Posts from — January 2009

John Robb, the author of Brave New War, recently speculated on the future of American education at Global Guerillas.

His first noteworthy point centers upon his assessment of the current educational process. Referring to our current form as an admixture of industrial and artisan processes, Robb correctly notes that “the quantities of product (graduates) produced and the facilities resemble industrial processes” even as the “actual production is most closely akin to artisanship (with guilds, no less!).”

Such a reference mirrors one of the age-old questions for educators. Is teaching a science or an art? It also raises one of the ongoing and legitimate criticisms of the current educational structure, one that actually follows the factory assembly line model.

Higher Education
Robb spends little time on that notion, instead shifting immediately to the costs of education and the failure of schools, at all levels, to significantly increase student performances despite enormous funding increases. Here again, Robb is dead on, and his description of the process as “an albatross of cost and stagnating quality” is certainly consistent with those who are concerned with the failure of public schools to significantly improve student performance.  

But Robb saves his strongest criticisms for higher education. Beginning with the costs for collegiate education, expenses that have increased 4.39 times faster than inflation over the last three decades, Robb indicates that higher education is no longer affordable for most households, especially as median family incomes stagnate.

Robb offers the following interesting assertion:

“Worse, there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree.  Since nearly all of the value of an education has been extracted by the producer, to the detriment of the customer, this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble.”

Unlike the Housing Bubble
While the current situation involving higher education has all the makings of matching the recent housing bubble, instead of the downturn facing the housing sector Robb sees the higher education bubble as offering immense opportunity to introduce educational improvements.  

At the heart of those improvements is the greater use of technology and the “ability of collaborative online education to replace much, if not most of in person teaching.” As many others have noted, there are some specific improvements afforded by greater use of technology in education:

• Lectures – Robb notes that video lecture series, along with associated learning materials, for many courses at some of the best universities in the world are now available online. He rightly notes that such an option allows students to get the very best lecture available (“There is no need to recreate the lecture with tens of thousands of less qualified/exceptional teachers”). Why attend another university when the very best lectures are available free.
• Application – Robb adds the push towards just-in-time information processes. Operating online with a JIT focus, we “can train kids to adults in complicated and complex tasks in a fraction of the time other methods require.” Such an approach is the complete antithesis of our current approach, one that features a broad array of subjects and concepts with the idea that students learn certain materials just-in-case there may be a need to know sometime in the future.  
• Collaboration – Robb notes the shifting of the business world from in-person work to a greater emphasis in online collaboration. Instead, at the university level, we continue the age old push to have face-to-face contact, with all students and the professor being present at the same time and in the same place. The idea of moving aspects online still is not “central to the educational world.”

We have discussed many of these notions in our prior work, including a lecture repository, just-in-time learning, and the need for education to begin to embrace the concept of social networking. We have also shared with readers David Wiley’s assessment that higher education as it currently is structured is “Dangerously Close to Becoming Irrelevant.”

Education’s Shift to a Fully Online Environment
While some may see his suggestions as radical, Robb is unequivocal as to the future of education.

“The shift towards online education as the norm and in-person as the exception will arrive,” he writes, “however, the path is unclear.  It is currently blocked by guilds/unions, inertia, credentialism, and romantic notions.” 

As noted, if we are indeed in a higher education bubble, the current economic downturn could well become one of the key catalysts for a radical shift in educational delivery. Robb suggests that the need for local governments to balance their budgets in the face of dwindling revenues will demand extensive cost-cutting measures. Those cost-cutting steps will have to include reduced monies for education, often the single biggest local expense, forcing higher education to pursue more cost-effective delivery methods (online courses).

If we are in the midst of a real higher education bubble, schools will likely see a dwindling student population. Here, Robb speculates on a amazing option. What if MIT or Harvard decided to “offer full credentials to online students at a tiny fraction of the cost of being in attendance.”  He postulates that the result just might be “ten million students enroll in the first year to attend Harvard’s virtual world.”

Of course, yet another option involves an entirely different take, one that features the opensource movement. If in-person education continues to be too expensive but no institution is able to step forward to create a major online brand, the entire world of education shifts. “A massive open source effort develops,” writes Robb, leading to the creation of “virtual worlds and other online courseware that rivals the best universities.”

In the third scenario there would be a need for a new credentialing agency. Of course one quick answer could be a continued move towards standardized testing and students demonstrating, by their performance on such tests, that their education in fact does match what one might have received in the more traditional college setting.  

The Future of Education
At the heart of Robb’s notions is the need for a “productive educational system that produces high quality graduates” but does so “at a small fraction (an order of magnitude less) of the current costs.” In addition, moving to online, just-in-time formats, would perhaps offer the kind of flexibility that is needed if workers, and our educational systems, are “to meet the challenges of a rapidly mutating global economy.”  

Robb even goes so far as to toss around a potential cost of $20.00 a month. While that seems a bit beyond the realm of possibility, the rest offers strong food for thought.

In fact, he might have hit one more proverbial nail on the head. While his ideas as to where education could head have been speculated by others before, his idea that the current higher ed financial crisis could be a catalyst for major change seems dead on.

In fact, in our history, once it has become clear that we can do something as well if not better at far less cost, the entrepreneurial spirit has taken off. Tougher financial times always place a demand on innovation, making us wonder:

Will education continue to be immune?

Or will technology finally intercede and lead one of the last bastions of our society to finally consider new, more cost-effective models?

Flickr photos courtesy of mrplough and metaweb.

Being a former coach, I have written many times about athletics and the many lessons that children can take from sports. That ongoing interest was tweaked once again this past week with the release of a very troubling story from the world of amateur athletics.

Running Up the Score

It featured the firing of a Texas high school basketball coach after his team defeated another by the robust score of 100-0.

That is correct, Micah Grimes’ Covenant girls basketball team hit triple digits, a rarity for high school ball, while his opponent, Dallas Academy, was held scoreless, an almost unheard of result given it was a basketball game.

Reportedly the coach was fired the same day he had published a letter on the web site FlightBasketball.com indicating he would not apologize for the startling margin of victory.

Kyle Queal, the headmaster for the Covenant School, a private Christian school, reportedly would not publicly state why he had fired the coach. However, the top school administrator had already gone on record as calling the final result “shameful.”

Queal and the board chair for the school, Todd Doshier, had published a strong rebuke of the overall result on the school’s web site.

“It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened. This clearly does not reflect a Christlike and honorable approach to competition.”

Ultimately, Grimes was likely terminated for his failure to acknowledge that he might have done something wrong in running up the score. In writing his online letter to express his public disagreement with the school’s position, Grimes clearly drew a line in the sand.

The coach offered this rebuttal:

“In response to the statement posted on The Covenant School Website, I respectfully disagree with the apology, especially the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel ‘embarrassed’ or ‘ashamed.’
We played the game as it was meant to be played and would not intentionally run up the score on any opponent. Although a wide-margin victory is never evidence of compassion, my girls played with honor and integrity and showed respect to Dallas Academy.”

He also insisted he had done a number of things to keep the score down including “sub in bench players, play zone defense, and run the clock for the rest of the game.”

What Score Might Have Been Acceptable?
In discussing the incident, Edd Burleson, the director of the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools acknowledged there was no mercy rule in the game of basketball. That means there are no rules that allow the game to be shortened or to even let the time run continuously.

But Burleson insisted there is “a golden rule” that the coach of Covenant should have applied.

But while it is easy to blame the coach, a comment we read from RedDwarf0510 likely best hits the nail on the head:

“This game should not have been played. Who ever organized it is clearly to blame.”

RedDwarf0510 went on to conclude:

“Competition isn’t nice. It’s not supposed to be.”

When an employee goes to the press to publicly offer his disagreement with the position held by his boss, he does stand a good chance of getting fired. No surprise there.

And we agree with the Headmaster, a score of 100-0 probably does not reflect a Christlike and honorable approach to competition.

But given the clear mismatch in skill and athletic prowess, we have to agree with the notion that whoever scheduled the game put a number of people in some very awkward positions, especially the girls playing for each team.

Leaving us to wonder, in a game of such disparity, what would have been deemed an acceptable score?

Flickr photos courtesy of mvongrue and tabrandt.

In May of last year, writing for the Journal of Cell Science, Martin A. Schwartz penned a very interesting essay The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research.

Schwartz, a Professor of Microbiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia, revealed an interesting anecdote about a fellow Ph.D. student. Unlike Schwartz, it seems that she had not completed her graduate science program. Instead, she had dropped out of graduate school and gone on to pursue a law degree at Harvard. The one-time science graduate school drop out was now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization.

Making One Feel Stupid

In telling his tale, Schwartz acknowledges asking her why it was she left graduate school. To his astonishment, she informed him that her graduate science program had made her feel stupid.

In fact, it seems that the program made her feel stupid on a daily basis. And not too surprisingly when one thinks about it, after about two years of feeling stupid, the one time science student was ready to do something else.

However, in telling his tale Schwartz indicates surprise, but his thoughts centered upon a rather unique fact. He writes:

“I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it.

So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way.”

An Explanation

Schwartz notes that one of the reasons he liked science in high school and college was that he was good at it. He goes on to assume, quite correctly I think, that almost everyone who likes science is because they too are good at it.

He acknowledges that can’t be the only reason. But he goes on to add:

“High-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.”

It is only later that Schwartz acknowledges he started to begin feeling stupid about science. Those feelings came when it was time to posture potential hypotheses and do some true scientific research.

At first, the feeling was overwhelming. There was so much he did not know. And doing important research was hard, “a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses.”

But armed with a certain amount of maturity, he soon had a realization:

“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”

And then in a moment of enormous insight he offers this extraordinary assessment:

“We don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m not talking about `relative stupidity’, in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t.

“Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.

“No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.”

Two Important Points

Of course, there are two rather interesting, but disparate points being made. The first is the case of his female colleague, exceedingly brilliant in Schwartz’s mind, who dropped out of graduate school.

Anyone seeking to understand the major reason that kids drop out of school at any level, be it middle school, high school, college or graduate, need not look any further than this simple story. In our schools, value is placed upon getting the right answers. In our schools, a person’s place in the pecking order comes from how they perform relative to specific academic standards.

If you cannot measure up to those academic standards, you will eventually become frustrated and angry. You will feel stupid. And if you are made to feel stupid repeatedly, day after day, year after year, well they are very likely to do what the attorney did, drop out.

The second, of course, is that all of us at some point will feel stupid. It may not happen until we are much older, but it will happen. Even those for which school was a breeze.

And it is interesting to note how strongly Schwartz contrasts with the proponents of NCLB and the high stakes testing movement that has swept our country in recent years. Instead , the professor suggests that our schools should focus on big important questions and that teachers should help students feel perfectly fine as long as they learned something each time.

That is certainly a direct contrast to our current structure which offers accolades only to those “students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.”

Flickr photos courtesy of artbandito, Jeremy Wilburn, and Radioflyer007.

As the presidency of Barack Obama gets underway, a lot of commentary has emerged regarding the letter he recently penned to his two daughters. Because of the manner in which it was constructed, “What I Want for You — and Every Child in America” (contents below) has been considered a sentimental though suspect “production from the Barack Obama factory of oratory.”

I too must express concerns over public emotional displays that are actually best left private. Such seems to be the case here, a bit like a gimmick to help Parade Magazine as well.

Yet, the concept is a good one and every parent should take note. The letter, done more intimately, may be one of the most important steps you can ever take with your son or daughter.

A Letter to My Son or Daughter
I began my teaching career at a small, Catholic High School in one of Maine’s larger cities, Lewiston. One key aspect of the St. Dominic Regional High School experience was the senior retreat, a time when we took students off campus for a two day spiritual event.

The high point of the two day period was a session involving such parental letters. Prior to the retreat, we would contact each student’s parents and ask them to write a letter. If they could find the time, two letters, one from each parent was all the better.

We gave few directions. The letter needed to come from the heart and it needed to speak of what it meant to watch their son or daughter grow into a young man or woman. We acknowledged that there were no doubt many challenging family moments along the way, but as much as possible we suggested parents focus in on the positive aspects of watching their children grow. We also suggested adding a touch about the fact this was their child’s senior year and that they would soon be moving on to another aspect of their life would also be meaningful.

The distribution of these letters and the subsequent session where students read them silently to themselves was always extraordinary. In a matter of minutes most would be teary-eyed, including the typically most macho group, those teenage male athletes.

The reason was two-fold. First, parents found themselves writing about things they often had never taken the time to say. In some cases, the parents acknowledged they actually had not analyzed some of the situations until constructing the letter – they then found they gained new insights and perspectives when examining those events in retrospect. The sum total was that students were able to read about a number of things they had never talked about with their parents.

Second, there was the power of the written word, the magic of seeing positives written down on a piece of paper where the reader can go back and read them a second and third time. And by virtue of the parents putting their thoughts in writing rather than speaking directly, they were more open and more willing to be intimate in what they shared.

Taking the Concept With Me
Though I would move on to public education after six years at St. Dominic’s, I always remembered the power of those letters on our students. I decided it was something I wanted to do with my own children when it seemed most appropriate.

I did so, constructing such a letter for each of my daughters when they completed high school. In the case of one, the plans at that point were to immediately go on to school to study physical therapy. In the case of the second who had decided she wanted to take some time off before going to school, the letter also acknowledged the challenges of a parent seeing their youngster make a different decision than the one mom and dad had planned.

I was surprised at how easy they were to write and how much there was to say. In fact, keeping the thoughts to a meaningful minimum was the greatest challenge for this dad. Still, writing them gave me extreme pleasure, a feeling that I hope was matched when they read the letters.

Those were the two that I constructed and in retrospect I wished I had done a similar one for the day they were to be married. It was the perfect occasion for another heartfelt assessment of their growth and what it meant to see them take that next step in their lives.

A Great Concept
I was reminded of all this when I read Obama’s letter to his two wonderful young girls. The fact that he understands this human side so well is one reason so many are hopeful about his presidency.

The man appears to have much to offer.

And last weekend, he offered all moms and dads a truly wonderful parenting tip.

Obama’s letter to his girls:

Dear Malia and Sasha,

Love, Dad

Flickr photo courtesy of radiospike, Feverblue, Mr. Wright, thinairchi and Barack Obama.

Imitation is considered the best form of flattery.

There is now a well-known web portal called RateMyProfessors.com. In keeping with that notion, Mark Pesce has suggested it is likely we will soon see yet another similar entity, RateMyLecture.com.

Brandford Marsalis
So it is no surprise to learn of yet another site, this one called RateYourStudents. It is there we found this rather provocative video from the brilliant jazz musician, Brandford Marsalis.

I must say, it is truly difficult to hear any teacher proclaim that students today are completely full of sh_ _ .

But it does beg some further thought. One can only speculate as to the caliber of students the musician works with but it seems to be highly unlikely that the man is dealing with the “average” student.

Those students who manage to get the opportunity to work with this man have to represent some of the best and brightest America has to offer. They also have to be individuals who have distinguished themselves from the crowd when it comes to the field of music.

Yet, Marsalis insists that these students are immensely flawed. Most importantly, according to the teacher/musician, they demonstrate an unwillingness to truly work at their craft.

A Societal Issue
Marsalis lays the issue upon our society.

“We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that. And it actually works just as long as everybody’s winking at the same time. Then, if one person stops winking, you just beat the crap out of that person, and they either starting winking or go somewhere else.”

Of course the strong words of Marsalis beg the question – if this is what he is seeing as a teacher, just imagine what the average college professor must be facing in his or her classroom.

To say nothing of what the public school teachers must be experiencing.

Jodi Hilton, writing for the New York Times, begins her discussion of a fundamental change in the teaching methodology for the introductory physics course at MIT thus:

“For as long as anyone can remember, introductory physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was taught in a vast windowless amphitheater known by its number, 26-100.”

True of Most Large Universities
The sentence was striking as I did not attend MIT. But as a math major and physics minor, the image of 26-100 was the same as that of Bennett Hall and the extraordinarily large amphitheater-like lecture room that was my home thirty plus years ago.

I do not know how many students the room could seat – but somewhere between three and four hundred would not have been an exaggeration. And it was full for first semester physics and calculus, and it was nearly full for the second semester of those courses.

And while additional semesters were often held there, beginning with the third semester of each those courses they could have been held in smaller halls. That was because of the winnowing out of those who simply did not have what it took to be able to survive the demands as structured.

According to Hilton, at MIT it was “as many as 300 freshmen” who sat in 26-100 who “anxiously took notes while the professor covered multiple blackboards with mathematical formulas and explained the principles of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism.”

A Monumental Change
Today, MIT has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture course with smaller classes. As befitting the latest in teaching methodology, the course is now taught with a hands-on, interactive, and collaborative learning approach.

Hilton is quick to point out that M.I.T. is not alone in the change. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard, physicists “have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.”

However, high school physics teachers will likely find the new format at MIT beyond the realm of comprehension. Hilton describes:

“Today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.

“Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related concepts in small groups.

“Teachers and students conduct experiments together. The room buzzes. Conferring with tablemates, calling out questions and jumping up to write formulas on the white boards are all encouraged.”

The new approach at M.I.T. is called TEAL (Technology-Enhanced Active Learning) and the two classrooms cost around $2.5 million each.

The Day the Lecture Died
Once upon a time, the process of teaching physics at MIT (and elsewhere) involved a well-prepared lecture, delivered by a subject matter expert. If the professor was special, he not only was an expert, he had a little shtick that made the entire 50 minute ordeal a little less painful.

Of course, another name for the format was sit and get. Interaction with the professor was nonexistent, questions of understanding and of curiosity took place back at the dorm when fellow classmates attempted to piece together the information they had been presented.

Of course that process worked because the students made it work. At least for those who could make it work. As I noted before, surviving deep into these programs was a sign of intellectual prowess – not everyone was able to do so.

Hilton quotes Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard, regarding the prior practice:

“The people who wanted to understand,” Professor Mazur is quoted, “had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, ‘Let me figure this out.’ ”

Maybe at Harvard or MIT they could all figure it out eventually with effort. That was not true for everyone at my state college.

Mazur indicates the majority of students need a much different approach.

“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV, likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”

Teachers Mimic

Of course the other piece of the puzzle is that some of the students exposed to the prior methodology went on to become teachers (yours truly). When those individuals began teaching such courses they did what most would expect, they used the very same methodologies that they had been exposed to.

Yes, the very methods that led to attrition at the collegiate level, a weeding out of students who had not made the grade, often were used with students of even lesser skill level.

Fortunately today we know better – we know that “sit and get” is not a great classroom strategy.

Yet in classrooms without the requisite technology, the white boards and the assistants, it can be easy to fall back on the lecture format. In fact, the more sophisticated the material, the more difficult it is to stay away from the lecture format.

And With Change

Of course, while it was exciting to read about the positive changes at MIT, there was one small piece of the article that stood out in enormous contrast. It in fact leaped from the screen as I read.

“Of the core science curriculum required of all freshmen, only introductory physics follows the new method. Math, biology and chemistry are still taught through large lecture classes and small recitations.”

And even within the physics department, the “debate over teaching methods continues. Younger professors tend to be more enthusiastic about TEAL than veterans who have been perfecting their lectures for decades.”

But, even at MIT, it is only a slow death.

Flickr photos courtesy of drgandy, infidelic and pinelife.

Lawrence Lessig is the man most turn to when discussing the open source internet era. Lessig, of course, is the author of “Free Culture” and the founder of the Creative Commons.

The brilliant legal mind spent years pushing the intellectual-property envelope, seeking to break down the barriers that might limit current internet innovations by rethinking copyright laws as they exist today. The lawyer had the audacity to insist that the current concerns surrounding copyright infringements in the new media arena was not one debating artistic freedom and protection. Instead it was about control.

But with brilliance clearly comes the desire for new challenges. And so Lessig has taken on a new focus as he moves from the West Coast where he served as a professor of law at Stanford University to the East and in his new position at Harvard University.

Emphasis on Corruption
Having previously taught at Harvard Law, the move to the Stanford of the East (as Harvard is often dubbed by left-coasters) was not the real surprise. The biggest shock with Lessig has come from his shift in intellectual pursuits, to a new topic based on an age-old problem, corruption.

Lessig has begun a five-year commitment to examine corruption in government and academia. In his role, he will head Harvard University’s Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

In an interview with Samuel P. Jacobs of the Boston Globe,
Lessig notes that both politics and academics have lost independence. The new emerging field of consulting creates a situation where professors and/or advocates receive funds from corporations for advice.

However, by virtue of taking funds, these individuals, once thought to be independent thinkers, create a situation where the public begins to assume that money is behind all public policy. The result is that those people once-deemed independent are no longer seen in such a light.

The key of course is that public trust disappears when such independence is lost.

Corrupt System vs. Corrupt Individuals

One of the more interesting points Lessig makes in his interview centers upon the fundamental question of responsibility. The legal scholar believes it is time to shift the focus from the notion of corrupt individuals and examine the larger issue of how society creates corruption opportunities.

Lessig explains to Jacobs:

“There are some people who think about the word “corruption” and they are thinking about it as if it is speaking about something evil. . . . Evil brings to mind images like Hitler or Pol Pot. I’m very much of the view that that is not an interesting way to think about this problem. We have enough attention and understanding about why people like Hitler or Pol Pot or the bad guys in the financial crisis are bad guys. I don’t think we’re actually going to make much progress focusing more of our attention on those bad guys.

What we need to do is to recognize the bad guys in all of us. All of us who don’t take small steps that actually would have a significant chance to eliminate problems. In the academic context, when you don’t raise a question about colleagues who are accepting money to do policy research, making policy recommendations that are directly connected to the money that they are receiving, what you are doing is nothing evil in the Hitler sense. You are just being weak. You’re not asserting an ethical position that, if asserted, might actually help keep the integrity of the institution.”

Great Example

As but one example as to why the entire system must be looked at Lessig offers a story of a situation involving former New Hampshire Senator John Sununu.

“I tell this story in one of my talks about Senator Sununu sending me a nasty note, after I was down in D.C. talking about network neutrality, saying that I ought not to be shilling for these companies. It struck me that he couldn’t imagine that while I was down there doing public policy work, I might just be down there not because somebody was paying me to do it, but because I thought it was the right answer.”

In simplest terms, because other intellectual scholars have sold out, there becomes the assumption that all have done so. Of course the need for public trust in certain institutions goes without saying, but currently there seem to be fewer and fewer such institutions that the public can count on as being independent.

Lessig goes on to note the challenges we now face.

He first notes “the domains of public life where trust is a central part of the success of the mission of those domains: medical research or the legal profession or the media . . . or what Congress does” then adds, “trust is at the center of those institutions …

“If you want people to listen to you when you tell them that they should vaccinate their children against malaria, people need to trust that when you say the vaccines are safe, they are safe.”

Building Trust

Clearly, one key component to rebuilding trust will be to examine the current practice of business funding university research. While many schools have come to see funds from the business sector as necessary to their survival as research institutions, under Lessig’s model any school that accepts such funds is likely no longer able to assert its independence.

And if the school cannot assert independence, then all respective faculty members likewise lose their ability to insist they are independent.

Lessig’s ability to get us all to rethink intellectual property has served the Opensource movement well. We truly hope that he can have a similar impact on the political and academic world.

Because restoring public trust in our political and academic institutions is essential to our society meeting the enormous challenges of the 21st century.

Flickr photos courtesy of DSearls, DSearls, and SimSullen.

If anyone ever had any doubt as to how technology could actually impact the world of education, this report from NBC News should put an end to any hesitation. Imagine if we spent the same amount of funding and provided an exciting real world environment for careers beyond those featuring the military.

After getting over the shock and disappointment of seeing the army sex up war, I immediately returned to one of my longstanding beliefs. If video games and virtual worlds could cause two nineteen-year-olds to consider joining the army and face deployment to Iraq, putting life and limb on the line, imagine what appropriately-designed programming with similar levels of funding could do to motivate our young people for other meaningful careers.

Something like a simulator to excite students about becoming a pilot, or a virtual world that takes children to the bottom of the sea to explore, or perhaps another technological offering that allows other students to make a virtual trip beyond the boundaries of our planet …..

Just imagine what we could accomplish with such an effort.

In fact, dare I say it, with such a process we just might turn schools into a place where children want to be day in and day out. A place that is exciting because of what is available to them, a place where no one would consider dropping out because of what they would miss.

Just imagine.

Sometimes you think you have heard it all only to realize that in actuality you just no longer have serious ingenuity.

Teachers, professors, and bosses – check this out, because it is ingenious! And apparently, it is not new by any means.

File Destructor

“Welcome to File Destructor 2.0.

Want to play games on your Playstation but got a deadline for an exam or report that didn’t match your gaming ambitions?

Then you have come to the right place.

Send trashed files and blame your faulty computer, instead of confessing that you are a lazy bum who just wants to play videogames.”

Yep its a tool to create a fictitious file – pretty ingenious to start with but there is of course more. There is the ability to cover your tracks in true, modern technological fashion.

You can even choose the extension type, something such as my_report.zip, presentation.ppt, fourth_quarter_results.xls, and final_exam.doc, along with a desired file size. It even works for both Mac and PC platforms.

All the while offering the technological equivalent of that age-old excuse, “My dog ate my homework.”

In both 2006 and 2008, Republicans took a sound beating, seemingly losing every close election contest. While many linked this phenomena to an unpopular president and his failed administration, it must be said that some perennial Republican party positions are also at the root of the party’s demise.

Funds for Abstinence Education
One such party position involves funding for abstinence education. Our outgoing president made increased funding for abstinence education a centerpiece of his campaign in 2000. During the Bush era funding nearly tripled, from $73 million per year in 2001 to $204 million per year in 2008.

The Republican party also took a similar position in 2008, a position that was certainly reinforced by the choice of Sarah Palin, an abstinence-only proponent for vice-president. That stance appeared as a plank in the platform alongside another party position, support for programs demonstrating a track record of success.

This stance came in spite of growing concerns over the effectiveness of abstinence education programs. We noted in a prior article that “abstinence-only education has been losing steam in recent years.” The web site WebMD Health News indicated that “Seventeen states, including California, have opted out of the programs, choosing to forgo federal funds and instead teach about abstinence along with contraception, including condom use.”

We also referenced an Associated Press article that confirmed the data noting “that participation in the program is down 40 percent over two years.” States opting not to partake in the program meant that nearly half of all funds for such programming remained unclaimed, this despite the fact that most states were experiencing enormous funding shortfalls.

Effectiveness of Program
Previously, when discussing abstinence-only education, most people would reference a recent summary by the Cochrane Collaboration. The Cochrane folks studied 13 abstinence-only education programs – they could not find one that showed an “enduring effect” on teen’s sexual behavior.

In addition to the Cochrane study, another federally funded study of four abstinence-only programs by the Mathematica Policy Research Inc., published in April of 2007, revealed similar results. The research group found that “participants had just as many sexual partners as nonparticipants and had sex at the same median age as nonparticipants.” In other words, abstinence education programs did nothing favorable – the result was the same as if there were no program being offered at all.

Now a third study, this by Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, revealed some of the most troubling data of all. A national longitudinal study of adolescents, specifically 934 high school students, examined one of the factors used as a measurement of success for abstinence-only education programs, the virginity pledge.

Final Nail in the Coffin
In the most recent study, researchers compared teens who had taken the virginity pledge to those who had not taken a pledge. The researchers found results similar to the aforementioned studies.

First, the rate of the teens taking part in sex was the same. Those taking the virginity pledge were just as likely to have intercourse. The only positive, statistically small, was that those taking the pledge had 0.1 fewer sex partners over the five year study than did those who did not take such a pledge.

However, two other findings were most damning. First, those taking the virginity pledge were less likely to protect themselves. Pledge takers were found to be less frequent users of condoms and other forms of birth control.

Therefore, those youngsters who took the virginity pledge were not only just as likely to have intercourse, they ultimately were more likely to take part in sex in an unsafe manner. This has led experts to conclude that the lessons students take from their abstinence-only education programs is a negative and/or faulty view of contraception.

Second, and most importantly, virginity pledges are one of the measurement tools for determining if the abstinence education program is effective. For these federal funded programs, the government has counted pledges as data that the program is effective.

Rosenbaum summarizes the data succinctly, “Abstinence-only education is required to give inaccurate information. Teens are savvy consumers of information and know what they are getting.”

Time to Put an End to Program Funding
Ellen Goodman, a national columnist, offered this assessment of the entire abstinence-only education movement.

“Our investment in abstinence-only may not be a scam on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But this industry has had standards for truth as loose as some mortgage lenders. All in all, abstinence-only education has become emblematic of the rule of ideology over science.”

While Goodman points to our current president as the source of ideology over science, it is important to recognize that it is not a Bush position, but a Republican position. It is one that may well find its way into the next presidential party platform if certain constituents have their way.

If it does, then people must speak up once again – as Goodman writes: “What the overwhelming majority of protective parents actually want is not a political battle. They want teens to delay sex and to have honest information about sexuality, including contraception.”

Recent data makes it clear – the only way forward towards these objectives is through programs that combine comprehensive sex education lessons.

Flickr photos courtesy of Anqa and Heather Corinna.