Scientists

In my last post, I insisted that you read what Aaron Bady has to say about "The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform". Now, I'm going to insist that you engage with Tressie McMillan Cottom's compelling look at dueling narratives around higher education. One of them is the narrative of market forces, of individuals as rational actors (and communities as mere collections of same), and of every single challenge having a market-based solutions -- and some market-based solutions being so attractive that folks seem to need to create problems on which to unleash these solutions. The other is a less economic, more sociological narrative -- one in which we get to see the salient details of the experiences of the students largely served by for-profit colleges, students who are offered (at least in the abstract) as the perfect clientele for MOOCs. You will maybe not be surprised that for-profit colleges, and the current market-logic of higher education, does not always serve these students so well. However, if you teach at a place like San Jose State, you may be surprised by how much these students have in common with some of your own students. Anyway, I've been recommending a lot for you to read, about MOOCs, which may seem contrary, given that some MOOCs seem content to assign "viewing" rather than reading. You're in luck! You can watch a video of Tressie McMillan Cottom presenting her arguments at UC-Irivine. (Her talk is from about 0:36:50 to 1:08:00.) Here's just a taste: When the story of profit in higher education tells us it will disrupt, it will innovate, it will cage-bust, it will unbundle, it is using the language of markets. It is telling a story of education as a tool of markets. We become a serf that exists at the largesse of market morality and financialization. When we use that language to resist our own commodification, even when we have the best of intentions but we use and adopt that language, we are limited in the possible outcomes of our resistance. If the language gets to define the problem, then it gets to define the solution. ... So how did higher education become a market is a thing I'm very interested in. That's a story that's integral to the narrative being sold about this "calcified" higher education system, particularly public higher education, that has been so in need of disrupting and innovation. I put this before you because in California recent legislation,... Senate Bill 520, would have you take for granted that "something" needs to be done about public higher ed. Something. That's always the starting point. Nobody ever interrogates whether or not that's actually the case. If you want to keep the written word, and your ability to read it, alive (on principle, probably because you're old, like me), I've tried to capture an approximate transcript here.

Some of you may have seen this James Hicks article in The Scientist, where he shows a graph that seems to correlate high notices of retractions with low NIH grant success rates. Interesting idea, right?Unfortunately, Nature reporter Richard Van Noorden (the collector of some of the data used in the graph) notes that Professor Hicks did not use the most relevant data for his retractions (i.e. US retractions, funded by the NIH) for his graph. When you do, the correlation is not nearly so clear.I agree with Richard that the hypothesis is sound (i.e. as it gets more difficult to get funded, the incentive to cheat goes up), but it remains unproven.

From international political economy professor Daniel Drezner, a comment on being paid honoraria for speaking in China:1) From a personal perspective, as the occasional visitor to China, I can confirm the wads of cash thing -- but it's a bit more complicated than Barboza suggests. First of all, for U.S. academics at least, the payment isn't in renminbi, but in U.S. dollars. Renminbi is sometimes dispensed for things like per diem reimbursements, but not for honoraria. After all, officially, the RMB is still not convertible to dollars outside of the country, so it wouldn't be very nice to get paid in a currency that is technically useless outside the People's Republic. There are two other qualifiers here. First, at least with respect to academic honoraria, it's not just China that pays in cash -- so does Japan, for example. Second, speaking as an academic who's received the occasional honorarium, it's friggin' awesome. At some point, someone takes you aside and gives you an envelope stuffed with bills. I know it's impolite to say, but every time it happens, I feel like I'm an earner in Tony Soprano's crew. It's soooooo much more satisfying than getting a check (as is the norm in the U.S.) or receiving a bank transfer three months later than it should be and only after haranguing someone a few times (as is the norm in Europe). Having just worked in the United States, I haven't had the pleasure of being paid in cash. (I've been paid in work experience and donuts -- why do you ask?) Whenever I go to the ATM to pull out a couple hundred bucks when we go on vacation, I always feel a little weird. Readers, what's the best way you've been paid?

I reserved our public library's copy of this book because the author is a friend of a friend, who told me I might like it. Here's the verdict: I do! I like it immensely! I am thinking of buying a copy for my mother, since she would also enjoy it!(Nobody paid me anything to write this. I sent the author a message once, but we are largely unacquainted.)The book starts out with a very amusing recounting of the author's childhood, being raised by wolves radical back-to-nature types. (They make my mother's Vegetarian Nut Loaf look positively mainstream.) He meets his future wife, the daughter of a surgeon, and they marry and are soon expecting a child, at which point we segue into a chapter on birth in America.I could have written this chapter. My favorite line: "I was looking for something more like No Nonsense Evidence-Based Midwifery." Ah, Bug's midwives, of "a zero-transfer C-section rate is unrealistic and dangerous" fame! He goes into the statistics of C-sections, maternal morbidity and mortality, and ensuing complications carefully, in detail, and in a very understandable manner - and also talks about the bad outcomes that can happen in the absence of medical care, and the fine line between lifesaving interventions and overcautious practices that harm patients (like routine continuous fetal monitoring).The next chapters are about raw milk, nutrition, vegetables, sugar (really, doesn't affect immunity; nicely dissected and taken down, with a fine understanding of the phrase "There is no evidence."), pork farming, immunity, vaccines, the environment. These subjects are all handled delicately and in a very neutral manner with no proselytizing. The last chapter is about medicine, and how to balance lifesaving treatments with unnecessary testing and intervention. The author shares an anecdote from his mother, who intelligently researches a possible hepatitis infection, and insists on a second test because the first one has a high false-positive rate. He also relates his own bout of appendicitis. He talks about primary care, emergency medicine, and end-of-life care, our problems with dealing with the root causes of... well, everything - and one of medicine's great failures, that of treating the symptoms. The last chapter is a nice bookend to the first- C-sections and suicides, birth and death. There are 19 pages of closely-spaced endnotes. A lot of research went into this book. I would like to add I've found no inaccuracies in this book, which is high praise from this pedantic, proofreading-maniac of a scientist. In some cases, I would perhaps have liked to see a stronger opinion come through (if you want to read about vaccines go look up Andrew Wakefield's financial interest in scaring people, and the reasons for his medical license being revoked in Great Britain). Some subjects could perhaps use a bit more depth; for example, the author talks about the 'immunity hypothesis', that more dirt and germs prevent autoimmune disease, and cites the rise of things like asthma in developed countries- but he doesn't mention the role of pollution, or of cheap and accurate sequencing in diagnosis. On the other hand, there's only so many pages in a book, and the author clearly doesn't want to be prescriptive or evangelical. He is leading you through his journey of exploration. If you have a friend who thinks that ridiculous, stupid, inaccurate, dangerous Sears book is the gospel, this will not convince him or her. If you know someone who has an actual inquring mind - especially people who are not trained as scientists- this is perfect. As for you, dear readers, you should all go read it immediately.* Did you know this strain has a stable plasmid with a horizontally-transferred Shigella toxin, which binds to ribosomes, and that's why it's so toxic? I wrote a paper about it in college.

Aaron Bady's essay at The New Inquiry, The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform, is so thoughtful and devastatingly on-target that it gets its own post in the series rounding up links that respond to issues raised in the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (PDF of that letter here). If you do not read the whole thing, ruminate on it, and read it at least once more, you are living a lie. Here, I share some tantalizing tidbits that you will appreciate even more in the context of Bady's nuanced discussion. On what can happen when the pace of what is viewed as inevitable change gets really, really fast -- and on how messed up our perceptions of the pace of change have become here: … the first story makes us imagine a groundswell of market forces and unmet need, a world of students begging to be taught by a Stanford professor and Google, and the technological marvels that suddenly make it possible. But it’s not education that’s driving this shifting conversation; as the MOOC became something very different in migrating to Silicon Valley, it’s in stories told by the New York Times, the WSJ, and TIME magazine that the MOOC comes to seem like an immanent revolution, whose pace is set by necessity and inevitability. For example. When the president of UVA was abruptly fired last June, it would be an exaggeration to say that a David Brooks column and a few articles in the WSJ were the cause of it, but it would not be that much of an exaggeration. As we can now roughly reconstruct—from emails which were FOIA-ed by the UVa student paper—UVa’s rector and vice rector essentially engineered Teresa Sullivan’s resignation because they decided she was moving too slowly on online education. And what you get from reading these emails is an overwhelming sense of speed, which they are repeating, verbatim, from the articles they are emailing and forwarding to each other. … Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education is changing how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly omnipresent, but the interesting thing is the fact that the future is already now, that it has already changed how we teach. If you don’t get on the MOOC bandwagon, yesterday, you’ll have already been left behind. The world has already changed. To stop and question that fact is to be already belated, behind the times. The first thing I want to do, then, is slow us down a bit, and go through the last year with a bit more care than we’re usually able to do, to do a “close reading” of the year of the MOOC, as it were. Not only because I have the time, but because, to be blunt, MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much, if you’re in too much of a hurry to go deeply into the subject. On whether MOOCs are a revolutionary new thing or something so familiar we should keep calm and just let it happen: Things are moving so fast because if we stopped to think about what we are doing, we’d notice that MOOCs are both not the same thing as normal education, and are being positioned to replace “normal” education. But the pro-MOOC argument is always that it’s cheaper and almost never that it’s better; the most utopian MOOC-boosters will rarely claim that MOOCs are of equivalent educational value, and the most they’ll say is that someday it might be. This point is crucial to unpacking the hype: columnists, politicians, university administrators, educational entrepreneurs, and professors who are hoping to make their name by riding out this wave, they can all talk in such glowing terms about the onrushing future of higher education only because that future hasn’t actua

This is a further continuation of my (futile) efforts to round up responses to the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here). Part 1 collected links mostly from old media-affiliated sites. Part 2 started digging into some of the discussion in the blogosphere. This post picks up with some more of the blogospheric discussion. There will be more because there are so many posts worth reading out there right now (and dagnabbit, people keep writing more of them). SR Education Group, Fixing What Is Not Broken: Since the large-scale launch of MOOCs last year, much of the excitement around them has been driven by their potential to revolutionize education and thereby solve many of the challenges facing higher ed, namely the perceived diminution of the value of a degree in today's economy and the increased cost of getting a degree. While no one can say for sure exactly how MOOCs will evolve or what role they will play, Michael Horn and Clayton Christensen recently described the potential in a Wired op-ed as follows: … over time, an approach where users exchange information from each other similar to Facebook or telecommunications (a 'facilitated network model') will come to dominate online learning. This evolution is especially likely to happen if the traditional degree becomes irrelevant and, as many predict, learning becomes a continuous, on-the-job learning process. Then the need for customization will drive us toward just-in-time mini-courses." Faculty at a number of schools don't necessarily see it that way, nor do administrators. … It might be easy to dismiss such concerns as conservatism in the face of a new model, or as faculty trying to protect their role in the existing academic model -- the model Christensen and Horn feel may become "irrelevant." But Inside Higher Ed recently released survey data that showed that even college administrators are not convinced that MOOCs will lower costs or improve the educational experience for students. The one area where administrators seemed more optimistic about the value of MOOCs was in their ability to generate creativity in pedagogical strategies (although even on this point, a minority of total responses was positive). In the meantime, there has been a steady stream of reminders that the factors putting pressure on the traditional academic model are not emerging because that model stopped working. More to the point, the traditional degree has not become at all irrelevant. The first such reminder came late last year with the release of a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts on the protection a college education affords against economic downturns. * * * * * Scapegoats and Panaceas, MOOCs, Part II: This Time It’s Personal.: MOOCs are symptomatic of greater tensions within higher education and not a core problem in themselves. Preventing their use, while good, doesn’t get at any of the reasons that administrations like San Jose State’s are eager to adopt them. That’s why Daniel Porterfield’s insistence that this become the “Year of the Seminar” is admirable in its spirit but questionable in its reasoning. Porterfield wants to “challenge the notion that MOOCs are the future of American higher education.” But seminars were becoming an endangered species on university campuses years and decades before the first MOOC popped up. Getting rid of MOOCs has little to do with providing seminars. That’s a matter of public education budgets, university spending, an overemphasis on economic utility, and an underemphasis on teaching. * * * * * Historiann, Guest post on the Lords of MOOC Creation: who’s really for change, and who in fact is standing athwart history yelling STOP?: Why in spite of the hype do MOOCs appear to be merely a digitalized version of the “sage on the stage” style of lecturing familiar to those of us in the United States and Commonwealth countries 100 (and more) years ago?  Why do MOOC-world advocates appear totally ignora

Here I'm continuing the round-up I began compiling in the last post of responses to the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here) This post focuses on some of the discussion in the blogosphere. It is not exhaustive! There are other discussions worth reading, and responding to, that I'm putting off for another post -- but I will get to them! What I'm including here covers less than half of my open browser tabs on the subject right now. College Misery, San Jose State and the Harvard "Justice" MOOC: Members of the Department of Philosophy at San Jose State wrote an open letter to Michael Sandel, the Harvard "superprofessor"* whose MOOC on Justice they are being asked to "teach" (exactly what this would mean seems somewhat unclear to all involved) instead of a course of their own devising. It's hard to choose just one part to post, since they summarize pretty much all the relevant issues, from the need to adapt curriculum to a local student population to the danger of class stratification in higher education to the irony of offering recorded lectures as an alternative to the supposedly-outdated in-person lecture model. sciencegeekgirl, Why we won't teach your MOOC: I hadn’t realized that these recorded MOOC lectures were being contracted by other universities as course material — I thought that MOOC’s were primarily used by individuals.  This is a troublesome trend to me.  While such online lectures could feasibly be used in a “flipped classroom” style approach, the more likely use is to replace local expertise with national “superstar” lecturers.  It feels quite counter to the aim of a university education, to develop deep expertise in contact with experts in your field of study. annevans9, MOOCs: has the counter-revolution started?: It would naïve in the extreme to think that those who control the purse-strings aren’t eyeing up MOOCs (and indeed other types of on-line offering) as a cheap option. If Harvard-quality higher education courses could be delivered to everyone via a computer screen at minimal cost, that would indeed be the answer to any finance director’s (or finance minister’s) dreams. The problem, of course, is that the quality inherent in a Harvard education is not encapsulated in the typical MOOC, which is merely a recording of some lectures, with some additional material (such as on-line tests). To think that the quality of an education lies entirely in attending classes given by a rock-star lecturer, is to miss the point entirely. Indeed, we’ve long known that attending large group lectures is one of the least effective ways to learn. And what about the guided discussion, the individual feedback, the help with study skills, the library resources, the extended reading, the opportunity for submitting lengthy formative written work, the stimulation of peer group debate…..? Not to mention the pastoral care and advice and all the other aspects that go to make up a student’s experience at university. Ars Politica, Don't Fear the MOOCs: Those in the “salvation” camp, see MOOCs as the best thing to happen to educational access since the printing press. Now, students from Zimbabwe to Brazil can enroll in a Harvard class, or even a lot of Harvard classes, and finally get the Harvard education once reserved for rich Americans. Those of us whose jobs require us to read things like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education every day are now quite used to the MOOC- Messiah language that is just now starting to filter out to the real world. The other side sees the MOOC as the ultimate adjunct instructor—a slick technological talking head that can do all the teaching that needs doing and reduce professors everywhere else to graders and bus drivers for a few superstar professors back East. The philosophy department at San Jose State recently threw their shoes in the MOOC mill by refusing to pilot a MOOC philosophy course from Harvard. So who is right? W

This day has been busy (as you might be able to tell), but a few things to talk about:This C&EN article by Beth Halford on the current state of the postdoc and the problem of chemists taking multiple postdocs is definitely worth a read and worth further comment. I love the quotes from senior industrial folks; it'll be great to see how their opinions match with how their companies have been hiring. Derek Lowe has a couple of great comments today:The first, about an Atlantic article that talks about the problems with getting Western pharmaceutical companies to address neglected/tropical diseases. Derek has some problems with the article, naturally. I do too, especially with the thought that the solution to the problem is getting the global (i.e. non-developed world's) pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity to solve the problem. Coincidentally, the second great comment is about Fortune magazine's fantastic exposé of the quality issues and outright fraud that was happening at Ranbaxy's plants in India for about a decade. For example, they were using submitting bioequivalence data to the FDA using drug manufactured by brand-name companies or competitors. After reading that article, I am not sure how Ranbaxy has managed to stay in business. All three of these articles deserve your attention (and mine!)

Nick Palmisciano is a former infantry officer in the U.S. Army. At the start of an interesting set of comments about being a new Army infantry officer (engagingly titled "Don't Be A Douche"), an interesting comment on caring about your people:2.) Your guys are more important than your career. This ties in nicely with my last point, but it is worthy of its own bullet. You’re all going to be civilians someday, no matter how much you love the military or how long you serve. Years from now, the fact that you made Colonel or Sergeant Major won't erase the fact that you threw some unsuspecting subordinate under the bus to avoid punishment, and it certainly won't remove a stupid decision you made based on pressure from above that got someone killed or injured. Every leader I've ever respected has been willing to stand in the Gates of Fire when it mattered. If you're not willing to do this for your people, be honest with yourself and quit. Join corporate America – you'll just annoy people, not get them killed, and you'll make more money. Everyone wins.I'm reminded of (former Marine commandant) Al Gray's comment to The Basic School in Tom Ricks' great book Making the Corps:What bothers him most about today's military, he goes on to say, is careerism. It has eroded the other services he warns, and is creeping into the Corps. The only thing you should worry about, he tells the assembled second lieutenants, is taking care of your people. In fact, he recommends adding one new little box to the officer evaluation reports: It would say, Does this officer care more about his career than about his troops? A "yes" mark would terminate that officer's career. Obviously, the evaluation criteria for officers in the military and managers in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are very different. The military expects 'leadership' (a vague term, to be sure) out of its officers and senior non-commissioned officers as a primary responsibility; that's not necessarily the case for the business world.However, I believe that direct reports can sense when supervisors and managers see them as valued members of a team (not, I note, just by referring to them as "a team") and not human data collection devices that will provide information/products/processes that will lead to greater corporate glory.*I'm not naive enough to think that there isn't a mutual benefit aspect to this, of course. A good way to move up in the world is "make your boss look good." (Making your boss look bad, of course, is a good way to move down as well.) Direct reports are very, very good at sensing when that "mutual benefit" is out of balance, and they're even better at sensing when managers are actively taking credit for results and decisions that they did not make.I agree with General Gray -- larger organizations should take note of the potential careerism of their employees and incorporate it into their evaluations of managers. I am, of course, hopelessly naive.*This is probably where industry's long-time model for scientific administration may be failing. It is usually the case that the person at the top is some combination of "the smartest scientist" and "the most senior person" and "the person most likely to make good decisions." Somehow, that got translated into "to be a people manager/supervisor, you probably need a Ph.D." Academics don't teach leadership/mentorship skills to their graduate students, and I am not sure that they should.

In response to the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here), at least two important things have happened. First, all the top-down pressure on our department to pilot the edX packaged version of Sandel's "Justice" MOOC as a "flipped" course (despite the fact that our existing PHIL 122 "Social Justice" has been serving our students well) has magically disappeared. Second, a lot of really good discussion about MOOCs and related issues in higher education has broken out all over the place. It seems like we've gotten to the point where people want to look beyond the hype and think about how new educational initiatives (and the role of private entities in driving them) could actually play out when the pedagogical rubber hits the road. There is so much conversation out there that I cannot give you an accurate digest of all of it (especially during final exams -- things get busy here!). But I want to give you a round-up of some of what I've been reading, probably in