update on the decline of print media

Over the last few months, I've largely kept my "print-media-isn't-viable" soapbox stowed out of public view. A new post by Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy got me lugging it back out.

Kennedy, a long-time subscriber to the Boston Globe (which he calls--and I agree with him--"the most important news organization in Greater Boston"), has decided to cancel his Monday through Saturday subscription. He writes:

Why did we do this? It’s been inevitable since early this summer, when the Globe made a couple of important changes in its distribution model. First, it unveiled GlobeReader, an electronic paper that’s a faster and easier read than the Web edition. Second, it raised the price of its print edition.

Seven-day home delivery of the Globe now costs $46.56 a month in Media Nation. With advertising in what may be a permanent decline, readers are going to have to pick up more of the cost, so I certainly don’t fault the Globe for charging more. But our family is not immune from economic pressures. For us, it makes sense to go with paper on Sundays and use GlobeReader the rest of the week.

Kennedy, like all of us who consider a thriving, free press to be the backbone of a thriving, free society, explains that he has struggled with his family's changing relationship to his local newspaper. He justifies the change with his subscription to the Globe Reader (it costs $14.95 a month it comes with subscription to the Globe--thanks for the correction, Dan) and explains that he would not have canceled his subscription if the only alternative were reading the news online, because

[l]ike virtually all newspapers, the Globe is struggling with its decision some dozen year ago to offer its content online for free. At one time, newspaper executives assumed that advertising revenues would eventually justify that decision. It didn’t happen — it may never happen — and the way out of that morass is unclear. We were not about to contribute to that pain.

Though Kennedy makes no judgment here about the net value of making news content available for free online, there are those who do, who have, and who will. I am one of those people. I believe that the decision to make news content available for free online is perhaps the single most crucial factor leading to the social revolution.

Imagine an alternate scenario: back in the 1990s, at the very beginning of the internet age, news executives decide to charge--and even a micropayment will do, for this scenario--for access to online content. Communication, creation, and circulation of individual ideas and creative works are still cheap or free, as they are today, but accessing the news will cost you. In this scenario, the power of the hyperlink gets diluted to practically zero, at least for those who choose not to pay for their news. Blogging loses its widespread appeal. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, if they even come into being, get relegated to the realm of the banal: tweets about what I had for breakfast, status updates spreading my results on a series of meaningless quizzes, achievements in Mafia Wars and Scrabulous.

It's tough to imagine this alternate universe because putting a price, even a tiny one, on access to content seems nearly unthinkable to us now. Indeed, perhaps the most significant fallout from media executives' decision not to charge for content is the general public stance exemplified by Jon Stewart's comment to Walter Isaacson, a journalist and policy guy who believes newspapers should start charging for access to online content: "Sir," Stewart said in disbelief, "the internet is free."

Since the advent of mass literacy, has there ever been a time when so many people believed so strongly that information should be free and accessible to all?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Walter Isaacson
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

putting some trust in "those little bastards"

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, H. William Rice has posted a thoughtful opinion piece titled "Don't Shrug Off Student Evaluations." (The piece is locked to nonsubscribers; because I'm all about open access, I will helpfully link you to a free version here.)

Rice, a long time higher education faculty member, describes a pair of colleagues who took distinctly negative approaches to the notion of students evaluating their professors: One, whom Rice describes as "an elderly faculty member," explained to Rice that he saw student evaluations as

“an absolute violation of academic freedom,” while jabbing a trembling, crooked finger in my face with a swordlike flourish. “No one has the right to come in my classroom,” he said. (I assume he allowed the students in.)

The other colleague, whom Rice calls "Professor X," confided in Rice that he read his students' evaluations before submitting final grades. Professor X had received nearly universally negative reviews and wanted Rice's advice on whether he should lower students' grades "to show 'those little bastards'."

Rice, of course, takes the more contemplative path by arguing that student evaluations have an important place in academia because they offer educators insight into how well they're doing their job, where they can improve, and in what areas they continue to succeed. He writes:

Sure, student evaluations have their limits. They should never be the only means of evaluating faculty members, and they should never be used to snoop on professors who deal with controversial subjects in their classes. Yes, administrators have been guilty of misusing them. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and faculty members who actually want to become better teachers—and who believe that good teaching skills are not bequeathed to them in perpetuity with the awarding of a Ph.D.—should read them over and over again.

Professor X’s great objection to student evaluations was one I frequently hear: “The student does not know the subject, so how can he or she judge my teaching?”

True, students’ perspectives are limited. But so are professors’. A professor cannot know what it is like to be 20 in an age of text messages, Facebook, and YouTube, and to be forced to endure lectures from someone who does not inhabit their socially networked world. I’m not suggesting that faculty members necessarily use that technology in their teaching, only that the point of view of those who do use it might be valuable.

As a former college instructor, I can attest to the deep value of student evaluations, though the danger of misinterpretation is always present. Often, we think about student ratings as a kind of popularity contest for educators--in some ways, I think, rightly so. After all, it's fairly easy to get high marks from lots of students: Just be friendly, funny, and a soft grader. It helps to make interesting use of new media resources.

Because so much of the student evaluation process hinges on faculty popularity, it's easy to overlook the much more important questions that only students can answer: Did the professor change the way you thought about the subject? Did you leave the class a better thinker than when you went in? Can you apply what you've learned to real-world contexts?

Here I draw from Ken Bain's excellent text, "what the best college teachers do." He writes about an experiment conducted by Arizona State University physicists in the early 1980s. They examined whether introductory physics courses changed the way students thought about motion. Most students came in with an intuitive set of theories about how the world works; most of these theories aligned with what the physicists called "a cross between Aristotelian and 24th-century impetus ideas." The goal of the course was to introduce students to Newtonian physics, which was in many ways directly oppositional to the Aristotelian approach. Given that most undergraduates went in "thinking like Aristotle," did they leave "thinking like Newton"?

Bain writes:

Did the course change student thinking? Not really. After the term was over, the two physicists...discovered that the course had made comparatively small changes in the way students thought. Even many "A" students continued to think like Aristotle rather than like Newton. They had memorized formulae and learned to plug the right numbers into them, but they did not change their basic conceptions. Instead, they interpreted everything they heard about motion in terms of the intuitive framework they had brought with them to the course.

....Researchers have found that...some people make A's by learning to "plug and chug" memorizing formulae, sticking numbers in the right equation or the right vocabulary into a paper, but understanding little. When the class is over, they quickly forget much fo what they have "learned."...Even when learners have acquired some conceptual understanding of a discipline or field, they are often unable to link that knowledge to real-world situations or problem-solving contexts.

Of course, there's no way to use end-of-semester student evaluations to gauge what kind of long-term impact on learning an instructor has had. Aside from the too-short time scale, there are the real pressures on students to perform, achieve, succeed--and, strange as it may seem, the only way they can definitively prove they've done this is through their grade point average. This means that evaluations are nearly inextricably linked to students' perceived achievement in the class; linked, that is, to what they think will be their final grade.

This isn't to say that student evaluations don't have a place in higher education: I firmly believe that they do, if for no other reason than to boot the universally bad instructors who either don't care about or aren't capable of teaching effectively and to toss the best instructors a little closer to the tenure finish line.


Most of us fall somewhere in the middle of the good-teacher continuum, which means that if we want to find out whether we've had an impact on students' thinking, we may need to supplement student evaluations with some evaluations of our own.

Here's one thing we might try: A set of surveys, administered at the beginning of the class and again at the end, that zero in on the key conceptual frameworks of the course's domain. While in introductory physics the key issue may be "how students think about motion," in geometry it may be "how students think about shapes." In English, my field of choice, it may be something like "how students think about effective written communications." You start there, think about the key issues that shape your conceptual framework, and design a set of questions that can gauge students' intuitive answers (at the beginning of the course) and informed answers (at the end of the course). The nice added benefit of doing this sort of thing is that it forces you to think about and articulate your foundational approach to the subject matter--useful for any educator, no matter how expert.

Indeed, the goal for all educators, no matter what discipline, no matter what the age of their students, should be to help all learners move, even a little, toward how real practitioners in the subject area engage with the world.

And let's try to put a little more faith in our students: "Those little bastards" may care more about grades than we'd like, but they also tend to recognize real, effective teaching when they encounter it. They may not, as one of Rice's straw men explained, be expert enough about the subject area to teach the class, but they're certainly experts in learning--they've been doing it their whole lives. Let's trust that, given the right questions, they'll offer up the answers we need in order to improve our teaching practices.

a new political model: "just in time" civic engagement

Over at Empathetics: Integral Life, my pal Rafi Santo just published a post about his experience voting in his city's Democratic primary election.

He explains that despite his commitment to civic participation--which, for him, includes casting a ballot in primary elections--he has struggled to keep up with electoral news. He writes:

While I’m motivated to vote in these elections, realize that my vote will make a real difference in deciding who gets into office, and understand that these politicians have probably the most impact on the issues immediate to my city ranging from education and real estate development to local environmental laws and criminal justice, I just can’t seem to get motivated enough to actually follow these races.

His solution: Whip out his laptop, plug in to his polling station's free Wi-Fi, and search for details on the candidates before casting a vote. In doing this, Rafi writes, he engaged in "just in time" learning, which he contrasts against

“just in case” learning, where the learner learns something on the chance that they might need to know it at a later point, but the situation in which they might apply it is certainly not present, and may never be. For a great example of just in case learning, think back to a good bit of your high school experience. I swear I have never used trigonometry.

Given the historically low voter turnout in primary elections, Rafi argues that it's not that people are too busy or don't care but that "they don’t want to waste their time with something they know nothing about." He suggests we leverage our capacity for supporting "just in time" learning by offering research terminals at polling stations so people can gather the information they need, when they need it.

I find this to be one of the most sound and cost- and time-effective ideas I've heard for fostering greater participation in the electoral process. Though clearly significant issues of equity and fraud could emerge (would certain sites be blocked? could hackers crash the system? what if some polling places lost their internet connections? would activists use the terminals to spread electoral results or other [mis]information?), the payout is potentially enormous. After all, more democracy is generally better than less democracy, and dealing with the fallout is therefore worth the investment.

Not only is Rafi's idea an important one to consider, but it also pushes us to rethink our definition of "civic engagement." Voting, after all, is not exactly the tippy-top of the civic engagement mountain--though we do like to believe it is, since it's fairly easy to measure and stands in nicely for everything that civic engagement means to our culture. But it's not the casting of the ballot that matters, but the symbolic drive behind the vote. Culturally, we carry in our head this icon of the Engaged Voting Citizen who stands up when the times call for it; who stands up in earnest and urgency to make herself heard on the matters at hand.

The days of the Engaged Voting Citizen, if those days truly ever existed, are long past. When it comes to voting for POTUS, it's almost a no-brainer for most of us, and the results are generally decided long before Election Day by pro-am journalists and media outlets whose reportage dictate not only what choices we will have, but upon what criteria we will make our decision. They fill our space up with information, just in case, and we try our best to remember as much as possible in case the time comes to act upon it.

Compare that to what we might call "just in time" civic engagement: It often emerges organically, from inside of an online or offline community that forms or unites around a perceived injustice, problem, or challenge. One example: The thousands of people who united to save the TV show Jericho for one more season were, for all intents and purposes, as engaged as the most energized campaign organizers. They didn't need to be heckled or cajoled into participating; they understood the need and, just in time, gathered and circulated the necessary information on how to react effectively and efficiently.

In Here Comes Everybody, technology guru Clay Shirky considers why so much collective action focuses largely on "relatively short-term and negative goals." He points to political protests in the Philippines, flash mobs, and protests against corporate policies as examplars of this, then writes:

Despite the number of stories about collective action, though, they have one thing in common: they all rely on "stop energy," on an attempt to get some other organization or group to capitulate to the demands of the collected group.... Everywhere we look, social media makes creativity not just possible but desirable enough that these examples and millions of others are all out there, with more added every day. Everywhere, that is, except collective action.

Perhaps collective action is more focused on protesting than creating because collective action is simply harder than sharing or collaborating.

Perhaps Shirky's right; but then again, I'd be hard pressed to think of a powerful example of civic engagement, either online or offline, that didn't emerge out of a need for "stop energy." I suppose voting is our best example of "go energy" engagement, coming around as it does like clockwork; but when do we get the largest voter turnout? When it's time to kick someone out, of course.

It's time to move past the lamentation that young people don't vote; they're used to models of civic engagement that feel more powerful, more effective, and more directly relevant to their everyday interests and desires. If we want (and I agree that we do) to get young people engaged in local and national politics, then we need to find ways to leverage this new ad hoc, "just in time" model for a range of civic needs, both large and small. Bringing in research stations and offering (hack-proof) online voting are two interesting strategies for doing this; and as we continue to rethink what we mean by the terms "civic engagement," "community" and "participation" we need to continue to develop and shift our long-established notions of what it means to be a good citizen in an increasingly participatory culture.

rerun: educational philosophies, in up to 20 words

Because this blog has recently attracted a new learning-leaning public, I thought it might be time to retread an older post I tossed up about 6 months ago about educational philosophies.

Here's mine:

Schools are not benign. Kids learn to be what they're labeled relative to other students. Then they bear that out.

What's yours? The only rule is this: You only get up to 20 words.

...and yet I don't use Facebook much lately

This blog has been an unofficial Don't Say Facebook is Over zone. I'm not quite willing to let go of that stance, especially since statistics suggest that Facebook activity continues to increase worldwide.

But you guys, I really don't use Facebook that much anymore. And I'm not alone: Lots of my friends have drifted away too. Most of us prefer Twitter now, which means that one of the more interesting features of Facebook--the friend newsfeed--is clogged up by lame quiz results and remediated tweets that I've already read. All of the interesting stuff is going on over at twitter now, and Facebook is starting to feel like the social networking version of a print newspaper: I already got all the important news elsewhere, and the rest of what's there feels like filler.

More significantly, gaining a new Twitter follower feels like a bigger win to me than adding a Facebook friend does.

Now, I don't want to open myself up to accusations of Virginia Heffernanism. I'm not going to argue that my experience is symptomatic of any larger social networking trends. As far as I can tell, Facebook is far from an "online ghost town." In fact--and this seems important--as Facebook increasingly becomes the domain of an older and generally less social networking-savvy demographic, it's shifting to accommodate its new users' needs and interests. Though it has certainly tried, Facebook just can't keep up with the dynamic, socially complex Twitterspace; and the more it embraces this fact, the more it attempts to fortify the features it can uniquely offer, the more likely its continued success becomes.

RIP Patrick Swayze

They just keep blinking out, don't they?



"Pain don't hurt," he said, while reading Jim Harrison. Pain don't hurt? What kind of a line is that? And that blond lady with the glasses--jesus.

Rest in peace, Swayze. Fifty-seven years got you installed as an icon. A brighter body, over a brighter firmament, none of us could hope for.

some stuff I like

Lest I open myself up to accusations of being that kind of graduate student (or, for that matter, this kind of graduate student), I want to point out that I don't hate everything, despite evidence to the contrary. Below, in no particular order, is a list of five awesome things that I've encountered so far as a graduate student at Indiana University.

1. The opening page of Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. Open up to the preface of this excellent new text by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, and you read this epigram:

I have not even intended to judge whether this social revolution, which I believe to be irresistible, is advantageous of disastrous for mankind. I have acknowledged that this revolution is already accomplished or about to be so and I have chosen among those people who have experienced its effects the one in which its development has been the most comprehensive and peaceful, in order that I may make out clearly its natural consequences and the means of turning it to men's advantage. I confess that in America I have seen more than America itself; I have looked there for an image of the essence of democracy, its limitations, its personality, its prejudices its passions; my wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it. (de Tocqueville, pp. 23-24)

The alignment with de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of democracy in early America, is significant. The drive of the Collins & Halverson text, as with many new texts focusing on the social revolution, is to identify and describe, without making a judgment of value gained or lost, a fundamental shift in the large-scale and day-to-day operations of a culture. The authors hope to observe and describe, not to judge, and if Collins and Halverson tend at times to follow de Tocqueville's lead in revealing their underlying attitudes toward this revolution (about which more later), the effort to approach the ongoing cultural shift toward participatory practices and cultures is valuable and necessary.

2. Early September in south central Indiana. Here in Bloomington, it's been 72 degrees and sunny for about a million days in a row, and at night the church clock's quarter-hour chimes slide through my open window. If I could only get my neighbors to close up their beer-pong table on Saturday nights, I'd be able to listen to the chimes and the crickets all weekend long.

3. Seymour Papert. I liked him already for explaining back in 1984 that he believed the computer would blow up the school, but now I'm grooving on him for his foundational work on constructionism. In attempting to define this movement, he explains the challenges of describing someyhing that is based on the premise of learning-through-making:

[I]t would be particularly oxymoronic to convey the idea of constructionism through a definition since, after all, constructionism boils down to demanding that everything be understood by being constructed. The joke is relevant to the problem, for the more we share the less improbable it is that our self-constructed constructions should converge. And I have learned to take as a sign of relevantly common intellectual culture and preferences the penchant for playing with self-referentially recursive situations: the snake eating its tail, the man hoisting himself by his own bootstraps, and the liar contradicting himself by saying he's a liar. Experience shows that people who relate to that kind of thing often play in similar ways. And in some domains those who play alike think alike. Those who like to play with images of structures emerging from their own chaos, lifting themselves by their own bootstraps, are very likely predisposed to constructionism.

Because the work of educational research is often grim, sometimes excruciatingly so, Papert's sense of play and delight in his work is not only refreshing but very deeply necessary.

4. Week 7 of Kylie Peppler's class, Learning in New Media. The readings for that week look like this:

Literacies as Multiple and Situated
Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981/1988). Unpackaging Literacy. In E.R. Kingten, B. Kroll, and M. Rose (Eds.) Perspectives on literacy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 57-70.
Scribner, S. (1984). Literacy in Three Metaphors. American Journal of Education 93, 6-21.

The New Literacy Studies
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2003). New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 3-49.
The New London Group (1996). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1).

Multimodal Literacy
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. New York: Routledge, 35-60.

For me, one of the most fantastic features of graduate school has been its promise to help me situate the various, undisciplined readings I've gathered up into respective schools of thought: to sort my knowledge, fill in the blanks, and build a backbone into my education.

5. The yellowjacket nest just outside my bedroom window. jk jk jk I actually hate the yellowjacket nest just outside my bedroom window. If they don't cut it out, I'm going to smack those yellowjackets down on my blog and with this can of Raid I have sitting right here.