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Blog: Confessions of a Community College DeanSherman Dorn asked a great question earlier this week. In response to the growing wave of enthusiasm for “competency-based” degrees, as opposed to credit hour-based, he asked why we couldn’t achieve most of the good that “competency-based” would achieve just by dropping the “hours” from “credit hours.” Since the standard objection to credit hours is that they’re denominated in units of time, and are therefore impervious to productivity improvements, why not just drop the “time” part, keep the “credit” part, and call it good? I’ll have to dust off my old 90’s notes for this one. (Let’s see...Kurt Cobain? No...Winona Ryder? No...Floating signifiers? That’s it!) Because then “credits” become floating signifiers, attached to no particular meaning. They could mean anything, and would therefore mean nothing. That matters because of online degrees and for-profit providers. In my DeVry days, we were careful with the weekend program -- which was specifically geared at working adults -- to keep the number of classroom hours congruent with the requirements for the number of credits given, even when it became inconvenient. The idea was to avoid the suspicion that fell upon certain competitors, who made a habit of awarding outsize numbers of credits for various courses to both make it easier for students to complete programs and to keep their own labor costs down. Give students eight credits for a three hour class -- that is, charge them for eight hours, but only pay the instructor for three -- and everybody wins: the students finish faster, the faculty at least have work, and the institution makes out like a bandit. If we just declare that credits mean whatever a given provider says they mean, then there’s no basis for denying federal funding or regional accreditation to a college that awards twelve credits for a three-hour class and a paper. And now that many of those classes are online -- in which the entire conceit of “seat time” becomes vaporous -- there would be nothing at all to put the brakes on a given college twisting “credits” to mean whatever is convenient at the time. Historically, the redeeming feature of the “credit hour” was that it was at least based on something. The fatal flaw was that it was based on the wrong thing. That’s the appeal of competencies. Let the students demonstrate that they’ve picked up a skill, and let them move on. Where they picked it up doesn’t really matter. Some will move faster than others, and probably most will vary their speed depending on the task at hand. Yes, the documentation aspect of competencies is a bear. The European project of “tuning” wasn’t done in a day, and doing it here isn’t easy, either. SNHU’s College for America -- the first fully competency-based provider that received DOE approval for federal financial aid -- handles the issue of documentation by keeping it entirely in house; it doesn’t accept transfer credits. For a student moving from, say, a competency-based college to a credit-based one, the transfer evaluation component is largely uncharted territory. That’s not to be discounted. But it’s the best and fairest way to break Baumol’s cost disease without just surrendering to a Wild West of credits meaning whatever anyone says they mean. The great appeal is twofold: break the cost chokehold while maintaining academic integrity. I haven’t seen a better way to do both. Is there one? Show on Jobs site:

Blog: Technology and LearningThe stats of Microsoft's next gaming platform, the Xbox One, are truly impressive. According to Wired, in comparison to today's Xbox the Xbox One will have: 8 times the graphics performance. 5 billion transistors, a ten-fold increase. 8 GB of memory, up from 512 MB. A custom built Blue Ray drive. A 500GB hard drive. Bigger, better, faster. Wow. So why is it that my reaction is mostly meh? Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for the Xbox One is routed in the fact that sitting in one place for hours and interacting with a gaming device is something that I will never ever do. Even a gaming device that I can talk to and gesture at, and that can control every electronic device in my house, is still a piece of technology that fails to match my life. When I play games it will be when I have a few minutes to spare. It will probably not be at home. It will be when I'm traveling, or in-between places, or have a few minutes to kill. The games I buy will be one's that I will only play a few times, so they better be cheap. To the extent that I play games (and I'll admit that I am not a hardcore, or even a softcore, gamer), I will play on my mobile device. Microsoft may invent the world's greatest device to hook up to a TV and play the world's most realistic games. But unless I ever sit in front of my TV (which I don't), this technology will go un-purchased. Which brings us to higher ed. We are probably a good deal like Microsoft. We've been successful. We are big. We know how to continuously improve what we do. We can improve our courses, upgrade our campuses, re-design our classrooms. Whatever the equivalent is in higher ed to adding more transistors and memory and processors, we can do that. It's worth asking, however, if continuous improvement is really what we need in higher ed? Will continuous improvement address the fundamental issues we face around costs, access, and quality variation? Is higher education following the same path as gaming? Are students moving to ahead of us to new platforms for learning and accreditation? Platforms that are more flexible, lower in cost, and designed around their needs rather than ours? Are we busily building the higher ed equivalent of the Xbox One, where instead we should be fundamentally re-thinking postsecondary? Show on Jobs site:

Blog: Mama PhDThis title is not meant to be negative. As all Trekkies recognize, it refers to the latest Hollywood version of the Star Trek series (J.J. Abrams-style), now telling prequel stories of Captain Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, et al. My kids — Nick and Katie, my ex — Jeff, and myself went to a midnight showing recently in Florida. I only fell asleep once or twice. (I now find Chris Pine more tolerable, but still miss Patrick Stewart. Shatner is so last century…) The outing seems an appropriate metaphor for my last Long Distance Mom column. Katie graduates from high school next week. Nick just finished his first semester of college. Jeff is trying to open a restaurant. Ted and I are working on a film project in Venice. I will start to repay the decade of debt I’ve accrued and some of the carbon I’ve put into the atmosphere with my travel, but not until we go to Italy this summer for study abroad programs and salves for our crises (mid-life and teenage). I wish to thank the original writers of the "Mama PhD" book/columns (particularly Aeron), as you all located a much-needed arena for expression—figuring out how a PhD can work for Moms. Since many of the original bloggers have children who are in college now, we are welcoming in a new crew of writers to tell us how they attempt to balance life in the academy, parent young kids, write, cook, clean the house, remain romantic and stay sane—probably in that order. It’s the psychological benefits of blogging—including the negative moments--that have been indispensable to me (and 3.9 million other Mom bloggers). Since my family has “strange new worlds” to explore (I know, I know—I’ll stop with the Trekkie metaphors soon), I’ll let the next generation have the last word: Katie: I love Chris Pine. Nick: I’ve always found the famous, (dare I say… bold?), lines regarding the mission of Star Trek’s Enterprise oddly profound and comforting, though I could never quite put my finger on what it meant to me. Now, on the precipice of adolescence, staring into the void of uncertainty that is adulthood, I’m beginning to understand. It’s a shock to realize after years practically wasted, cocooned comfortably in the constricting apparatus of high school, that you have a very unclear idea of who exactly you are. Simply hatching hasn’t been enough; I’m still shedding pieces, trying not to leave anything important behind. That being said, the metamorphosis of an anxious nineteen year old is far too graceless to keep up the butterfly metaphor. If I had wings to unfurl, I’d be writing about how awesome flying is. So here I am, at my afore-mentioned precipice, getting ready to jump. Jump to what exactly? It remains to be seen. A new college, a new group of friends, a new city, perhaps even a successful attempt at facial hair all loom in the distance as mirages of my possible futures. The gravity of my decision makes it hard to hope for a good outcome. High expectations argue with lower ones over which one is more realistic. In these moments before the leap, all the childhood angst and fear of the unknown bubble up and I assume the worse. The lyrics of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” come to mind. I imagine myself floating in space, shot out of the airlock of life for making the wrong choice, doomed to suffocate on regret and monthly debt payments for the rest of my pathetic existence. There, during those moments of self-prophesized negativity, is where the timeless message of Star Trek comforts me the most. The somber words of Kirk, Spock and Picard instill a hope that makes even deep space travel seem less terrifying, because ultimately, it isn’t about the destination or the outcome. At the risk of sounding like a gift card, it’s about the journey and the experiences you’ll have while on it. Thus I prepare fo

Today was a very productive “writing” day, although no formal “writing” happened.  I realized that in order to go forward with the chapter that I’m working on I needed to go backward and think about and face the book-as-a-whole.  I’ve been avoiding facing “the book-as-a-whole.” My first book, which emerged out of my dissertation, was a much “tighter” project, even though the shape of it in some ways looks similar to the shape of this one.  Ultimately, I had a very narrow scope for what I was trying to achieve, and so I knew where I was going pretty much from the very beginning.  Yes, there were “discoveries” throughout the process – threads that I pulled together – but ultimately, in composing each chapter, I was mapping a particular theory onto a particular literary text in order to arrive at an interpretation of what was, really, a very limited thing.  And so it wasn’t, actually, scary to look at the project as One Big Thing.  I knew what I would find when I did that. With this book project, my process has been less deliberate and a hell of a lot messier.  Now, part of this has to do with the fact that I now understand, in a way that I did not in writing my dissertation/book what a “book” really is.  I’ve read a lot more critical books from beginning to end, for one thing, and I also have been through the process of bringing my own book to publication.  Another part of why this process has been different is because other than when I first began, during my sabbatical, I’ve had to squeeze the book into my other professional obligations piecemeal: I haven’t had the luxury of time that I had during graduate school, and I haven’t had the luxury of the kind of single-minded focus that one has during one’s graduate training.  Let me note, I’m not at all complaining about this: I think it makes my ideas richer, in some ways, that I’m not so imbedded in my original field of specialization, and I think that working in this way is actually allowing me to do more interesting work (at least I have hope that this is the case) than I did in my dissertation/book. But because I’m trying to work on the “first” chapter, I sort of need to know where I’m going to end up in the “last” chapter, if I’m writing the book I want to write, which I don’t want merely to be a a loose collection of disparate chapters around a general idea, but really a work of theoretically oriented criticism that hangs together as a cohesive and coherent whole. And because the project has been evolving since I first pitched the topic (having done no work on the topic prior to said pitching) in my application for sabbatical in 2009, I needed to reckon with the fact that what I’ve been writing, and the ideas that I’m most interested in throughout what I’ve been writing, don’t really match what I initially had set out to do.  I mean, there is a relationship – this isn’t a completely different book – but it’s not the book I’d initially thought I would write, and probably nobody but me could see clearly how the book I’m apparently writing has emerged from the idea that I originally had. But so anyway, I faced that particular scary task, and I was able to a) write a paragraph in which I was able to articulate the three linked objectives of the book-as-a-whole, b) articulate – again in writing – the major theoretical apparatuses that I’m engaging in order to flesh out those objectives (and this was tricky as the theories I’m engaging wouldn’t necessarily seem like obvious choices to bring together), c) discover that I’m going to jettison one particular set of ideas, which are super-interesting to somebody, but which don’t actually fit with the objectives that I outlined that I am trying to

...sort of. Today I went to a meeting at a Big Impressive High Ranked University in the midlands. I drove (because three different trains plus a bus each way took a lot longer and had considerable mess-up potential). I hate urban traffic, and despite strategically chosen leaving times, got thoroughly mired in it both ways (although perhaps that wasn't actually that BAD and I'd missed the BAD traffic through the strategy, undertaken with local advice. What a horrible thought!). Motorways are boring. And some unprintable parked so close to my car in the carpark of the service area that I had to wait for them to get back and remove theirs before I could get into mine and carry on being bored.The meeting was to discuss a big, exciting grant application. I'm flattered to have been asked to participate... but left wondering how come if we get it none of the persons working on the project will be based at NorthernUni (there are perfectly good reasons for this, I can see that they look rational, but I am irrational sometimes) therefore I will not get much if any credit/work load allowance for it and it won't help me get other things at NorthernUni, yet I'm the only person who can produce the 'OMG Need It Now' pilot data for the application and my contribution is the key link that pulls together several disparate elements and makes them into a single project. Maybe I was too nice again... but it's all perfectly reasonable... and I will learn a lot through the grant writing process, I can see already, as well as if we get the project... but still. And I dropped baked beans down my front at lunch time... orange streak on cream top, not a good look. I hate being busty.So I'm feeling pretty blah - and not just because of having got up at 05-30 to 'beat the traffic', and despite the lovely weather today and the fact that all the people at the meeting are nice people who I like to meet up with, and it was kind of fun to spend a whole day talking science... it's just a pain that my to-do list growed again ::pout:: and I'm no closer to solving my "no group from the end of 2013" issue.

Blog: Just VisitingThere was a time when I thought of myself as “The Rejectionist.” From 2003 until 2007 I edited McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Many of you may not know this publication, but it is a cultishly popular website associated with McSweeney’s Publishing, a company founded by author/activist Dave Eggers. Among certain demographics, McSweeney’s means something. For that period of time, every week I would reject 200 or more submissions while accepting anywhere between three and five. Our rejection rate approached 99%. Since 2007, I’ve had a different, much more pleasant, editorial role with McSweeney’s, but to give the current editor a break, I’ve been back at the helm of the S.S. Heartbreak, and it’s got me thinking about things. I like to think I got very good at doling out rejection. I wanted to be: quick, kind, honest, and equitable. The only criteria that mattered was the piece of writing itself. My ethic of equitability once caused me great pain when I passed on a submission by a writer/performer I absolutely revere, and is pretty much a legend, but who also obviously did not send us his best work. Apparently, my status as The Rejectionist became widespread enough to even be satirized in The Onion, to this day one of my proudest achievements. Doling out all that rejection taught me a few things. 1. Success against the odds is not a lottery. A lottery implies that everyone has equal chance. This was not the case. While my approach to the submissions was resolutely egalitarian, a number of people disqualified themselves from consideration. Most of the time this was because they submitted pieces that were fairly obviously not the kind of thing we publish. Other times, the genre may have been appropriate, but the execution was just as obviously limp. Still other times, they would insult me or the publication in their cover note, something along the lines of “You guys suck. Maybe you’ll suck less if you publish this.” It’s tough to be equitable towards that submission. 2. Success against the odds is also not a meritocracy. While I like to believe that every piece I chose to publish was deserving, the process was inherently subjective. Either I liked it or I didn’t. There was no committee, no deliberative process outside my own taste. I had high confidence in my taste - what other choice did I have? – but it would be absurd to think that my taste is everyone’s taste. “You guys suck.” Additionally, for every three to five submissions I would accept, there were another eight to ten or sometimes more that were very very good, well worthy of being published. We just didn’t have the space. I would tell the writers this (honesty), but I always wondered if this only increased the disappointment associated with the rejection. I’ve been thinking about things that are not lottery/not meritocracy as related to higher education based on two recent articles. One was an interactive graphic from the Chronicle of Higher Education inviting us to “Play the Role of the Search Committee” for a tenure track creative writing job. The other was Lee Skallerup Bessette’s essay here at Inside Higher Ed on receiving a rejection for a job for which there were 500 applicants. One of the commenters on Prof. Skallerup Bessette’s post suggests that the academic job market is “a lottery” and that she had “lost.” How cruel would it be if the job market in Higher Ed really is a lottery? All that work become qualified and then it’s a random chance? The Chronicle graphic declares that 117 of the applicants met the qualifications for the tenure track creative writing job. The suggestion, perhaps, is that within those 117 we are looking at a kind of “lottery,” except an examination of the 117 as individuals shows that this isn’t necessarily the case.

Blog: Law, Policy -- and IT?MOOCs: edX has some new partners, Cornell among them, named CornellX. Sometimes a later adoption is the right financial and strategic move, as was the minimal wait the Provost (with all kinds of administrative and faculty support behind him) gave before committing the University. My personal opinion? I am thrilled with the choice, the process, so far, as how the CU came to this decision, and look forward to future developments. Cornell has some outstanding teaching as well as research faculty. Moreover, in this digital age, I could not imagine a better approach to its long-standing commitment to outreach both as New York State's land-grant college and as a private university. Salute! Privacy: The Cornell-George Washington Law School Privacy Information Forum was a success! Excellent speakers, fantastic facilitators and engaged participants. The insight I gained addressed the question, "Why doesn't higher education adopt more readily the privacy officer model now fully embedded in corporate America? Historically, because it was a leader in privacy with the Family Education Rights Privacy Act, and therefore already has processes and solid stakeholders, such as registrars, so it may not experience or even actually need a "privacy" officer per se. The real answer is the old lawyer's response: It depends. There are a lot of other privacy laws now, most obviously GLBA for interest-bearing financial accounts (bursar, for example) and of course patient health care record of covered entities (HIPAA for hospitals or clinics). While those examples have their privacy and security officers by statute, coordination is the key among these three federal law requirements. And on the state front, we have Data Breach Notification laws too. My opinion: if the history, culture and traditions of an institution mitigate against the appointment of a central privacy officer per se, then let's take the issue to the next step: Institutions still need an authoritative information management officer. My principal contribution to Cornell in this area has been helping to put together a Regulated Data Chart which seeks to educate stewards and custodians on the appropriate use of data in our enterprise technologies. More about which I would be happy to discuss in later blogs, but for now reviewing it is the homework: http://www.it.cornell.edu/policies/infoprivacy/regdata/index.cfm Cloud Computing: The site above arose out of the need to address information management in cloud computing, although as we worked on it, it became clear that it was education we long could have used for on-premise services. Cloud computing has so many interesting components: consortial pricing and negotiation with Net+ Services of Internet 2, a very big win for higher education and growing; attention to information management; new internal processes within institutions for development of such services. These new processes are taking shape in ways that, once again, suit the institution. Some schools have created project management in order to guide it. Some have created ad hoc committees. But overall, the pattern is inserting the life cycle from identified need to implementation as a more intensely collaborative effort involving: contract lawyers, procurement, business pricing, technical support not only for plug-in but also for functionality, technical security assessment, institution policy harmonization and information management, and finally strong communications and outreach for the users. It is a cycle, not a linear process, one which I have likened to "gears" working together rather than a straight line of individual check boxes for procurement. And the sooner a school adopts it, the more efficient and professional it will become to address cloud computing in the higher education environment. That's all for now, more quick snap shots to come! Show on Jobs site:

As millions of children start streaming out of schools for a much-anticipated break, it's important to remember that there is a price to pay for summers free of learning. Students who don't engage in educational activities over the summer lose between one and three months of learning every year on average. In reading, the loss is cumulative; by the end of sixth grade, students who lose their reading skills over the summer will be as much as two full years behind their classmates.

Keeping kids reading over the summer is important. While some children enjoy reading, others would rather do just about anything else. So what is a parent of a reluctant reader to do? Look to your child's interests. Ask yourself, what is their favorite movie, hobby, sport or pastime? Look for a book with a similar plot line or topic matter.

Graphic novels may have a place in the classroom as an alternative form of literature, according to researchers. The results found in the study, published in Boston University's Journal of Education, are complex. For nearly every category of educational use, the response was overwhelmingly "never." Yet, a fourth of the teachers did say that they used graphic novels for struggling students or English Language Learners (ELL) either once a month or once a week.