Two Boards and Most of the Idea

There has been an interesting exchange on one of the Chronicle of Higher Education blogs relating to a story on the efforts of Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) to manage the funding of research grants by the National Science Foundation.  This effort is part of Rep. Smith and the Republican majority in the House to politicize and eventually eliminate NSF research funding . One source describes it thusly:

“The bill says that any research done using federal funds (which is the majority of research done in the United States) must have its results and finding approved by the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the House of Representatives. If the findings are not agreed to, the research is taken from the researchers and disposed of by Congress as it sees fit.”

Rep. Smith’s long-term agenda is quite clear: kill off any independent research in the country that does not explicitly support the Republican political agenda, made abundantly clear by his attitude toward climate research.

As usual, I had to have my say ; here’s my response to the original posting:

I served as an NSF Program Manager in the early-to-mid 1980′s; I’ve also been both the recipient of NSF grants and had proposals declined, so I’m very familiar with the game from all sides. While I might not be one of Manoflamancha’s “best and brightest”, I and my colleagues conducted thoroughly professional and thorough reviews of the research proposals that we received, obtaining reviews from a wide range of highly competent scientists who took time from their own research to help us evaluate the next generation of projects in their field, and then synthesizing these comments into helpful guidance for the proposers and working closely with them to shape their projects more effectively. As a result of this very demanding and time-consuming process, we helped to generate a large number of ground-breaking research projects, including the first empirical studies of the impacts of personal computing on white-collar work.

There is no question that political elements enter into NSF’s funding of research. At the time, our “adversary” was Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin – I put that in quotes because despite his stern criticism of some NSF grants, he firmly believed in the value of science and its ability to improve lives; we just occasionally disagreed on how to do it. There was also internal academic politics, involving pressure to fund large well-established researchers rather than innovative new proposals, so we always had to juggle these elements as well. All program managers learn quickly how the research funding game is played; but the result of the game is that almost all of the research funded by NSF is of high quality, and a lot of high-quality proposals are not supported.

Rep. Smith is trying to impose an entirely different political agenda on research funding. He is hardly agenda-free; he is an explicit denier of climate change, among other things. He is seeking to impose a political review on all federally-supported research to be sure that the findings confirm the prejudices of his political supporters. If he succeeds, there will be no research supported that is not cleared first by his committee, which includes numerous self-proclaimed anti-science members. Independent research and research that might reach independent conclusions will be effectively dead in this country which is entirely in accordance with the Republican agenda. This whole dialogue needs to framed on terms of what its real purpose is – not screening for quality, but for conformance to a rigid and generally anti-scientific political agenda.

Following a brief and extremely general diatribe against all social science research and an accusation that I was furthering my own political agenda, I responded further:

I am trained as an organizational psychologist, largely through the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, one of the most respected programs in the country. I have taught research methods and statistics from beginning through structural equation modeling at several well-ranked universities, and I will go toe to toe with you on any statistical or measurement issue you care to debate (although I doubt it would interest anyone else). And yes, I do use “canned programs” such as SPSS, SAS, AMOS, and SmartPLS, largely because I don’t see all that much virtue in spending the next 15 years inverting matrices by hand, as apparently you feel is desirable (although I also doubt that you practice.)

Behavioral/social science is not physics (despite the degree of “physics envy” that sometimes leads my colleagues to drape their research in complex statistics that the data won’t support. It is a science, in that it has established rules of inference and procedures in place to reasonably protect against bad reasoning. Statistical analysis is helpful, as long as it’s adapted to the data. Statistics at bottom is simply a way of helping us avoid committing the inferential errors we’re all prone to. It doesn’t “prove” anything – but neither does it do any damage. Ultimately, the utility and validity of any research study, in “hard” or behavioral sciences, depends on the quality of the research questions asked, the nature of the data collected relating to the question, the acceptability of the research procedures, the suitability of the data to the analytical procedures employed, and the reasonableness of the conclusions based on the analysis. This is not a series of assessments to be made off the cuff by someone with no training or experience in research – particularly not by a congressman from Texas who cavalierly dismisses all scientific evidence in the case of climate change and whose publicly proclaimed agenda includes the systematic subordination of women, the suppression of gay people, and, it might be reasonably inferred, white supremacy.

Of course I am and have been political; no one can operate in any organization today without being sensitive to both organizational and national politics. Politics is, as Robert Dahl once commented, all about “who gets what, when, and how.” When everyone else is devoted to acquiring your resources for their purposes, you’d simply be a fool not to join the process, if only to protect yourself in the clinches. Obviously, you have your own political agenda, which may or may not coincide with Rep. Smith’s, which includes deriding or suppressing any behavioral or attitudinal research that might call your agenda into question. The difference between us is that I encourage research -good research – regardless of its direction, and if it’s well done, I’ll give credibility to the findings. I’m not afraid of new knowledge, as I’m afraid all too many folks today are.

I apologize for taking up so much of the blog with reprints of dialogues engaged in elsewhere, but I feel strongly enough about this potential perversion of research at NSF and elsewhere that I’d like to see the dialogue broadened. I’m sure there will be further exchanges on this subject; watch this space.

I’ve been experimenting recently a bit with a quite fascinating new research tool brought to you by those wonderful folks at Google Labs. It’s called an “Ngram Viewer“, and it’s basically a tool for taking words and phrases and, as Google puts it, “…display[ing] a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., “British English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over…selected years”. It’s a technique of limited extent, but quite interesting in what it can do. Since it’s easier to describe in illustration than in the abstract, let’s consider an example [BTW, if the page versions are too small to make out appropriately, click on the [FS] after the ngram and a full sized version of the picture will be available]:

[FS] This ngram considers the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) as represented in the American English corpus from 1850 to the present. The metric on the Y-axis is the percent of books published at the date in question (the X-axis) that contain the subject word or phrase. It can be interpreted approximately as follows: science  is far and away the most common term, and although it fluctuates some up and down, has remained about as common between then and now. Engineering and mathematics got relatively little play until the 1930s, rose some then, and have remained about the same since then. Technology, however, although it got a really late start, skyrocketed past the others about 1960, even surpassing science itself about 2000; since then it has dropped down slightly but remain sat about its high level.

World-shaking? Hardly. Suitable for hypothesis testing? No this is strictly an exploratory technique (I’ll be posting on the critical differences between exploratory and hypothesis testing research in the next few days.) Informative? Well, that depends on what you can tie to it., and what your interests are. Personally, I found it interesting how fast technology rose as a meme during our techno-fascination period,\, and how it’s begun to fall off almost as quickly since 2000.

[FS] Let’s look at another one. This one charts six disciplines with which I have been strongly or loosely identified with over the years. It shows that until around 1910 these terms hardly ever emerged into book titles, but starting then and continuing until about 1930 they all took off, with psychology taking the lead; that field then dropped some, but then recovered somewhat.  Sociology peaked about 1935, and despite a brief rise in the 1970s, has generally remained pretty flat; likewise engineering, but at a somewhat higher level. Economics briefly plateaued,m but then took off again, reaching a high in 1985, but then falling off again. Political science and business administration are essentially non-starters;l it doesn’t mean that they haven ‘t been written about, but that they haven’t been featured in titles.

[FS] The ngram viewer can also be configured to look at differences between terms. This one explores three current dichotomies in terms of which term got more play at what times.The line for “public-private” shows a definite advantage for public over this time period (1800-present). The line for “government-business” shows a slowly declining advantage for government until about 1905, when business took the advantage; about 1940 government regained the edge, but lost it again in 2000. I find the line for “problem-solution” particularly interesting. Titles featuring “solution” had an advantage until about 1928, when problem took the lead and has held it since then although with its advantage declining slightly since 2000.

That’s enough for now. I’ve got some more that I’ll present soon. In the meantime, I’ll ask you to think about this, and if there’s any particular analysis you’d be interested in, either run it yourself or better yet, send your question to me in a comment and I’ll run it and interpret it for you. As I said, this isn’t a hypothesis testing technique, but it can be quite interesting. And, thanks to the nice folks at Google, it’s both free and comprehensive.

Well, I’m still working on my MOOC presentation, so I’m not ready to post on it yet. But I thought that I would share some thoughts that came to me recently, following watching a History Channel special on dinosaurs that, among other things, shattered my previously held image by pointing out that among other things, velociraptors were almost certainly covered in bright feathers – veritable boa-raptors! So, I reasoned in my inimitable fashion, what ELSE don’t we know about dinosaurs?

In a following exchange on one of the BigThink discussions, I took the opportunity to respond to a somewhat negative view of dinosaurs, as follows:

“It’s premature of you to dismiss the dinosaurs so casually as mere animals. It’s entirely possible that they possessed science, literature, and/or philosophy, through a rich mental and conceptual life. Just because they apparently lacked technology, particularly for writing, is hardly evidence of lack of thought. After having been around for 200 million years, why is it impossible that T. rex could have come up with quantum mechanics, a velociraptor the theory of relativity, or a lambeosaurus a theory of interspecies ethics far surpassing that of Kant? None of this would have required any paws-on technology; merely a nimble mind.

It’s also quite possible that written language was created and subsequently abandoned by mid-Jurassic, in favor of epic poetry committed to memory (a much superior medium, I believe). Expressing the fundamental theorems of calculus or general relativity in the High Stegosaurus equivalent of Myxolydian mode would have been just the thing to do while casually munching one’s way across a  fruited Cretaceous plain. And let’s not forget the possibility of telepathy; with a couple of hundred million years to work with, why shouldn’t evolution have been able to come up with something like that, as well as longer fangs?

It’s mammal-chauvinism of the first water to arbitrarily assert that arguably the most successful (at least in terms of long-surviving) group of vertebrates ever to walk this planet had to be incapable of advanced intellect, perhaps surpassing ours. Exploring the implications of the theme of therapod sapience would be an enterprise at least as worth pursuing as, say, unraveling the perpetration of 9/11, IMHO.”

In response to a subsequent question regarding the species identity of dinosaurs, I relayed the following experience to explain why I take this issue somewhat personally:

“Regarding the reptilianity of dinosaurs, I recall back in sixth grade in Iowa City hearing my teacher Mr. Brooks tell the class that dinosaurs were mammals. I questioned this, and despite being somewhat admonished, subsequently decided to write a short but well-researched report (with several citations, based on a couple of trips to the library over the weekend) establishing that dinosaurs were in fact not mammals but reptiles (I generally don’t do admonishment well.) When I presented my report to Mr. Brooks on Monday, I was given the opportunity to learn an important lesson about social relationships; namely, that it doesn’t matter nearly as much who’s right as who has the power. This is a lesson that I have had to learn the hard way on a number of subsequent occasions, fortunately none of them fatal.

As it turned out, there wasn’t a whole lot of the sixth grade left, and by seventh grade I was in a different school halfway around the world where my Permanent Record from Iowa didn’t really reach, or perhaps was trumped by the fact that my father was a colonel. Had I remained in Iowa, even I would pretty soon have noticed the little target pinned on my back visible at first only to teachers, but later on to all the kids – “snot-nosed little know-it-all troublemaker – handle with as little care as possible”. Since the badge was only conceptual, I don’t still have a copy, but I regarded it at the time as a badge of honor, and it’s shaped my subsequent career in interesting ways. I’ve wiped my nose and gotten fat, but I am still a know-it-all troublemaker – although I have also gotten better at managing trouble, along the way.”

One of the pleasures of writing this sort of blog, read by very few but wide open to my flights of fancy, is the opportunity to offer peculations on issues such as the sapience of dinosaurs, as well as to confess to assorted sins of attitude. When I return to being a normal person, I may no longer have this luxury. So if you are also taken by the notion of the quantum-raptor, please let me know! If you’re not, well, you’ll be pleased to know that at least Mr. Brooks would agree with you.

There has been in the Chronicle of Higher Education and BigThink blogs recently considerable debate about the value and role of massive online open-source courses (MOOC’s, in the jargon.) If you’ve been stuck in Lower Slobbovia State U. for the last year and a half or so, you may have missed the emergence of this phenomenon; for anyone else in the educational establishment, the idea has managed to move from unknown to novelty to mainstream to existential threat in record time. Implemented through a number of consortia of elite universities including Coursera, Udacity, edX, and others, this model for delivering course material on topics ranging from computer science to poetry at no cost to recipients other than the time involved in participating is probably the major topic of conversation in higher education today once one has finished deploring the student loan crisis. Everyone has an idea as to where this trend is going, and predictably these range from “flash in the pan” to “the end of higher education as we know it”, sometimes from the very same sources.

Unlike a large portion of the experts who have weighed in on the topic of MOOC’s, I actually speak from some degree of experience – first as the designer of early large-scale courses during my time with my previous University, then as an actual enrollee in three separate Coursera courses. Each experience was different in critical ways, and I’ll try to clarify just what that means in a moment.

Before proceeding further, I’d like to call your attention to a rather amazing short video by “technology guru” Richard Katz called “Edu@2025″  (it’s available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07KnT4Fg9Go.) Ostensibly cast as a history of higher education through the year 2025, the meat lies in the predictions for 2013 and immediately beyond. [NOTE: spoilers follow. Really.] The overall theme is the increasing convergence of education and popular media, including the potential mergers of Google and the University of Phoenix (see intro pic) and of Disney and Sony, leading to standardized national curricula for higher education, elimination of faculty in favor of instructional designers, and the fundamental demise of what one would normally consider to be the college or university experience. As 15 minutes of academic dystopia goes, this is hard to top. The problem is that it is all too real, or at least all too plausible not to become real. If you review this vision in light of what I’m about to say with regards to my own MOOC experiences, you’ll see what I mean.

The first Coursera course that I took was on gamification – that trendy approach to learning and involvement that tries to adapt principles learned from video gaming to the reinforcement of participation in beneficial activities. Taught by a very competent and interesting professor from Wharton, the course was definitely enlightening, bringing together principles from a wide variety of social psychological and related studies. Methodologically, there was nothing particularly innovative about it except for the 35,000 student enrollment. There were some relatively simple multiple-choice quizzes and a couple of short writing assignments that were subject to “peer grading” – an interesting approach, but not one that yielded much of any useful feedback. I did work my way through all the material, but due to some other time pressures did not complete the final assignment and thus did not receive the certificate. I felt that I had gotten all I was going to get out of the course from the lectures and readings, and thus saw little benefit in going out of my way to finish the assignments.

The second course rapidly became legendary for being the first Coursersa course ever to have it its plug pulled after only about 10 days. Interestingly, it was billed as a course on “distance learning” -  although it promptly became evident that the course designers had no real idea how to manage a course of that size while at the same time preserving the small group approach to which they seemed committed. After stumbling through a week and a half of trying to organize groups with some coherence and failing to even touch upon the content, the course was unceremoniously shut down, presumably to the relief of all.

I am still in the middle of the third course. It’s interestingly titled “Passion-Driven Statistics”, and I enrolled because (a) I wanted to verify my own data analysis skills against someone else’s criteria, and (b) I wanted to see where the passion came from. Going into the third week, I’m still unclear about the passion. A large portion of the course effort thus far seems to revolve around how to set up and run SAS analysis routines. There has been some moderate attention to the formulation of effective research questions, but relatively little about how those might be driven by passion, either positively or negatively. There is an imaginative presentation system built into this course through the requirement that students create a Tumblr blog for presentation and discussion of their findings, but I have yet to see how this can be significantly enlarged and effective feedback provided. My own blog is in a state of under-development at the moment, so I won’t point you toward it just yet; when I feel I have something useful to say, I will.

I think I will break this discussion at this point and do some more work on my course. In my next follow-up post here, I will begin to make some comments on MOOC advantages and limitations, as well as to draw some conclusions relative to the video I mentioned earlier. At any rate, it feels good to be back online, and I hope that I can continue to attract at least some audience for some of the ideas I hope to develop in future months. Watch this space.

Well, my friends, it is high time that I got back to putting ideas before the public. Grieving for my friend Tora has gone on long enough. She was always one for getting on with things, and not letting oneself get distracted by epiphenomena. So beginning today, I’m going to try to resume a regular schedule of postings to this blog.

One minor note before I resume: it is interesting to note that for a brief period, Tora’s final gift to me was increase my modest readership to unheard-of levels – one day, as high as 165 (this from a baseline of approximately 20.) I was briefly the number three listing on Google under the heading, “Tora Bikson.” I was enormously flattered to be considered such a resource, but at the same time realizing at what cost. The following graph shows changes in my readership from Feb. 1 until now. I don’t know what’s more embarrassing – the regular readership, or the temporary spike due solely to tragedy:

At any rate, I hope that we will be able to pursue the idea of the “festschrift” that I raised originally a couple of months ago. John King and others have raised some possibilities worth pursuing.

In the long run, Tora’s real memorial is her body of work and influence. That will be with us as long as fine and insightful behavioral science research is valued.

I’d like to begin part two of this memorial to Tora with deep appreciation to those of you who commented on part one, sharing some of your own remembrances (I’ve adjusted the settings so that comments now show by default). I’m sure we’ll have a lot more to share at the RAND memorial on Friday, February 22. While you’re here, I hope you have a chance to stick around and read some of the other pieces that I posted here, and perhaps come back again.

I was at my acupuncturist’s a day or so ago, and mentioned Tora’s passing as a source of some strain. Sympathetically, she said “Remember the good times.” A kind observation – but it prompted me to think that with Tora, there never were any bad times. Extraordinarily, over the course of the more than 32 years that we worked and lived through, I cannot recall a single occasion on which we had any significant argument or disagreement. Occasionally, we would have different opinions about some issue in a project or such, but these were always resolved quickly and effectively by simply talking them through. I certainly don’t have any other friends or family about whom I can say that we’ve never argued; I’m usually pretty quick to defend my positions, and verbally dexterous enough to argue rings around almost everyone. But with Tora, I never needed to. Either she was so right that I immediately accepted her point of view, or calm enough that it would simply absurd to raise the emotional temperature to boiling. In short, she was always able to bring out very best in me – and, in my observation, in everyone else with whom she interacted.

Thinking about this, and thinking about Don’s comment regarding the RAND project on which they worked together (I do remember your screenplay, Don!), I realized one other thing. Tora never did a piece of less than top-quality research, and never allowed those working with her to perform at less than top-quality. This can’t be said about most researchers, myself included; there have been a number of my projects that I’m just as happy to see relegated to the bottom drawer. It’s not that we set out to do mediocre research; but circumstances conspire to allow us to get away with things under pressure that in our research heart of hearts we know we shouldn’t do. But Tora was always able to keep her eyes on the prize, plan ahead or adapt on the spot, and ensure that what we did was done well and addressed the issues clearly. The one time that she and I were not able to deliver exactly what we promised was the fascinating project for which we had an NSF grant on user-modifiable interfaces to email systems. That was the occasion on which our great technical research assistant, who had put together all of the programming including the automatic data collection procedures that logged our results into the records at Sun Microsystems (our client) had left RAND for a job at Sun. This would’ve been fine, except that he was most unfortunately killed in an auto accident shortly after arriving in Mountain View. We soon discovered that he had left no record of where in all the Sun systems our results were being logged; thus, we had next to no research data to analyze. Nothing will bring a research project to a screaming halt sooner than no data. Thanks to Tora, we were able to rebound and find enough knowledge in what we had already assembled that we were able to write a responsive report, but the opportunity was lost to do a truly cutting-edge project at the time. The moral of the story is, I suppose, make sure you know where you’re putting your data. Needless to say, I was a shrieking wreck, but Tora’s equanimity soon restored my soul.

I can’t resist one more short anecdote of remembrance. In 1992, Tora and I attended the European Conference on CSCW in Milan. We agreed to arrive a couple of days earlier for a bit of vacation. We met at the train station, and decided to run up to Lago Maggiore for the weekend. It was a delightful occasion, despite having to explain to a somewhat surprised hotel operator why we needed a room with two beds instead of one. The most amusing part was walking into stores – she being blonde and I at the time having fairly light brown hair, all the shopkeepers immediately spoke to her in German. She would promptly respond in French (her fluency always amazed me), and I just stood there looking cute, my German and French being confined to so few effective phrases as to label me terminally American. In that part of Italy, of course, German, French, and Italian are spoken almost interchangeably; blonds, obviously, would be German. This happened so often that we giggled all the way back to Milan. In all our assorted social and professional travels together, I believe this was the only time I was ever mistaken for a German. It should happen to everyone at least once.

By way of conclusion, I’d like to suggest to all her colleagues that that we consider putting together a festschrift in her honor. In case you’re not familiar with this concept, it’s a memorial collection of new research papers written by people who had worked with the honoree and addressing issues on which they had worked together. These are not common, but it’s my opinion that her standing in the research community (or, more properly, communities, since she worked in so many different areas) warrants thinking about this possibility. This could be published either as a RAND report or, equally fittingly, online in what’s called a “webfestschrift”. This doesn’t have to be done immediately, but if you are possibly interested in participating in such an effort, let me know. I’d be more than happy to serve as editor of this effort if we can get enough people interested in contributing. The research reported doesn’t have to be major, but it certainly should be complete and of high quality, reflecting the honoree. At any rate, I’m putting this suggestion out there to see if there is enough interest. Think about it.

Thanks for following my small attempt to honor one of the most truly fabulous people I’ve ever known. She will be with us always.

The world is a lot less interesting today. On Friday, Tora K. Bikson of the RAND Corporation passed away, suddenly and in her office, while doing what she loved and did so well – applying her fine mind and eloquent expression to research problems. For the past more than 32 years, Tora was my closest working intellectual partner and best friend apart from my family members. It’s almost impossible to understand what a loss this is to her family and close friends, as well as to her enormous and highly varied set of colleagues all around the world and in so many different scientific and literary disciplines. She has been a towering presence in my professional and personal life, and she will be missed without reservation.

Tonight I’m not up to a full-scale memorial effort; in coming weeks, I will be writing further about her contributions and about our work together and with other close colleagues – Cathy Stasz, Don Mankin, Barbara Gutek, Lynne Markus, and so many more. I’ll content myself for now with the image of our first meeting back in 1980. I was at the National Science Foundation at the time, and fighting an uphill battle to have the idea taken seriously that computers, particularly the emerging mini- and micro-computers, were going to have major effects on offices and white-collar work generally (I had been told by the senior management of the Foundation that computers might be useful for engineering work, but weren’t likely to have much impact beyond that.) I’d been working for a number of months with my friend Bonnie Johnson, then at the University of Oklahoma, putting together a proposal to study this area under the topic of what we then called “office automation”. It was about ready to go to review, but I was very skeptical of its chances through the process.  At this point, the mail dropped on my desk a research proposal from the RAND Corporation, with a certain T’K. Bikson as principal investigator, to study many of the same issues! Having had no interaction at all with the investigators before receiving the proposal, I was not at all sure how we might be able to deal with it. A couple of hours later, having read it through in detail, I was pretty much completely blown away. The clarity and quality of the proposal were stunning, the research both manageable and reasonably priced – and to top it all off, it meshed so beautifully with the work that Bonnie and I had been discussing, it was as though the RAND team had been listening in on us for a year. I went howling down the corridor, for the first time able to believe that we might actually be going to do some great research in an area up to that time almost completely ignored. Meeting Tora in my office for the first time a couple of months later, after several long and enthusiastic phone calls, was as much of a treat as I thought it would be, and bringing her together with Bonnie added further icing. It should be noted that there was still much drama to go before the work was done, but that a story for another time.

Once we got the work under way, and I started going to RAND to meet with the team, there was hardly a month that went by that Tora and I weren’t up to some joint project. My leaving NSF in 1985 for California added a new level of collaboration, through and including our work together on the 1990 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (the third one held, this time in Los Angeles.) That was a great intellectual party, even if ACM wound up being a bit underwhelmed at how I’d handled its finances (another story.) And for several more years, the hits just kept on coming – one of the most productive, as well as enormously fun, periods for both of us.

Well, that will have to do it for now. I can’t deal with this any more tonight. All of Tora’s family, friends, and colleagues will have to deal with this devastating loss in our own ways. There’s so much more to remember and treasure, when my eyes aren’t running quite so much. Rest well, my dear friend…until the Storytelling!

As  you may have noticed, I’ve added a bit of Japanese art as background to this blog. I felt that it looked a little bland and excessively centered. In these days of extreme positions of one sort or another, being in the middle isn’t necessarily a bad thing; however, I think that it’s important to be aware of the universe of discourse within which these posts are being made.

I’ve undertaken to provide both left and right wings to the site. As you’ll notice, they are both suitably fierce and confrontational. My aim is to provide a zone of relative calm between the contenders. It’s not that I intend to be bland or even non-confrontational; you’ll find me taking some fairly extreme positions of various sorts from time to time. However, you’ll probably have some difficulty locating them on a conventional left/right spectrum.  I tend to operate within a sort of political string theory; generally no less than eleven dimensions are required to categorize most of my positions. [I'll expand on this in an other post soon.]

The particular prints from which these images are taken came into my family in 1953, when my father, a US Army officer serving in Japan, visited Fukuoka in southern Japan, and purchased the book of prints. They are all classic woodblock prints, made between about 1815 and 1845, on traditional subjects. Originally, there were about 32 prints in the book; over the years, a number have been removed and framed separately for family members. The specific artists are generally unknown (although there was one original Hiroshige print glued to the back of another one; this was rather carefully removed and separately framed.) But they are all stylish, some enormously intricate, and overall excellent examples of classic Japanese art.

Over time, I may be moving these around, or adding others – or I may change the entire format. We’ll see. But for the meantime, that’s what these are (and yes, they are my property to use in this fashion.)

By the way, I’ve also put together a new logo for my site. I haven’t  quite figured out where to use it, but I do believe that it embodies the key concepts of “two boards” and “most if the idea”. Let me know how you like it:

At one point in the CHE discussion on transferability of ideas across courses, a participant noted that students graduating from their program often expressed concern as to whether all they had taken added up to anything useful in the Real World. As conditions out there become increasingly difficult particularly for new graduates, this is a completely legitimate concern, and one that needs to be addressed explicitly by faculty (see Part 1 of this discussion.) But it also occurred to me that this issue of “how does what I know apply in other areas?” doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door, but is a continuing concern throughout one’s career.

At the moment, I am at the age of 69 and without a job for a substantial period for the first time in my post-college life. Interesting work opportunities have tended to present themselves at crucial points, and this has added up to a long and very interesting and varied career. This time, fate seems to be striking out; however, I’m not ready to pack it all in just yet. Thus, I’m trying to sort out just what I can do and why it might matter to someone. What may look to me like excellent qualifications for many different positions seem to look to many potential employers like either lack of focus or over-qualification. I’ve put my name in on perhaps 25 different opportunities, and have yet to receive even a nibble. This tells me that my experiences, and by extension the presumed skills that I would have to have to have done what I have done (wow, that’s quite a tongue-twister!) count for just about diddly. Obviously, I’ve been able to transfer ideas and skills between different kinds of organizations and across industry, government, and university sectors, but I have yet to figure out how to reflect this in a way that’s meaningful to my potential next employer.

It’s very similar to the plight of the brand new graduate trying to reflect how their education qualifies them to do anything. The broader the scope of what they’ve studied, and presumably their ability to transfer ideas and skills among different environments, the less focus they seem to have. Likewise, my highly varied and diverse career seems to look like dilettantism, and fails to appeal to employers looking for a specific kind of person. I never thought that being a polymath would actually work against me in the marketplace. Demonstrating the value of transferability requires actually getting in the door – and that’s hard to do in a workplace increasingly focused on specific skills.

I’m not complaining here, or whining about how potential employers aren’t giving me a fair shake or properly attending to my credentials; I’ll do that on my own time, not yours. What I’m simply posing here is the idea that developing generalizable and transferable skills across one’s career is very like developing generalizable and transferable ideas across a student’s program of study. The difference is that in the case of the student, the burden for development of transferability lies on the faculty teaching him/her; in the case of the mature professional, the burden lies on the individual to develop and demonstrate such skills. The paradox is that the more varied one’s career may be, the less valued transferability may be to potential employers.

I’m trying to develop a way of understanding and describing myself that portrays my set of varied professional experiences as adding up to something rather than as a lack of focus. Any thoughts and suggestions that you, my dear readers, might have on this issue will be warmly received and attentively respected. Thanks!

There’s an interesting discussion currently underway on one of the Chronicle of Higher Education blogs regarding the issue of students transferring skills and techniques learned in one class to another class. The original article and a lot of the comments support the idea that transferability tends to be pretty low, and that while faculty are sensitive to and generally try to enhance transferability, they don’t seem to do a very good job of it. This has very real repercussions in the context of a university program, where it’s commonly assumed that learning is cumulative and that by the end, the student will be able to see the common themes running through the courses and be able to apply generalized lessons to situations not specifically taught. But if students in general are not learning how to transfer ideas and concepts between their classes, what are they going to have as an overall effect when they graduate?

I’ve weighed in on this discussion at a couple of points, but I thought it worth expanding on here a bit. In fact, there are multiple implications worth discussing, so this will be a two-part post with the second part taking up a different way of thinking about the problem. In this part, I’m going to address the issue of a curriculum as a mechanism for encouraging transferability. By “curriculum”, I mean the next division of a program above the individual course, consisting of a set of intellectually connected courses where there is intentional progression from one idea to another and a gradual elicitation of connections without having to necessarily belabor the point. There may be multiple curricula within a given department or program, as well as second-level curricula tying together a number of specific curricula and courses. A degree may include only one curriculum or possibly more, depending on the area and the individual University. Without the idea of a curriculum, all a student has is a group of individual courses that may or may not add up to anything generalizable.

Some universities are very conscious of and strongly manage curricula; at others, the issue is either skirted or left implicit, usually relying on the structure of the profession to supply the common themes. I’ve seen this pattern work, but in general, I would claim that greater awareness of curricular issues and specific faculty involvement in their formulation is a Good Thing. As the first Chair of a Faculty Curriculum Committee at my late university (the concept of curriculum was late emerging there), I tried to encourage us to move away from the independent-course model with student self-determination toward a greater emphasis on curricular structure.

As I observed in the CHE discussion, one way to encourage the kind of curricular structure leading to greater transferability is slightly less than universally felicitous in its effects – that is, having one individual take responsibility for putting it all together. An example would be my late university’s information technology management program, in which virtually all of the courses in both the bachelors and masters programs were developed and written by me over the period of a couple of years (15 in one term, actually). The good news is all the courses reflected a common perspective (socio-technical systems design) and were systematically linked both explicitly and implicitly; in addition, I was able to impose a sequencing of sorts that reinforced this common direction. The bad news is, of course, that the perspective reflected was, for better or worse, my own somewhat idiosyncratic approach to information systems implementation and use, with only a minor leavening of alternative viewpoints, at least at the earlier stages of the program. I can recall on more than one occasion attending graduation and watching a long line of ITM students trek across the stage receiving their degrees, realizing that all these folks were about to be unleashed on the IT world thinking mostly like me. I wondered if either they or the profession would be thus well served. Obviously, I believed (and continue to believe) that the approach embodied in the ITM curriculum was of value and did at least encourage transferability of ideas and skills, but in general the monoculture approach to curriculum design is as dangerous in education as it is in agriculture.

The alternative to intellectual monoculture is, of course, the explicit involvement of multiple faculty in the formulation of curricular goals and attention to the issue of ideas to be transferred from one course to another. This needs to be clearly set forth in program documents available to students as well as faculty, and reinforced in each course syllabus and in the feedback given to students. As some have observed in the CHE discussion, transference of ideas is not particularly emphasized at any point in the K-12 sequences that most students bring with them to a university. It’s likely to be a pretty foreign concept to many students, and needs to be specifically cultivated rather than taken for granted. It’s important to remember that regarding transferability and generalizability of the ideas, what may sound to faculty like the repetition of the obvious is likely to be largely unfamiliar to most students. Sometimes, it takes beating a concept to death with a stick to make it sink in.

Overall, the transferability of ideas and concepts across courses and throughout a student’s time with the University is critical to the development of the well-rounded graduates we’d like to send out into the world using the things that we taught them about. It’s pretty clear that unless we increasingly and explicitly attend to development of generalizing skills with our students, they are unlikely to develop by themselves. I would commend this issue to all faculty as they think about their own courses and curricula. I would also encourage the development of curriculum committees at all levels of a program or university; unless the development of integrated curricula gets addressed at all the various levels involved, the students – and by extension, the faculty – are not going to have the generalizable experience that they want and deserve.

In Part 2 of this discussion, I’ll address another issue of transferability that occurred to me later on.