Who you callin’ a MOOC?!

My first job out of college was at a classical record store. It was one of the best record stores in the city–hands down. That includes rock stores. By standards of stock, we were unmatched. The store manager was a composer who had studied with Maxwell Davies and the assistant manager was a mean fiddle and bouzouki player who recruited me into his celtic rock band, The Hooligans. We had fun. The store had some basic tenets. We were open every day from 9am until midnight. No matter what. We had–in stock–every record in print and often several records that were out of print. It was a haven on South Street in Philadelphia. You know. Where all the hippies meet.

It was around that time that digital audio tape was still around. Digital cassettes were new and already fading. Laserdiscs were still being bought and sold (for good reason). Super Audio Compact Discs were becoming the rage for the audiophile set. It was a growing set.

People wanted def. Hi def. They mos def wanted as much def as you could get. They paid for it, too.

A typical new release cd was selling for $14.99. That’s $16.04 after the (formerly) 7% sales tax. On sale it would be $11.99 ($12.83). Yes, I still remember 7% of most retail price points–do not even mess with me. Super audio compact discs (SACD) were selling at above $20 which was a stretch for a lot of consumers. Most were around $22.99 which after tax is pushing $25 and pushing a lot of people away from the idea of high definition.

There are some things that you need to understand about the recording process–or any creation process–in order to understand why these quality standards were, in many ways, a farce. That is not to say that there was any deception. But there was surely a misperception. The misperception that a SACD of George Szell’s famous Beethoven Symphonies may sound like they were recorded using today’s technology–noiseless, bright and alive. Often times, it was just the opposite. These super-recordings often emphasized the faults of recordings or the editing process was very recognizable. The end result in the early digital age of music left us longing for our vinyl records and tube amplifiers.

Many failed to read the disclosure statements and the labels on the backs of cds. I do not even know if they are still there. We ‘in the industry’ knew the ages of the recordings and the quality of recordings from experience, Schwann or Peterson’s guides, or from complaints heard when a recording was returned. Overall, you got what you paid for. That $7.99 Great Performances on Sony? Yes. It is a great performance. A great performance that sounds like someone in the percussion section is frying up some sausages. You see a perfect 24-bit digital copy of an analog recording is only as good as the original recording quality.

Cut to: MP3s, file sharing, portable digital players, voila! the iPod.

Apple taught us an important lesson.

file size is more important than sound quality.

Any engineer, mechanic, electrician, or team leader will tell you the same thing. You set your tolerances based on the weakest of the components. Back in the SACD 80’s, you would be well set to have a noiseless digital recording playing through your hand-wired amplifier and playing through your active crossover full range of home speakers in a room with an integrated bass trap. It would be lovely. Someone asks you to keep it down and you plug in a $9.99 pair of COBY headphones from Funk-O-Mart and you have broken the chain. All of those other components cannot shine. The same would be said of any other link in that file chain being compromised.

We lowered our high definition standards in the name of fashion and convenience. Portability was also pretty cheap. Easy access was worth it. Chip away. File sharing? Don’t mind if I do. 8-bit? No that’s too low. You Tube? Oh look, video. Chip away. We have enormous televisions and we opt to watch screens inches wide that make videos look really sharp. Chip away, chip away.

So why do I bring this up and what does it reveal? We sacrifice a lot for many reasons. We make a series of decisions that influence the types of options and the types of decisions that follow. Eventually, hopefully, we raise our eyes and look around. We see where we are and realize that we are far off from the road we began. Take inventory. Is this the quality that you expect from yourself and from others? Are the sacrifices in one area worth the gain in another?

If not, what’re you? Some kind of mook? mooc?

Pedagogy and its Discontents pt.2, Lead me where?

“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement–that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Let us not make any bones about the situation. The teacher is at the front of the room and hold the keys. There are places that students cannot go. There are places that students can go. There are places that students may only go if the teacher takes them there. Say what? This is the 21st century. This classroom is flipped. We are unlearning. Delearning. Relearning. It is our new pedagogy. You can’t front on that.

Never sleeps

Or can you, Biz? Will you front on that? Is it the content, the context, or the process that is of value in the classroom? Some mix of the three, perhaps. Maybe, even, a fourth entity–the interaction of them all. In the same way that you may not separate nature and nurture, it is unlikely that you may separate the content from the context or either of them from the process that brings them to light. Further, it is unlikely that by explicitly valuing one part of the mix that a teacher or student will be sure to have the desired influence over those components.

Do you follow? If I, as a teacher or student make explicit statements of value, the reaction of students may be to value or devalue or, perhaps, to have no change in their valuation of the component. Some rebel while some draw near. It depends on how that serves their needs for safety, belonging, esteem, or actualization. Remember Maslow? Not to oversimplify, but if you have ever tried to teach a hungry student, you are probably missing more than my point.

Getting back to the matter at hand, students respond to the content, context, and process–along with the demonstrated valuations by the instructor in a given manner. They may follow, rebel, or have no change in their value of the experience. The teacher, assessing the response, may ‘course-correct’ mid-stream-of-thought BUT what may happen is not entirely predictable! Change on the part of the teacher–either re-emphasis, over-emphasis, or a decreased emphasis–may result in a different overall response.

The most significant (read risky) overall response may be an overarching loss of interest should the instructor effectively abandon ship on the premise or the beliefs that were held at first. Any teacher still holding the torch of pedagogy as a method of a priori distribution of information should probably have a widow’s walk built and learn a new lament. The kids are alright.

And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are indanger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.”

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

At Seventeen

I learned the truth at seventeen
that love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired — Janis Ian at seventeen

The words of Janis Ian sting. They conjure images of bullied, ignored, thoughtful, and lonely kids. Seventeen is a hard age to learn those truths expressed in her hit song from 1975.

When I hear this song or when it becomes an earworm for days on end, I cannot help but think of my own time in middle and high school. Or undergrad. Graduate school. So on. Present day. Sometimes.

That is not to say that I was friendless or lonely. I place a mental pushpin every time in my life when truth is revealed. Signposts. Bread crumbs. Regardless of what or when, it always seems too early and too often that we learn a hard truth. In education, that is–as an educator, the pins drop like needles on songs. One after another whether you like them or not. Heavy rotation. Top of the pops. Hits. We take a lot of hits.

awkward teenagers lol
by ~JonathanTheSmex

Remember those veteran teachers scorning our eager, go-get-em attitudes with warnings? Their threats seemed so far-fetched. Trite. “Someday, you’ll be just like me.” We laughed them off. We worked hard. We came in early. We stayed late. We graded and prepped during late nights, weekends, and holidays. Grading parties. Thank God for TiVo. “I’m always a teacher so I always do teacher work,” we say. We learn a truth. Get a peek behind the curtain. See that all those appreciations we enjoyed were more fair-weather than once thought. We thought that we were on top of our game and have our legs cut out from under us. We are seventeen again.

Remember those who win the game, they lose the love they sought to gain

A decision is made. We will continue to do it for the kids. Of course we will. The kids. The only convolution is that we are not as resilient as we were at seventeen. Those wounds heal more slowly. Calluses thicken. Eyes look to the floor. We begin to have regrets. Begin to feel all those eyes that gaze.

 

Critical Demagogy, or, Stabbing the Eye of the Beholder

obtaining position and/or power through the manipulation of prejudice, emotion, and fear

When given the opportunity to speak, I often discuss topics connected to the theme of a particular context–assessment, teacher quality, and the like. Regardless of the primary focus of a discussion I like infuse information and exploration from my own research interests–Expertise, (nonexistence of) talent, skill acquisition, tacit knowledge and perceptions. Not so strangely enough, the discussion of perception is one that tends to permeate all aspects of many discussions. The pre-cognitive decisions that are made in any context have major sway over our actions and reactions to stimuli. What may be equally disconcerting is our inability to intervene despite any ‘awareness’ we may have regarding these prejudices.

That is to say, a person acts and reacts a certain way based on their prejudices–once made aware, their actions and reactions are still based on their prejudices.

this is your brain on everything
Creative Commons image by Patrick Denker http://flic.kr/p/7ALY4″

 

It is a strange thing to be aware. One might even think that awareness provides some measure of control. In terms of perception, consider where beauty lies and how beauty lies.

I am reminded of my favorite scene from The Fly (1989) in which Geena Davis’s character tells Brundle, “…you’re getting worse!” to which he replies “I’m getting…better!”

Unfortunately, the profession of teaching has the potential to become a demagoguery. In some cases, perhaps you have experienced it, it already has become such. A teacher may become popular, well-liked, and possibly even considered a master teacher despite having little influence on actual learning in the classroom.

A challenge, acknowledged or not, that has been ever-present in education is that those who hold the gradebook are sometimes only judged by the gradebook. It is possible that students walk out of classes with inflated grades having learned little. Of all the stakeholders in the school setting, the ones who are not fooled by this are the students. The master teacher has no clothes and the students are unlikely to ring the alarm for obvious reasons.

Whether fooled, bullied, or simply convinced, what is most critical in our current pedagogical mess is that we unveil the charlatans who have risen in ranks due to this Critical Demagogy.