Dear Commons Community,

The New York Post has a short article reporting that nearly 80 percent of New York City public high-school graduates who enrolled in a City University of New York community college last year had to relearn the basics of reading, writing or math — the highest percentage in years.

A stunning 79.3 percent of New York City public-school grads who went to CUNY’s six two-year colleges arrived without having mastered the basics, up from 71.4 percent in 2007.

The ballooning numbers come despite the state having raised the requirements to graduate from high school in each of the past five years.

In 2012, this meant that roughly 10,700 students who earned high- school diplomas and enrolled at two-year CUNY schools weren’t prepared for college-level work — most of them because of math.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I spent the better part of today at Pace University at its Annual Best Practices Conference on Teaching with Technology.  I gave the keynote presentation on Blended Learning Meets MOOCs:  Education’s Digital Future.  The abstract is below and the Powerpoint is available at slideshare.net specifically at: http://www.slideshare.net/apicciano/blended-learning-pace-march-2013-slideshare-version

Good discussion and questions on a topic of increasing importance to our colleagues around academia.

Tony

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Blended Learning Meets MOOCs:  Education’s Digital Future

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to examine the influence of two major developments in online learning namely blended learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs) on the future of education.  Both of these developments evolved from the basic asynchronous online learning model that arrived in the 1990s and continues today.   Blended learning which combines aspects of face-to-face and online  learning into a single course or academic program, gained widespread popularity in the early 2000s.  The term MOOC was coined in 2008 and made a major breakthrough at Stanford University in 2011 when over 100,000 students from around the world enrolled in a computer engineering course led by Sebastian Thrun.   The major thrust of Dr. Picciano’s presentation is that the pedagogical value of blended learning combined with the scalability of MOOCs will be major drivers in education for the foreseeable future.

Other aspects of online learning technology related to individualized learning environments, learning analytics  and instructional ecosystems will also be presented.   Dr. Picciano will draw specifically on his own work in online and blended learning, the research of Allen & Seaman, and recent MOOC developments such as the agreement between San Jose State University in California and Udacity to develop jointly a series of remedial and introductory courses to be implemented in the latter part of 2013.

Dear Commons Community,

Hugo Chavez the fiery president of Venezuela died of cancer on Tuesday.   The news media throughout the world are reviewing his life and legacy.  A New York Times editorial stated:

“Hugo Chávez dominated Venezuelan politics for 14 years with his charismatic personality, populist policies and authoritarian methods before his death this week. His redistributionist policies brought better living conditions to millions of poor Venezuelans. But his legacy is stained by the undermining of democratic institutions and the embrace of malevolent foreign leaders like Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

There is no denying his popularity among Venezuela’s impoverished majority. He won elections by devoting a substantial share of the country’s oil income to building public housing, creating health clinics and making affordable food available to the poorest citizens. But there have also been shocking levels of corruption, shoddy construction, chronic shortages of basic goods, and neglect in the investment needed to maintain and increase oil production. Billions have been squandered through inept and careless management. And the financial ability to sustain Mr. Chávez’s social programs has been seriously eroded.”

There is also an article about Chavez’s involvement with the South Bronx where he donated money and heating oil to the poor.  Jose E. Serrano, Democratic Congressman, commented:

““He related to the Bronx, because in so many ways it was just like the Latin America that he wanted to change… He felt very comfortable with the people, and the people felt comfortable with him. It was not an awkward visit. We can criticize his comments or the world leaders he befriended, but you can’t deny the work he did in the Bronx.”

Mr. Chávez was perhaps remembered most fondly in the Bronx for the gallons of heating oil [he donated]…

Citgo has donated seven million gallons to the Bronx in the eight years since the program started, according to Citizens Energy, the Boston organization that manages the project.

“Here was a guy who the corporate media tried to push us to dislike by saying, ‘This guy is trying to empower himself forever,’ ” said Julio Pabon, a City Council candidate who participated in a Citgo-financed food co-op. “That’s not how we saw him in the Bronx. In the Bronx, he was a guy who came here and talked about helping people so they didn’t get strung out trying to pay their heating bills.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City schools and the current chief executive of Amplify, News Corporation’s fledgling education division, will announce the Amplify Tablet, its own 10-inch Android tablet for K-12 schoolchildren.  Complete with the Amplify curriculum, it will be a turnkey system designed to blend technology with instruction. This is not a bad idea but the problem is that Klein brings a lot of baggage to his new sales position.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, commented:

“Now that he is in the private sector, some of Mr. Klein’s advocacy work presents a conflict, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Last year Mr. Klein wrote, with Condoleezza Rice, a Council on Foreign Relations report that called the state of United States schools a “grave national security threat.” He contributed $25,000 to a coalition that supported specific candidates for the Los Angeles Board of Education elections held on Tuesday. (A News Corporation subsidiary also contributed to candidates.)  “You can’t at the same time go out and present yourself as a civic citizen talking about how public schools right now are horrible and then say, ‘Oh, I have a product that is going to make it better,’ ” Ms. Weingarten said.”

Ms. Weingarten is on target and every educator should reject any product that emanates from Mr. Klein and the News Corporation.  Mr. Klein has evolved in the epitome of a player in the education-industrial complex.   Create and sensationalize in the media a problem with public schooling and then make a product to create profits for your company .  In a word, disgraceful!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has an article on the conservative news media that paints a picture of an industry in disarray.  It interviews a number of prominent editors and producers of conservative news and the result is a grim picture.  For example:

“There’s absolutely no pretense from any of these publications [conservative news] of giving a policy a sort of objective hearing,” Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, “It’s very clear that it comes from the same mindset as talk radio and Fox News. This is something that’s by and for a particular kind of conservative.”…

McCarthy didn’t mince words when describing the current state of conservative media: “It’s a shipwreck.”

McCarthy praised reporting by Robert Costa and the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, but had a less positive take on newer outlets that, to him, appear more focused on sensationalism than legitimate scoops. While McCarthy described The Daily Caller as “somewhat qualitatively better” than Breitbart or the Washington Free Beacon, he said all three appear to be trying to mimic the hyper-activity of BuzzFeed while wanting to be “hyper-partisan.”

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, a regular Fox News contributor, the article comments:

“Four years ago, on stage at CPAC, Tucker Carlson told the conservative faithful that right-leaning journalists need to do reporting that meets the standards of The New York Times. “Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions,” Carlson said. “That’s the truth.”

The truth didn’t go over too well. Some attendees heckled Carlson for suggesting that conservative media, in any way, should follow the Gray Lady’s example.

“I wasn’t talking about thematic accuracy, which the Times lacks,” Carlson said recently at a midtown Manhattan hotel bar, a few hours after finishing guest-hosting duties on “Fox & Friends Weekend.” “I meant, strictly speaking, grammatical accuracy, strictly speaking, factual accuracy.”

Reflecting on his remarks four years earlier, Carlson said that the “essential problem remains.”

The article concludes with a quote from Robert Costa, National Review’s editor of its Washington Office:

“Conservative journalists are recognizing that they have to offer more to readers beyond talking points and columns,” Costa added. “I think that’s the evolution right now — moving toward narrative journalism, investigative journalism. It’s a growing process. There will be some growing pains.”

Growing pains indeed.  Conservatives and the Republican Party in particular have not been served well by lambasters such as Rush Limbaugh, some of the Fox News personalities, and other angry,  hate-filled media types.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a private summit held yesterday in Cambridage, Massachusetts, and sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, at which many of “online education’s heaviest hitters” discussed the future of residential higher education, particularly at elite institutions, in a digital age.

The article comments:

“while online education may have arrived at the upper echelons of higher education, it’s not going to make elite colleges any cheaper to attend.  Massive open online courses and other online tools, however, may change many aspects of top undergraduate campuses. That was the conclusion of a private summit, After years of standing by while the online wave gathered momentum at lower-tier institutions, MIT and Harvard last year gave online education a $60-million bear hug by collaborating to found edX, a nonprofit MOOC provider that could also serve as a laboratory for studying the dynamics of virtual classrooms.  The universities made it clear then that they intended to use their MOOCs to improve, not supplant, traditional courses.

Furthermore:

“Some attempts to use MOOCs to improve the experience of traditional students have not panned out. One panelist said early attempts at his university to foster interaction between learners in the traditional and MOOC versions of a course met with resistance from the tuition-paying students, who wanted a distinct experience for their money.

Those students may eventually come around, but the amount they are paying for a traditional college experience probably will not—at least not at top colleges. None of the institutions represented at the summit is likely to use any revenue or savings from the use of online tools to lower tuition, said one provost. No one at the session disagreed.

It’s more likely that online tools will be used to increase value at the same price, said another provost. That means more seminars, more project-based courses, and more mentorship opportunities, he said.”

Taking another view was William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, who:

“reminded the audience that they occupied “really rarefied air” in deciding how they might want to use online education.

But professors who are serious about reaching the masses online, he said, will have to think about innovation and design with a broader, more diverse audience in mind.

“I would humbly suggest that the kinds of assessment and standards and all the rest that I’m sure are appropriate at MIT and Harvard and so forth,” Mr. Bowen said, “have very little relevance for the large parts of American higher education, particularly in the state systems, that are under genuine siege.”

I agree with Bowen and it appears  that the elites are saying that online education to supplant courses is okay for public and second-tier universities but not for their institutions.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Reuters News Service reported yesterday on a $100 million database built to chart the academic paths of public school students from kindergarten through high school has just gone into effect.

In operation just three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion.

The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18 months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.

Local education officials retain legal control over their students’ information. But federal law allows them to share files in their portion of the database with private companies selling educational products and services.

Reuters commented:

“Entrepreneurs can’t wait.

“This is going to be a huge win for us,” said Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at CompassLearning, which sells education software.

CompassLearning will join two dozen technology companies at this week’s SXSWedu conference in demonstrating how they might mine the database to create custom products – educational games for students, lesson plans for teachers, progress reports for principals.

States and school districts can choose whether they want to input their student records into the system; the service is free for now, though inBloom officials say they will likely start to charge fees in 2015. So far, seven states – Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Massachusetts – have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide.

“We look at personalized learning as the next big leap forward in education,” said Brandon Williams, a director at the Illinois State Board of Education…

That’s hardly reassuring to many parents.

“Once this information gets out there, it’s going to be abused. There’s no doubt in my mind,” said Jason France, a father of two in Louisiana.

While inBloom pledges to guard the data tightly, its own privacy policy states that it “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored … or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted.”

Parents from New York and Louisiana have written state officials in protest. So have the Massachusetts chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and Parent-Teacher Association. If student records leak, are hacked or abused, “What are the remedies for parents?” asked Norman Siegel, a civil liberties attorney in New York who has been working with the protestors. “It’s very troubling.”

There is no reason for a database of this kind other than to provided for-profit education companies with a mailing list for selling their products.  Furthermore, why should all the details of our children’s school records be available on a national database where they can be tracked throughout their lives.

Lastly, how can American parents trust a database develop by Rupert Murdoch and The News Corporation.  Murdoch and his company have been the subject of systemic hacking scandals in the United Kingdom.  Key managers in his company have been indicted for hacking private citizens email including those of children and bribing public officials.  What an affront to the American people and what a danger to our children.

I thank Erik Bennett, a student in our program in Urban Education here at the Graduate Center for drawing my attention to this article.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Many of us who follow and/or engage in quantitative analysis have been following the rise of interest in “big data”.  A major issue is the question of real findings versus spurious findings that result because of the very large size of datasets.  The statistician, Nate Silver, referred to the above as the “signal” and the noise in a recent best seller.  Geoffrey Pullum, a professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, in the blog Lingua Franca in the Chronicle of Higher Education, cautions those engaged in linguistics research about the subtleties of big data.  He specifically calls out recent work conducted by Keith Chen, a professor of economics at Yale University:

“The results (see this blog post for an informal account) were jaw-dropping. He found that dozens of linguistic variables were better predictors of prudence than future marking: whether the language has uvular consonants; verbal agreement of particular types; relative clauses following nouns; double-accusative constructions; preposed interrogative phrases; and so on—a motley collection of factors that no one could plausibly connect to 401(k) contributions or junk-food consumption.

The implication is that Chen may have underestimated the myriads of meaningless correlations that can be found in large volumes of data about human affairs.

Roberts and a colleague recently published a paper on this topic (“Social Structure and Language Structure: the New Nomothetic Approach” by Sean Roberts and James Winters, Psychology of Language and Communication 16.2 [2012], 89-112). They noted several zany positive correlations of language with behavior; for example, people who speak a subject-object-verb language (like Japanese, Turkish, or Hindi) have more children on average than do people who speak a subject-verb-object language (like English, Indonesian, or Swahili).

Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile (2012, Page 417, quoted by James Winters in a blog comment) contains a relevant remark about why such things might be: “In large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to noise (or variance) than to information (or signal). … The more variables, the more correlations that can show significance. … Falsity grows faster than information.”

We should expect correlations that are statistically significant but ultimately meaningless to pop up all over the place once large quantities of data are available—especially with regard to something like language, given the difficulty of controlling adequately for cultural diffusion, geographical proximity, shared origins, and intervariable linkage.

I suspect that Chen’s correlations mean nothing at all: There is no causal link, and we do not need an explanatory story. In the kind of world we live in, you wrestle every day with a swirling mass of inexplicable correlations, and then you die.”

Pullum’s analysis is meaningful as we attempt to define how big data can be used in a number of applications including our own research.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Evgeny Morozov, the author of To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. has a featured article in today’s New York Times, providing commentary on the hubris of Silicon Valley technology companies that purport to be able to solve all of life’s problems by providing an app or some other tech solution.  As an example of Morozov’s position:

“Recent debates about Twitter revolutions or the Internet’s impact on cognition have mostly glossed over the fact that Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity. If they have their way, no individual foibles would go unpunished — ideally, technology would even make such foibles obsolete.

Even boredom seems to be in its last throes: designers in Japan have found a way to make our train trips perpetually fun-filled. With the help of an iPhone, a projector, a GPS module and Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, their contrivance allows riders to add new objects to what they see “outside,” thus enlivening the bleak landscape in their train windows. This could be a big hit in North Korea — and not just on trains.

Or, if you tend to forget things, Silicon Valley wants to give you an app to remember everything. If you occasionally prevaricate in order to meet your clashing obligations as a parent, friend or colleague, another app might spot inconsistencies in your behavior and inform your interlocutors if you are telling the truth. If you experience discomfort because you encounter people and things that you do not like, another app or gadget might spare you the pain by rendering them invisible…

Sunny, smooth, clean: with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway.”

Morozov’s conclusion cautions us about the intrusion into our lives of big technology:

“Silicon Valley, oddly, likes to wear its “solutionism” on its sleeve. Its most successful companies fashion themselves as digital equivalents of Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch, not Wal-Mart or Exxon Mobil. “In the future,” says Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, “people will spend less time trying to get technology to work … If we get this right, I believe we can fix all the world’s problems.”

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg concurs: “There are a lot of really big issues for the world that need to be solved and, as a company, what we are trying to do is to build an infrastructure on top of which to solve some of these problems.” As he noted in Facebook’s original letter to potential investors, “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money.”

Such digital humanitarianism aims to generate good will on the outside and boost morale on the inside. After all, saving the world might be a price worth paying for destroying everyone’s privacy, while a larger-than-life mission might convince young and idealistic employees that they are not wasting their lives tricking gullible consumers to click on ads for pointless products. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are competing for the same talent pool, and by claiming to solve the world’s problems, technology companies can offer what Wall Street cannot: a sense of social mission.

The ideology of solutionism is thus essential to helping Silicon Valley maintain its image. The technology press are only happy to play up any solutionist undertakings. “Africa? There’s an app for that,” reads a real (!) headline on the Web site of the British edition of Wired. Could someone lend that app to the World Bank, please?

Shockingly, saving the world usually involves using Silicon Valley’s own services. As Mr. Zuckerberg put it in 2009, “the world will be better if you share more.” Why doubt his sincerity on this one?”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In the past couple of years,  the issue of monitoring online test takers keeps coming up in various meetings and forums.  The accreditation agencies among others keep raising it  with colleges and universities that offer online courses.  Online  cheating especially is generating concern as more students enroll in MOOCs for college credit, and not just for personal enrichment. Already, five classes from Coursera, a major MOOC provider, offer the possibility of credit, and many more are expected.

One option is for students to travel to regional testing centers at exam time. But reaching such centers is next to impossible for many students, whether working adults who can’t take time off to travel, or others in far-flung places who can’t afford the trip.  The New York Times is also reporting on:

“… eavesdropping technologies worthy of the C.I.A. that can remotely track every mouse click and keystroke of test-taking students. Squads of eagle-eyed humans at computers can monitor faraway students via webcams, screen sharing and high-speed Internet connections, checking out their photo IDs, signatures and even their typing styles to be sure the test-taker is the student who registered for the class…

Employees at ProctorU, a company that offers remote proctoring, watch test-takers by using screen sharing and webcam feeds at offices in Alabama and California. ProctorU recently signed an agreement to proctor new credit-bearing MOOCs from Coursera, including one in genetics and evolution offered at Duke and one in single-variable calculus at the University of Pennsylvania.

MOOC students who want to obtain credit will be charged a remote-proctoring fee of $60 to $90, depending on the class, said Dr. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif.

Other remote proctoring services offer different solutions. At Software Secure in Newton, Mass., test-takers are recorded by camera and then, later, three proctors independently watch a faster-speed video of each student.

Compared with services where proctors are monitoring students in real time, this combination of recording first and viewing later “gives greater latitude for the institution to adjust the timing of exams to whenever they want,” said Allison Sands, Software Secure’s director of marketing. The cost is now $15 per exam.”

In sum, online classes are not new anymore but earlier courses typically didn’t have to handle exam proctoring on the scale required for the multitude of students enrolled in MOOCs.  New technology and service providers are evolving to address the problem.

Tony