Sailing

Was down at the North Cove to visit the boats yesterday at the Manhattan Sailing Club. The fleet of J/24 boats are just big enough to not be too small and sail nicely in the harbor of New York. I'm getting more and more interested in sailing, especially in view of my work. I think that sailing is a great way to introduce kids to science and the ideas of a bigger world for themselves. It's also something that you can't do without taking into account forces you can't control, like the tides, currents and wind. To get to where you want to go you have to constantly negotiate and adjust. But you do get to your goal, which is a great, powerful lesson.

I took Clara down to look at and meet a crewmember of a boat sailing around the world, the Makulu, a boat that sails around the world for Reach the World, an educational program. Check this out: http://www.reachtheworld.org/

Leave No Politician Behind

Here is a great article in The Nation by Deborah Meier on the current state of education in America and how there is a great mess due to testing and top-down solutions by politicians. No matter how hard we try the simple fact is that half of us will always be below average on something. You cannot legislate a change in mathematical law. I guess they didn't teach that at Yale or Harvard, but they did at CCNY. As a SEEK student who was by many measures "below average" I did figure that out, but I also knew that it didn't mean that doing well on a test made you smart or successful in the long run. I'm quite proud that I was a SEEK student and that I went to CCNY in the time of Open Admissions. I'm also proud of my classmates who came from all over the world and struggled against adversity to get their degrees. Now that I'm in an Ivy graduate school I value my years at CCNY even more.

E-Rate

This is an interesting article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/technology/28net.html

This is an article on how a big, well connected electronics company managed to rip off schools using the Federal E-Rate program to get schools on the Internet. As someone who actually advocates the use of the Internet in schools I'm hardly against E-Rate, which was one of the great things that President Clinton and Al Gore did for education, but one must have a healthy regard for the problems with technology in education. Larry Cuban of Stamford has made something of a career of pointing out the obvious and not so obvious problems with using technology in schools, but here we have just plain old corruption. Still, let's look at the big issues here. One, that technology is oversold as a "solution" for the perceived problems of schools in America when the fact is they are nothing of the sort because they don't address the conditions or assumptions of education. Two, that even if they weren't oversold they engender something of a technological priesthood at the expense of teachers. It creates another level of authority. Karl Popper, the great philosopher of democracy, would remind us that the world has many experts, but no authorities. Computers can create in schools an anti-democratic force that subverts the true work of the school. It can also, as we see here, create quite nice opportunities for corruption as well.

Ed.M.

It has been busy. Very busy. A little over a week ago I graduated once more from a college here in New York with a second masters degree in Instructional Technology. This one was not an M.A. like the first one from that institution, but an Ed.M. which is the pit stop to the doctoratal degree I hope to be getting in a few years. I'm enjoying the process quite a bit, and not the goal at all. Learning is an exciting thing, and in a formal setting where one can find a structure and a community it is all the more rewarding, and I will miss that quite a bit. I do not want the process to end.

Over the past year or so I came to the conclusion that the most significant use of technology in education was something we ignore and tend to wish away. It is like a corpse rotting at the dinner table or a particularly well-dressed but flatulent and foul guest who insists on being at every party as a matter of right. That technology is testing. Every kid is getting tested and tested and tested. There is no getting around it. Bush likes it. Bloomberg likes it. The Board of Trustees where I work likes it. It is, it would seem, the solution to every problem. Just like I guess they thought napalm was in the Vietnam War. It has, I'm afraid, about the same result.

When you get a college degree of any kind you sort of get the impression that your SAT scores and the like are just a useless rite of passage or a peverse form of creating scarcity. "Tests" don't really matter as much as the power of your own ideas, the willingness to argue from evidence, to debate respectfully, work hard, accept your role as an apprentice and to take ownership of the process yourself. Tests of the standardized ilk mean nothing, so why do we value them so much? What do they prove? As we test more and more with our #2 pencils and computer-readable forms we are using a particular technological solution that solves nothing. I will be reading alot of Debbie Meier books over the next few weeks, and hope that I can find a way to discuss this fetish in a hopeful manner.

Answering a Question

Here is a response to the instructors that I wrote yesterday. Back to the question of CMC and distance learning.

Do you see the asynchronous written nature of the class as benefits or drawbacks for your learning? Why?

After about a decade of using e-mail and two decades using computers I think I’m pretty well used to the idea of this form of communication and don’t really see it as being something all that new so I tend not to think about it as much as I should and I have to confess that this is a problem. When you think about it you have to adjust to some unpleasant truths.

The benefits, where they are practical, are pretty clear. I can still go to school, work, and be a father and husband. These benefits are clearly directly mirrored by the disadvantages. You think you can be attentive, think, research and write in a good manner, but what you really are doing is shoving more and more work into a very small amount of time that is left over from the rest of your life. It gives you a certain advantage but it doesn’t really improve your scholarship. It’s sort of like being on an IV drip and a respirator in the hospital. It keeps your scholarly dream alive, which is good, but it isn’t the same as being healthy. Roland Barthes once wrote about this:

There used to be a white streetcar that ran between Bayonne and Biarritz; in the summer, an open car was attached to it: the caboose. Everyone wanted to ride in that car: through a rather empty countryside, one enjoyed the view, the movement, the fresh air, all at the same time.

Today neither the streetcar nor the caboose exists, and the trip from Biarritz is anything but a pleasure. This is not to apply a mythic embellishment to the past, or to express regrets for a lost youth by pretending to regret a streetcar. This is to say that the art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

So, if I could be on campus, in the library I’d be like in that streetcar. The nature of this class isn’t really about good or bad, it is about mutation. It doesn’t substitute for being able to work on campus and have the full experience. You might say that the nature of this class takes history out of the higher educational experience as well as all the ivy. It’s a mutation.

Open Source Redux

I've been awfully busy the past few weeks, which is normal this time of the year. Nevertheless, back to Open Source for a few words.

Programming is a field that is pretty daunting for alot of people, mostly because there aren't too many ways to fake it. Code either compiles or it doesn't. While I don't program as much as I would like, I have strong feelings that this basic fact about programming is one of those things that makes it so satisfying, and Turkle speaks of this as well. When you get something to work and it takes effort you end up feeling good. Easy is not really all that much fun. Work is good.

While I think most educators have a hard time distinguishing between entertainment and fun that isn't really the point here. People who work hard as programmers respect other programmers who work hard, and when you can go beyond making something work to making something clean and elegant that can be really impressive. It isn't just programming either. There is an appeal to craftsmanship that all people can relate to. In Open Source the movement is to a large extent driven by this sense of beauty in something well done that works. What is most interesting is that you don't have this sense of beauty unless you see the code, so this appreciation comes from sharing what commercial software cultures would consider proprietary information. You give something away so it can be appreciated. It's a gift culture.

Gift cultures are interesting in that your status comes from your generosity. Open Source is like that, but so is politics, and probably more than anything else is scholarship. You do not write that paper to get paid or go to that conference for any material profit. You go to share ideas. You write (and read) for the same reason. And the worst thing you can do is not to use an idea, but to not cite it. Ideas are public property, but you have to recognize the person who came up with it. Gift cultures also don't function well with force or compulsion. You can't make someone be brilliant or productive. You have to trust them.

This is where I close the circle on Dialogue as it relates to computers. Open Source is the best example, but if you look at the Internet it didn't come out of Microsoft or IBM or Sun Microsystems; it came out of research labs, academia and the ethics of scientists, librarians and engineers, all people who believe in collaboration, exchange and teamwork. TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, POP and the other protocols that make the darn thing work were developed by people happy to get a rather modest salary in exchange for doing great work. Mosaic, the first multimedia web browser upon which all the others were built, came out of a research grant at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; the web itself from the CERN pan-European physics research lab. Much wealth created by people who not only couldn't cash in but never even saw that as a goal. When you browse the web, send e-mail or do any of those things just remember Bill Gates had nothing to do with it. Tim Berners-Lee is the hero here, but just one of them. There are many more.

We live in a world where more people will die in large parts of the world from having too much food rather than too little; where many people will see more moving images and hear more sounds in a day that their great grandparents saw in a lifetime; where most of us will be able to say we lived better than our ancestors ever expected and still we are not happy. When you see this I just hope you think of the hackers who figured out things like packet switching and mark-up languages and never thought about getting rich. Think of them, and then think of David Bohm. Maybe they have something there that makes much more sense than, say, being the richest man in the universe.