TLT's Harvesting Feedback Project

I encourage you to take a look at the ratings system demo from a presentation made at the request of the TLT Group in a series they were doing on rubrics. The work originates with the Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at Washington State University. For background, see the Community Based Learning blog.The design is very attractive, and it doesn't take too long to work through the rubrics to rate a sample assignment and student work. Or you can skip to the results if you want to see the kind of assessment summaries produced. It's a fascinating project, and to me the most interesting design element is one not actually highlighted here, viz. that the plan is to be able to rate any kind of work anywhere on the Internet. The era of "enclosed garden" portfolio systems may be drawing (thankfully) to an end.

Because the intent seems to be to be able to tap into crowd-sourcing for assessment (you assess some of my students, I assess some of yours, for example) I wonder if the group has considered using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service as a cost-effective way of getting ratings from "the public."

The blog post has some interesting analysis on results to date. There are a couple of points I'd like to comment on, but I only have time for one now. This is the question "how much inter-rater reliability is enough?" The graph shows this to be between 70 and 80 percent over a five year period. The author, Nil Peterson, writes that

This inter-rater reliability is borderline and problematic because, when extrapolated to high stakes testing, or even grades, this marginal agreement speaks disconcertingly to the coherence (or lack there of) of the program.

To me, the numbers actually sound really good. I don't know if anyone has measured what the inter-rater reliability for "normal" grading is, for say a history midterm, but I doubt that it's any better. As complexity increases, reliability ought to decline in general. For example, minor changes in the way the assignment is written can create changes in the scores. Minor changes to rubrics can too. These variations point to an inherent fuzziness that comes from data compressing complex things down to simple ones. For an example of lossy compression, see this fascinating article at StackOverflow on sending images via Twitter:
(image by Quasimondo, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license).

How much reliability is required to be useful? That one's easy: anything better than random data can be useful (electronic stock trading programs, for example, try to ferret out very small correlations to make money on). But if we have to stand up and swear that we believe in the results for a particular student, that's a different question. So the question really turns on what we are using the data for. This is an interesting dilemma faced by administrations that try to actively use assessments of any kind. And of course the unfortunate Assessment Director will be caught in the crossfire. My contention is that too often too much faith is put in the assessments, and damage can easily result. One should not believe too much in one's convenient fictions. More on this topic later.

Innovation and Liberal Arts

Necessity, it is said, is the mother of invention. Who the father is remains unclear. Perhaps the less said about that the better.

We had a retreat the last couple of days, themed out as a summer camp. I jokingly told a couple of colleagues that it wasn't as bad as I'd hoped--we never actually used the ropes for anything. I'd imagined tying each other up as trust exercises or something (!). It was nice to get away from the office and the routines I've accumulated. Some new ideas were able to percolate.

One topic of conversation was a local success story: High Point University, which has rather miraculously transformed itself in recent years. You can see a google-created timeline here. President Nido Qubein started work in early 2005. He wrote an article called "Real World 101: A New Paradigm for Higher Education," which describes the innovation at the heart of his vision. You can find it here at University Business, among lots of other places. He asks a question I asked a few posts back: what is the purpose of higher education? His answer is that while there are many reasons, one encompasses them all: to prepare for life in the real world.

The corridors of corporate America demand a different skill set than the hallowed halls of academia. We must do a better job of teaching these skills.

As part of the High Point solution, all students now take a Life Skills course. I summarize the course objectives below:

• Self-esteem
• Goal setting
• Leadership
• Fiscal literacy and stewardship
• Health and wellness
• Time management
• Communication skills
• Etiquette and protocol

Some of this is traditional orientation course fare (goal setting and time management, for example). Most of these are non-cognitives. It's interesting to compare this list to the High Point mission statement. I've extracted and summarized my interpretation of learning out of the longish formal statement here:

• Intellectual inquiry
  
• Breadth of knowledge
• Command of written and spoken language
  
• Insight into ethical behavior
• Critical thinking
• Aesthetic appreciation
  
• Innovation
• Skill and knowledge within professional disciplines;
• To promote the balanced development of students' cognitive, social and physical capacities;
• Development of character, personal responsibility and a sense of civic duty
• Exploration of faith and humane values within a Judeo-Christian context

This is a long list, but usual liberal arts fare that coincides pretty well with the AAC&U LEAP initiative. LEAP's goal isn't self-described as meeting a need for innovation, but seems to be more an attempt at introspection and perhaps standardization.

LEAP is AAC&U’s primary vehicle for advancing and communicating about the importance of undergraduate liberal education for all students. LEAP seeks to engage the public with core questions about what really matters in college, to give students a compass to guide their learning, and to make a set of essential learning outcomes the preferred framework for educational excellence, assessment of learning, and new alignments between school and college.

There is the practical goal there of alignment, but not with job markets. This is the interesting question that High Point is addressing: how will liberal arts evolve to better meet demand? It's no secret that the words "liberal" and "arts" do not immediately lead the unsophisticated reader to assume that this has much to do with career preparation. I think that High Point could be the leading edge of second-tier liberal arts schools beginning to distinguish themselves by innovative approaches to the traditional curriculum and methods of delivery. I have some ideas about that, but they'll have to wait.

Making Education Scientific

In my previous post I mentioned a good-natured debate on the ASSESS list-serv about whether education can be scientific or not. I focused more on whether the actual practice of assessment is scientific, but there are broader issues. One of them could be a meta-assessment of programs to see if they employ current knowledge about how learning works. That is, connect brain research to the delivery of instruction. As an example, an article in Science Daily from 2007 claims that physical movement enhances learning:

Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned.

Taking that at face value, and assuming that is works at the university level too, how long would it take this knowledge to seep into the practice of teaching college math?

On the other hand, what if one were to persue the practice of science to its logical end? Without rigorous standardization, it's very difficult to separate out potential causes from effects. Is such a rigid scheme appropriate or desirable for an educational setting? It would be a radical transformation. Such a transformational middle school math program is being tested in New York City, according to the website GothamSchools.org:

Students in the new pilot program [...] take a quiz every afternoon, and then receive a computer-generated schedule each morning, called a “playlist.” A student’s playlist might tell him to begin the day by meeting with a tutor, then to complete a set of online tasks, and then to work on a project with his classmates.

This robotic-sounding instruction method was concocted by the same group who came up with a rigid curriculum delivery described in a 2005 New York Times article, where this description of a teacher's work under the system is described:

But in his classroom, he was not designing anything; instead, he was following the balanced literacy script. In a 90-minute period, actual imparting of knowledge was restricted to a lesson as short as five minutes. Then pupils broke into small groups for independent guided work, and reconvened to share their efforts. School administrators made unannounced visits to ensure that teachers were using their rugs and abiding by the "flow of the day" schedule posted in each classroom.

This reminds me of fifth grade. For at least part of the year, our math lessons came from a purple SRA box. This program is now online, of course, but in the old days a student was suppose to start at the front of the box with division problems (there were probably other types of problems, but I remember only division). Our brains are not designed to do long division--an example of Moravec's Paradox, I'm sure. As a consequence, it's a hard slog to grind through what I learned later is basically an inverse convolution. (I now wonder if it could be done more easily by just inverting the convolution matrix... Have to think about that during the long meetings today.) At any rate, it was a real pain for an energetic fifth-grader, and probably turned many off to the idea of math entirely.

There was a system to the problems. Everything was self-scored, and if one did better on a particular test, the next one would be more challenging. The reverse was true too--if you missed many of the problems, the next set would be easier.

You can imagine what I did. I quickly discovered that if I "forgot to do" several of the hard problems, the next batch would be much less taxing. I shared this secret with my friend Ronnie, and soon we were working our way through the problem cards without breaking a sweat. While the other kids were trying out 14589/235, Ronnie and I were doing stuff like 256/16. Unfortunately he got caught. Fortunately he didn't rat me out, but I had to go back to the slog out of fear of being sent to the gulag.

The point is that systems can be hacked, cheated, and gamed. Any system. We hominids have faced that problem ever since people have lived in groups, probably, and have very good on-board apparatus for detecting cheats of all sorts. Computers and card systems aren't so good at it. Not yet, anyway.

Read what happens when a teacher in the teaching system described in the Times article employs a little flexibility and gets off track:

To avoid being caught if they did not follow the schedules, some teachers began "actually training their kids to switch subjects on command," [a teacher] says. "They can be doing a reading lesson, and if somebody walks through the door, all of a sudden they're doing the writing lesson."

This sort of side effect to standardization is inevitable. If we're going to go this route, it's imperative that we do the meta-analysis and ask: how can our beautiful system be gamed? It's the equivalent of building a new operating system to unleash on the world's computers. It needs to have safeguards against hacking, right? But no system is completely hack-proof, so in practice there's always a race between the hackers and fixers. (Computer people call malicious hackers "crackers," actually.) And this race, I think, is computationally so complex that it is out of the realm of prediction: that is, it's not a subject that can be easily made scientific.

Farming Credits and Your Next Million $

One of the more frequented posts of mine is this one on the fear and uncertainty about the Higher Education Opportunity Act's language about ascertaining a student's identity. In the post I noted that "the requirement is for accreditors, not schools, meaning that this requirement will likely become part of the accreditation list of to-dos next time it rolls around." This appears to be happening. The last time I talked to a SACS VP, a few weeks ago, she went out of her way to tell me that this authentication issue was coming around the bend. There were no specifics. She also mentioned, by the way, that it will soon not be possible to reject transfer credits merely because they come from an unaccredited institution. This seems bizarre to me, but I haven't followed up on that yet.

The problem of authentication stems from the easy anonymity of the internet. If a student signs up for and takes online courses, how can you be sure that it actually is the registered student doing the work? How easy would it be to hire someone else out to do it?

With face to face interactions, this is still possible, but seems to me would be pretty rare. You'd essentially have to hire someone to become your alter ego, interacting in the classroom with students and faculty. It would take a peculiar sort of person to be willing to do that (are you listening, Mr. Ripley?). But with a purely online environment, an unscrupulous student could conceivably hire different stand-ins for each class. It becomes much easier to hide one's identity in general.

Interestingly, this happens in online games already. Massively multi-player online games like World of Warcraft have their own virtual currency. A player who doesn't want to grind through the lower levels, suffering the pains of an entry-level character, can simply buy a powerful avatar with cash by converting US dollars to World of Warcraft gold. There are plenty of so-called farmers out there who specialize in creating this product (as well as others). Because the internet is ubiquitous, the farmer can live in China. This June 30 article from GossipGamers states that:

According to a survey in 2008 by Richard Heeks, he estimates 80-85% of the gold farmers are based in China and the virtual currency market generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually.

This trade, however, is to be banned by the Chinese government. I suspect it will go on anyway, but the larger point is what else can they farm? College credits, maybe? Language would probably be a problem in China, but perhaps less so in India. And home-grown credit farms are not unlikely either. I remember from my SIU days that there was a guy who made a living just doing math tutoring, with his posters all over campus: Vince makes Sense! I wonder if Vince is still in business. How much harder would it be for a financially-strapped grad student, say, to spoof a couple of online sections of Math 101 for cash? Don't you think that's already happening?

I've heard rumors about devices coming to market that would provide some level of cheat-proofing. Imagine a USB-plug-in gizmo that monitors audio and video around your computer as you take an online test at home. In my opinion this will never work. That's must my gut feeling as an IT guy. Even that could relatively easily be gotten around by a clever student. Think how hard it is to prevent cheating when the instructor is actually in the room walking around...

This is a hard problem. I foresee a large market for identity-spoof-proof products. (There's a brand name for you: go pay $10 for spoof-proof.com--you won't be sorry!). It's an interesting line of thought to imagine what is it about YOU that ties you to a particular product: a writing, homework, test, interaction... Really, the only thing that cannot be spoofed is the connection that it comes from your mind and body. So, for example, a type-sensor that notes how you use the keyboard when typing would be very hard to imitate. Potentially, another person could learn the pauses and fits and starts that characterize your particular style of keyboarding, but this I imagine to be so time-consuming that the cost would become prohibitive. In a different vein, deep patterns of style in vocabulary and grammar would be invisible to the spoofer, but could be perhaps detected with pattern-recognition tools like latent semantic analysis.

So there, dear reader: I've presented you with a latent demand for a new product, two solutions, and a brand name. When you make your next million, please make out the thank-you check to:

Stanislav Zaa
Gmail, Com

Alternatively, should you turn to the dark side, please hire me as a consultant and we'll see how we can get around those pesky keyboard and semantics limitations. (Just kidding. Really. No, Really.)

Debating Science in Education

I've had a leisurely debate lately on the ASSESS listserv with Richard Hake about whether or not scientifically-based education is an oxymoron. In actual definition, of course, it is obviously not an oxymoron as defined in the 'pedia:

An oxymoron (plural oxymora (greek plural) or, more often, oxymorons)("sharply dull" in Greek) is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms. They appear in a range of contexts, from inadvertent errors such as extremely average, to deliberate puns like same difference, to literary oxymorons that have been carefully crafted to reveal a paradox.

A true oxymoron would be something like piano forte, which literally means soft loud. Since "scientifically-based" and "education" are in no way opposites, the phrase doesn't qualify. In common usage, however, people seem to bend the use of the word. In the present sense, it would be more direct to ask "can education be approached scientifically?" The answer to that question would be "yes" since anything can be approached scientifically. Science may not be able to tell us much about the subject, but we can attempt to use the methods of science on any subject we like. That, however, doesn't make for an interesting debate!

Dr. Hake takes the position that science-based education is not only possible, but happening. Here are the links to this thread. You can find current posts on this topic, including ones not cited below, here by searching for "scientifically-based".

• Original post
• My short response
• Richard's reply
• My longer response
  

In my last response I used a fact that I learned or was reminded of recently: that speech production and understanding happen in two different parts of the brain. They are called Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area, respectively. They're actually pretty far apart, but both on in the left hemisphere. In light of the creativity versus analytic thinking that I'm always going on about, this was obviously interesting. It also explains why I can understand far more German than I can produce, and suggests that the only way to get better at producing speech in a foreign language is to actually practice it. I'm sure all the language people know all this already.

The book this comes from is highly recommended. It's a short little thing I read on the flight back, called My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. Jill is a brain scientist, who had a stroke in her left hemisphere one morning. The first-hand account of her brain deconstructing is fascinating:

[...] I was literally thrown off balance when my right arm dropped completely paralyzed against my side. In that moment I knew. Oh my gosh, I'm having a stroke! And in the next instant, the thought flashed through my mind, Wow, this is so cool!

The text is very readable, and describes the areas of her brain that were affected, and how she perceived those areas going offline. With the left hemisphere's speech centers debilitated, her right hemisphere took over:

In this altered stated of being, my mind was no longer pre-occupied with the billions of details that my brain routinely used to define and conduct my life in the external world. Those little voices, that brain chatter that customarily kept me abreast of myself in relation to the world outside of me, were delightfully silent.
[...]
As my consciousness slipped into a state of peaceful grace, I felt ethereal.

At the very least, this little book can make long committee meetings more bearable, by suggesting you how to tap into the mellow side of consciousness.

Another book that bears on the question of science and education tangentially is the current one I'm reading. Okay, it's a stretch, but bear with me. The book was sent to me by my historian friend Bob, after our discussion about the Russian Revolution. It's a classic called Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler and translated from German to English by Daphne Hardy. The pertinance to the topic at hand is the adherance to a pre-determined political position, despite facts on the ground. I would say it's a fair criticism of the accountability in education movement that it assumes we can assess far more accurately than we actually can the skills and knowledge of learners. And if that's a weak segue to this lovely piece of literature, then it's my fault and not Mr. Koestler's.

Here, the protagonist (and I presume the author) confronts the results of the Party's deep commitment to principles, to the ends justifying the means:

The cause of the Party's defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested?

We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked. ...

This is another in long history of warnings that ideals and theories and principles and beliefs are useful only as long as they are fluid enough to conform to reality. A theory should be like a suit you use on occasion and then put back in the closet, not like a suit of armor to climb in to before viewing the world through its helmet's grating.

Back from Germany

I'm trying to switch back from the German keyboard, which switches y's and z's, among other things. Interesting how plastic the brain is in this sort of thing. More on that tomorrow.

We had checked five pieces of luggage on the flight from Frankfurt to Charlotte, and I noticed for the first time that baggage retrieval from the conveyor is a tragedy of the commons. Everyone crowds around the large oval that slowly rotates the newly retrieved bags. Everyone tries to see around his neighbor to keep an eye on what's coming down the line. If you're positioned on the flat part of the circuit, this means you can't see very far without leaning out. A better solution would be if everyone took about three steps back, and only stepped forward to grab a bag. Then you could see much more, much more easily AND not trip over people when dragging a large suitcase off the belt. But to the individual, it always seems better to go as far forward as possible, making the optimal group solution impossible. This sort of thing could be fixed with tape on the floor and signs or something (perhaps). It's a good example of how a simple rule could make things better for everyone. When I "landed" our largest suitcase, I was dragged along the edge of the conveyor trying to heave it over another bag. I felt like I'd hooked a giant fish that was pulling me through the gaggle of other people crowded around the conveyor.

I did a fair amount of reading on vacation, including Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead, which is about his time in a Siberian prison as a political prisoner. The book is remarkable for a number of reasons, but the one that I want to highlight is his description of what I called Blue Hat Syndrome in another blog post, where he describes officers that have been promoted from the lower ranks:

Their promotion turns everything topsy-turvy in them, including their brains. After groaning under the yoke for years and passing through every subordinate grade, they suddenly see themselves officers, gentlemen in command, and in the first intoxication of their position their inexperience leads them to an exaggerated idea of their power and importance; only in relation to their subordinates, of course. To their superior officer they show the same servility as ever, though it is utterly unnecessary and even revolting to many people. Some of these servile fellows hasten with peculiar zest to declare to their superior officers that they come from the lower ranks, thought they are officers, and that "they never forget their place." But with the common soldiers they are absolutely autocratic.

He notes a characteristic of BHS that I had missed in my post: that their behavior depends much on the audience. Dostoevsky also describes the fall of such a man--the Major who ruled the prison--after a trial had found him guilty of some malfeasance:

He retired, sold his pair of greys, and then his whole property, and even sank into poverty. We came across him afterwards, a civilian wearing a shabby coat and cap with a cockade in it. He looked viciously at the convicts. But all his prestige went with this uniform. In a uniform he was a terrible, a deity. In civil dress he became absolutely a nonentity, and looked like a lackey. It's wonderful what the uniform does for men like that.

Tomorrow I'll describe some thoughts about my reading material for the flight home: My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor.

Unplanned Obsolescence

On a morning bike ride here in Düren, I returned to the abandoned military post I'd discovered last week, this time with the camera along. The entrance to the installation is shown below, with what I presume to be a guard house.
According to our host Hans, this was originally a WWII era site that was then taken over by the Belgians and not truly abandoned until 10-15 years ago. He has a lot of stories about the Belgians, their two official languages, and the state of their equipment. Whatever the case then, the buildings are falling apart now, aided by local vandals. It's silent and spooky to walk around in these modern ruins.
Part of this large installation has been turned into a nature preserve, and a large chuck is now occupied by commercial interests. AVIS has a car park there, on the other side of the overgrown road I biked in on. It's fenced off, but the cars surround what look like barracks. I stuck the lens between the chain links and snapped the photo below. There are rows of identical buildings, in much better shape than the abandoned ones.
I'm thinking back, but I don't think I've ever visited an abandoned university. They surely exist, and one can easily find photos of them courtesy of your favorite search engine. Here are some links, none of which I've verified, so caveat emptor:

• Some lovely photos on Flickr, but location and name of university unspecified.
• One in Greece
• Institute de Chemie et Metallurgi in Belgium, according to the text and pictures.
• University of Brazil expansion, according to the text.
• Flickr photos of Morristown College, then Knoxville College, now abandoned campus. According to Wikipedia, the college closed in 1994 and has several historical buildings at the site.

The bricks and mortar of established campuses represent substantial costs to operate and maintain, and unless the summer has a good enrollment or other forms of income, 25% of the year many buildings aren't earning their keep. We might compare the established way of delivering education to the now-established ways of running those same institutions using big expensive software packages like Datatel or SCT Banner or Jenzabar products. The installation time is about the same as a building project, and costs of maintenance are probably comparable.

The bricks and mortar approach has been under pressure to change from online-only institutions. Similarly, the big-iron approach to college administrative software is under pressure from open source competition. I'd heard about the Kuali project before reading this article in InsideHigherEd today. The big news (to me at least) is that major universities are converting to the open source software, with Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta College being live on the system according to the article, and The University of Arizona and Michigan State University soon to follow.

I've often made the point in these blag posts that sometimes the only reasonable approach to a hard problem is an evolutionary one. In fact, we might call this the ultimate creative endeavor. A combination of either random or inspired input, combined with a rational weeding-out process can over time differentiate ideas that work from ones that don't. I argued more technically in "Survival Strategies" that in the long run this is probably the only route to long term survival in a changing environment. In terms of the topic at hand, that means that open source software is better positioned to survive than commercial software because of the evolutionary approach of the first, compared to what I called a monolithic entity in the paper--a one path to success model, that commercial software companies have to follow. It's not practical for Microsoft to create 100 different versions of Windows to see which one is most popular. Open source software, by contrast, thrives with that model. Of course most open source projects fail--that's really the whole point--that's how evolution works, by leaving a lot of bad ideas in the software cemetary.

But I don't want to write about software; the point is a broader one. The very same process is now beginning to play out in the general realm of higher education. Competition for bricks and mortar colleges from online universities is only the beginning. The means to deliver education conveniently in electronic forms creates a whole new environment that is different from the one that universities and colleges have grown up in. Open source software to run a college is small potatoes. Imagine the whole educational product from start to finish as evolutionary instead of monolithical, plodding beasts.

To embark on this excursion, we'll need to consider what the obstacles are currently to success for a university. This is first and foremost: money. Mammon is the oxygen of higher education, and it's the pursuit of it that creates a natural environment for larger and larger beasts. As with any economy of scale problem, there are efficiencies that come from size. The barriers to even functioning as a basic higher education provider are substantial. There are state and federal entities who have a hand in because of the money they dump into financial aid. There are accreditors of all kinds, the costs of finding and processing potential students, and the large bureaucracy that is needed to support the whole edifice. Doing this on a small scale can be done, but there's no room for error.

That is the Jurassic model of large lumbering beasts living in an oxygen-rich enviroment, but what's the open-sourcy alternative? What is it that prospective students really get out of higher education? If the answer is allegiance to a football team, or a brand name diploma, or making great contacts for their future careers, that's one thing. If it's actually learning to think and communicate, that's another. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but the point is that the teaching part can be done in an entirely different way that doesn't involve vast amounts of money. It already is. You can download free courseware from MIT and other places, for example. But let's suppose that education requires interaction with teachers and fellow students. This can clearly be done online, as with University of Phoenix Online, for example. But their model serves just to rake in as much financial aid and loan money as possible--essentially porting to the old bricks and mortar model to the digital age without changing much, in the same sort of way that the first cars resembled the horse-drawn carriages they were to replace.

Instead of a big online university, with all the same problems of accreditation and such, imagine something more like eBay for education. In this model, a match-making service pairs up students and teachers online. Probably the course slots are actually bid for in an auction. A ratings system tracks feedback from customers (students), and the prices students would be willing to pay for a particular instructor would serve as another kind of rating. The eBay-like service would provide a minimal administrative structure in return for a percentage. This could, for example, include a minimal standardization of courses, or at least suggestions, for different areas of study. Students ideally would continue to take courses as a life-long process, something the dinosaria can only preach but not really deliver. Why? Because of the money. It would be far, far cheaper to deliver courses in this way. As a first order calculation, imagine that the service provider takes 10% for overhead. This itself would be subject to competition, which would drive the price to some reasonable level, since there's no reason only one such service could exist.

So I as a math professor decide to offer a Digital Logic class, with an enrollment of 20. I'll teach three sections simultaneously, which may be less than a face to face load, but online is more time consuming, so let's call it even. How much do I need to get in tuition to have a reasonable lifestyle? Two semesters worth is a maximum of 120 nominal tuitions T. If I charged $1000 each, that's $120K less the administrative cost. Even at $500 per student, I could afford to live nicely in lots of places, and still have three months a year free. The more specialized the course, the more in demand the professor, the more comfortably he or she could make a living.

Meanwhile, the administrative eBay-like service doesn't have to worry about processing student loans, applications, or accreditation. It doesn't have to build and maintain a lot of buildings, nor hire a football coach. It can run at full speed twelve months per year. And of course, it can do lots of this with open-source software, using Moodle as a course-delivery platform, for example.

I searched for such a service, but haven't found anything like it. If you read this and know of one, please let me know.

The downside is an erosion of standardization, the obsolescence of the 'major' and many other conventions of higher education. That's the nature of evolutionary change, and it's ultimately the marketplace of careers and ideas that decides if it works. Because of the drastically reduced cost of such a model, it's a good bet that something similar already exists or will soon. Whether or not it, or something similar eventually takes root is an open question. But I think it's a good bet that in the long run a lot of old buildings with neo-classical fascades will have weeds growing around them.

Lost in Translation

I have finally stumbled out of the swamp of good beer and fine food and marketplaces ringed with cafes, ur-old churches and city gates, and beautiful weather, and have sat myself at a computer. Albeit, one with a keyboard that has the 'y' and 'z' interchanged, and a number of slightly less annoying permutations.

I had intended to try to find someone at University of Köln to interview about the Bologna process, but that's not going to happen. We're going to the city today, but to meet friends and shop. So I'm afraid I'm not going to have much useful to say about assessment in Germany.

If you haven't been to Aachen, I recommend it. This was my third visit to the Charlemagne's Dome, but somehow I'd never really seen it the way I did this time. The designs on the ceiling seem like something out of the twentieth century to me, despite being 1200 or so years old. I'm certainly not an art historian, so take this for what it's worth, but the detailed mosaics seem different from anything I've seen anywhere else. In particular, there is an attempt to create patterns that evoke 3-D images when seen from a distance. My pictures aren't very good, but the one below gives you a sense of what I'm talking about.
Some of these illusions are very effective, and I had to walk around and look from different angles to convince myself that there were not in fact pieces sticking out from the ceiling.

Design seems to be a big deal here in the 21st century too. Below is a photo of a house a block from where I'm staying. I find it striking. My reading list includes Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead, which I bought both in English and German so I could read both simultaneously. I've found that approach not to work particularly well, however. It's too easy to cheat. One of the more interesting vingettes from that work is an account of prisoners during transport to a transit prison exchanging their identities in order to swap prison sentences. A relatively rich prisoner might pay a poor one to take his 20 year hard labor sentence in Siberia in exchange for a lighter one. These swaps were public to the rest of the prisoners and enforced by them--an interesting example of rules emerging that we might call evolutionary stabilities, from game theory and evolution theory (see Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for more).

For my non-cheatable German assignment I picked up Henning Mankell's Kennedys Hirn (Kennedy's Brain), which is a translation from Swedish to German. (Reading translations I have found to be much easier than literature written originally in German.) I'm on page 58 and having fun reading it. My German vocabulary is pretty poor at this point, so I keep a dictionary handy. This one is Langensheidt's German dictionary as a foreign language, meaning that it's all in German, but using simpler words and concepts for the definitions. So when I come across a word I don't know, like 'verteidigten' I find a definition like this:

etwas gegen einen (feindlichen) Angriff schützen, indem man zu kämpfen beginnt

I can almost figure it out: something against an enemy attack ???, where a battle begins. But I've forgotten what schützen means. There's a 'Schützenfest' going on down the street this week--some kind of party, but that doesn't help. So I have to look up that word too:

verhindern, dass eine Person verletzt wird oder in Gefahr kommt

That I can almost get--prevent a person from being in danger or being harmed. But the example sentence clenches it: Er schützte seine Augen mit einer dunklen Brille = He ??? his eyes with dark glasses. Clearly schützen is to protect.

What's interesting about this excercise is that the definitions by themselves often convey too little information alone to be able to make sense of. The richer and more complex sense conveyed by the examples make all the difference. I think this is a consequence of problems of inherent in data reduction I'm always going on about. Namely we often assume that abbreviations are enough, but more often they are not enough to convey, measure, communicate, and otherwise be as useful as we imagine. A word is its useage in the language, not its sterile skeleton as laid bare in a dictionary. Learning outcomes work the same way.

Update: Verteidigten means to defend--I forgot to close the loop on that one. And schützen also (bizarrely) means to shoot as well as protect. The astrological sign Saggitarus--the one with the bow and arrow--is der Schützer. It must say something about the history of the word that shooting and defending are so closely linked.

As it turned out I actually did get to have an informative discussion about the Bologna process. One of my wife's friends from the University of Köln, whom we spent the morning with, has a doctorate in German and Philosophy and now teaches those subjects in Gymnasium (like high school plus some college). He was quite aware of how it worked, and on the whole didn't have much positive to say about it. On the plus side the process will make it easier to transfer from one university to another. There are a lot of minuses, in his opinion. First, the creation of a Bachelor's degree seemed like a dead end to him unless the whole system is changed. But worse in my judgment was his comment about the effect of this standardization on the curricula. It is wiping out individual emphases in different regions. Currently some emphasize rote learning, for example. Here in Nordland-Westphalia, he described the approach as more dialogue-based, with less emphasis on memorization. I would contrast these as deductive versus inductive/creative types of thinking. I'm speculating at this point, but it seems that standardization would generally favor the deductive style, since it's much easier to write down in protocols and test with standardized tests.

I forgot to mention earlier that Peggy Maki has edited a book to be released soon on the Bologna process. I just squeaked under the deadline my chapter submission for her book about assessment from the faculty perspective from Stylus, and she told me about the other book in an email.

We spent a most wonderful day chatting, trying out the local Turkish diner, and later on shopping in the city center. The Dom (cathedral) is simply huge. It's impressive in a unique way, entirely different from St. Peters or Notre Dame. One of the long streets stretching out from the plaza is for foot traffic only, and we spent several hours dodging a few rain drops and finding gifts, sampling the pastries, and shopping. I found a wonderful German language book for non-native speakers. It's a picture book with at different theme on each two pages. One has a drawing of some thing, event, or subject, like say a submarine, with the parts numbered. On the facing page are the names for all the bits that make up said submarine. It's far too heavy, and an indulgence, but (shrug) I bought it anyway.