Good news for anyone who loves bad news

Changes to the application process for law school might mean...absolutely nothing.
Hey, good news for future lawyers of America: A research group out of UC Berkeley's law school has come up with a new test that they say can predict lawyerly potential better than the LSAT. Well, okay, this is only good news if you believe the entrance requirements, and not law schools themselves, are the problem. But more on that in a few.

The study's lead authors, Marjorie Shultz and Sheldon Zedeck, started from the belief that the Law School Admissions Test (known by most as the LSAT and by some as "that fucking test") was neither an accurate predictor of future performance nor a fair means of identifying potential lawyers. Part of the problem, they argued, is that admissions committees rely too heavily on LSAT scores and grades—as they explain, "[t]o admit primarily on the basis of LSAT test scores and grades to a professional field that has great importance to our society, seemed short-sighted."

The study began by identifying the key traits that make up a good lawyer; they listed 26 characteristics in eight categories.

1. Intellectual & Cognitive

• Analysis and Reasoning
• Creativity/Innovation
• Problem Solving
• Practical Judgment

2. Research & Information Gathering

• Researching the Law
• Fact Finding
• Questioning and Interviewing

3. Communications

• Influencing and Advocating
• Writing
• Speaking
• Listening

4. Planning and Organizing

• Strategic Planning
• Organizing and Managing One’s Own Work
• Organizing and Managing Others (Staff/Colleagues)

5. Conflict Resolution

• Negotiation Skills
• Able to See the World Through the Eyes of Others

6. Client & Business Relations - Entrepreneurship

• Networking and Business Development
• Providing Advice & Counsel & Building Relationships with Clients

7. Working with Others

• Developing Relationships within the Legal Profession
• Evaluation, Development, and Mentoring

8. Character

• Passion and Engagement
• Diligence
• Integrity/Honesty
• Stress Management
• Community Involvement and Service
• Self-Development

No surprise here, right? But they took it a step farther and developed tests that they argue can measure applicants' strength in the above categories. They administered their tests to practicing lawyers and compared results to the the lawyers' LSAT scores, and found that

while LSAT scores, for example, “were not particularly useful” in predicting lawyer effectiveness, the new, alternative test results were — although the new test was no better at predicting how well participants would do in law school. Unlike the LSAT, the new test did not produce a gap in scores among different racial or ethnic groups.

On the one hand, this is good news for anyone in the law profession who believes the net used to catch future lawyers is too small and has too many holes in it. On the other hand, another test? Seriously?

The law profession, at its best, is intended to uphold the basic structures of our society: To protect its citizens, to support its government and its economic infrastructure (and to hold these in check when necessary), to stand for the wealthy and indigent alike. A standardized test—even one that measures empathy instead of analytical skills—will never be able to assess with any accuracy an applicant's disposition toward justice, morality, and ethics. If we really want to identify applicant potential, we should discard, not tinker with, the current admissions process. There should be interviews. There should be role-playing activities. There should be deep interactions with candidates before anybody is admitted to any law school, ever.

Of course, this approach can only work if we assume that law school itself is not designed, at its foundation, to churn out new lawyers just like the old lawyers. And we can't assume that. A friend of mine who is at the tail end of her law school experience explained to me that she decided to pursue a law degree because she believed in the universal nature of justice, ethics, and the law. But in law school, she quickly learned, success comes by learning to play the game.

Part of the game, as linguist and educational theorist Jim Gee explains, is learning the Discourse of law school. Citing the ethnographic work of Michele Minnis, he explains that

In the typical law school, instruction in the first year involves total immersion in the course material. Teachers do not lecture in class, rather they engage in adversarial interactions with students patterned after those of judge and lawyer in appellate courtrooms. The dominant instructional approach is the "case method." This method consists in discussing and comparing appellate opinions through a question-and-answer routine sometimes called "Socratic dialogue."

Before each class, Gee explains, students are expected to write briefs summarizing multiple appellate opinions; when called upon in class, they must be prepared to articulate (often under pressure) the contents of their briefs. Here's where it gets tricky, because

[t]o write a competent brief the student has to be able to read the text being briefed in much the same way as the professor does.... Students are not taught these reading skills—the ones necessary to be able to write briefs—directly. Briefs are not, for instance, turned in to the professor; they are written for the students' own use in class.... One of the basic assumptions of law school is that if students are not told overtly what to do and how to proceed, this will spur them on essentially to teach themselves. Minnis argues that this assumption does not, however, work equally well for everyone. Many students from minority or otherwise non-mainstream backgrounds fail in law school.

My friend the law student is not failing; in fact, she's doing quite well. But in order to succeed, she had to swallow down what amounted to intense, unrelenting sexism. This applies not only to treatment by professors and other students but also to how case law is dissected. In many ways, she's had to just put her head down and let it happen. There is no way to get through the experience otherwise.

"Every female law student I know," she said to me, "has had the experience of saying something, getting told she was wrong, then hearing a male student say exactly what she said and get praised by the professor for it."

We can assume this experience extends beyond gender into ethnicity, sexual orientation, and worldviews in general. The purpose of all of this is to create lawyers who replicate the lawyers that came before them. Who decides what, for example, comprises the "integrity / honesty" identified in the Berkeley list above? Welcome to the new law profession, same as the old law profession.

And we haven't even broached the subject of the Bar exam, which is used in much the same way as the LSAT, but with higher stakes: This is the last opportunity to ensure that a new lawyer aligns with the values and belief systems supported by the law school system. To pass the Bar, you have to speak Lawyer--you have to have internalized the Discourse of law school and, by extension, the law profession. There's no room here for alternative approaches to law, to ethics, to justice.

"They have too much at stake," my friend said when I asked her about the possibility of getting rid of or at least changing the Bar exam. "You have to understand that the lawyers who are in charge of these things went through the whole process, and they think, 'I got through it, so you have to too.'

"Not only that," she added, "but the high-up lawyers are there because they support the status quo. They have no stake in thinking outside of it."

The awesomeness going down at Project New Media Literacies

Something amazing is happening over at the blog for Project New Media Literacies, and I'm not saying this just because I've been involved in it.

Well, okay, I'm saying this just because I've been involved in it. But it's still amazing.

As I explained in a previous post, I've been working on a series of blogposts about spreadable educational practices with my sensei, Dan Hickey, and my mentor and partner in crime, Michelle Honeyford.

Our first post, "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Current Educational Practice," argued that the concepts of spreadable media outlined by media scholar Henry Jenkins (and first taken up in sleeping alone here) translate to the educational practices and policies as well. We argued that disseminated instructional routines (DIRs), the materials developed and distributed (most commonly by government agencies) with the intention of strict adherence to the curricula, often fails because:

• "fidelity" to the curricular intent is often impossible, not only because of classroom variables but because the intent is not always clear to or valued by the teacher in her or his specific context;


• there is little to no motivation for teachers to spread these practices to other teachers;


• the inherent promise—do this and your students will do better on the required standardized test—is not only a false promise but also runs counter to teachers' efforts to foster real learning beyond testing skills.

In our second post, "If it Doesn't Spread, It's Current Educational Practice (Part Two): Distributed Instructional Routines vs. Spreadable Educational Practices," we continue the argument by examining the contrast between thinking about "lesson plans that work" (DIRs) and "practices that work" (Spreadable Educational Practices, or SEPs). On a fundamental level, shifting the conversation to SEPs allows us to switch lenses: Now we get to consider the teacher's role as an expert on learning instead of focusing on the best methods for handing out materials that work independent of context, independent of teacher, independent of community needs.

In the DIR model, the teacher is a kind of mainframe computer: You feed the information in; the teacher computes it and spits it out. In the SEP model, things get much more complicated. First, if you want to really think about spreadability, you have to think about how practices spread both in the classroom between students—after all, a practice only "works" when it's taken up enthusiastically by the class as a whole—and from teacher to teacher outside of the classroom.

As we write over at the NML blog:

The notion of spreadability leads media scholars to ask about the aspects of the media environment that support the spread of media across different communities. They ask about the ways consumers create value for themselves, the properties of content that lead to spread, and how companies can benefit from spread. If we translate this notion to educational practices, spreadability might describe how properties of students, teachers, content, and accountability work together to enable circulation of mutually meaningful practices in a networked educational culture. For us, the notion of spread raises four questions about educational practices:

• What aspects of the academic learning environment (i.e., in-school and about-school) support the spread of practices across different educational communities?


• How do students and teachers create value for themselves and for their schools through their spread of practices?


• What properties of practices make them more likely to be spread?


• How do teachers and schools benefit from the spread of their practices?

What makes this big is that it can help us clear away the technology fetish—what's the newest technology? How can we get it into classrooms so we can transform education?—and make space for the real question: How can school prepare learners for future schooling, work, and life in a society whose values, systems, and very structures are under constant question as a result of the technologies that have transformed how we are as a culture? We write:

[A]s new tools and technologies are rapidly transforming when, why, and how we communicate, circulate ideas, connect with others, and produce new materials independently and in collaboration with others, there is a value in examining which elements of an educational practice wither and which are appropriated for the new contexts and tools that await us just past the limits of our vision. While a practice that supports activities within Wikipedia will certainly fade as wiki editing becomes more common outside of the context of formal education, on a basic level, the mindsets and skillsets that allow for wider collaboration within this type of community not only remain in our social memory but remain valuable for whatever values and practices emerge from the widespread adoption of such a tool.

The ultimate goal of education, after all, is to arm all members of our society with the ability to transform their environments as they see fit. Gee writes that "humans at their best are always open to rethinking, to imagining newer and better, more just and more beautiful words and worlds. That is why good teaching is ultimately a moral act." This is why, too, good teaching—and by extension, good educational research—requires deconstruction and deep examination of educational practices—and, through this examination, an ongoing discovery of what would best serve the moral imperative of teaching toward a more just and more beautiful society.

I'm serious, you guys. This is gonna be really really big. And when it happens, don't say I didn't tell you so. And this is how I feel about it:

If you see this person, ask her if she dropped her sense of humor out of the canoe.

I have been informed that the appeal of the photoblog Fuck You, Penguin is not universal. This comes as a great surprise to me, as I had been given to believe that blogs where people use foul language to tell cute animals what's what were an instant recipe for success. But no: My older sister has informed me that she doesn't understand the point of this particular blog.

I would never want to ruin FUP for the rest of us (and by "the rest of us," I mean people who are sensible enough to NOT allow themselves to get trapped in low-hanging trees while canoeing—you know who you are), but one of my goals here at sleeping alone is to guide you through the morass of resources available online and to lead you to those that are worthy of your intelligence, time, and energies. This being the case, I feel it is my duty to promote widespread dissemination of the FUP materials and to analyze, with great respect and honor, Fuck You, Penguin.

Element One: Insane photos aligned just beneath enlightening and accurate titles.
Take, for example, this entry from February 5, 2009:


Here's another one, from January 20, 2009:


It's literally impossible to read the titles and view the photos without understanding that OBviously these animals are DOING IT ON PURPOSE. They know what they're doing, with their anime eyes and paws that do human things. They clearly want to take us down, one email attachment at a time.

Element Two: Wisdom.
The author of FUP goes only by the three-letter acronym of BZA, which is probably an effort to protect himself from a more direct onslaught of cute animals than he has already been subjected to, as in this entry from November of last year:

Those better be giant fingers, Monkeys. Or you're in real trouble. I'll let you go this time. But if I don't see some article somewhere about a giant 50-foot-tall man going around holding monkeys in his fingers, I'm coming for you, and guess what? HUGGING MY THUMB WILL ONLY GET YOU SO FAR.

The author also kindly explains why the Tibetan fox thinks he's better than you:

I'm not one for slapping foxes, as I generally think they know what they've done, but this one really has that look, like the asshole boyfriend of the girl the main guy wants in an 80s movie. Unsurprisingly, he is extremely rare. That's probably because he thinks if he has too many babies, some of them will turn out to be commoners and he wouldn't be able to show his square face at the country club anymore.

Element Three: Rage.
Ostriches, it turns out, amuse only themselves. BZA, noticing this, despairs to think that despite his scolding, "the ostrich will never know that its days have come and gone. Similar to the grandfather that makes terrible jokes that no one finds funny, but people laugh at them to not make him feel bad, ostriches walk around like they are the funniest damn thing since camels, and everybody goes along with it because they could literally slice open your entire fucking body."




Element Four: Despair.
BZA, explaining that seals are always looking for a handout,also helpfully explains why it's not going to work:

This seal can obviously see I am eating a Fruit Leather at the moment (apple) and expects me to give him some. Honestly, I think this seal must be stupid, because there is no fucking way I am going to give my fruit leather, which I work hard every day to pay for, to a GODDAMNED, GOOD-FOR-NOTHING SEAL just because he looks at me with giant droopy eyes when I know damn well all he does all day is lounge around on rocks getting fat. Besides, a. I already finished the fruit leather, and b. he didn't give me any kind of home address where I could send it even if I still had some.

Element Five: Defeat.
This blogger happens to be a guy who knows when he's been beaten. In the January 27, 2009, entry, "get your own damn legs, pig," he curses the pig who appears to not see the sheer indecency of getting carried around a county fair by humans:

I see you're very proud of yourself aren't you, Pig? You get to walk around the fair without exerting any effort. For what? So you can roll around in the mud the rest of the day and not get tired? What are you doing that's so fucking exhausting that you get to be carried around and have your picture taken like you're the fucking king of the fair? EVERYBODY BOW DOWN TO THE LITTLE PIG, KING OF THE COTTON CANDY STAND. I think it's time you learned to fend for yourself, you little piece of-

What? I can hold him?... Okay, just for one second... NO! Stay strong, don't let him get to you.

For more on the important work of Fuck You, Penguin, you can visit the main page at http://fuckyoupenguin.blogspot.com/ or just go directly to my favorite entry, "Moose are the biggest dorks ever".

Conquering the blogosphere, one blogger at a time (and revisiting the Facebook fracas)

I recently learned that sleeping alone has a follower in the Spanish-speaking world. Over at Castor ex Machina, a blog run by a Peruvian college student named Eduardo, a big chunk of my recent post on the battle over Facebook's terms of service agreement got translated and discussed in a post titled "El affaire Facebook y sus posibles interpretaciones" ("The Facebook affair and its possible interpretations").

I don't speak Spanish, so I'm relying on my years of studying other languages, along with a variety of incredibly bad website translators (about which more soon) and, I hope, the reading public of sleeping alone to help. Eduardo writes:

Pero uno de los problemas que me viene a la mente, también, es uno muy básico: Facebook no es un espacio público, es un espacio no sólo privado, sino cuyo sentido de fondo es, también, un sentido económico/comercial. No es que esto, de plano, sea un problema: pero, ¿cómo transforma esto nuestra idea de lo que es un espacio público? Si mañana Facebook quebrara, toda la información, toda la creación, todas las interacciones que existen en el sitio, desaparecerían. ¿El Estado benefactor, entonces, debería preservar este espacio? ¿Es un patrimonio compartido? Y por otro lado, ¿es acaso posible concebir un esfuerzo similar llevado adelante de un modo y por una motivación que no fueran privados?

I believe the (very loose) translation of this paragraph is something like:

But one problem that comes to mind is a very basic one: Facebook is not a public space. It's a privately owned space, one with economic/commercial motives. This isn't on the face of things a problem, but it does give rise to the question: How does Facebook transform our vision of what a public space is? If Facebook failed tomorrow, all the information, all the creations, all the interactions that exist on the site would disappear. Should the government, then, preserve this space? Or is it a shared heritage? And on the other hand, is it possible to conceive of a similar effort carried out in a manner and for reasons that are not commercial?

I do suspect this is a relatively poor translation, and I hope that if Eduardo or other Spanish speakers read this they will help me adhere more closely to the spirit of the passage.

As it is, though, I do think I get a good general sense of what Eduardo is arguing here: Facebook may feel public, but it's run by private interests whose values and motives do not always necessarily align with those of the population of the space. Because Facebook feels like it's ours, tension arises when we're notified that we don't have quite as much agency within the Facebook environment as we had believed. It makes us angry; it leads us to action.

If my interpretation of the rest of Eduardo's post is accurate, he also argues that the action we took in the case of the Facebook battle was in large part conducted by people who had no idea what they were even fighting, and how they were fighting it. Even the response from Facebook during and including the struggle indicated a misunderstanding.

I've been quoting Clay Shirky a lot lately, and I'll just go ahead and do it again. Shirky argues that for a new group to be successful, it must meet three requirements: Promise, tool, and bargain. As he explains,

The promise is the basic "why" for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the "how"—how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise an adopt the tools, what can you expert, and what will be expected of you?

The bargain, Shirky explains, is the hardest to get right because it's so complex and often unspoken. Shirky gives the example of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales moving the project from a .com site to a .org to indicate his intention not to profit off of the work of contributors. The bargain, then, was this: Wikipedians contribute to the work of Wikipedia, and nobody will exploit that work for monetary gain. Encarta, Microsoft's effort at getting an online encyclopedia going, failed because its bargain didn't seem like a bargain:

users had to grant Microsoft permission to "use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission" for a product Microsoft was going to charge money for.

Shirky explains that "this was hardly a bargain at all, as all the power lay with Microsoft, a fact that made the option for user contribution largely irrelevant."

For Facebook, we might say the bargain is something like this: Users get a space where they can manage a wide network of friends, family, and professional and personal acquaintances. They get to keep up with the details of the personal and professional lives of their Facebook friends. They have the option of joining groups, playing games, taking public or semi-public stands on issues that matter to them, and gaining access to photos, links, and other online information that is of deep personal interest to them. In return, Facebook gets to ply users with ads and, to a largely unknown extent (at least by most users), gain access to private and often quite personal information.

This does feel like a bargain to us, especially for younger Facebook members whose entire lives have been lived deep in the morass of corporate-sponsored environments. What's the difference, after all, between attending a sporting event at Coors Field, Invesco Stadium, or Banknorth Gardens and playing Mafia Wars surrounded by ads for whiter teeth and online graduate programs?

Facebook changed the bargain when it suggested that everything users did to contribute to the site was subject to corporate exploitation—even if this was, as posts from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested, a misinterpretation of the revised terms of service, this was how it felt to angry users. Interestingly, Facebook caved to public pressure. They didn't have to; by now, most Facebook users are hooked and will not leave, no matter how angry they get or how loudly they threaten their mutinies. Presumably, then, Zuckerberg et al. had a sense that users felt that the bargain had been violated, and that resentment over this could have resulted in a public relations nightmare.

It doesn't matter, then, whether the users were correct in their interpretation of the terms of service change. What matters is how a change in the terms of service changes the perceived bargain, the agreement between the owners and the users of a space that is represented, in theory if not necessarily in practice, as a public one owned by the people who live there. (Now Zuckerberg and his gang are soliciting users to help collaborate on a "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities," intended to replace the terms of service agreement altogether. You can learn more here.)

Early in this post I promised to elaborate on the issue of ridiculously poor website translators. I don't have the space in this post to do this, so expect to hear more from me on this issue soon.

Cross-post: If It Doesn't Spread, It's Current Educational Practice

Contrary to popular opinion, I do hold down a day job in addition to my blogging responsibilities here at sleeping alone. Fortunately for me, a significant chunk of my day job requires blogging about what I do. Recently, I've been working on a series of blogposts about spreadable educational practices with my sensei, Dan Hickey, and my mentor and partner in crime, Michelle Honeyford. You can read the first of several planned posts, "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Current Educational Practice," here.

This first post aligns a series of arguments about educational practices with media scholar Henry Jenkins' take on spreadable media. As I explained in a previous post on sleeping alone, Henry considers the conflict between the commodity culture, in which everything is for sale, and the gift economy, in which social capital is developed through the giving and receiving of gifts. I wrote:

Borrowing from Lewis Hyde's 1983 book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Jenkins explains that in a gift economy,

[t]he circulation of goods is not simply symbolic of the social relations between participants; it helps to constitute them. Hyde identifies three core obligations which are shared among those who participate in a gift economy: "the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate." (p.xxi) Each of these acts help to break down boundaries between participants, reflecting a commitment to good relations and mutual welfare.

Jenkins takes up Hyde's notion of the difference between "value" and "worth," focusing on Hyde's argument that "a commodity has value... A gift has worth." Value, in this case, means the exchange rate of a good: Cash for the merchandise. Worth, on the other hand, is the extra-economic value of a good: Its emotional meaning to us.

Given this conflict, then, what spreads via new media—the gifts we give each other (think Kittens, Inspired by Kittens; think the T-Mobile Dance at Liverpool Train Station)—does not always necessarily align with what's sellable. In other words, what makes something spreadable may exist independent of its economic value. In "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Current Educational Practice," we argue that

the critiques that Jenkins and colleagues level at prevailing conceptualizations of the transmission and construction of ideas in media have a lot in common with the way instructional routines are transmitted to educators and then presented to students. Traditionally these ideas have been transmitted via textbooks and other formal curricular materials. As with traditional media, this "filter then publish" model made sense given the costs of publishing traditional textbooks and the relatively modest canon of knowledge school children needed to learn but is increasingly cumbersome, ineffectual, and inefficient in an environment that allows for on-demand publishing and dissemination of material. We think that the emerging "publish then filter" media model made possible by digital social networks can revolutionize the way we identify, refine, and share worthwhile curricular practices. We believe that such an approach can accommodate learning needs in a world where the feasibility and usefulness of learning a core body of content is decreasing.

Future blogposts on this topic will explore why disseminated instructional routines (DIR's), curricula produced and broadly disseminated by initiatives such as the US Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse, will fail to impact education generally or achievement more narrowly, for many of the same reasons that Henry Jenkins argues that corporate attempts to create viral media messages fail as well. We will also introduce and explore the notion of spreadable educational practices (SEP) to consider methods of leveraging the affordances of participatory media to work toward a vision of a participatory classroom structured around a participatory assessment model.

You guys, I think this is gonna be huge. The implications for educators and researchers are enormous, and the implications for media scholars interested in education are equally big. I'm pretty lucky to have the chance to join in on it. In case it wasn't yet clear, I'm snoopy dancing all over the place over here.

What open source can teach us about failure

You only have to be half paying attention to have heard about the software revolution resulting from the open source software (OSS) movement. Put simply (and ported from the Wikipedia entry), open source software is

computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner.

That's the simple description; a more complex definition is available via The Open Source Initiative, which describes itself as "a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community."

The OSS movement has had a significant effect on mainstream software companies like Microsoft and HP, who have had to work to maintain their "hands-off," proprietary presentation of products. Yet, as Clay Shirky points out, most open source software fails hard and fast and is no threat at all to major (or even minor) software companies. As proof, Shirky looks to SourceForge.net, the largest collection of open source projects available for download. The most popular open source projects have been downloaded millions of times, but that's only true of the top handful of projects. Three-quarters of the projects hosted at SourceForge have never been downloaded at all. Not even once. For every Linux, it seems, there are a thousand GNOME Bulgarias.


It's not, after all, that most open source projects present a legitimate threat to the corporate status quo; that's not what scares companies like Microsoft. What scares Microsoft is the fact that OSS can afford a thousand GNOME Bulgarias on the way to its Linux. Microsoft certainly can't afford that rate of failure, but the OSS movement can, because, as Shirky explains,

open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.

Anyone who's worked for a company of reasonable size understands the push to keep the risk of failure low. "More people," Shirky writes, "will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea." The higher up the organizational chart you go, the harder the push will be for safe choices. Innovation, it seems, is both a product of and oppositional to the social contract.

The implications for education of the ideals of open source are enormous, if we can find a way to address the question of stakes. If a large-scale educational initiative takes a risk and fails, we risk failure for an entire generation of children—or at least that's the story we tell to help ourselves sleep at night. Of course, this is only true if we think the only space for innovation is in teachers enacting lessons in the classroom, the daily innovation or stability of knowledge transferred from one head to another. But what if the lessons enacted by teachers were part of a movement toward a different kind of learning environment, one in which failure is not only allowed for but common and not even particularly notable, one in which failure is valued as part of a larger process, the movement of the group toward collective accomplishment?

And don't tell me that schools are in any way set up for this approach to learning; I've heard enough students ask, in various ways, what they need to do to get an A to know that the whole machine is set up to reward the kind of achievement that feels safe—to all of us, governed as we are by the myths of universal curricula, core knowledge, and the SAT mind. We want students to learn how to follow the rules, how to work within the dominant Discourse or to be fully aware exactly how far outside of it they are. We want our students to learn their place in a world where competition reigns and failure is the way we decide who will rule and who will be ruled.

Rethinking Plan B

When I was in my early 20's, I wrote a letter to my community newspaper arguing for curbs on freedom of expression on college campuses. The letter was in response to an anti-abortion exhibit that displayed incendiary and flagrantly misleading photos in an effort to repulse and terrify the demographic most impacted by public opinion about abortion laws. Even though the display was repugnant, I realized pretty quickly that what I was calling for was a limitation on speech that I didn't approve of. So I changed my mind, of course. But it was too late—the letter ran, with my photo next to it, a week later.

A few weeks back I argued that the economic crisis might benefit academia by streamlining research and giving rise to increased academic rigor and commitment. All it took to change my mind was a recent campus recruitment visit for potential doctoral students. There were ten of us, all highly qualified and enthusiastic; and though no faculty mentioned it directly, we knew that not all of us would be offered financial support to begin doctoral work. There just wasn't enough funding to go around, as qualified as every recruit may have been.

This is the real damaging power of a recession--to limit the contributions of the many and call instead for the contributions of the necessary. Universities nationwide are likely considering ways to cut a few thousand dollars here and there; one easy way to do this, presumably, is to bring one or two fewer students than previously allowed for.

This phenomenon isn't limited to academia, of course. Cuts across all industries will limit the size of the table and the number of people who get to pull up a chair to it. The only groups who appear well positioned to benefit from the recession are cockroaches and mice.

Yet I can't help but try to look on the bright side. In the electronics industry, computer manufacturers are trying to keep costs low by recycling materials from older or unused electronics. The video game industry continues to profit, supporting the assumption that in tough times, people want cheap entertainment.

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lev Gonick argues that:

Future generations of learners will no doubt look back at the global economic crisis of 2008-9 and reflect on which institutions were agile enough to make a difference by bringing the wisdom of their scholars together with the acumen of their technology officers and the ingenuity and determination of their university leaders. It’s actually not only the future of the university that is in play. How we produce, organize, and distribute open education resources is at the heart of the future of education around the world.

One of the enormous benefits of social networking tools is the access they provide to free or cheap educational resources. We haven't yet figured out how to leverage these resources to meet even a fraction of their full potential, but we can. And god willing, soon enough we will.