2008 January | stimulant - changing things around. . .

things to look at (January 29th - January 30th)

posted in links by Alec on January 31st, 2008 :

a few, tasty links (January 29th - January 30th):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

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things to look at (January 26th - January 28th)

posted in links by Alec on January 28th, 2008 :

a few, tasty links (January 26th - January 28th):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

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“college is killing me”

posted in edumication by Alec on January 27th, 2008 :

For those of you unfamiliar with PostSecret, it’s a blog that posts postcards mailed every week from people all over the world. These postcards are creatively decorated and written upon, and all expose secrets of their authors’, ranging from the mundane to the heinous to the heartbreaking. Today, I saw this one:

Consider these types of reactions and the pressures we accept as a natural part of school, all the way back to elementary school science fairs. Then, try to convince yourself that school isn’t a fundamentally coercive institution.

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overheard in W20-575

posted in slush by Alec on January 27th, 2008 :

Is there any way to make this¹ exploratory² ? Because man, I mean …

Grades get in the way.
QED.

6.470 - a web programming class/competition being held during IAP [↩]
At MIT, you can take a class as “Exploratory,” which essentially allows you to switch the status of your registration of a course to Listener (meaning you get no grade; you essentially audit the class) after term ends. So, you can preview your grade, and decide whether you want it. [↩]

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“accountability”

posted in edumication by Alec on January 23rd, 2008 :

Don’t worry, this has nothing to do with NCLB.

I’m concerned with this article regarding the recent decision by several schools in Iowa to mitigate the consequences of failing to turn in homework.

“I have an 8- and a 10-year-old,” said parent Jodi Brown. “And as they excel through school, I would rather have them be held accountable for their actions. If they don’t turn in an assignment, I would think they deserve a zero for not completing it.”

“I think it’s great to give them a second chance to make up for it,” said Julie Michalski. “I don’t want to see anyone fail, but they need to be held accountable for their work.”

“Held accountable for their actions,” “held accountable for their work.” On their faces, these phrases seem innocuous enough: simple, Puritan ethic. But this isn’t the case. Consider recasting the parent’s message in the proper context¹:

“I have an 8- and a 10-year-old,” said parent Jodi Brown. “And as they excel through school, I would rather have them be held accountable for their actions. That is, I think that the teachers and administrators in charge of the school my children are compelled to attend should be able to craft artificial consequences if she does not do as they expect. If [my children] don’t turn in an assignment, I would think they deserve a zero for not completing it.”

“I think it’s great to give them a second chance to make up for it,” said Julie Michalski. “I don’t want to see anyone fail, but they need to be held accountable for their work. We’ve set up this reward system and given grades arbitrary value. Besides, my kids don’t have a choice as to whether they do this work in the first place.”

When you compel someone to do something, when you force their hand, you can’t then “ask” for their obedience and claim that your response to “disobedience” is only fair, proper, or fitting. Many people suggest that schools’ authority is backed up via proxy by the parents’ authority, signalled by the decision to send their children to school. Maybe you could make a case for this if schooling weren’t compulsory. And if parents had fine grained control over their children’s education. And if the economic bedfellows of traditional schooling weren’t so compelling. But the fact that people nominally have the freedom to choose poor grades or no school does not trump the reality that they do not have the opportunity to pursue their education — what most people see as a right — in the manner they choose.

So next time someone uses language like “He’s such a responsible student,” or, “You don’t deserve that grade,” ask what exactly students are responsible for. And to whom? And why? Ask what the real purpose of grades is. And what it means to “deserve” someone else’s approbation of a task that is natural and wholly our own. We would never talk about our faiths our spirituality like this. We would never stand for gatekeepers to allow some religions but not others to be practiced. Why is education so different? Why don’t we naturally use the language of human rights to talk about school?

OK, OK — the loaded context [↩]

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versatile by design

posted in edumication, technology by Alec on January 23rd, 2008 :

During an open house at the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, I listened to one of the school’s founders speak extensively about how quickly technology changes, pointing out — with a mixture of nostalgia and amazement — the rapid cycles of technological obsolescence in the past three decades. Just as I thought he was getting ready to talk about the self-governance and free model that gave the school its reputation, he ended the talk. Needless to say, I was disappointed. The friend of mine who had brought me to the open house commented that it seemed as though the founder had intended to build up to the point that our current, instruction-heavy curricular model is broken. Given how quickly our world is changing and how rapidly it is expanding, the idea of “preparing” a high school student with the “right knowledge” for the world is increasingly irrelevant. Despite this, many see credentials as more important than ever. But, [the founder] never made it that far.

I’ve complained before about the senseless spiral of credentialism. As the high school diploma lost its scarcity, the college diploma supplanted it, and now, educational inflation has led people to see graduate degrees as increasingly desirable. The politics of manufactured scarcity mean that the same ubiquity of access we seek on people’s behalves creates an economic pressure to keep up the distribution of haves and have-nots, leading to an ever-lengthening list of “necessary” credentials. Simply put: making schooling more accessible is not enough to flatten the distribution of those correlates we associate with education (namely, economic security).

On one hand, there is a conservative push toward increasing specialization qua credentials, characterized by the group who were termed “millennials” several years ago. The other shift¹ , there is a movement toward the disestablishment of credentialism as people find broader and broader contexts in which to monetize their creativity. People like Paul Graham have pointed out that the ease with which startups can now be founded seems to mean that an increasing number of alternatives will be provided outside the successes within the traditional infrastructure of the academic and corporate world. Non-traditional programs and curricula in vaguely defined fields like “design” and “innovation” are cropping up in the face of intense demand. Websites like Etsy are giving individuals’ creations direct exposure to consumers. Despite this broadening of our vocational imaginations, it has favored decidedly “cognitive” or “academic” aspects of work.

Crawford notes that,

Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future. Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement.

Ironically, this “egalitarian worry” is paralleled at college as post-secondary education’s openness, in concert with atrophied intellectual autonomies, force students into what feels like a painfully underdetermined system. High-achieving students anxiety balloons to fill this void, hyperfocusing on their choice of a major, often to the exclusion of their genuine interests or even an awareness of what interests them. At finer scales, students obsess over the long term prudence of class choices, planning out courseloads years in advance. Even in relatively portable² fields like math and physics, students operate with the implicit assumption that their life (academic, intellectual, economic) is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Not only does this create bad habits (like taking at face value the alleged inviolability of prerequisites), but in trying to engineer this, students create absurdities not unlike those of hyperprudent parents who select kindergartens by the schools’ long-term college admissions track record.

But, things are changing. Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class documents the trend among creative professionals to prefer a “horizontal job market.” By this, Florida means that creative professionals anticipate holding many, different jobs, as opposed to many, increasingly senior positions within one company:

When asked about the importance of employment, the people in my interviews and focus groups repeatedly say they are not looking just for a single job but for many employment opportunities. The reason, they tell me, is simple. They do not expect to stay with the same company for very long. Companies are disloyal and careers are increasingly horizontal.³ To be attractive, places need to offer a job market that is conducive to a horizontal career path. In other words, places have to offer a thick labor market.⁴

For most, this type of comfort with mobility and turnover is only possible given assurances of economic security. As the job landscape flattens and widens, it becomes easier to ignore the credentials that guaranteed you admission to what used to be the only games in town. By far, one of the most exciting threads tying themes like personal fabrication, “Web 2.0”, revised visions of intellectual property, and my own plans for changing education is that of economic empowerment through personal creativity. Instead of living on someone else’s terms, people are making the tools and communities that will one day naturally support living on your own.

and to me, the inevitably dominant trend [↩]
In the context of the job market, that is [↩]
From The Next American City:

Because the Creative Class career trajectory tends to be horizontal (movement from job to job within an industry) rather than vertical (movement up within one company), creative workers look for places with a thick job market. They may not move to follow one particular company, but they will choose places that offer many possible job choices.

[↩]
Emphasis Florida’s. [↩]

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things to look at (January 22nd - January 23rd)

posted in links by Alec on January 23rd, 2008 :

a few, tasty links (January 22nd - January 23rd):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

let me know what you think, there are no comments [yet!]

ironically false dichotomy: mental v. physical

posted in economics, edumication by Alec on January 23rd, 2008 :

I discovered the Smith-Hughes Act through “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (PDF)¹

The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training in two forms: as part of general education and as a separate vocational program. The invention of modern shop class thus serviced both cultural reflexes of the Arts and Crafts movement at once. The children of the managerial class could take shop as enrichment to the college-prep curriculum, making a bird-feeder to hang outside mom’s kitchen window, while the children of laborers would be socialized into the work ethic appropriate to their station through what was now called “industrial arts” education. The need for such socialization was not simply a matter of assimilating immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who lacked a Protestant work ethic.

This raises the chicken-or-egg question as to the origins of the connection between immigrants and the manual arts. I would have assumed that poverty (or at least, economics) and the social isolation of the manual arts is what made that connection. But even the assumption that the manual arts are socially isolating is predicated on my preconceptions built from the late 19th century. I’ve contacted Crawford to ask after more evidence, but it’s an interesting point in the history of pedagogy.

Consider the following,

Of the Smith-Hughes Act’s two rationales for shop class, vocational and general ed, only the latter emphasized the learning of aesthetic, mathematical, and physical principles through the manipulation of material things (Dewey’s “learning by doing”). […] The act’s dual educational scheme mirrored the assembly line’s severing of the cognitive aspects of manual work from its physical execution. Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of “white collar” versus “blue collar,” corresponding to mental versus manual. These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. First, it assumes that all blue collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white collar work is still recognizably mental in character.

Paradoxically, the impetus behind hands-on, project-based learning as well as the constructivist and [especially!] constructionist philosophies is dependent upon the primacy and efficacy of the “manual.” Unfortunately, we don’t really have language for the physical that does not discount the mental. Circumventing this, the language of constructionism and constructivism relies on precisely the vocabulary Crawford uses in discussing the psychic value of manual work: engagement, empowerment, relevance, and social embeddedness. I suppose the next step is finding those source that provide the arguments for the denigration or separation of the manual and mental. Given how entrenched the stereotyping of vocational and technical education as second-class has become, I’m fascinated by this long-standing cultural oversight, unsupported by an institution as explicitly and carefully supported as education.²

Thanks again to Colleen Kaman for the link. [↩]
That is, I am less surprised by our societal blindness to the problems with our educational system, given the explicit infrastructure we’ve built around it. [↩]

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things to look at (January 18th - January 21st)

posted in links by Alec on January 21st, 2008 :

a few, tasty links (January 18th - January 21st):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

let me know what you think, there are no comments [yet!]

an idea for a community workshop activity

posted in slush by Alec on January 20th, 2008 :

While reading Shop Class as Soulcraft, I came across something I already knew:

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

Now, this is entirely true at every level. We take our bikes to bike shops to change their tires. We don’t even repair appliances any more, and those that do are suffering for the advent of the “ending is better than mending” outlook. Even in university labs, the problem exists. While my brother was in graduate school.

So, what’s the idea? What if appliance repair were free? What if access to the community workshop entailed helping people to work on their appliances? And what if having your appliance fixed there meant that you were in turn responsible for helping someone with a similar problem?¹ And what if instead of just giving them the repaired appliance, you set up a policy of documenting how you fixed it, made this available online, and made sure to inform the customer as to what was wrong and how to fix it. Typically, businesses profit off two things: they sell their time, and they sell their expertise. Frequently, this expertise is no more than a difference in information, not a difference in skill. Rather than work to keep customers in the dark, what if we were to plug educating consumers about their possessions into a separate, community resource (the workshop). Instead of making it in the experts’ best interest to hide the information from the consumer, what if openness were in their best interest?

Of course, this relies on the community workshop being fiscally sound, independent of this activity. But I’m pretty sure this is possible. In general, I think that people consider sustainability of organizations and initiatives at too fine a grain. Rather than focusing on just the program and its fiscal independence, we should think about it as part of a greater, economic ecosystem. Just as there are mutualistic, parasitic, and symbiotic relationships in nature, I think that it is possible to support a great diversity of work by looking to collaborate with others, instead of accepting the dog-eat-dog perversion of capitalism’s emphasis on self-sufficiency.

Thanks to Michael Nagle for articulating the “microcredit” idea behind trading time in an organization. [↩]

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stimulant

changing things around. . .

things to look at (January 29th - January 30th)

things to look at (January 26th - January 28th)

“college is killing me”

overheard in W20-575

“accountability”

versatile by design

things to look at (January 22nd - January 23rd)

ironically false dichotomy: mental v. physical

things to look at (January 18th - January 21st)

an idea for a community workshop activity

whoami

static

find old things