Tech Round-Up

It’s time for another technology update, as a follow-up to the two previous posts on the tools I’ve been using for research and for connecting with others. Since I’ve been checking out a number of new and nifty tools recently, I thought I’d share the goods.

Diigo: an important change I’ve made is a switch from Del.icio.us to Diigo. When Yahoo! announced that they would cease to develop Del.icio.us, there was a sort of general uproar from committed users (myself included—I’d come to rely on it for bookmarking articles for media analyses) since we were afraid of losing such a great tool. Even though it became apparent that Yahoo! would not shut down Del.icio.us, I decided to switch to another bookmarking tool for the sake of stability. I admit I’d also been tempted by the many options available. As it turns out other sites, like Diigo, have been developed more than Del.icio.us and so they provide helpful features such as highlighting on web pages, caching pages for later reference, and the option to add notes to a page (which others can view). Most of these features are only fully available with Premium service, but I’m considering buying in (it’s only about $5 per month).

Scrivener: Thanks to Dr Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer) for continual praise of Scrivener that prodded me into giving it a try. I think I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of its capabilities, but already I love the way I can create a “project” in Scrivener and include not only Word files but also .pdfs, images, web pages (html files) and even sound files—all relevant research materials in one layout. Scrivener’s handy “splits” feature allows you to view two files at once in the same visual space, invaluable when you’re looking at information on web pages or copying notes into a draft of a paper (for example). For those of us who need to organise things visually, Scrivener has an iTunes-like format that allows you to places files and folders in easy-to-access order, to easily add/create new files and folders and add documents, and to write different sections with the full structure in view. Another great thing about Scrivener is that you can download a 30-day trial, which I did, and that helped convince me that it was worth purchasing a copy. Bonus: if you pay for Scrivener you can install it on multiple computers without paying any additional fees. The bad news: it's only for Mac, as is another suggested tool, DevonThink.

Below: an example (screen-shot) of a Scrivener project layout, showing the outline for a paper in sections and also a series of .pdf files of articles I've used in the research.



Prezi: I first saw a demonstration of Prezi at the Georgetown University Round Table back in March of this year. As an alternative presentation format (alternative to Powerpoint, that is), I immediately liked the look of Prezi and was eager to find it online and try it out. Once I got going with the site (Prezi is not downloadable software, rather it’s an online tool) I enjoyed the way in which it facilitated my thinking as well as the creation of my presentation; whereas Powerpoint always makes me feel boxed in, with Prezi I can move objects around to see how they might “look” in another order, or indeed how ideas might make more sense in a different sequence. The one complaint I’ve heard from those who aren’t keen on Prezi is that it makes them feel “seasick” or nauseated because of the “zooming” motion that happens as the program moves from one “slide” to the next. So far I haven’t given any presentations using Prezi, but I’m attending a conference at the end of the month and will give it a try for at least one of the two presentations I’m planning. I’ll be keeping the zooming to a minimum, given the complaints about it.

Scribd: Though I haven’t used it much, I realised the potential usefulness of Scribd when I came across a cache of letters and other documents relating to my dissertation research. In order to download from Scribd, you have to upload documents of your own; this wasn’t a problem since I was able to connect through Facebook and complete an upload easily (taking into account the relevant copyright restrictions). I think as a document sharing site Scribd actually has a lot of potential and I’m gradually starting to upload more items (generally reports from Statistics Canada and from think tanks, relating to post-secondary education).

Zotero: Zotero is a citation manager that works both as an add-on to Firefox and as a web site through which users can sync their account across multiple computers (great for me, since I use a desktop and a laptop); it’s similar to sites like Del.icio.us and Diigo in that way. Zotero was suggested to me by a number of people, but after an initial try I found it clunky and didn’t see how it would be of any use to me. Recently I was prompted by Dr Lee Skallerup (@readywriting) to give Zotero a second chance, and thankfully this time I’ve figured out where it fits in to my personal media/technology ecology. I use Zotero now for the search process, so that as I browse online I can create citations without having to go back and document everything later. (If you’re not keen on Zotero, recommended alternatives include Mendeley and Endnote).

Dipity: Suggested to me by John Dupuis (@dupuisjohn) of York University’s Steacie Library, Dipity is a site for constructing timelines. This became important for me because of the nature of the research I’m doing for my dissertation—i.e. I am mapping institutional developments onto provincial and federal policy and political trends, so for me it really helped to be able to see those things in a kind of linear, comparative way. My “Post-Secondary Education in Canada” timeline is still very much under construction, but I think it will eventually be a time-saving tool for others looking at the same topic.

Moo: A final nod goes to Moo, not technically a “tool” but rather a site through which you can design your own business cards, post-cards, and so on. I wrote a bit about Moo in a post in my other blog, where you can also see the images I chose to use. I love this idea of having my photos in this miniature form that I can hand out to new acquaintances. The cards arrived the other day in the mail, and they look lovely; I can’t wait to start dishing them out.

Market Fail: UK Attempts at Marketisation Bring a Cascade of Troubles

Many articles over the past little while have been looking at the failure of government marketisation efforts in England. Following last year’s Browne Review (which recommended that university fee limits be lifted), the UK government dropped the policy bomb that universities had long feared—massive funding cuts (including 40% cuts to teaching), a drop from ￡7.1 billion to ￡4.2 billion, and a marketisation scheme to be implemented through raising the “cap” on tuition fees to ￡9,000 from ￡3,290. The idea was that universities would voluntarily differentiate their fee levels in order to capture different student demographics/groups, creating a quasi-market. However, when faced with the option of setting fees of "up to" ￡9,000, the majority of universities opted to charge the highest possible price. They did this in spite of the government’s threats to penalise them in various ways for inhibiting accessibility.

Why has the UK government's marketisation scheme failed so dramatically with regards to fee levels? Surely the less well-known universities knew that in claiming the maximum possible tuition, they would now be charging the same fee as heavyweights such as Oxford and Cambridge. The government assumed that universities would naturally want to compete for various student “markets”, relying on institutions to create an appropriate distribution. However, such a tactic doesn’t ensure that a market will emerge. That outcome still depends on the behaviour of individual institutions. Since universities operate in competition for prestige at least as much as for revenue (the two are closely connected), their “behaviour” as actors in a market is unlikely to mirror that of (e.g.) a pet food company or an automotive corporation. So the relationship between price and prestige is undoubtedly one factor in the equation; no-one wants to be a "low-cost provider".

In keeping with this logic, students do not behave like regular consumers when "shopping" for a university degree. They don't necessarily seek out what's affordable or reasonable in terms of cost; they are making an estimate on the future returns from their short-term investment, and education is not something that can be traded for a "better model" later on when one has more money to spend. Students are in a bind of their own, with those lacking present income being encouraged to take on debt in order to finance their future employability.

Lastly, it's very difficult to create “economies of scale” in education (in my opinion it can’t be done, but that’s a whole other blog post). Thus universities cannot easily expand enrolment while also keeping tuition low, offering "discount education"--though this has happened to a certain extent with for-profit, online providers, mostly in the United States.

Another important aspect of the UK government’s plan was to remove funding from teaching, already an under-valued aspect of university work (international rankings are based on research); and from what I understand, this funding was taken only from the arts, social sciences, and humanities. But it seems that that the very universities that depend most on those enrollments will now have to raise tuition even more to make up for the significant loss of revenue--more so than, say, a university focussed heavily on the sciences. Is the UK government asking students to pay more for degrees that they (the government) have demonstrably judged to be less valuable-? (NB, I don't personally believe that degrees outside STEM areas are less inherently valuable; but they are certainly less marketable according to the logic being employed.)

As it turns out, in most cases students will pay the same (increased) price for their degrees no matter where they choose to enroll; but clearly they won’t all be getting a better “product”. One reason is that the tuition money is replacing government funding that had been cut, rather than augmenting current income in order to increase “quality”. If the funding estimate of cost per student was considered insufficient to begin with, then it makes sense that universities would raise the level of tuition to the maximum possible (￡9,000). So it seems there might be a fundamental disagreement between universities and government about the “cost” of educating a student in a certain discipline or area of study (not a surprise).

On a more theoretical level, I don't believe it's possible for students to “receive” a uniform education since every person brings something different to, and takes something unique from, their educational experience.

Overall I think this is a good example of some of the problems with trying to marketise education as a “product” with an inherent economic/monetary value. Universities in Britain are now stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place: if they charge higher fees (i.e. above ￡6,000), they are more likely to be penalised by the government for inhibiting accessibility. The necessity for this stop-gap measure demonstrates the failure of the initial policy to establish the desired equilibrium. Such radical policy change within a short period is likely to have deep effects on the British universities, including changes to student decision-making and to the faculty workforce.

A sticky issue: (Post-secondary) education and the Canadian Federal election

[Full disclosure: in the 2008 federal election campaign, I worked on the communications committee for Gerard Kennedy's campaign in Parkdale-High Park, Toronto.]

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With the announcement of the date of Canada's next federal election (May 2nd), amid the sound and the fury we have already seen the point made that education can (and should) become an election issue.

Those readers who are not Canadian or have never lived in Canada may find this statement nonsensical or at least somewhat odd. How could education not be an issue in a nationwide election? The answer is that in Canada, education is under provincial jurisdiction (along with health care and social services). So Canada is one of the only countries--if not the only country--in the world lacking a national office, department or ministry of education. In fact, education is constitutionally relegated to the jurisdiction of the provinces, so federal intervention is never direct (though it certainly does occur). This complication was explained well by Carson Jerema in a recent blog post along with some predictions about the major parties' proposed education policies.

What makes education a difficult issue in a Canadian federal election?

Election issues for universities could be described as a series of long-term problems around which policy choices and political platforms tend to revolve. Some examples include:

…Authority along institutional, provincial, and federal lines.

As I mentioned above, the federal government cannot intervene directly in post-secondary education, though they do enjoy indirect influence through their control over such areas as student assistance (loans and grants), science and technology policy, research and infrastructure funding via the Tri-Council (SSHRC, NSERC, and CIHR) and Canada Foundation for Innovation, and also language policy, education for indigenous peoples, training and employment initiatives, and immigration. At the same time, because the federal government deals with national economic policy, it has a direct interest in the development of “human capital” (an educated workforce) through higher education institutions in particular.

This is why proposals such as those found in the NDP’s election platform, for example, are problematic. Funding for post-secondary operating budgets comes from “transfers” to the provinces from the federal government. But to assert that an $800 million dedicated transfer can be used specifically to reduce tuition costs, probably steps over two lines—provincial, and institutional—at once. From what I can tell this is a policy goal that couldn’t be implemented from the federal level.

The issue goes beyond merely having to avoid any talk of university tuition fees. For example, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff wants every student who is qualified—i.e. every student who has high enough grades—to be able to attend university. This is a fine goal, but because his plan cannot encompass high schools, he cannot guarantee that an increasing focus on grades will not merely result in an increase to grade inflation, something that has been discussed anecdotally for years and for which more solid evidence has been presented in the United States (at both secondary and post-secondary levels). So while Ignatieff’s plan would help, it would help those who received high grades without also ensuring that all high schools are preparing these students adequately for university-level study. Accessibility in one way does not mean accessibility in all ways; and the lack of communication and collaboration between universities and high schools needs to be addressed through collaboration between all levels of government.

…Targeted funding vs. egalitarian funding; elite/focused vs. mass/dispersed models.

In recruitment for both students and faculty, elite (merit-based) funding programs involve funneling a larger amount of funding to the most competitive candidates, including most recently an emphasis on those recruited from overseas since the “market” for talent is now a global one. In research, targeted programs (used by institutions as well as by governments) tend to emphasize certain areas as strategic priorities and direct funding them to accordingly. The federal Conservatives have in the past focused heavily on this practice, especially via the Tri-Council. One example would be the addition of extra funding to SSHRC that was reserved specifically for “business-related” projects.

The Liberals’ proposed “Learning Passport” is, on the other hand, designed to spread non-repayable funding over a broader base of students with an emphasis on financial need and accessibility. But it still doesn't address the full extent of the problem faced by 30 years of planning for an unsustainable system (i.e. continued expansion of enrollment without parallel increases to funding), since the amount available to students barely makes a dent in the overall cost of their education.

…The research/teaching “problem” and expansion of the university system.

Expansion is not sustainable in the long-term if the ideal is an elite model funded primarily by government contributions; yet this model seems to continue without serious systemic re-planning even at the provincial level. In the United States we can see a somewhat unhealthy version of marketized, massified systems, wherein online, for-profit programs are mopping up those students who cannot gain acceptance to quality public and private non-profit schools. In the U.K and particularly in England, the current policy chaos reflects the same conundrum—rapid expansion of enrollments with a very high level of funding from the government, leading to a series of deep targeted cuts (to teaching, primarily) and an extreme quasi-marketization policy that has so far failed in creating a differentiated university “market”. In Canada the situation hasn’t yet reached such an intense level, but neither has the answer been found to the question of widespread accessibility and quality; based on the evidence I’d say that marketization is not an answer, but it’s what is usually proposed.

What makes education difficult as an election issue--in general?

Governments employ a two-sided logic in promoting PSE, arguing for it as both a public (social) good, and a private (individual) good for students and families. These arguments are important because over time, students have come to pay a proportionally larger amount of the cost of their education in the form of tuition and other fees. As PSE becomes more of a hefty investment, students want to know that this cost will generate a “return” (a private good) in the form of increased job prospects. This is why we see so many news reports discussing the monetary gains of degree-holders over a the course of a lifetime. As well as promoting individual gains, governments also operate with the assumption that a more highly educated population will benefit national economic goals; education is thus seen as primarily “economic” in both arguments. Yet as a personal investment PSE does not pay off for each person in the way the collective investment (of many people) will ultimately pay off for the government. Education is a highly personal and uneven “product” that is marketed as universally beneficial.

Another political issue is that people who don’t already have post-secondary credentials are less likely to vote on or care about education; they may even (justifiably) resent the idea that “everyone” should have a post-secondary credential, because it demonstrates less respect or apparent value to whatever role they occupy, and because they may well have been excluded from PSE themselves. In fact there is an entire discourse about university/educational “waste” of taxpayer dollars, in particular that students waste money and professors’ salaries are too high, and indeed that public institutions are in general overly wasteful. Sometimes this converges with the idea that “they” (university-education people and academics in particular) “think they’re better than us”.

Even those who do have a PSE credential are unlikely to care about this issue after their university or college days are over, unless they have university-age children and are currently liable for the bill. And that phase passes within the term of a government, making post-secondary education a very difficult issue to argue in the public political realm in terms of seeking new funding from governments (and also tuition increases). Unlike health care, it’s not an issue in which many people tend to take a sustained/lifelong interest.

Lastly, there’s the student vote, the one connected directly to education issues as a part of campaign platforms. Every election “youth apathy”, in the form of low voter turnout, is decried (students are also conflated with “youth” in general). This election we’ve seen the issue highlighted in a new way: with “vote mobs”, inspired by the now notorious videos produced by Rick Mercer. There’s been much speculation as to whether this will actually improve the turn-out of young voters. I hope it does. But I also notice that the focus has been primarily on universities and students, and not on the youth who stand most to gain from electing a more progressive government—those who are unemployed, under-privileged, and have least access to education and training (and to political information).

In sum, there’s always somewhat of a Canadian quandary come election time: how can advocates, activists and "stakeholders" make education a political issue, in a meaningful way, during this federal election?

Will the remainder of the campaign provide any answers on this count?

Future Tense

I haven't been writing much in this blog for the past six weeks or so. After posting more than usual in January, I took a bit of a break to catch up on other work (blogging takes it out of me, for some reason!) and to attend and present at the Georgetown University Round Table in Washington, D.C. from March 11th to 13th.

Here I'll catch up by writing an extra-long post for your enjoyment ;-)

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Perhaps because it’s grading season—mid-term exams and assignments have been rolling in and TAs and course directors are dealing with the results—over the past few weeks I’ve been seeing a lot of frustrated talk from academics on Twitter and Facebook. Some of it’s angry, some of it’s more anguished than anything else; but the common thread is that we’re all feeling as if we can’t “reach” students, and that students in turn aren’t doing their share of the work involved in the educational process.

Part of the problem is the way I just defined “education” in that last sentence. I invoked the notion of education as a “process” involving effort from both the person assigned as “teacher” and the people being “taught”; I don’t assume the students are the only ones doing the learning. But as I’ve argued in the past, a consumerist model of education—which encourages students to view education as either a service or a product or some mutation that blends both (“service product”)—undermines the notion of active participation because it assumes a strong element of “delivery” rather than “co-production”. We had a discussion about this in a recent tutorial where I pushed the knowledge-as-object metaphor to its ridiculous limit by drawing on the image of a “basket of knowledge” that we could pass around the room and from which students could simply take what they needed.

Apart from this definitional misunderstanding that causes so many conflicting assumptions about responsibilities and self-conduct, I suspect there are even bigger issues at work. I like asking of students, “how did you know you should go to university?” The reason I ask is because I’m interested in where that decision came from, not just the “why” of it. When we ask “why did you come to university?”, the answer is usually predictable—“because without a degree I cannot get a job.” If we ask how the decision was made, responses are usually quite interesting, and they reflect the influence that parents, teachers and guidance counselors have on students’ decision-making processes.

But what happens to the “work preparation” narrative when students realize that a university education is no longer any guarantee of employment, let alone the “dream jobs” that so many young people are encouraged to envision for themselves? I think this is where the whole arrangement starts to fall apart. You can tell students there are rewards (e.g. in the form of post-graduate employment options), and indeed the statistics continue to point to the financial benefits of PSE for graduates. But if you offer students no (clear) path to those rewards then the result is sometimes a disaffected nihilism towards learning. And one problem with university education is that is was never really designed to offer a clear path to employment.

We need to get at the contradiction in the fact that students come to university because it's "necessary" to get ahead in life, yet in some cases they show little or no enthusiasm for university learning and confusion that there is no obvious connection between what happens in class and what they expect to happen at a job, later on. I think this is why we sometimes hear disparaging comments about how "undergrad is the new high school"--necessary, but not necessarily enjoyable or productive.

I've been thinking a lot this year about why students "tune out" during class and tutorial, particularly when technology shows up as a distraction from class. Larger social, economic and educational trends are one reason for effects such as these, for example the consumerist concept of education as "product" often correlates with students' focus on grades (outcomes) rather than learning (which often irritates professors and TAs).

We can't take on those big issues alone, in one course, in one university; they're ongoing and need to be addressed and re-addressed by everyone. The question is how to navigate these currents when we're faced with the everyday "realities" and frustrations of teaching in universities--grammatically unsound assignments written in haste because students are working 20 or 30 hours a week alongside full-time study (so who's to blame?); flimsy excuses for skipped tutorials (who can we believe?); papers submitted weeks late without notifying the professor or TA that an extension was required (how could we know?); students "burning out" and disappearing without even dropping the course (what happened?); and on, and on.

Now more than ever we're reminded that education is a collaborative effort, and behind that effort must be desire--the desire of the person "teaching" to assist, collaborate and convey; and that of the students, a hunger for knowledge based in questions about the world. Last night in class I talked about how I became interested in education and involved in politics, and how in my experience the key ingredient to success in university is to find some thing about which you have critical questions, a boundless curiosity, a constant hankering, an "itch" that can only be scratched with learning. I think then the learning starts to drive itself.

The difficulty lies in getting to those questions and issues, since their instrumentality for the future is obscure in the present. It's why I told my own story--because students lack narratives they can use to order their present experience, and the tools to construct their own potential narrative; so they find it hard to project into the future even though they are so focussed on it. This is an anxiety-producing state of affairs.

New possibilities open up when we make the connections required to understand a story about how something happened, rather than a description of what is. Maybe it's this causality that students crave, since they live in a world lacking the certainty with which their parents were so fortuitously blessed. The old stories about careers, adulthood and family no longer ring true in this era of instability, workforce "flexibility", debt and recession.

Perhaps the universities should be places/spaces where we start telling new stories.

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"How do you get from here to the rest of the world?"
"I wish I knew."

--From The Wire, S05 Episode 5

Places of Learning

This entry was originally posted on October 5, 2010 at University of Venus blog on Inside Higher Ed [link here].

I’ve always felt that the physical environment of educational institutions — their colours, their spaces, their architecture — is one of the least-considered elements in the constellation of educational “success factors,” though possibly the most pervasive one.

Take, for example, the graduate program in which I'm currently completing my PhD. Just before I began my degree, the Faculty of Education—in which my program is housed—was moved from a concrete tower in the centre of campus to a newly-renovated college building. This seemed like a fine plan; however, it wasn’t long after joining the program that I realized the re-design had been a failure. While the Pre-Service Department was housed on the airy, welcoming ground floor, the graduate students’ space, consisting primarily of a computer lab, was relegated to the basement. This separated the grad students from the Graduate Program office and faculty—who were now sequestered on the second floor.

You might be wondering: other than the inconvenience of stair-climbing, what’s wrong with this arrangement? Everyone is housed in the same building, at least, and it looks clean and efficient thanks to the renovation job.

The first problem is that while grad students can probably work in almost any room with a computer, housing them in the basement—which is referred to as “The Dungeon” by some program members—is a poor choice because they will spend more time in this room than most other students will spend on the ground floor. Providing a pleasant working environment means more people will use the lab facilities, and it gives grad students an additional reason to come to the department from off-campus. At a large and isolated commuter campus like ours, this is important, because it helps to create a communal environment and to foster the social and peer support that is so vital to graduate student success.

The second problem relates to the same issue: physically separating faculty members from graduate students makes it more difficult for students to have informal, serendipitous and social contact with professors. So assigning graduate student space to the basement, in a room which is well-equipped but sterile and detached, means adding distance to the existing (non-physical) chasm that often separates students from faculty. Not that the faculty space is well-designed either—it’s standard academic architecture, a loop of corridor lined on each side with offices, following the shape of the building. Most of the office doors are closed.

Part of keeping students in a program, keeping them “engaged” with classes and faculty and other students, involves creating a space where they can feel welcome and included. I feel strongly that educational architecture—the “place” of education—contributes to the kind of educational experience we have, from grade school all the way to the doctoral degree. Institutional architecture sends a message, and affects messages sent; it expresses an idea about the function of the environment it helps create. In the documentary How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand suggests that while buildings may indeed “learn,” people also learn from buildings; our practices and habits, even our feelings, are shaped by our environments—and thus so is the work we do within them.

Amid the current cuts and crises in higher education, it may sound trite to offer this kind of critique. But with graduate school attrition generally hovering around 50%, universities should be taking more seriously the research about what helps students adapt to university life and to academic culture. The effects of physical space are very real. I think it’s no coincidence that in our program, students often find it difficult to “meet” a supervisor. After all, there are few real in-person opportunities to do so, outside of planned events and the classroom—relatively formal occasions.

While we can’t necessarily change the buildings we’re in, we can be sensitive to their use, to our adaptation to the context provided. And we can ask ourselves questions. What would the building look like if we began by asking how people learn? How do people meet each other and form learning relationships? If you could design your own workspace, your own learning space, what would it look like and why? This need not involve a major reconstruction project. If the university had taken these things into account before renovating our program space, the same amount could have been spent and things might have looked, and felt, very different.

The absurdity of numbers?

A number of recent posts on Inside Higher Ed have highlighted national (U.S.) debates on post-secondary policy and its relation to Barack Obama's economic/policy plan. Obama has repeatedly emphasised the importance of education and research funding, even as the Tea Party have lobbied the Republicans to try to reduce funding. Meanwhile legislation has been introduced for the purpose of regulating private, for-profit career colleges, and it’s being battled every step of the way by the lobby groups associated with said colleges and by their political various allies.



All these developments relate in some way to the pressure to increase enrollments and "completion" rates—what some have referred to as the “completion agenda”—from post-secondary institutions. And that imperative is about developing a “knowledge economy”, so that the United States can remain competitive in the assumed global zero-sum game in which national prosperity is at stake.


In Canada, federal and provincial governments have taken up precisely the same strategy of pushing for more graduates, both in undergraduate and in graduate education (witness in Ontario the provincial Liberals’ goal to create 14,000 more graduate student spaces from 2002-3 levels, by 2010—see OCUFA, 2007).


Like others, I question the use of these kind of numbers as a means of gauging a nation's success at, or progress toward, developing a sustainable “knowledge economy”. Human capital may be available, but this doesn't mean that the “capital” will be put to use (i.e. that people, with their skills, will be able to find employment) in the immediate or near future. Are there sufficient job opportunities for those who make the “individual investment” in PSE, such that the investment will “pay off”?



The numbers conceal a potential over-production of graduates through the assumption that more college/university degrees automatically means more access to gainful employment for all those who graduate, as well as producing a more "innovative" workforce. (I've previously written posts about relative value vs. inherent value in education, and the policy implications.)

The focus on these numbers also hides the uneven quality of mass post-secondary education and the unequally shared burden of its increasing cost. For example, in the United States the for-profit career colleges often market to traditionally under-privileged groups who cannot access more prestigious institutions, but who ironically end up paying hefty tuition fees anyway—and finding themselves burdened with debt by the time their studies are over. It’s a debt they have trouble re-paying due to difficulties with obtaining appropriate employment after graduation.


Along with student “completion” comes the imperative to discover its causes, a search that has produced a whole range of new objects for measurement. One example is the project to measure levels of “student engagement” (gauged by the National Survey of Student Engagement, NSSE). Tests of student learning “outcomes”, and the development of standardised curricular goals, are also related to this process of environmental assessment.

Responsibility for failure must also be assigned, such as in this article where the author discusses reports that argue that “many American colleges are failing to graduate their students, at a time when the Obama administration and leading foundations are trying to ramp up the number of Americans earning a postsecondary credential.” So the university/college becomes a new target for critiques and for governmental interventions designed to ensure “quality” and positive “outcomes” for graduates.

In some ways, the obsession with numbers is really just a sign that education and its “products” are considered to be more important than ever—for their economic value—and thus they become, increasingly, sites of scrutiny for a plethora of “publics”, including not only governments but also parents, students, employers, and the media. But focussing on and rewarding outcomes, usually “completion” as either a proportion of the eligible age cohort or of the national adult population overall, means that institutions are more likely to implement “quick” technocratic fixes to what is generally a much deeper structural problem. Do we really need more graduates who are struggling to find work and to alleviate debts? How can we create a situation where these graduates are more likely to be solvent and employed upon, or shortly after, finishing their PSE courses?

A larger number of PSE graduates is only desirable, economically, if it produces the intended effect; but what we see instead could be an increase to the number of young people who are actually unable to participate fully in this economy even though they may technically possess the credentials for doing so. Unless this issue is addressed, the "production" of more PSE graduates is much less likely to benefit either the national economy or the individual graduates themselves.

Reference: OCUFA, 2007. Quality at risk: an assessment of the Ontario government’s plans for graduate education.

"Myths & Mismatches": Where from here?

The last series of blog posts left me all blogged out for a couple of weeks, but I thought I'd offer a follow-up post regarding my thoughts on the e-course by Jo and Julie, on career planning and professional development, and a few other things.

What I found helpful about the course was that it provided me something to respond to, and in the process I found myself thinking harder about my current decisions. And because I'm feeling "stuck" and unfocussed at the moment, this was a valuable exercise. I tried to imagine my self in a particular role, and asked: what would I look like doing this job? How is that going to happen? Where do my current actions take me in terms of that kind of goal? Fairly basic stuff, but I find writing it all down tends to help me with coherence and direction. And when I'm feeling lost, I like to focus on the tangible aims that make it easier to make decisions in the present--since they build towards something in the future.

Some of the things I'm doing at the moment in order to provide myself direction--in a few different aspects of (academic) career development:

Making a decision about an academic "subject area" in which I could work comfortably, i.e. as a member of a department or program or team. This sounds like a no-brainer, and for most people in a PhD program it hasn't been an issue since at least the MA level. But because of the way my interests have developed, choosing an "area" has been a less than straightforward process (my degrees are in Communication Studies, Linguistics, and Education).

A related task is to work towards drawing my various projects into a well-articulated and coherent research "map" that works within that subject area. I have diverse interests, but diversity is only a strength if it's grounded in something stable like a good knowledge base, along with a plan regarding how the various pieces fit together and reinforce each other. I know well enough how everything is related, but I need to work actively to make those connections clear to others. This is important no matter what line of work I end up following.

...Alongside the usual academic channels, I've been experimenting with using social media to meet new colleagues and develop professional relationships, to "network" and to share/publicise my own work, to develop opportunities for contributing to ongoing debates (such as writing articles for other blogs and web sites), and to keep up with news/issues in my fields. As a result, I'm thinking about blogging and other "public communication" as part of academics being "public intellectuals", not just professors or employees of the university. I'd like my blog to be a way to share my ideas even as I'm developing them in other ways (e.g. through research).

While I won't swap social media for more traditional fora such academic conferences, participation in the latter is restricted for me because of the expense (travel, accommodation, registration fees) and timing. Sources like Twitter are an ongoing means of conversing with others whose interests I share, engaging in long-term exchanges that keep me thinking and that open up the discussion to anyone who can use a hashtag.

I'm working on teaching through practice (even just with my small tutorial group this year) and through development of approaches and philosophies; and I'm thinking about pedagogy rather than "teaching", about theory and overall strategy as well as classroom tactics and practices. I'm looking for ways to examples that "stick".

And in the context of our wired classroom, where students can use laptops and Blackberries to "tune out" from course discussions, I'm trying to understand and take into account the issues involved--"student engagement" and technology in the classroom; consumerism and credentialism; cognitive development in learning; differences in learning "styles"--and translate that back into an approach that gets students interested enough to abandon Facebook in the middle of class (high hopes, I know).

I still see teaching and learning as being about relationships, communication, partnership, mutual responsibility, motivation, feedback, confidence, hard work, listening, and changing your approach when something doesn't work. Most important to me is to create an environment wherein questions and discussion can happen. With all that in mind I'm considering things like course design (in the abstract) and how this relates to pedagogy, particularly in terms of how different aspects of the course (curriculum/readings, assignments, tutorials and TAs, lectures) all have to work together in a way that makes sense to students.

I think that's all for today. I hope you enjoyed the series of "Myths & Mismatches" posts, and if you're following my blog--thanks for joining me!