A top administrator goes to a conference – often hosted by – and certainly feted by – companies in the business of selling “educational materials” – textbooks, computer software, etc. The administrator is shown a piece of educational software designed to “improve efficiency” in teaching one of his institution’s thorniest skills – lets say, writing instruction. The administrator, whose academic/professional training is in say, finance or accounting, is impressed with the vendor’s claims for the software software – it will streamline writing instruction and save money.

So the top administrator returns to his/her university and the word goes down – from provost to vice-provost to dean – there’s technology to teach writing that will streamline instruction and save money.

Finally the word reaches the university’s faculty – and particularly writing program directors – experts in writing instruction whose academic/professional training is in – writing instruction.

And the struggle to save the university from itself begins anew….

Battles in the academy are usually fought with research. So the writing program director above turns to the writing program’s consultant – an professor and former writing program director with a long history in the field. The consultant posts a question on the field’s pre-eminent listserv. It might look something like this:

I hope the group will forgive me for such a question:

Our university’s president wants to know about “automated
tools” to “enhance writing instruction” – we are a large
state university with a vast on-line instruction program. We
have a highly valued (by faculty) on-line writing center. I’m
not sure what the president’s interest is in such automated
tools, but the university has become increasingly fond of
“self-service” solutions for value added student services.

If you have suggestions about such services, please post them
here – or you may contact us directly at the following
addresses with info:

Professor, consultant to SUS writing program

Immediately, a representative of the company seeking to sell software who’s been “lurking” on the listserv jumps in with “helpful assistance”:

(Product) is a fully interactive and customizable writing practice and
learning program, for remedial through advanced writing, training and/or
placement. It’s great for Writing Labs, remedial courses and Writing Across
The Curriculum. It saves instructor time and helps encourage students with instant feedback
and unlimited practice. Using the (Product) Web-based application, students draft and submit essays,
and within seconds, a holistic score, annotated diagnostic feedback and
in-depth analysis of errors on the basic elements of writing grammar, usage,
mechanics, style, and organization and development are provided to both
students and instructors.
The (Product) service not only gives you the detailed, documentable metrics
you need to benchmark individual and group writing skills, but also the
flexibility to easily configure that data to guide instruction, inform
student placement, plan remediation, gauge progress and improve curricula.
Faculty can create and assign their own writing tasks, or select a writing
prompt from a library of more than 100 topics. Accessible any time and from
any location with an Internet connection, the (Product) service motivates
students with unlimited opportunities to practice, builds confidence and
reinforces learning.
I have samples or demo versions of the product which I can share with you
(and any other interested colleagues) via e-mail or via a web seminar, to
show you the full use & features of (Product). Let me know if you’d like to
see a sample or set up a time to meet online, when I can present more
information to you, and answer any specific questions.

This all sounds impressive. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, the writer identifies herself as a representative of the company promoting the software. And of course professional listervs are open to anyone who chooses to sign up. And of course the only interest any sales rep for a software company pushing writing instruction products could possibly have in monitoring the discussions of a professional listserv would be to provide helpful assistance – as in this case. Of course…

But the consultant, a grizzled veteran of the long struggle to improve writing instruction at several universities, is slightly skeptical. Rather than immediately contact the sales rep to set up a demo, he waits for colleagues – many of whom are distinguished experts in the field of writing instruction – to offer their views. The wait isn’t long – just after the message from the sales rep, a well known writing program director and author posts the following:

My primary concern about (Product) is that it is designed for classroom use,
for “teaching help.” Here I echo comments made by Bob Broad in his fine
chapter in Ericsson and Haswell. For me, (Product) would get in the way of
working to help students develop the range of rhetorical skills I value,
skills outlined well in the WPA Outcomes Statement. (<http://wpacouncil.org/positions/outcomes.html>
http://wpacouncil.org/positions/outcomes.html). As Broad concludes, “The
Outcomes Statement helps clarify that the overhwhelming uniformity inherent
in mechanical assessment undermines our efforts to prepare students to
compose, assess, and succeed in complex and varied rhetorical scenarios”
(231).

It focuses primarily on grammar and form, making it ill suited for feedback
early on in the writing process where the focus should be more on developing
ideas where questions and suggestions from peer or teacher respondents would
be more appropriate. Further, the kind of feedback it provides is limited
at any point in the process.

It cannot give effective feedback on more rhetorical matters such as tone or
style. If you look carefully at what it analyzes for “style,” you’ll find
that it’s a primarily error-based, reductive view of style: e.g.,
Repetition of Words, Inappropriate Words or Phrases, Sentences Beginning
with Coordinating Conjunctions, Too Many Short Sentences, Too Many Long
Sentences, Passive Voice.
For Grammar, it aims to identify such things as fragments, run-ons, and
subject-verb agreement, although not infallibly. For an essay I wrote on
(Product), it mis-identified two sentences as grammatical run-ons, that were
not. (Note that it also erred in identifying a few grammatical errors in
the essay Charlie Moran wrote.) While obviously, we humans are fallible
also, (Product) with its number counts and graphs, invokes the error of
infallibility.

While the explanatory materials admit that (Product) cannot read, in other
places a human reader is implicitly invoked. Note this trait that is listed
for a 6 rating, the highest holistic rating: “Responds thoughtfully and
insightfully to the issues in the topic.” I question whether (Product) can
judge insight.
WebCT and other platforms for online courses provide a number of supports
for writing courses, including support for peer and teacher feedback and
sharing of texts. The grammar and style checks on word processing programs
do as well as (Product) in those regards. And, many writing centers have
developed effective online tutorial services. As writing teachers, we are
better to put our energy to using these platforms in creative ways that
further the development of our students as writers.

- Professor, former writing program director, author of several books on writing instruction, major state university….

The sales rep becomes flustered at the sharp analysis and critique and fires back thusly:

If you have actually used the product and do not like it, I would appreciate hearing your feedback. If you have not tried it and you simply are opposed to any automated writing supplement (no matter how it is used), that is certainly your prerogative.

These are brave words for a sales rep to use against highly skilled and experienced teachers and scholars. And they draw fire from one of the top experts in the field:

Sales Rep wrote, in part: “If you have actually used the product and do not like it, I would appreciate hearing your feedback.If you have not tried it and you simply are opposed to any automated writing supplement (no matter how it is used), that is certainly your prerogative.”

Sales rep, I’m in the latter camp and wanted to offer some reasons as to why. It would be wonderful if (Product) or even just the grammar/spell-check tools built into MS Word were the starting points for conversations between student writers and their instructors. Unfortunately, however, given the conditions under which many writing instructors work and given the pitching of products such as yours at administrators hungry for efficiencies, the student’s interaction with the product becomes the end point. This situation has been true for a whole range of technologies as applied to the teaching of writing for a very long time. I think the evidence for negative reaction is well contained in your company’s press release for the award you cite. The use of (Product) is combined with teaching to the state-mandated test. Given your company’s role in that testing-educational complex, many of us have ample reasons to be suspicious.

- Distinguished professor and scholar, major American research university

And just when one thinks these mean old professors are piling on this poor sales rep, more piling on – with scholarship:

Sales rep patches in a promo for (Product) that (Company) has been using for
quite a while. Indeed, if you are interested you can read an analysis of
some of its claims, for instance that students benefit from “instant”
feedback and teachers “save time.” The analysis is by a writing teacher, Bob
Broad, who concludes that a more “candid” sales pitch by (Company) for (Product)
would have the motto “Teach your students to write like machines for a
reader who is a machine.” His piece is “More Work for Teachers? Possible
Futures of Teaching Writing in the Age of Computerized Assessment, pp. 221-233, Machine Scoring of Student Essays, ed. Patty Ericsson & Rich Haswell, 2006, Utah State University Press.

- Professor, author, and writing program director, major state university

The consultant passes along these strong arguments against the writing instruction software to his colleague at the university. She in turn, approaches the dean with the concerns of the writing program about whether the focus of instruction should be technology and tests – or students.

And the struggle for “hearts and minds” in the academy continues.

“There is especially no research that details the economic impact of a two-degree restriction, nor what kind of influence such a target would bring on the development of each nation.” (Ma Kai, the minister of China’s key Reform and Development Commission, quoted from Deutsche Welle’s article above)

According to the IPCC report that China signed last month, the cost in global economic growth is expected to be approximately 0.12 percent growth in GDP. Note that this simply a slowdown in the current rate of growth, not an actual shrinkage in GDP.

Ma is either misinformed or is outright lying.

The Guardian Unlimited posted a related story with this quote Ma:

Ma, however, stressed that the bulk of responsibility for battling climate change still lay with industrialized countries, which “are in a better position to cap emissions.”

As these positions from China show, energy is inextricably tied to the economy, global heating, and even foreign policy. China, as the world’s second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, must start making massive cuts to its emissions of greenhouse gases just as the developed world must. Ma is correct in saying that the developed world is in a better position to cap emissions, but the developed world cannot solve the global heating problem alone. Without continuous pressure on developing nations like China and India, and without significant investment in carbon-free or carbon-neutral energy generation for developing nations, it is only a matter of time before the developed world’s ability to cut emissions is dramatically outstripped by the developing world’s emission.

[Crosspost: Scholars and Rogues]

However, as PBS’ NewsHour program reports, another application of nanotechnology is dramatically improved batteries and electronic components called “ultra-capacitors.” The amount of energy that a battery can store is directly proportional to the surface area of the electrodes, meaning that if you double the surface area of the electrodes, your battery can store twice as much energy and either operate twice as long, run twice as hard, or, if you could figure out a way to fold up or roll all that area into a smaller package, make the batter smaller and lighter.

To give you an example, Tesla Motors put out a white paper on their electric roadster’s battery pack in which they say that they’re using a battery pack composed of approximatley 6800 lithium-ion batteries that are each a little bigger than a AA battery. The pack weighs about 450 kg (993 lbs), stores about 56 kilowatt hours (kwh) of electric energy and delivers up to 200 kilowatts of electric power. According to this interview of AltairNano CEO Alan Gotcher, the electrode area for lithium-ion batteries is about 1 square meter per gram of electrode material. Applying this to the Tesla battery pack (and assuming that only about 50% of the pack’s mass is actual electrode material), we end up with 225,000 square meters. To put this into perspective, this is about 55.6 acres, a little less than 1/4 square kilometer, or about 30 soccer fields.

Using nanotechnology, however, gives us the opportunity to increase this area dramatically. According to Alan Gotcher, his company estimates that they can increase the area of their lithium-ion batteries by a factor of 40-200 using nanotech-based battery electrodes. To continue using the Tesla battery pack as an example, this would mean that their existing battery pack would be more like 9-45 square kilometers of electrode area, or 120 to 600 soccer fields. Tesla Motors estimates that they can get over 200 miles per charge – this could increase to something like 8000-40,000 miles per charge using nanotech. Or, more likely, Tesla Motors could keep the electrode area roughly the same but save vehicle mass instead, conservatively reducing the battery pack mass by 50% and thus cutting around 475 pounds out of the vehicle.

And this is why companies like Nissan (from the NewsHour story) are so interested in using nanotechnology for electric and hybrid vehicles.

[Crossposted: The Daedalnexus, Scholars & Rogues]

Of course, this is hardly so. Say you get a government grant to study Alzheimer’s and do an absolutely textbook, brilliant, landmark study that moves the field ahead ten years. You’re published in a premier journal, win awards, get quoted left and right, lock up tenure, etc. Nothing biased at all about it.

Except that government funds are not infinite, and back when that grant was being reviewed somebody decided to fund research into Alzheimer’s instead of research into something else, like maybe AIDS or HPV or Parkinson’s or whatever. Like it or don’t, the perfectly objective research you conducted was determined, at an essential level, by a governmental decision to prioritize one disease over another. Political? Maybe. Personal? Maybe – does Alzheimer’s run in the family of the head of the committee making that final decision?

I’m not suggesting that there’s anything radically sinister at work here – merely that even our purest intellectual endeavors are never as free of politics and bias as we’d like and as we sometimes pretend.

Sometimes, though, the things affecting research decisions are sinister. Like when fundamentalist school boards replace science education with superstition. Or legitimate governmental agencies are hijacked by those who decree that up is down because their preacher said so. Or – this:

Smithsonian Toned Down Exhibit on Arctic
By BRETT ZONGKER (Associated Press Writer)
From Associated Press
May 21, 2007 2:24 PM EDTWASHINGTON – The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.

Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year’s exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Also, officials omitted scientists’ interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered “to show that global warming could go either way,” Sullivan said.

“It just became tooth-pulling to get solid science out without toning it down,” said Sullivan, who resigned last fall after 16 years at the museum. He said he left after higher-ups tried to reassign him. (Story.)

All the science in the world says black is black, but the administrators at the foremost museum in the nation can’t build an exhibit saying that black is black because they fear retribution from political leaders whose imams and corporate bedfellows have decreed that black is white.

Actually, this case is even worse than it seems at first glance. If a couple bureaucrats roll up in a long black car and tell you that the boss ain’t happy, that’s one thing. But here, the thugs never had to show up:

Sullivan said that to his knowledge, no one in the Bush administration pressured the Smithsonian, whose $1.1 billion budget is mostly taxpayer-funded.Rather, he said, Smithsonian leaders acted on their own. “The obsession with getting the next allocation and appropriation was so intense that anything that might upset the Congress or the White House was being looked at very carefully,” he said.

The Bushies and their land-raper buddies didn’t even have to flash the muscle – they won the fight without even showing up.

This is what’s called a “chilling effect,” and if you live within the control sphere of the Bush administration and are trying to make a living trading in facts, your ass probably has frostbite. You can’t take a chance on challenging the official, faith-based science line, not if you want your doors to stay open. So you make a compromise here, decide that you have to pick your battles there, in hopes of sneaking at least a little knowledge past the brownshirts.

Perhaps the best part is the official Bush response:

White House spokeswoman Kristen Hellmer said Monday: “The White House had no role in this exhibit.”

Which, of course, is a glorious rendition of the fork-tongued dark arts. It manages to be technically accurate and as flagrant a lie as has ever been told all at the same time.

I need to get outside and enjoy the nice day while I can. At any minute someone might pronounce that sunshine is rain, and then where will I be?

posted Scholars & Rogues:

We’ve been nominated for Best Education Blog as well as Best Political Blog. If you like what we’re doing, please click the image and cast a vote for us.

Thanks.

Predictably, it circles back around to education. Have a look.

“Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong…”

Stephen Stills

The New York Times reported Friday that the Liverpool (NY) school district will begin phasing out student individual use laptop computers beginning next year. Citing problems such as students using their computers to cheat on tests, to surf porn sites, and to hack into local businesses as well as nightmarish problems with network security, laptop hardware/software problems and system crashes caused by large numbers of students surfing the Net when they were supposed to be studying, Liverpool, like an increasing number of school districts, has decided to give up on the grand experiment of having a computer for every child:

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Despite the fact that many school systems are still adopting laptop computer plans for their students, others who’ve had time to give the programs a reasonable tryout (in most cases 5-7 years) are getting rid of their computers for many of the same reasons that the Liverpool school system is abandoning their program.

Many in education believed that giving students laptops would revolutionize education and make kids better educated and tech savvy all “in one fell swoop” as the Bard would say. How did things go so wrong?

Well, there are at least two ways (I won’t say there aren’t others) we can look at the issue of computers as changers of the way we gain knowledge and experience learning:

One might be what we call the Wired view: Lewis J. Perelman, in a landmark article from Wired Magazine from 1993, proclaimed that “hyper-learning” would eventually outstrip traditional education and that people with computers would become so adept at educating themselves that public schools, for one, would simply atrophy and be replaced by a sort of “educational” marketplace where users would simply educate themselves to prepare for careers they desired, social understanding they craved, and artistic or philosophical depth they sought.

Given that high school and college students use their computers mostly for downloading music, watching videos on sites like YouTube, playing video games, blogging, and visiting social sites like MySpace and Facebook, it may be a while before Perelman’s utopian vision is realized.

The other might be called the Technopoly view: communications professor and culture critic Neil Postman, in his 1993 classic about the dangers of technology run amok, Technopoly, argues that the computer is an insidious destroyer of the institution of education because it seeks to substitute technological solutions for the “human” (read “humane” as in “humanities”) solutions that one learns in school – group learning, social responsibility, and cooperation.

Well, MySpace and Facebook certainly promote social interaction, and blogging allows for the full and free exchange of ideas (though one can argue that many of the opinions blogged should spend more time being cogitated before being expressed), while on-line classrooms make it possible for students to pursue degree programs in innovative (if not always in entirely socially satisfying) ways.

So what do we know about computers and learning?

- We know that kids need guidance using technology as a learning tool.

- We know that if you give students the privilege of their own computers without attaching some serious responsibility for maintenance and care that they’ll be careless and destructive with them – just as they are with state issued textbooks.

- We know that so far, simply handing students computers and expecting them to learn has made little or no difference in their standardized learning progress measurements. (Yet another form of technology….)

- We know that it’s probably too soon to tell how computers will eventually change education.

So we don’t know much – except that assuming that there are quick fixes to the problems with our educational systems is costly, foolish, and stupid.

“Domo arigato, Mister Roboto…”

Dennis DeYoung

The United States has the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)on the books that make it illegal for another country or non-citizens to donate money to candidates (see the FEC foreign national guidebook). Because of the FECA, foreign governments, individuals, corporations, organizations and associations, and parties are not permitted to donate money because doing so may unduly influence the candidate(s) who received those donations. Because we don’t want people like President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and President Vladomir Putin of Russia interfering with our internal politics, even the political activities of allies and their citizens are severely constrained within the United States.

Unfortunately, in a world where Wal-Mart has the 22nd largest economy in the world and thus has more economic power than even Saudi Arabia, and where each of the top four automobile makers (GM, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, and Ford) individually have more economic clout than Venezuela and combined have a larger economy than Russia, why is it we keep allowing corporate money to equal free speech?

A large part of the problem is that the U.S. permits corporations to claim to be “juristic persons”, or a group that is not a human being but nonetheless has the responsibilities of a real person. Juristic persons can be charged with crimes, have their property seized, etc. just as real people can. The problem comes when you give a legalistic construct intended to codify the legal rights and responsibilities of groups of people the rights of a living, breathing individual human. Our natural or God-given rights enshrined in the Constitution do not inherently apply to human-created organizations such as corporations. And when you’ve got companies like Nike claiming the right to lie in advertising and public relation as free speech under the First Amendment, something has gone horribly, terribly wrong.

In an era where 95 of the 150 most powerful economies in the world are corporations, we should stop treating them as if they are people and start treating them as if they are nations instead. Since we don’t permit foreign nationals to influence our elections, we should similarly not permit corporations to spend corporate money in order to influence our elections. Individual corporate employees are citizens and are natural human beings, and as such they have their naturalistic right to free speech (although no-one ever said that speech couldn’t be sensibly regulated – if the Congress has the authority to invoke laws on libel and threatening speech, I don’t understand why they lack the authority to regulate laws on campaign speech). But the corporate entities themselves are not people – they are artificial constructions of people, and as such they have only the rights and privileges we choose to grant them.

It’s time to recall some of the very rights that corporations claim that they simply do not deserve.

[Crossposted: Scholars and Rogues]

If only they’d taught math at Jack Thompson’s school. Hard to blame him too much, though, because when it comes to the myth of powerful media effects the whole country seems incapable of parsing even the most basic statistics.

Let’s leave aside, for just a second, that Seung-Hui Cho was apparently driven into a homicidal rampage by a game he didn’t even play (that would be some powerful influence right there). Let’s just examine the plausibility of the assertion.

Assume, for the sake of argument:

• a million kids play Counter-Strike, the game in question;
• one of them goes nuts and commits a mass murder;
• the other 999,999 … don’t.

What can we conclude from this set of circumstances, class?

The answer: in 99.9999% of cases, Counter-Strike players don’t go out and kill people. (Somebody double-check my math and make sure I have enough 9s after the decimal point, would you?) But in America, we form conclusions and propose policy based on the .0001% exception instead of the 99.9999% rule. In fact, we’ve been trying to do it since the late 1920s, when researchers first took up the question of media effects on behavior. 80 years later the attempt to make that case is as weak as it ever was. Can mediated stimuli contribute to anti-social behavior in some subjects if a number of other factors are also present? Sure – but there’s a buttload of ifs and variables in that equation, and with severely disturbed cases like a Cho or an Eric Harris (just tossing out a name here – according to a lot rocket surgeons out there it was the devil KMFDM that made him do it) even if you establish a correlation of some sort you still have indicated direction: did violent media make him do it, or was he attracted to violent media because of a homocidal disposition? (And spare me the Bobo Doll, okay? As staged lab stunts go that was a good one, but I’ve never seen anything credible that ties it to real-world behaviors like we talking about here.)

Violence in American media and society is an ungodly complicated soup of millions of factors, and witless demagogues like Thompson do us no favors when they try and reduce massively complex issues to inanely simple pronouncements (although that’s certainly how one goes about grabbing attention and power in an undereducated society).

When Thompson’s 15 minutes are up, though, I want to invite him over for a night of high-stakes gambling. He looks like a guy with money and I figure if I can get somebody with his head for odds and probability to bring his wallet I can pay off the house in no time flat.

[Thx to Jade23 for the tip.]