I’m up to day 2 1/2, and of course it’s harder to keep things straight since, well, there are more things. Nevertheless, I know about intuitive/narrative, mathematical, and graphical levels. I know that the slope of a productivity profile frontier (I think that’s what ppf stands for; I’m going from memory here) (EDIT: production possibility frontier) is always negative because economics deals with scarcity. I know that absolute advantage is different from comparative advantage, and I think I remember that the former has to do with how much/how fast, whereas the latter has to do with cost. Even if that’s not quite on the money (sorry), the fact that there are two kinds of advantages and they differ is intriguing enough to keep me going.

I also know that cookies and pancakes are Dr. Blanchard’s daughter’s favorite foods. But now I’m too tired to remember her daughter’s name. (EDIT: Caroline.) The other person’s name in the ongoing cookie/pancake example is Scott. I’m betting Scott is her husband, though I don’t think he’s yet been identified as such.

Three other things before I forget them. One is that it was obvious on day one that people started to leave five minutes before class was over, and left en masse as soon as any word of conclusion came out of the professor’s mouth. To craft a graceful end, not an abrupt one, Dr. Blanchard took pains to talk a bit about the next class, and to try to recap a few points. Yet the exiting students were clearly done. Most students at UMW are far more polite (or, perhaps, engaged) than that, and will wait patiently until the class is done. Perhaps it’s also that there’s less anonymity in our smaller classes. If the lecture hall for my intro film class held 500 people, I’d be much more of a kiosk to those in the back row, I’m sure. Still don’t make it right, hoss, as John Mellencamp would say.

I also noticed that at the beginning of day two, Dr. Blanchard had to ask the class to stop talking. That’s also pretty rare at UMW. Yes, there are blessings to be counted here.

Finally, I noted at the end of day one that Dr. Blanchard offered an example of cost involving textbooks. I believe the whole thing centered on opportunity costs, but the point for me was that she confidently asserted that no one would ever buy an economics textbook if they weren’t taking the course. I was struck by the truth of that statement, and how readily it applies to most textbooks for most of my students. I got in the early habit of keeping all my books, even the textbooks (as opposed to primary sources), because I was starting a library and wanted to preserve my contact with the materials of my education. (Sounds high-flown, but it’s true.) There’s something interesting here, and it’s not just about generational changes. I think it’s about school and its processes. Perhaps a textbook can be defined as a book you would never buy unless you were taking a course. And perhaps that definition means that the book isn’t much more than a set of study notes. If the text has no more intrinsic interest than that, who wouldn’t sell it back?

Or perhaps it goes the other way, and the textbook industry with its sell-back processes of disposability (and the price-gouging that seems to take place these days) merely reflects the complete commodification of the classroom itself. Instead of trying to make an education out of a set of courses of study–or more accurately, the start of a habit of education–students and faculty and administration concede to a model in which the course is a good to be used and thrown away.

Maybe that’s too dismal. Still, Dr. Blanchard’s words forced me to consider my own practices and my own experiences within education. I’m always sad to think my students would sell back the books they bought for my classes. There may be economic necessity here, and I’ll concede that necessity, of course. But behind all that there’s also a strange view of books and education, or at least it seems stranger to me now than it did pre-podcast today.

EDIT: Production Possibility Frontier.

Partly as a tip of the hat to Steve Greenlaw, partly because it just seemed interesting, I’ve subscribed to one of the BoilerCasts at Purdue University: Econ 210, “Principles of Economics,” taught by Professor Kelly Blanchard. Driving in to work today, and driving through the drive-thru for my midday chow, I listened to the first day of class in what sounds like a large lecture hall. I believe Dr. Blanchard spoke of seven TAs, so I’m guessing the enrollment is over 100 students, perhaps well over. The hall holds nearly 500 students.

The class meets three times a week, twice for lecture and once for “recitation” (a TA-led discussion group). The first ten minutes or so of day one were taken up with administrative stuff: the “Katalyst” (with a “K,” like the name of the school of management) course management system, the syllabus, etc. I found this part weirdly interesting. There’s an astonishing amount of implicit culture bound up in the administrative details everyone at a university takes for granted, and hearing about it gave me a strange feeling of defamiliarization, like visiting a family with very different customs.

Professor Blanchard is a very good lecturer. She speaks clearly, in a lively and conversational tone, but always driving forward with an impressive momentum. She sprinkles her lecture with asides ranging from Back to the Future to her love for chocolate and shoes. She sounds both knowledgeable and personable, and has the gift of introducing concepts by emphasizing their strange or counterintuitive nature. I admire this in an intellectual. It’s a hook for the brain: “you might think this, but actually something rather different is true.” An element of surprise and wonder enters the discourse, something like the “oh!” moments that pepper Doug Engelbart‘s speeches.

I found the lecture easy to follow, so much so that I wasn’t sure what I’d gain from reading a textbook, other than elaboration. In fact, I had the strong feeling that I was actually learning economics. A tough exam would put that feeling to rest, I’m sure, but I have found myself thinking about several parts of the lecture at odd moments during the day: micro- vs. macroeconomics (I knew the difference, but my knowledge has a little more depth now), the idea that behavior resulting from scarcity is of central interest to the economist (I hadn’t thought of scarcity as a catalyst for the field, or as an essential part of its self-definition), and most interestingly of all the fact that some economists distinguish two types of labor: physical labor and entrepeneurial labor. The latter has to do with thinking up ideas. Immediately my mind began looping Lessig-wards, thinking about intellectual property and intellectual labor, thinking about whether and to what extent work in the academy counted as entrepeneurial labor, and so forth. The larger point here is that Blanchard’s tone, her willingness to say a little about her own life, her evident enthusiasm and knowledge, and most of all that sense of strangeness or unexpectedness I tried to articulate above, combined to inspire me to consider aspects of my experience in the light of what she was saying.

I see from her faculty biography that Dr. Blanchard is interested in the economics of information. I surmise this interest led her to join the BoilerCast podcasting effort. And I wonder if she’ll speak more about this particular interest as the course progresses.

I should also say that today was the first day of teaching for me this term, and hearing another professor go through another first day was oddly reassuring and comforting. Students don’t realize this, probably: every first day for a teacher feels like a first day, no matter how many first days we’ve had. Nervous, exhilarated, and (for me) very curious about how this journey will end come December.

Dr. Blanchard doesn’t have an especially sonorous voice. She isn’t theatrical, or overtly charismatic, or portentous. She is, however, expert at coming up with those hooky moments, like catchy bits in a melody, that have the brain hmmming along. It’s that explaining voice, scaled up to project to a large lecture hall, scaled out via podcasting to reach potentially an even larger audience, one listener at a time.

Beginning this fall, Purdue University will be offering a podcasting service called “BoilerCast” to faculty who would like their classes recorded and made available to students as RSS-enabled audio feeds for downloading, streaming, or podcasting. The service, furnished by Purdue’s Information Technology department, promises “no lead time” scheduling for professors teaching in classrooms that are already set up to record audio. Other classrooms can be accommodated “with sufficient notice.”

The BoilerCast subscription list is pretty spiffy-looking and already includes over 40 courses, plus a self-guided audio tour of the library. (I wonder: will that tour change over the course of a semester? is an RSS feed needed here?) The BoilerCast press release is most enthusiastic, right down to its Peter Piper alliteration and its very reasonable answer to the predictable question of “won’t this encourage students to skip class?” Other predictable questions were not addressed in the press release, however. Do students need to sign releases if there’s a Q&A session as part of the class? What about classes that are not primarily lecture-based? Is anyone worried that an entire set of class lectures would amount to a free course for auditors (in the truest sense of the word)? I know how I’d answer those questions; I’m curious about how Purdue would, or has.

All of that said, I think BoilerCast is a great idea. Our own “Profcast” project here is less comprehensive and aimed more at the general podcast audience, but both ideas strike me as valid ways to present education as a public good.

Thanks to Podcasting News for the initial story.

Apparently the RSS feed didn’t kick in for some reason, at least in my iTunes subscription. Apologies for the repost.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.6MB)

Another farewell poem from John Donne. This one doesn’t reveal itself as a farewell until the very end. Until that time, it seems very much like “The Canonization” in its hyperbole regarding the lovers as epitomes of love. The ending, though, is a mindbender. Astonishing: and it effects a transformation of everything that’s come before.

“Twicknam Garden” both celebrates and subverts the Renaissance garden as a place of refuge from city life, a place that recalls the harmonious union of art and nature that was lost when Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, the original garden. As you’ll hear, there are some unpleasant moments of self-aggrandisement and bitterness in the poem, and you’ll hear my commentary trying to tack between the Scylla of ignoring the unpleasantness and the Charybdis of discounting the poem because of it. That’s the kind of tricky sailing Donne often demands from his critics, especially because the emotions in the poem seem so intimately related and are so vividly expressed.

A P.S. to the “Valediction: of my Name in the Window” of a few ADADs back: It now seems to me that a key distinction is between the daylight hours, when the window can be seen through, and the nighttime hours, when the interior lighting makes of it a kind of mirror, and a mirror that displays the poet’s own name. If that bedchamber ever hosts another lover, the name in the window will be an accusing trace of the earlier love that is now betrayed, a trace that will have been written upon the reflection of everything transpiring in the room.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.9MB)

From Podcasting News, a link to a Guardian article on podcasting. Not too much new here, but what seems to be a growing chorus of voices is encouraging.

Not a particularly thoughtful post, for which my apologies. I’ve been expending energies in the comments galleries at Abject Learning and Infocult (links to your right on this screen, in the Blogs section on the right sidebar). Feeling a bit dry on my own site just now, but no doubt something will provoke me and elicit more verbiage soon.

Interesting Q&A in Computerworld with Andy Boynton, Dean of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. Lots to consider here, but I’ll pull two items out to entice you to read the longer interview (Boynton says “he” instead of “he or she,” but I don’t think that, however regrettable, invalidates his points):

What kind of characteristics would the team manager require? He has to be a conduit of ideas from the outside. He has to listen extraordinarily well. He has to be supremely self-confident, because he’s got to let those egos and the “I” soar. Nothing dumbs a team down more than everything being “we.” Compromise is the sire of mediocracy. It’s not about compromise; it’s about getting there. And he has to value failure as an opportunity to learn.

What do you think is the biggest challenge in managing a virtuoso team? You need a manager that understands the rules of the game; someone who’s direct, who’s there to get results, not to be polite; someone who won’t let them accept compromises; someone who wants to change the world and will keep that ambitious target in front of them. Leadership is a contact sport. It’s a whole different environment, and if you don’t know that going in, it can unravel.

I wonder what happens when we consider classes, or colleges, or faculty, as “virtuoso teams.” It’s also interesting to think of a teacher as someone who manages a (potentially) virtuoso team. Or perhaps the teacher first convinces the class they can be virtuosos, then manages them. Some good mulling material here.

A few days ago, Steve Greenlaw sent me to Will Richardson’s excellent PowerPoint presentation on new Internet literacies in the Web 2.0 world. As is often the case with me these days, I’m just now moving from skimming to perusing. (Often this move accompanies a desire to procrastinate on some other job–but I digress.) The presentation is excellent, hitting all the right bases, pressing all the right emphases, when all of a sudden the bright line shines as I read this slide:

“Natives need immigrants.”

In one sentence, Will articulates something so profound that my head spins (and my heart leaps up). Digital natives, those who have grown up in the Web, need the strategies of defamiliarization, wonder, and revision that only an immigrant can bring. An immigrant, not an outsider: those who emigrate are committed to a new culture, but they also have a “beginner’s mind” that allow them to see gaps and tensions and undiscovered treasures that the native’s mind has long been accustomed to filling in, dismissing, or overlooking.

Now this metaphor leads us into even deeper waters. One of the things education must convey to students is the ability to make oneself an immigrant, to step back and defamiliarize the context in which one operates, but use that defamiliarization not as a gesture or location of cool, critical, detached, and potentially arrogant superiority (which is why I like Shklovsky better than Brecht and the verfremdungseffekt) but as a stage on the journey to even greater intimacy, community, collaboration, and effectiveness. Perhaps I am unfair to Brecht, but the role of the affections in his thought has never been clear to me.

The Russian formalists, including Victor Shklovsky (cited above), articulate not only a theory of art but one pole of the educational continuum: to “make the stone stonier,” as my friend Terryl Givens was so fond of quoting. Or to pull another Shklovsky quotation from the Wikipedia article:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.

I do not accept Shklovsky’s remarks as definitive of art, mostly because I believe art can convey knowledge, not just perception. Or maybe it’s that I believe communicated perception is a form of knowledge. But I do think that a move toward defamiliarization, an unknowing, is always a part of what we feebly call “critical thinking.”

Not just skepticism in its usual connotations, for ardent commitment has its own defamiliarization to offer as well. Or as Van Morrison once sang, “I’m just a stranger in this world.”

Read all about it. I’ll be following Steve’s experiments very closely, and I hope you will too. I’m also curious about how information technologies might further his aims. The automated quizzes are a good start. Visit his blog, offer encouragement, and share strategies if you’re of a mind.