Dear Commons Community,

David M. Perry, an associate professor of history at Dominican University, has an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education advocating blogging as an important academic activity.  He also provides three useful rules for blogging.

“I’ve learned a lot about blogging and how it fits into an academic career…Here’s three lessons for anyone considering building their own space for online writing.

1. Pick the right platform. I failed to do that twice. ..I began to covet the fancy sites of other writers. So I hired a designer and commissioned a site on Wix, a cloud-based platform that seemed beautiful to me. Although my designer was fabulous, the experience was a disaster. It turns out that supporting a high-volume writer like me is a specific problem for Wix. Each blog post functions as its own page, so sites like Blogger and WordPress, (the one I would probably recommend), are designed to help writers easily manage that volume.
2. Write whatever you want. Don’t let ideas about propriety or academic silos limit you. My blog has evolved past its original, fairly narrow conception.
3. Write for the sake of writing. This one is the most important. Because I have been an advocate of academics writing in a broad array of mainstream publications, I routinely field questions from other academics about whether they should start a blog as a pathway to reaching a bigger audience.”

As someone who has been blogging for six years, I second everything David Perry is saying.  First,  the CUNY Academic Commons (WordPress platform) is a pleasure on which to work.  Also, the support that Matt Gold and his staff provide is outstanding.  Second, I originally was going to post only about education technology but found it too confining and now blog on anything that I think might be of interest to others.  Third, I have found that blogging daily has significantly made me a better and more efficient writer.  Writing helps us think more deeply about ideas and issues.  The blog also provides a repository on which I can search for topics that at one time or another stirred my interest. 

Academic blogging is alive and well and worth it!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The emergence of artificial intelligence software is growing significantly and Google wants to be at the forefront of this movement.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Google announced it would turn its machine-learning software, called TensorFlow, into open-source code, so anyone can use it.

“We hope this will let the machine-learning community — everyone from academic researchers, to engineers, to hobbyists — exchange ideas much more quickly, through working code rather than just research papers,” Google announced on its website.

Until now, researchers have had access to similar open-source software: Torch, built by researchers at New York University, as well as Caffe and Theano, are also open to everyone. TensorFlow is meant to combine the best of the three, Jeff Dean, a top engineer at Google, told Wired.

“I think it will be extremely widely adopted by researchers and students in universities and in companies,” Christopher Manning, a computer scientist at Stanford University, told The New York Times. After trying TensorFlow, he described the software as better and faster than the alternatives.

But while TensorFlow is now open-source, Google will continue to manage the project, and some researchers question what that level of control might mean.

“This platform will live or die based on how they handle who controls updates to the code,” Gary Bradski, a computer scientist and president of OpenCV, told the Times. “Can the community have a say, or will Google control the official version by fiat?”

The announcement is “part of a platform ploy,” Oren Etzioni, executive director of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, told the Times. Google, he said, is trying to attract developers and new hires to its technology.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In 2010, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg made a $100 million donation to the Newark public schools.  In partnership with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the goal was to make Newark a national model for turning around urban schools.  Five years later, it is generally acknowledged that while there have been some improvements, Newark cannot in anyway be considered a model.  The Zuckerberg, Christie, Booker public school saga is well documented in a book, The Prize by Dale Russakoff that was published earlier this year.

In a recent Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg says he’s using lessons learned in Newark about the need for community involvement in his next effort in California.

“It’s very important to understand the desires of a community, to listen and learn from families, teachers, elected officials and other experts,” he wrote. “We now better understand why it can take years to build the support to durably cement the changes needed to provide every student with a high quality education.”

Last year, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced a $120 million donation to improve education in the San Francisco Bay area, particularly for low-income students.

He said the goal going forward is to work with people across the spectrum, including district schools, charter schools, private schools, teachers, parents, unions and other philanthropists.

“Change in education takes time and requires a long term focus. We are committed to working to improve public education for many years to come, and to improving our approach as we go,” he wrote.

We wish him and his wife success in San Francisco.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The president of the University of Missouri system and the head of its flagship campus resigned yesterday over what faculty and students saw as indifference to racial tensions at the school. As reported in the Associated Press:

“President Tim Wolfe, a former business executive with no previous experience in academic leadership, took “full responsibility for the frustration” students expressed and said their complaints were “clear” and “real.”

For months, black student groups had complained that Wolfe was unresponsive to racial slurs and other slights on the overwhelmingly white main campus of the state’s four-college system. The complaints came to a head two days ago, when at least 30 black football players announced that they would not play until the president left. A graduate student went on a weeklong hunger strike.

Wolfe’s announcement came at the start of what had been expected to be a lengthy closed-door meeting of the school’s governing board.

“This is not the way change comes about,” he said, alluding to recent protests, in a halting statement that was simultaneously apologetic, clumsy and defiant. “We stopped listening to each other.”

He urged students, faculty and staff to use the resignation “to heal and start talking again to make the changes necessary.”

Hours later, the top administrator of the Columbia campus, Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, announced that he would step down at the end of the year.

The school’s undergraduate population is 79 percent white and 8 percent black. The state is about 83 percent white and nearly 12 percent black. The Columbia campus is about 120 miles west of Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was killed last year in a fatal shooting that helped spawn the national “Black Lives Matter” movement rebuking police treatment of minorities.”

The New York Times coverage of the resignations also commented on other issues that arose in the past year at the University.

Months of student and faculty protests over racial tensions and other issues that all but paralyzed the University of Missouri campus culminated Monday in an extraordinary coup for the demonstrators, as the president of the university system resigned and the chancellor of the flagship campus here said he would step down to a less prominent role at the end of the year.

The threat of a boycott by the Missouri football team dealt the highest-profile blow to the president, Timothy M. Wolfe, and the chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, but anger at the administration had been growing since August, when the university said it would stop paying for health insurance for graduate teaching and research assistants.

It reversed course, but not before the graduate assistants held demonstrations, threatened a walkout, took the first steps toward forming a union and joined forces with students demonstrating against racism.

Then the university came under fire from Republicans for ties its medical schools and medical center had to Planned Parenthood. The university severed those ties, drawing criticism from Democrats that it had caved in to political pressure.

But it was charges of persistent racism, particularly complaints of racial epithets hurled at the student body president, who is black, that sparked the strongest reactions, along with complaints that the administration did not take the problem seriously enough.

Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, said, “Tim Wolfe’s resignation was a necessary step toward healing and reconciliation on the University of Missouri campus, and I appreciate his decision to do so.”

This indeed was a necessary step and indicative of university leadership that failed to act.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There has been a relentless media barrage during the past week questioning  Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s claims in his biography, Gifted Hands.  Interviewed on Sunday morning’s Meet the Press, the Democratic candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, criticized the media for scrutinizing Carson’s personal story, stating that they should instead focus on his policy positions.

“I think it might be a better idea, I know it’s a crazy idea, but maybe we focus on the issues impacting the American people and what candidates are saying, rather than just spending so much time exploring their lives of 30 or 40 years ago.  And I think the reason that so many people are turned off to the political process has a lot to do with the fact that we’re not talking about the real issues impacting real people.

… Sanders told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that while he found the controversy “interesting,” voters ultimately do not care. 

“Look, I listened to the interviews with Dr. Carson. And it’s interesting,” he said. “But you know what, Chuck? The American people want to know why the middle class of this country is disappearing, why we have 47 million people living in poverty, why we have massive income and wealth inequality.”

Sanders is on the top of his game!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

According to several  reports released last week, students who take classes over the Internet through online charter schools make dramatically less academic progress than their counterparts in traditional schools.  As reported by Education Week (subscription required):

“Statistically speaking, the gains that online charter students saw in math were so limited, it was “literally as though the student did not go to school for the entire year,” said Margaret Raymond, the director of the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes at Stanford University.

Prepared by CREDO, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, and Mathematica Policy Research, the three-part National Study of Online Charter Schools represents the first comprehensive national look at the roughly 200 schools in the publicly funded, independently managed cybercharter sector. Such schools enroll about 200,000 full-time students across 26 states.

More than two-thirds of online charters were found to have weaker overall academic growth than similar brick-and-mortar schools. As a group, the schools were characterized by high student-to-teacher ratios, low student engagement, and high student mobility. They also offered students limited opportunities for live contact with teachers. From funding to enrollment to oversight, states are failing to keep up with the unique policy challenges that online charters present, the researchers contended.

The findings “leave little doubt attending an online charter school leads to lessened academic growth for the average student,” wrote the researchers from CREDO.

In response, the country’s largest for-profit operator of online charter schools criticized the studies as based on outdated data and a questionable methodology.

National groups representing charters and online-learning proponents, meanwhile, described the results as alarming and troubling.

“There is a place for virtual schooling in our nation, but there is no place for results like these,” said Greg Richmond, the president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, in a statement.”

I agree fully with Mr. Richmond.  There is a place for online learning in K-12 education but these schools need to get their act together.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press is reporting that Toyota will invest $1 billion in a research company it’s setting up in Silicon Valley to develop artificial intelligence and robotics.   While devoted mostly to its determination to lead in futuristic cars, Toyota also hopes to apply AI  technology to other areas of daily life.  As reported by the AP:

“Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda said Friday the company will start operating from January 2016, with 200 employees at a Silicon Valley facility near Stanford University. A second facility will be established near Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The investment, which will be spread over five years, comes on top of $50 million Toyota announced earlier for artificial intelligence research at Stanford and MIT.

Toyota said its interest extended beyond autonomous driving, which is starting to be offered by some automakers and being promised by almost all of them. The technology was pointing to a new industry for everyday use, delivering a safer lifestyle overall, it said.

Toyota has already shown an R2-D2-like robot designed to help the elderly, the sick and people in wheelchairs by picking up and carrying objects. The automaker has also shown human-shaped entertainment robots that can converse and play musical instruments. As the world’s top auto manufacturer, Toyota already uses sophisticated robotic arms and computers in auto production, including doing paint jobs and screwing in parts.

To drive home the message that the automaker’s vision was more than about just cars, Toyoda appeared at a Tokyo hotel with high profile robotics expert Gill Pratt, who will head the new organization called Toyota Research Institute Inc.

Pratt was formerly a program manager at the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He joined Toyota as a technical adviser when it set up its AI research effort at Stanford and MIT.

Pratt said the company’s goals are to support older people in their homes with robotics, make cars free of accidents and use AI to allow all people to drive regardless of ability.

He gave three examples from his personal life that motivate him to develop robotics and related technology: when he was a child, seeing a boy on a bicycle killed by a car; telling his 83-year-old father he could no longer drive; and sending his father to a nursing home when he was 84.

Pratt, who grew up on Japanese robot animation and dreamed of one day building such robots, said he chose Toyota over other jobs because it was “so focused on social good.”

He said coming up with a car as smart as a human being will take a long time. But that also meant the competition had just begun and no one was ahead significantly.

The new company will be hiring researchers and engineers, according to Toyota. Wooing talent is crucial because not only are automakers such as General Motors, Tesla and Nissan competing on autonomous driving but outsiders are as well, including Google, Apple and Uber.”

This is a big time investment in AI technology development.  It won’t be the last.  Other companies and venture capitalists will follow.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It appears that the U.S. Department of Education will be taking more steps to review higher education accreditation practices particularly for those organizations accrediting for-profit colleges.  As described in a ProPublica article:

“Accreditors are supposed to make sure that schools provide students with a quality education. They are not government agencies, but wield enormous power: Schools need accreditors’ stamps of approval to maintain access to the government’s annual $170 billion in federal student aid.

Losing accreditation would be fatal for most for-profit schools since they rely on federal aid for much of their income. But accreditors rarely crack down, even when students are struggling. One of the areas where students at for-profits face extra burden is debt: While only one-tenth of college students attend for-profit schools, they account for nearly half of all students’ defaults.

What role are accreditors playing? Using recently released federal data, ProPublica analyzed how students are faring under the various accreditors that oversee many for-profit schools.

One accreditor stands out: The Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, also known as ACICS. It oversees hundreds of mainly for-profit schools where students struggle at remarkably high rates.

Just 35 percent of students at a typical ACICS-accredited four-year college graduate, the lowest rate for any accreditor. Nationally, the graduation rate at four-year schools is around 59 percent. (Read our methodology for details on how we crunched the numbers for our analysis.)

“If you don’t graduate anyone, you can’t make claims that your program is any good,” said Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress.

Students at ACICS-accredited four-year schools also take on more debt than students at other schools with similar accreditors, typically about $26,000 in federal loans.

And then students struggle more to pay off the loans: At a typical ACICS-accredited school, about 60 percent of students were unable to repay even $1 of their loan principal within three years of graduation. That’s 23 percentage points higher than the national average. (Miller also did a study this summer that found that more than one in five students at ACICS-accredited schools default on their loans.)

Anthony Bieda, vice president for external affairs at ACICS, told ProPublica that the organization does hold schools accountable. While ACICS does not track student debt load and loan repayment, it does look at other indicators, such as job placement figures and default rates.

Bieda also says there’s a reason ACICS-accredited schools may look worse: they enroll poorer students. At a typical ACICS-accredited school, 75 percent of students receive federal grants designed for low-income families, a much higher proportion than similar accreditors.

“The primary predictor of whether or not a student will default on their student loan is their economic circumstances, not the quality of the institution that they enroll in,” he said.

Targeting poor students is exactly what regulators are concerned with. Take Corinthian Colleges, for example, which was the second-largest for-profit college chain in the country until it went bankrupt earlier this year. Before it closed down, the for-profit empire faced federal allegations of using deceptive advertising to lure poor students into predatory loans. Last week, a federal district court in Illinois found Corinthian liable for more than $530 million, the entire amount of the predatory loans.

Miller, who previously served as a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education, said that a student’s socioeconomic background is not the only factor that determines whether loans are repaid. “No one would pretend that there aren’t demographic factors that influence results, but we can’t pretend the schools don’t have any effect too,” he said.

The Obama administration appears to agree. The Department of Education announced that it’s about to launch a push for accrediting agencies to focus more closely on student outcomes.”

These oversight measures are surely overdue.  However, while the problem seems to be most pronounced in the for-profit college sector, all accrediting organizations will come under increased scrutiny.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A recall election in Colorado on Tuesday resulted in the dissolution of the conservative majority on the Jefferson County, Colorado school board.  As reported by The Huffington Post:

“The fight in the district was significantly more controversial than a typical school board election. At issue were three members of the board elected in 2013 — Ken Witt, John Newkirk and Julie Williams — who ran on a reform platform of expanding school choice and increasing transparency.

All of the members were recalled by large margins. Sixty-three percent of voters opted to recall Newkirk, and just over 64 percent of voters chose to recall Williams and Witt. 

The members’ move in 2014 to review a new Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, criticized by Republicans, drew national attention. Williams proposed that the board consider whether teachers should present materials that emphasize “positive aspects of the United States” and respect for authority, free enterprise and individual rights, rather than encouraging or condoning “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” Hundreds of students walked out of their classrooms and teachers called in sick, shutting down multiple schools in the district. 

Though the board didn’t ultimately change the curriculum, acrimony over the majority’s actions continued. Teachers and parents of students in the district have complained about the board’s votes to tie teacher pay to performance and to direct more funds to charter schools. 

One of the recall’s organizers told The Huffington Post she was thrilled with the result of the election. 

“I believe this sends a strong message to corporate interests (e.g., Americans for Prosperity and the Koch Brothers) and their reformers that our public schools are not for sale!” said Tina Gurdikian, who has a child in the Jefferson County school system. “Looking at the election outcomes … the message is clear — we love and value our public schools; we do not like to have reforms forced down our throats; and we value and expect collaboration, transparency, respect and fiscal accountability from our elected officials.”

The board’s conservative majority was criticized for holding secret meetings and hiring its own lawyer. The district’s longtime superintendent resigned, saying she felt disrespected by the new members.”

Congratulations to the parents and teachers who organized this effort.

Tony