On Shipwrecks

I sometimes liken studying humanities at Newcastle to engaging the ocean beaches here. In the beginning of your studies you learn to swim, avoid riptides, and maybe start to body surf a bit in the waves. More advanced students eventually learn to make surfboards with wood lying about and some become quite acrobatic. Later even boats can be made and whole crews join massive research vessels that take off to sail the ocean blue. However, it seems to me that advanced studies in philosophy are something more akin to scuba diving. We study those ships that sink, interrogating their integrity under extreme conditions. Our task includes the various disciplines that surf and sail, maybe even sublating them to draw on Hegel's terminology. However, our aim is to look beneath the waves. It might be called an interest in substance, but probably best to leave it vague given how many ways we've come to think of being since Aristotle first identified metaphysics as such.

To some surfers it's hard to tell what we're doing, as we're invisible below the water. To others who care to peak, it seems rather odd that we might be interested in such de(con)struction. Still the passion for scuba is so strong that I've even known some of my colleagues to sink old ships intentionally and wait for the coral to grow. It's messy at first, but soon, whole new ecosystems develop. New schools of fish come to swim and eek out an existence (new sharks too). I've come to think that some of the new things we're doing in philosophy at Newcastle require some sinking and settling. But there's a reef waiting for us if our wreck catches those age old ocean currents.

Online Ed

A slew of articles have been posted the past few weeks about the "revolution" in online education ventures like Coursera and Edx, but also more widely in universities around the world.  The technology has allowed two main things to happen. Firstly individual instructors are flipping their classes. This is a technique where course content like lectures and other materials are recorded and posted online. Class time is then devoted to seminar discussion and problem solving. Secondly, there are new MOOCs or massive open online courses offered for free where literally hundreds of thousands of students take an advanced mathematics course based on a Princeton professor's course materials which have been revamped into a snazzy online delivery system. As you can imagine, there are all kinds of concerns about the future of higher education in these new modes. Will they make some universities and/or academic staff obsolete? Will student experience of university life be obliterated?

I thought I'd just post a few of these articles here in one go as well as provide a few comments. 

• "The Practical University"  http://nyti.ms/10EfkRa
• "It's a Flipping Revolution" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/10EfbgM
• "Will Online Education Ruin the University Experience" - http://www.newrepublic.com/node/112731
• "New Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level" - http://nyti.ms/10Dt9y3
• "The Professors Who Make the MOOCs" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/10EhHUc
• "To MOOC or not to MOOC" http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/?p=31721

In brief, although I think the modes are likely to change, the actual time and effort it takes to learn will not. Students and staff alike will have more options to transfer knowledge, but the transfer itself is bound by our humanity. "As the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder likes to joke, “With the possible exception of prostitution . . . teaching is the only profession that has had no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.”

1. The time it takes to develop and teach with online education technologies does not significantly decrease for most people. In many cases it increases and takes more time to maintain and produce video lectures, upload them, develop quizzes for them, and maintain the materials year on year.
2. One size does not fit all here. Yes, an advanced algebra class could be built and run again and again for millions of students. However, upper level quantum mechanics will likely need updating as the research progresses. So too, in the humanities our research is constantly contributing to knowledge and updating even first year courses on religion would be necessary to stay up to date.
3. Even with the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the initial investment of putting the material online and then managing it is, itself, a massive venture. Some have received hundreds of thousands of dollar grants just to develop MOOCs on things like creative writing. Although extensive testing works in some instances, the humanities also still require essays, which, in turn requires human time and work to mark them adequately. Even with new artificial intelligence essay marking software, which is going to be released for free by MIT, a human being must mark 100 essays to "train" it to mark the rest. So too, many skeptics remain dubious about computer essay marking's effectiveness and the ease with which it can be duped. 
4. Some of these articles worry about how the university experience is going to change after this online revolution takes hold. I think many are correct in arguing that universities will not be able to continue to sell lecture theatre style courses without providing some significant added value. Why would a student sit through a general first year introduction to religion course when the materials are already online for free somewhere else? It seems to me we will be required to spend more time in smaller seminars with more personal engagement to help students better understand, interpret and engage what they are downloading.
5. In the end, the extra time staff put into online materials can enhance the time put into class with students. What's happening is that rather than seeing the class time as the place to gather information, and the out of class time where students discuss and organise it, the reverse is being practiced. What students most need are the practical skills and the habits of the mind that universities are ideally suited to nurture, e.g. curiosity, thoroughness, and cognitive empathy. Class time should focus on teaching those skills and use them to engage with our specific discipline areas.
6. After all is said and done, I think academic staff will be as vital as ever to these new modes of teaching. It's not the end of the university but a new beginning. Financial pressures have been making courses larger and larger. We should be able to use these technologies to get back to more engagement with students face to face. As broadband becomes ubiquitous, smartphones get smarter, and all of this technologies becomes cheaper and more reliable, we should be able to harness their potential to get back to engaging students as has been done for thousands of years.
7. I think there is a barrier that many will have overcome as they learn how to use and develop these technologies. However, they are getting easier and easier to use. A lot of attention has been placed upon MOOCs, but just as important is the advances in usability for a range of online tools.
8. I think there will be lower level courses that are MOOCed (yes, it's now a verb). However, this should free many academics' time to be focused on more advanced teaching and research at upper levels.  I don't see why this won't be possible to coordinate if managed properly so that academic staff make the transition equitably.
9. However, this is not to avoid the obvious. A shake up is coming in higher education and there will likely be fall out for those who either can't embrace the new modes or refuse to. This is not just a matter for those lecturing in these courses. Equitable transition depends on managers who understand the actual costs and develop new workload models required to fund and support these new systems. In any case, even if all university professors flipped their classes tomorrow and made half of them MOOCs, it would still require an enormous amount of work to manage and maintain. So too, the time it takes students to learn more or less remains the same. In other words, I'm not sure recent advances indicate the beginning of the end, so much as the end of a new beginning for higher education.

Generous Atheism?

“No matter how they answer the God question, generous-minded people could profit from adopting an attitude of critical sympathy towards religion and maybe even taking the odd dip into it – provided they heed Canon William Vanstone’s warning that the Church is like a public swimming pool, where most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”

"After God: What Can Atheists Learn from Believers?" New Statesman -http://bit.ly/10tPe3D

UC Online

“Online classes are and will be part of the educational mix, in California and elsewhere. But they cannot be counted on to revive a beleaguered public system whose mission is to educate a great many freshmen who need close instruction and human contact to succeed. To broaden access and preserve what is left of the public university, California lawmakers will need to change budget priorities that have been moving in the wrong direction for a long time.”

"Resurrecting California's Public Universities - http://nyti.ms/10r8ltK​

On Anti-Judaism

“It would be churlish to end on such a note. A good book—and Anti-Judaism is a very good one indeed—raises more questions than it answers. Nirenberg makes perfectly clear, with good reason, the questions that concern him most. Martin Luther’s onslaughts on the Jews were even more violent and destructive than those of his Catholic predecessors. Nirenberg shows that they arose in the first place from biblical interpretations hammered out in controversy with Luther’s theological antagonists. This, not actual conversions for which little real evidence exists, was the basis of his anxiety that the world was converting to Judaism. Nirenberg concludes, ‘I am not interested in contributing to arguments, so often dominated by apologetics and anachronism, about whether Martin Luther was an anti-Semite or an architect of the Holocaust. My point is that Luther’s reconceptualization of the ways in which language mediates between God and creation was achieved by thinking with, about, and against Jews and Judaism.’ Generalized to embrace the whole of Western intellectual history, this becomes a point of great importance. It will take some time to absorb its implications.”

"The Quarrels of Others: On Anti-Semitism" The Nation ​-http://bit.ly/YwqvQf

You're Distracted

“The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in a unique class designed to raise students’ awareness about how they use their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill’s course, ‘Information and Contemplation,’ goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation—during class—to sharpen their attention.”

"You're Distracted, This Professor Can Help" The Chronicle - ​http://bit.ly/16c1Obi

How Movements Recover

“Like most of the world, I don’t know much about Pope Francis, but it’s hard not to be impressed by someone who says he prefers a church that suffers ‘accidents on the streets’ to a church that is sick because it self-referentially closes in on itself.”

David Brooks, "How Movements Recover," - http://nyti.ms/Xh8YVS​

On Paper Surveillance

An interesting article was just posted reviewing Ben Kafka's recent book The Demon of Paperwork: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. ​It's interesting in pointing out the bureaucratic nature of writing, and, more importantly its optimistic promise of the power of transparency in making governments accountable. Precisely here, the gordian knot of surveillance and citizenship is tied.

“The hope of some of the French revolutionaries was that paperwork would rationalize the state, that it would depersonalize power and destroy the corrupt networks of aristocratic influence.... While this desire can turn documentation into what Kafka calls a “technology of political representation” by which citizens can track whether the state is serving their interests, it also makes paperwork into a voracious medium that authorizes blanket surveillance of citizens and their reconstitution as vulnerable data sets as a condition of citizenship. You are no one without your permanent file. Part of Kafka’s achievement in The Demon of Paperwork is to show how readily revolutionary optimism is undone by administrative surveillance, even when it’s adopted in the revolution’s name. Revolution promises to wash away the most intractable social problems, but then paperwork rears itself to show that these problems have only been displaced to an impersonal and intractable medium.”

Paperwork Against the People" Dissent - http://bit.ly/Y4vCzZ​

On Cursive

“I did also once ask my daughter’s teachers what they thought they were doing by teaching her cursive. When they realised this was not a rhetorical question but a literal one, there was bemusement and panic. “It’s just what we do,” one said. “We always have.” Another ventured the answer I’d anticipated; that the children will be able to write faster, and then added that she thought she’d seen some research somewhere showing that some children find the flowing movements help to imprint the shape of whole words more clearly in their mind. ”

Philip Ball, "Curse of Cursive Handwriting" Prospect - ​http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=131155

16th Century Kindle

“One of the defining features of Kindles and iPads and their fellow e-readers is their ability to store tons of books in the same place, at the same time. Which means that, thanks to these quintessentially twenty-first-century technologies, we are newly encouraged to consume our books not as long meals, but as occasional snacks: a few nibbles of Moby-Dick here, a few bites of Bossypants there. Under e-readers’ influence, the linear project of book-reading — from page 1 to page 501, sequentially — has shifted to something much more chaotic, much more casual, much more accommodating to whimsy and whim. Literary restlessness, though, dates back much further than the 21st century. It dates back, at least, to the 16th — to the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, and to his desire for a reading interface that would allow for book-borne snacking.”

"Behold, The 16th Century Kindle," The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/Y4uHzv

Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, via Wikimedia Commons