Dear Commons Community,

In response to Donald Trump’s victory in Indiana yesterday, today’s front page in the New York Daily News depicts the GOP in a coffin killed by the “epidemic of trump”

Tony 

Dear Commons Community,

Last night I attended a panel discussion at Hunter College’s Roosevelt House led by David Steiner (formerly of Hunter College and now at Johns Hopkins University) entitled Can Education Technology Narrow the Achievement Gap.  Panelists included Julia F. Fisher, Jamie Stewart, and Kevin Wenzel.  I thought the most significant discussion came when a member of the audience raised the question of why teachers resist technology.  The context of the question related to teachers fearing technology as threatening their jobs. The responses were mixed but I would summarize (and add my own views on the issue) as follows.

First, not all teachers resist technology.  To the contrary there is mounting evidence that teachers and faculty at all levels have integrated technology into their teaching.  Much of the narrative that teachers are resistant is promulgated by technology-vendor hype.

Second, some teachers are hesitant to use technology because the support for it does not exist at their schools.  For education technology to succeed, there has to be appropriate infrastructure (reliable high-speed connectivity, training, support staff).  While many schools provide this infrastructure, many others especially in some of our urban school districts do not.

Third, education technology is not a panacea and it will not solve all of education’s problems.  One of the panelists made the point that students who come to school hungry may need much more people on people attention.  Most teachers understand this well.

Fourth, some of the education software and other technology products are not very good.  Teachers have to be involved in the selection/purchasing decisions and not just have it handed down to them by the administration.

Good discussion!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee yesterday with a major win in Indiana that forced Senator Ted Cruz, to suspend his candidacy. Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton by a narrow margin.  As reported in the New York Times:

“Donald J. Trump became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday with a landslide win in Indiana that drove his principal opponent, Senator Ted Cruz, from the race and cleared the way for the polarizing, populist outsider to take control of the party.

After months of sneering dismissals and expensive but impotent attacks from Republicans fearful of his candidacy, Mr. Trump is now positioned to clinch the required number of delegates for the nomination by the last day of voting on June 7. Facing only a feeble challenge from Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, Mr. Trump is all but certain to roll into the Republican convention in July with the party establishment’s official but uneasy embrace.

In the Democratic contest, Senator Bernie Sanders rebounded from a string of defeats to prevail in Indiana over Hillary Clinton, who largely abandoned the state after polls showed her faring poorly with the predominantly white electorate. But the outcome was not expected to significantly change Mrs. Clinton’s sizable lead in delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination.

Mr. Trump’s victory was an extraordinary moment in American political history: He is now on course to be the first standard-bearer of a party since Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and the commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, who had not served in elected office.

Mr. Trump, a real estate tycoon turned reality television celebrity, was not a registered Republican until April 2012. He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, including his likely general election opponent, Mrs. Clinton. And, at various points in his life, he has held positions antithetical to Republican orthodoxy on almost every major issue in the conservative canon, including abortion, taxes, trade, and gun control.

But none of this stopped him. With his ability to speak to the anxieties of voters, and his shrewd use of celebrity and memorable put-downs, Mr. Trump systematically undercut veteran politicians in a field of candidates that many in the party had hailed as the strongest in at least three decades. He was underestimated by leading Republicans and Democrats time and again, and he succeeded while spending far less money than most of his rivals and employing only a skeletal campaign staff.”

Bring on the general election!  It is going to be quite a battle.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It is well known that there is no love lost between conservative Washington Post columnist, George Will and Donald Trump.  You might recall that in 2012,  Will referred to Trump as a “bloviating ignoramus”.  Now on the eve of what will probably clinch Trump’s nomination to be the GOP presidential nominee, Will has a column blasting Trump again. He recommends the following:

“Were he to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states — condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life. Second, conservatives can try to save from the anti-Trump undertow as many senators, representatives, governors and state legislators as possible…

If Trump is nominated, Republicans working to purge him and his manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power. Six times since 1945 a party has tried, and five times failed, to secure a third consecutive presidential term. The one success — the Republicans’ 1988 election of George H.W. Bush — produced a one-term president. If Clinton gives her party its first 12 consecutive White House years since 1945, Republicans can help Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, or someone else who has honorably recoiled from Trump, confine her to a single term.”

Good advice, Mr. Will!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last Wednesday, Donald Trump gave a foreign policy speech during which he referred several times to his proposed “America First” position:

 “My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”

During the Sunday morning television news shows, several commentators mentioned briefly the history  of another America First theme, used in the United States in the 1930s to maintain an isolationist position in the days leading up to World War II.   Susan Dunn, a professor of Humanities at Willaims College, in a CNN op-ed, summarized the earlier America First as:

“It is extremely unfortunate that in his speech Wednesday outlining his foreign policy goals, Donald Trump chose to brand his foreign policy with the noxious slogan “America First,” the name of the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler.

The America First Committee began at Yale University, where Douglas Stuart Jr., the son of a vice president of Quaker Oats, began organizing his fellow students in spring 1940. He and Gerald Ford, the future American president, and Potter Stewart, the future Supreme Court justice, drafted a petition stating, “We demand that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat.”

The American First Committee became fairly popular and was supported by a number of prominent businessmen and government officials. 

“Seeking to brand itself as a mainstream organization, America First struggled with the problem of the anti-Semitism of some of its leaders and many of its members. It had to remove from its executive committee not only the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford but also Avery Brundage, the former chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee who had prevented two Jewish runners from the American track team in Berlin in 1936 from running in the finals of the 4×100 relay.”

America First came to an end with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the War.  I doubt that Trump’s speech writers deliberately selected the theme as a throwback to the 1930s.  However, as Eleanor Clift of CBS’s McLaughlin Group commented, they would be wise to check their history books more carefully in the future.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michael Patrick Lynch, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, had an essay earlier this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, examining what it means to teach when mobile apps and search engines such as Google provide so much information at our fingertips.  He discusses “Google-knowing” as readily having accurate and warranted information from a reliable source. His gives this example:  “If we are looking for a restaurant, and the directions we get online turn out to be accurate and from a reliable source, then we “know.”

Lynch goes on to describe two main features of Google-knowing.

“First, Google-knowing is cognitively integrated — meaning our use of it is so ingrained in our lives that we don’t even notice how seamless our acquisition of information in this way really is. We rely on it every day, all day long. We routinely allow it to trump other sources. It is our default. In a way, it is like sense perception: Where we used to say seeing is believing, now we think Googling is believing.

Second, Google-knowing is also outsourced. It is not just in our heads. When we Google-know, we are really knowing via testimony: Ultimately we are relying on the say-so, the design work, and the sheer cumulative weight of others’ preferences. We are outsourcing, and as a result, interconnected by the strings of 1s and 0s that make up the code of the digital atmosphere. That is the truest sense in which knowledge is more networked now, and why it is not an exaggeration to say, as the economist Jeremy Rifkin does, that the Internet “dissolves boundaries, making authorship a collaborative, open-ended process over time.” It is also why our online life is more affected by the opinions and biases of others than we often appreciate, as even the most casual web search illustrates (search for: “Climate change … ” for example, and Google will helpfully suggest “is a hoax”).

It is this combination that makes Google-knowing distinctive: at once seamlessly integrated into individual experience but outsourced and guided by the preferences of others. It is both in and out of our heads. That is what makes it so useful, and also so problematic. The Internet is at one and the same time the most glorious fact-checker and the most effective bias-affirmer ever invented. Google-knowing allows us to share in and with the world. And sharing, as Mom always said, is good — except when it isn’t. It depends on what we share (whether it is good information) and whom we share it with (do we stay in our own circle, or do we try to expand our information horizon beyond our personal prejudices?). As any teacher knows, these are the sorts of problems that overreliance on Google-knowing can cause.”

Lynch concludes and advises that

“The epistemic overconfidence that Google-knowing encourages is one reason teaching critical, reflective thinking matters more than ever. In a world where the sharing of information has never been easier, it is not enough to luck into information from good sources; we need to know how to tell which sources are reliable, how to recognize evidence, and how to employ that evidence when challenged.

But while critical thinking is important, it isn’t the end of higher education itself. It is a means to that end, which is a different kind of knowledge — what philosophers have sometimes called understanding.

Understanding incorporates the other ways of knowing, but goes farther. It is what people do when they are not only responsive to the evidence, but also have insight into how that evidence hangs together. Understanding is what we have when we know not only the “what” but the “why.” Understanding is what the scientist is after when trying to find out why Ebola outbreaks happen (not just predict how the disease spreads). It is what you are looking for when trying to grasp why the Battle of Vicksburg was a turning point in the Civil War (as opposed to simply knowing that it was).”

Indeed, teaching has to foster critical thinking, reflection, and understanding.  It has to be about the how and the why and not just the who, what, and when!

Tony