Monthly Archive for December, 2005

Is real school like real work?

Published on December 30, 2005 in Podcast Reviews and Teaching and Learning. 1 Comment

Paul Graham, OSCON ’05: What business can learn from open-source and blogging
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I subscribe to all the IT Conversations podcasts, though there are many which strike me just not worth my time or interest. Every once and a while I come across one which is a gem. This was one of them.

Clever, thoughtful and thought-provoking, both in terms of the story and the underlying economic principles involved, I found myself seeing parallels between Graham’s description of mainstream business today and higher education.

Let’s start with the point that has the most obvious economic parallels: Open source and blogging face greater and more direct competition than proprietary software and professional media.

Because the barriers to entry are so low, virtually anyone can blog. As a result, the quality of the average blogger is pretty low compared to average professional journalist. But due to the power of competition, the quality of the best bloggers is high, higher than that of the best professional journalists. (Economists will note that this example illustrates the commonly confused distinction between marginal and average.)

The blogging universe is comparable to what economists call perfect competition. By contrast, professional media are oligopolies with only limited competition. (Later Graham describes the management and decision-making of professional media as like that of a Soviet state.) The lack of effective competition provides little incentive to improve quality. By contrast, bloggers who don’t improve quality lose readership, so they face a strong incentive to improve.

Graham’s next point is that people work harder when they’re doing something they like. (This sounds like the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.) It’s commonly understood that students work harder in courses for their major than other courses. Students tend to work harder when they pursue a senior thesis than when they take a class. Two former students are working with me on a paper for publication. I see them as equal participants in this project and they are (gradually) buying into that. In any case they working hard for a project with no grade or other immediate reward.

What do we call someone who works for the love of it? Amateur. What do we call someone who only works for the money? Professional.

People working for love often surpass those working for money. This explains the success of the Firefox browser over Windows Explorer.

Graham: “I propose a new name for someone (e.g. a blogger) who publishes on line. A writer!�

Graham then observes that the average office (faculty office or classroom?) is a miserable place to get work done, because of many qualities we associate with professionalism. Businesses require official “work hours� because they can’t measure productivity. Is this similar to some administrators’ confusion between access to faculty and faculty holding “office hours?� What proportion of students would prefer to come to your physical office rather than email or IM you? But I digress. Most employees (students in a lecture hall?) spend time in a no man’s land neither working, nor having fun.

Graham: “The problem with the face time model is that the people who are pretending to work are interrupting the people who are actually working.” This reminds me of students who try to dominate class discussion, even when they have little of substance to say.

Graham: “Meetings are another net loser of productivity. Meetings (class sessions from a student’s perspective?) count as work, but they are so much easier. Meetings (classes) break up people’s day into little fragments where it’s not worth trying to get anything done.”

Real work (e.g. thinking) may not look like it as much as pretend work “activity� does.

If Graham’s argument is true, then the fundamental task for successful teachers is getting students to engage with and see themselves as primarily responsible for their own education. In order to accomplish this, teachers need to persuade students to see education as much bigger than I suspect most students currently do: not simply as a series of arbitrary hurdles towards certification (the degree) and a job, but a lifelong process of making meaning of the world and one’s life. In a very real sense, it’s not what students learn then, but what they make of what they learn. (So much for “covering� the course content.) It’s not that content doesn’t matter, or that process is more important than product, but those I think are secondary issues to getting students to become intentional learners

A Teachable Moment

Published on December 24, 2005 in The Experiment. 0 Comments

Yesterday I described my less than ideal review of the last three meta activities. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that I could turn this into a teachable moment. On Monday I began class by mentioning that a group of students had expressed their concerns to the administrator about how I had asked them to leave prior to our discussion the metas. I told the class I wanted to address those concerns.

I started with a list of economic concepts & principles that would be the basis of the discussion. These were:

• Incentives Matter!
• Positive Externalities
• Free Rider Problem
• Consistent Intertemporal Planning

Next, I pointed out that in this class, I’ve tried to build an environment that will create the right incentives to optimize student learning. I reminded them of our early semester discussion on the meta activities as my best advice for preparing for the exams and learning macroeconomics. I pointed out that when students study for this class they are creating a positive externality, since others can benefit from their learning. (For the non-economists reading this, a positive externality is a situation where one’s actions favorably affect someone else.) I noted that the structure of the course is designed to internalize the positive externalities so as to create a “virtuous circleâ€? where we all learn more than we otherwise would. But for that to happen students have to buy into the program. That requires doing the meta activities.

I then observed that when one doesn’t do the meta activities, but wants to hear the discussion of them, he or she is attempting to be a free-rider (essentially trying to obtain the benefits of something without paying the cost).

I noted a likely challenge: If David does the assignment, how is he harmed by allowing others who haven’t to listen in. The answer should be clear from the above–since they haven’t done the assignment they are unlikely to make a comment that David can learn from.

Now there are also incentives that run the other way. Free riders probably could benefit from listening in. This is the situation economics describe as consistent intertemporal planning. Given that one hasn’t prepared for class, one can still benefit from the learning of others. You will note that I felt uncomfortable excluding the students from the meta discussions. This potential benefit is why. But if I were to allow free riders, while they might benefit in the short term, it would also provide strong incentives for others to free ride in the future. As a consequence, everyone–even those who did the meta assignments–would learn less in the long term. This is inconsistent intertemporal planning. To prevent such losses of learning, I had to stick to the rules of the class, which required excluding those students who hadn’t prepared.

The teachable moment went, though I’m not sure how well. No one raised any objections or even asked questions—it seemed as if 48 hours post exam, the tensions has dissipated. I spent roughly 25 minutes discussing this before going on to the next topic.

One follow-up note: the students that I believe were most likely to have gone to the administrator turned in nearly all the subsequent meta activities. Perhaps this was a learnable moment.

Missteps?

Published on December 22, 2005 in The Experiment. 0 Comments

I think there was somewhat of a miscommunication today, the last day of class before the second midterm exam. [Note that this posting was drafted roughly a month ago.] I reminded students of the format for the exam and the topics it would cover. I asked students for any questions they had about the exam or the material on it. In the first section there were many questions asked, so many in fact that I worried whether or not I would have enough time to review the meta activities. In the second section there were relatively few questions asked. I told students that I would be around tomorrow (a day when I don’t teach and don’t usually hold office hours) pretty much all afternoon to take any questions they come up with.

Next I dismissed those students who hadn’t turned in any of the metas. I told those who had not done meta 6 but had done subsequent metas that they could come back when we discussed those. I expected those students to hang around in the hall, but none did. It was uncomfortable for me to discuss the last three metas with only a handful of students in each class. But I had clearly communicated well before the first exam that students who didn’t turn in the metas wouldn’t be privy to discussing them. Such students wouldn’t be prepared to contribute to the discussion and additionally they would be free-riders, which didn’t seem fair to those students who had prepared. The important thing to me was that all students knew the rules well in advance.

Later in the day, an administrator called me to let me know that “a group of concerned students� had visited to express their displeasure with being excluded from the discussion. They felt that they could have benefited from listening to the discussion of the metas and that missing that discussion could adversely affect their exam grade. The administrator indicated that these were serious students who wanted to attend class. The administrator also said I was on shaky ground to ask students to leave the class just before the exam, given that the meta assignments were optional.

I did feel during the meta discussion that the students attending would likely do better on the exam than those who did not. And I also felt uncomfortable how few those students were. But it also seemed to me that the students who failed to do the metas made a choice and they knew what the consequences would be in terms of missing the subsequent discussion. I think that asking them to leave was similar to asking students who were unprepared for class to leave.

What I should have done differently was better manage the meta deadlines. I essentially allowed students to turn any of the last 3 metas in up to the day we discussed them. It would have been better to discuss at least the first two earlier than the day before the exam, so that students wouldn’t feel so excluded on that last day. Still, I don’t believe students would have gotten much more out of that last class since I had already answered all the questions they had.

Back in the Saddle Again

Published on December 21, 2005 in Blogging as a Teaching and Research Tool. 1 Comment

I went off the wagon–I knew it was possible, but in the glow of my initial adoption of the blogging lifestyle, I didn’t think it would happen to me. During the summer, I had virtually 40+ hours a week to read and write blog postings. Then when school started I made time for blogging, especially since it became a part of my teaching thru the experiment. When time became tight, I was able to blog during interstitial time. (Thanks Gardner for the link to D’arcy’s posting.)

Blogging has made me more aware of my teaching than I can ever remember. It provided a venue for near real-time reflection about what I was doing in class, how it was working, and what if anything I needed to change.

Then came Thanksgiving. I decided to take a few days off to get caught up grading papers, etc. The few days became a week, and the weeks became a month. The longer I stayed away, the harder it became to come back. Interestingly, when I stopped blogging, my experimental course stopping being experimental and went back to it’s traditional format. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Well I turned in my final grades, so I no longer have an excuse not to blog. Fortunately, I wrote scads of notes on possible blog postings. So, I’m climbing back into the saddle again. Look forward to seeing a lot of postings over the next few weeks. At least I hope so.

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