Jones, sparked intense criticism of Romney and provided fodder to those who portray him as an out-of-touch millionaire oblivious to the lives of average Americans. The remarks became a staple of Obama campaign criticism.

Initially, Romney defended his view, telling reporters at a news conference shortly after the video was posted that his remarks were “not elegantly stated” and that they were spoken “off the cuff.” He didn’t disavow them, however, and later adopted as a response when the remarks were raised that his campaign supports “the 100 percent in America.”

In an interview Thursday night with Fox News, Romney was asked what he would have said had the “47 percent” comments come up during his debate in Denver on Wednesday night with President Barack Obama.

“Well, clearly in a campaign, with hundreds if not thousands of speeches and question-and-answer sessions, now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right,” Romney said. “In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong…”

Critics of Romney’s “47 percent” remarks noted that many of those who don’t pay federal incomes taxes pay other forms of taxes. More than 16 million elderly Americans avoid federal income taxes solely because of tax breaks that apply only to seniors, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reports. Millions of others don’t pay federal income taxes because they don’t earn enough after deductions and exemptions.”

A late admission is better than no admission.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Besides the first presidential debate, the other important news story in New York was that the Yankees did it again and won the American League Eastern Division.  They feasted on Red Sox pitching last night and banged out 14 runs. They will now face the winner of the Baltimore Orioles and Texas Rangers wild card playoff game.

Congratulations to Derek Jeter, Robinson Canoe, Curtis Granderson and all the others who brought the team to this point.  Now on to the playoffs.

Tony