This is where I am. It’s beautiful and relaxing, all the things you need for a good vacation.
– Post From My iPhone
Yesterday we ended up with several extra kids around. It was a good thing all the way around, keeping the kids off the electronics for a while, participating in a couple of rounds of Monopoly, followed by a trip to the park to play tennis, picking up a couple of other kids, then to the water ice stand and back again. Two of the extras stayed with us for dinner and in fact, all night. You can’t plan these things. They require letting your kids roam a bit, encouraging them to stop by friends’ houses to say hello. I’m thankful we live in an area where I have no fear about their doing these kinds of things.
I just finished reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Taleb has equal scorn for academics and bankers. Academics are too insular, having never been in “real” decision-making situations. Bankers are in real decision-making situations but don’t think critically about those decisions. They check their brains at the door. Worse for him are bankers who use tight mathematical models from academics to predict risk.
Interestingly, when searching the blogosphere to find what others have said about the book, I mostly found commentary on Taleb’s hedge fund that is based on his ideas. Some have claimed it’s not doing well–because his strategy is to lose small amounts of money 90% of the time and win big 10% of the time–while others have touted its brilliance. I don’t care much about applying his ideas to finance, even though that’s his field. I think it’s more interesting to consider the idea of the black swan, both positive and negative in more general terms. He says to be open to opportunity, to be generally open-minded about what might happen. Try as much as possible to think outside the box. People are not predictable; society as a whole is even less predictable.
I remember being a kid trying to imagine how my life would turn out–what kind of job would have, who would I marry, would I have kids, where would I live–and it always felt like this black hole. I was not, back then, one of those people who planned much past the next few days. I had friends who were already planning to be doctors or lawyers and were planning their classes and colleges based on those plans. I just figured some unexpected event might occur that could change any plan I made. I was right. Just thinking that something unexpected might occur helps you deal with it. It doesn’t mean that when a good thing or a bad thing happens that it doesn’t impact you. It just means that you can take it in stride. You can just start doing what you need to do to minimize the pain or take advantage of the opportunity. Rather than, as I sometimes do now, worrry about what might happen, and conjure up all the most horrible images, it makes more sense to live from day to day. It’s harder than you think.
I managed a little more writing today, amid the chaos of channeling the kids’ energy appropriately and the sounds of “why can’t I”. Today, I began thinking about and writing about the idea of expertise. Academics (an others) complain that blogs are written by non-experts and are therefore prone to promoting bad and inaccurate information. What I’m trying to reconcile in my mind is the respect I have for experts such as scientists and my skepticism toward those experts. For example, I don’t like the way right-wing religious folks discount evolution or global warming or the causes of cancer. On the other hand, I don’t like to be told I’m not an expert in something because I don’t have the right degrees or publications or whatever. In academia, there is only one path to expertise and if you haven’t taken that path (or veered from it in some way), you have no right to speak.
Enter the blogs. There are some “experts” writing blogs–hooray! And they are getting their expertise out there to a larger audience. On occasion, they have to deal with people who’ve made up their minds based on incomplete or incorrect data, and they often show how they come to their conclusions, revealing not just the content they have expertise in, but also the process of arriving at conclusions. And that’s good for everyone. And there are blogs written by non-experts that are very, very smart. While they may not always have the deep knowledge about a subject that an expert does, they often have a very different context for what they know that is sometimes broader than an expert’s knowledge. Of course, it depends on the subject. One is less likely to trust a non-expert’s opinion on particle physics than on politics.
I’m reading more deeply into this issue and these are just my initial thoughts. I probably have blind spots about expertise, given my own fraught history of not being considered an expert for lack of the right credentials. But it’s a fascinating topic, to be sure.
So, my project for the summer is to restart, for about the umpteenth time, a book project about facing fear and anxiety over social media tools. Thankfully, I have two wonderful colleagues, Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill helping me out. We decided to dive in after our latest presentation on the topic and have set ourselves a fairly ambitious deadline to get something written. I suggested that we start with topics and ideas that we feel most close to, which is different for all of us, and see where that takes us. Since I wrote a whole dissertation on blogs, that’s where I started.
On Monday, I was at a social event with some folks I hadn’t seen in quite a while (hey, to any of you reading this!) and they, of course, asked how things are going. I told them that I’d just returned from a conference where I’d given a presentation. They asked, on what?, expecting me to say on something to do with technology in education. I said fear. They did a double take. I explained that my colleagues and I had decided that the underlying reason for much of the resistence to social software was fear. They said, oh, and I thought it was because I didn’t want to share my personal life with the world. I corrected them briefly that we weren’t talking about fear of setting up your Facebook profile, but of using social software in teaching and research, which can be done in a private setting or with other kinds of parameters that reduce exposure. We’re talking about using these tools professionally, in learning, not to talk about what kind of pajamas we’re wearing.
Only 9% of the population has created a blog, so I don’t expect creating and maintaining a blog to appeal to everyone, but just as very few students continue writing or doing math or thinking about sociology after they leave college, the experience of blogging can have lasting effects. I’m sure that students exposed to sociology look at the world differently than they would have otherwise. But, given the small number of people who do blog, I decided to start by writing about reading blogs. My husband has been a consumer of blogs since the dawn of Slashdot and he reads only a handful of blogs regularly, and he *loves* them. When he spouts off about something he read on a blog and starts making connections, I tell him he needs to get his own blog, and he agrees, but then he never does it. There are many more like him.
When I gave my talk at University of Mary Washington, it was reading of blogs I started with first. When I described my argument to my husband, explaining that I wanted to dispel the myth that all blogs were stupid, he said that would be simple, just have them read Tim Burke or Janet Stemwedel and you’re done. Of course, the problem is, that even showing them these blogs isn’t always enough to dispel their disdain for blogs. Those are outliers, they say. The rest are rubbish. And I wanted to take the argument a bit further. I wanted to say, hey, blogs are just as good as some peer reviewed material. Heresy! And I think they are in many cases for many situations, even within academe. At the very least, we can surely say that peer review is not above reproach. (See Janet’s blog for stories of cheating and tragedy in peer review.)
So I shouted out to my twitter faculty friends a question about whether they allow their students to read blogs. I got some funny responses about how much power faculty have to “allow” their students to do anything. So I rephrased it to ask if they’d let their students use blogs in academic work. Faculty on Twitter are necessarily more open to social media than many others, and so I got the expected answers. Many, in fact, required their students to read blogs, and many encouraged it, and used blogs as a way of teaching digital literacy and critical thinking skills. Which is what I usually say to the skeptics, and now I can point to actual real live faculty who use blogs in just that way.
Journalists are afraid that blogs are going to put them out of business and I started thinking, wondering, whether faculty had that fear as well. Despite my saying that blogs can be just as good as peer reviewed material, I think that unlike journalism, the audience for the two media are different people. And, I think, that students don’t actually read many blogs. But the faculty who do resist, the ones who ban not just blog reading, but using the Wikipedia, they seem to not trust their students to be able to make good judgements, and rather than teaching them how to, they keep them away from “bad” material. But what else might be at work there? That seems somehow too simple. Any skeptical faculty out there, or any people who work with skeptical faculty who have thoughts?
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Today is the final day of school. Although I wrote a while back about managing my (and my kids’) time without the benefit of school or camps, I definitely want to allow for a *lot* of down time. We all need it. The house is kind of a disaster after my absence coupled with a crazy schedule in said absence, but I’m not going to panic; I’m not going to induce my kids to child labor. Not today. Today, like yesterday, we will poke at the dishes and the laundry, but we might play soccer or Mario Kart or tennis (real tennis). There are new shoes and shorts to buy. There are things to learn about maybe. There’s just being together.
I’ve just returned from a lovely trip to Monterey, CA to attend the New Media Consortium‘s summer conference. It was, all told, a good experience, about which I will write more later. At most education conferences, especially those that have a technology component, talk often centers around what the future holds for education and what role technology will play in that future. As I am reading The Black Swan at the moment, the best thing we can say is that we don’t know. On the other hand not knowing does not mean not being prepared. It means being prepared for even the weirdest outcome. Laura pointed to several articles and blogs addressing what she calls a potential higher ed bubble. I’m leary of arguments that suggest that technology can save education entirely, but I’m equally skeptical of positions that suggest that technology will kill education (at least of the traditional kind).
As I wrote last week, and as Tim Burke wrote, cost pressures are going to cause many colleges to make some difficult decisions. Students who might have once considered an elite liberal arts college may not be able to even get in as need-blind admissions go away. Or they won’t consider it at all. Colleges will have to find ways to make their brand affordable to a larger population by cutting significantly–programs, staff, etc. Those are tough decisions to make, and they often have significant effects on the future of the college. There’s no way of knowing what those effects are.
I have this strange feeling that education is changing right before our eyes, but like a blurry picture, we can’t see what it’s changing into yet. As students make their desires and needs known through selection, we will see how the industry responds.
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Inside Higher Ed, among other sources, has been reporting on several incidents of institutions gaming the US News and World Report ranking system. No one should be surprised, today’s report says, especially when the stakes are so high. These incidents dovetail nicely with my own recent thoughts about college expectations for my kids. My brother-in-law is visiting this week and we took a stroll around campus while Mr. Geeky was in a meeting. He asked how much it cost to go to fancy pants liberal arts college. The total price tag, with room and board, is about $50k. He wanted to know why the hell it cost so much and what makes going to a place that costs that much so much better than a state school. For the record, he has 4 kids to get through school (10 years from now), with a huge amount of overlap, so cost is going to be a huge factor, as it is for many parents.
One key reason people want to go to expensive schools, of course, are all the intangible benefits: the connections you make, the name recognition, etc. I agree that the cost seems way out of sync, but it also gets you some tangible benefits as well. At an exclusive SLAC, you won’t have a class larger than 40 or 50 people (and those are the lecture classes). Most classes will have 15 or so people. That means your opportunities for engaging in class discussion, for the teacher knowing you and keeping an eye on your progress are vastly increased. Your faculty will be from “better” schools (they cost more as a result, though their pay is still less than other professionals). The faculty will also be more available for one-on-one consultation and in theory, will also be more focused on teaching and learning rather than research (though this is debatable). Even at schools like Harvard and Yale, one could argue that having the opportunity to work with the great minds of our time is a privilege worth paying for.*
So here’s the thing, yes, state schools can be just fine for many people. Mr. Geeky attended state school and went on to get a Ph.D. from said state school and ended up teaching at a presitigous liberal arts college. There are thousands of success stories like that. But it’s also true that some students would be lost in a large state school population and would not only not thrive, but might even fail. I knew that of myself after visiting a large state school I was considering. Not only did I not check out any of the classes (because my hosts were skipping classes), but I spent the entire time there really drunk. I figured I would spend 4 years drunk if I went there.
Rankings don’t tell you that. They might help you begin to make a list, but there are many other factors to consider. Location, demographics, class size, curriculum, general philosophy. Going to a school ranked below the top 25 isn’t going to ruin your life. It might not catapult you into that fabulous political career, but it will probably allow you a pretty good life.
*Of course, with many of those great minds’ lectures and course materials being made freely available, one can forgo the expense of Harvard and simply take advantage of the free offerings while attending state school.
This is the last full week of school. Next week will probably be a complete wash with only a day and a half. I’m sure that time will be used for parties and cleaning out desks and lockers. For the first time since I’ve been a parent, I’m staring down a summer where both the kids and I have a lot of free time. We also have, thanks to said free time, quite a few trips planned. No longer do I have to account for my vacation time, so I’m taking advantage of it. We’re heading to the beach twice and Mr. Geeky and I just found out that we’ll be going to Paris in early July.
But, I still want to accomplish something myself this summer. There is work to find, a potential book to write, and who knows what else will come up. Also, I want to establish some better habits in my kids and not let them languish all summer. At the same time, I don’t want to be too regimented. After all, you don’t get this kind of relaxed schedule for much of your life. So I’ve decided on a few things. They will both be practicing their instruments every day. We will spend time outside. Both kids want to play tennis and soccer. And we’ll likely visit the pool. I also want to fit in some school stuff, which I have a feeling they won’t like much, but I think it will be good for both of them not to atrophy too much.
How do the rest of you manage the summer? I’d love to hear your ideas.
Today is Geeky Boy’s birthday. He’s 14 and about to go into high school. He’s had a very up and down year and I think he’s looking forward to a new environment and new things. I’ve had a very up and down year as his parent. I feel certain at times that I’m just doing it wrong. But we still muddle through pretty well. Geeky Boy is a generous soul, very forgiving and kind, though I think being that way weighs on him at times, especially when he’s the one getting hurt. I’m proud of that quality in him though. He’s a great kid in so many ways, smart, athletic, sensitive. I worry pretty constantly, though. In part, I know what a minefield my own teenage years were, and I hope he has fewer mines than I did. In part, it’s just that I know I have so much less control over his life now than I did 5 years ago. And that feels really weird to me.
Geeky Girl turns 10 on Sunday. Double-digit midget she calls herself. She, too, is a great kid, though very different from Geeky Boy. While he is quiet and reserved mostly, she is bold and enthusiastic. When she was younger, we used to tell her to use her inside voice all the time. She had what we called a “stadium voice.” She seems to not be afraid of anything. Most of the time, she exudes confidence, though she has moments where she’s unsure of herself.
If someone had told me 14 years ago that I’d be as proud, anxious, excited and terrified about being a parent as I am now, I wouldn’t have believed them. This has been an interesting journey, and in some ways, what’s been interesting about it is how much it’s becoming their journey and not mine. I’m trying to get used to that.
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