Towards the future of higher education economics

Towards the future of higher education economics

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Yesterday a group of us presented on the future of, well, everything.  Brilliant people spoke to the future of the book, of food, and of work.  In contrast, I gave a short presentation on the future of higher education economics.

I’ll share it with you now, starting with the slides:

Like Gaul, it’s in three handy parts.

I. How higher ed financing currently works.

I distinguished between private, public, and for-profit institutions (an audience member rightly added military and corporate training), then outlined different ways we pay for high ed: state support (for publics, and in decline), federal loans, third party aid, and above all tuition.  Tuition really means financialization, given the enormous expansion of student loan debt.  Pointed out that “tuition-dependent” describes nearly every college and university, with the exception of the richest campuses who have big endowments (naming two represented in the room).

Next I broke down where that money goes at institutions, emphasizing that personnel costs loom largest, since higher ed is a service industry.  In addition there are research costs, “administrative” costs (in quotes because the term really covers all non-teaching staff), student social and academic support, and physical plant (which varies widely between institutions).  Why does this structure look the way it does?  I introduced Baumol’s Cost Disease, our ethos of care (for students especially, but also for research and the institution through service), and, for some, the amenities arms race.

Academia’s finances have changed in other ways.  I noted the rise of adjunctification, which reduced instructional costs while shrinking tenure.  I also explained the rise of the discount rate, which seems like it was news to many in the audience.  This famously makes actual tuition costs harder to grasp, even using the metric of net tuition.

II. Drivers of change

Having established the current high ed financing situation, we then turned to present-day forces driving change.

Income inequality led off, springing from tuition discounting (because as the wealthy peel away from the rest of us, schools can build finances strutures around that gap).  I ran through Thomas Piketty’s work, Pew research on the shrinking middle class, and income gaps exacerbated by race., and the rise of the gig economy.  We touched on a variety of causes, including globalization, the shift from manufacturing to service jobs, the decline of unions, automation, neoliberal ideology and policy, and financialization.

Another major driver is demographics, with American society aging and its geographic distribution.  The latter was especially urgent for the audience, as they were drawn from New England (which is aging rapidly).  We discussed the economic impact in terms of public higher education competing with Medicaid, Medicare, pensions, and other senior-focused state expenditures.  I touched on problems of a shrinking workforce in terms of tax revenue and potential income inequality.

The third major driver is politics, starting from policy uncertainity about the upcoming Trump administration, which could include changes to federal student loan structures, pressure on schools with the largest endownments to alter their spending, and defunding certain academic projects and fields (i.e., climate change studies).  Political change could also come from insurgent students and perhaps campus staff, such as in resistance to deportation efforts. This can lead to hostile reactions from state and/or federal officials (for example).

III. Possible futures

For discussion I offered several scenarios for higher ed economics.

PIKETTY IS RIGHT Income inequality continues to grow, reaching Gilded Age levels.  Adjunctification increases.  Campuses spend more resources to attract wealthier students and their families.  Student debt exceeds consumer mortgages.  Technology skews by class, with the 1% preferring face-to-face instruction, the middle class taking courses online, and MOOCs reserved for everyone else.  Leading majors reflect the economic change: political science (because of political instability), finance, human resources, computer science and engineering.

I offered a sketch of eighteen-year-olds in this world, obsessed with the 1%’s conspicuous consumption.  These teens have already participated in the ” sharing economy”, and think the middle class is a relic of the 20th century.

PIKETTY IS WRONG Income inequality ceases to grow, as America reacts against it.  The 1% commit to high levels of philanthropy, governments invest more in social services, globalization ceases encouraging a race to the bottom for wages.  States end the localization of K-12 funding and take steps to break up racial segregation.  Campuses partner with K-12 schools, adjuncts organize and are recognized, faculty teach and research inequality, and economic aid shifts from merit to economic need.

PEAK HIGHER EDUCATION I reprise my now-familiar argument about declining enrollment.  I added Brian Mitchell’s precise, quiet, and devastating observation:

The premise is that student-generated revenues will expand to offset increasing operational expenses of the institutions. However, the decline in per-student net tuition revenues and the backlash against higher student loan debt have pushed this core assumption off the planning table. At the same, time, higher education faces evolving demographic, political, and economic trends that will constrain revenue, and produce smaller and more diverse admission classes.

Good discussion followed these slides.

Being a book obsessed person, and also not a professional economist, I had to issue a reading list:

Archibald and Feldman, Why Does College Cost So Much? (Oxford)
Cappelli, Will College Pay Off? (Public Affairs)
Christensen et al, Disrupting Class (McGraw-Hill)
DeMillo, Abelard To Apple (MIT)
____, Revolution in Higher Education (MIT)
Massy, Reengineering the University (Johns Hopkins University Press)
McGee, Breakpoint (JHUP)
NACUBO.  Everything they produce.
Newfield, Unmaking the Public University (JHUP)
____, The Great Mistake (JHUP)
Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard)
Stevens and Kirst, eds., Remaking College: The Changing Ecology of Higher Education (Stanford)
Wildawsky et al, eds., Reinventing Higher Education (Harvard Education)

 

Edutech

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December 7, 2016 at 06:25AM

The Business of Education Technology

The Business of Education Technology

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This is part three of my annual review of the year in ed-tech

In previous years, when I’ve written about this topic, I’ve saved “The Business of Ed-tech” for one of the last articles in my “Top Ed-Tech Trends" series. If nothing else, I’ve wanted as many days in December to pass as possible so that my calculations for the total amount of venture funding invested during the year were as accurate as I could get them to be when I hit ”publish.“ This year, however, I’ve scheduled this topic earlier, which means I can’t really offer a finalized list of the year’s ”Most Well-Funded Startups“ or ”Most Active Investors." I will do that in a separate article at the end of the year.

But even without knowing the funding data for the month of December, I can say a lot.

I think it’s safe to say, for example, that venture capital investment has fallen off rather precipitously this year. True, 2015 was a record-breaking year for ed-tech funding – over $4 billion by my calculations. But it appears that the massive growth that the sector has experienced since 2010 stopped this year. Funding has shrunk. A lot. The total dollars invested in 2016 are off by about $2 billion from this time last year; the number of deals are down by a third; and the number of acquisitions are off by about 20%.

To the entrepreneur who wrote the Techcrunch op-ed in August that ed-tech is “2017's big, untapped and safe investor opportunity.” You are a fool. A dangerous, exploitative one at that.

“This Tech Bubble Is Bursting,” The Wall Street Journal pronounced back in May. That’s not a new prediction, by any means. We’ve heard this for years now. “The Tech Bubble Didn’t Burst This Year,” Bloomberg cautioned in October, “Just Wait” – suggesting that what the future might hold instead of an outright bust is “several years of relative stagnation.” (But who knows what shape tech investment will take under a President Trump.)

Bust or not, companies across the tech sector, particularly those with high “burn rates”, faced tough choices in 2016: “cut costs drastically to become self-sustaining, or seek additional capital on ever-more-onerous terms,” as The WSJ put it – that is, if they were able to raise additional capital at all.

Even without providing you the final tally of funding for 2016, I can point to other signals about what’s happened to ed-tech startups over the course of the last twelve months – their sustainability, their viability. (Or lack thereof – see “The 2016 Ed-Tech Dead Pool.”)

You can read these signals in the phrases used by Edsurge and other publications to describe startups’ press and product releases. “Tweaking the business model.” “Crossing the chasm to profitability.” “A path to profitability.” “A path to revenue.” “Focus turns to money.” Phrases like these were repeated again and again and again this year, as many ed-tech companies have, for years now, relied on venture capital as their primary source of revenue – a source that’s no longer readily available.

You might read the signals of the health of ed-tech startups in the departure of their founders – both from leadership positions and from their companies altogether. Daphne Koller left Coursera this year. Sebastian Thrun stepped down as Udacity’s CEO. Jen Medbery stepped down as CEO of Kickboard. Remind co-founder Brett Kopf was replaced as CEO by Brian Grey, formerly CEO of the Bleacher Report. NovoEd co-founder Amin Saberi was replaced by Ed Miller, a former Blackboard exec. That’s what happens when you raise millions of dollars in venture capital: venture capitalists have a greater say in how your company is run, in who runs your company.

You might read the signals of the health of ed-tech startups – how they’re “cutting costs drastically to become self-sustaining” – in their downsizing. Layoffs at MasteryConnect (30% of staff). Layoffs at Noodle.com (80% of its marketing and editorial teams). Layoffs at Treehouse (20% of staff). Layoffs at General Assembly (7% of staff). (These are just the ones that were reported by the press, of course.)

In fairness, startups weren’t the only education companies experiencing this sort of upheaval this year: Amplify, News Corps’ education division, continued to sell off various parts of its failed business. Blackboard replaced its CEO. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s CEO resigned. ISTE’s CEO left “unexpectedly.” Dale Dougherty returned as the CEO of Maker Media, following layoffs there. The CEO of Safari Books left the company “amidst massive layoffs.” Pearson cut 4000 jobs – 10% of its staff. K12 Inc got a new CEO. DeVry Education Group got a new CEO." (I’ll chronicle the layoffs at for-profit universities in more detail in the next article in this series.)

Clearly ed-tech startups weren’t the only ones facing financial struggles in their quest for profitability, as neither testing nor textbooks nor online education nor for-profit education has proven to be as wildly lucrative as the hype of “the digital” promised.

You can find stock market data about publicly-traded education companies at funding.hackeducation.com.

Who’s to blame that companies aren’t selling enough stuff to schools? Why, schools of course.

What Do Venture Capitalists Want?

Here are the areas that have seen the most ed-tech investment activity so far this year:

Learning to code: Investments include Galvanize ($45,000,000), Codecademy ($30,000,000), Andela ($24,000,000), Wonder Workshop ($20,000,000), Revature ($20,000,000).

Tutoring and test prep: Investments include Byju’s ($125,000,000), Zuoyebang ($60,000,000), Jerry Education ($40,000,000), Smartstudy ($29,540,000), Entstudy ($18,210,000), Brainly ($15,000,000), Zhiyou Education ($9,200,000).

Private student loans: Investments include Affirm ($100,000,000), Incred ($75,000,000, CommonBond ($30,000,000), College Ave ($20,000,000), Indian School Finance Company ($6,000,000).

Online education (admittedly, a very generic category): Investments include Udemy ($60,000,000), DigiSchool ($15,700,000), MasterClass ($15,000,000), UNICAF ($12,000,000), OpenClassroom ($6,740,000).

I maintain a dataset of all education technology investments and all education technology investors. Again, I’ll publish a finalized list of “who,” “what,” and “how much” at the end of the year.

Some of these areas that are popular for investment do coincide with the popular narratives about “the future of education” – “everyone should learn to code,” for example. But some of them, like the explosion in startups offering private student loans, suggest something is happening quite contrary to the narratives of “free and open,” not to mention to a tradition of publicly funded education or the policies of federal financial aid.

Glaring in its absence from this list: “personalization,” one of the most trumpeted technology “solutions” this year. (I’ll look at “personalization” in more detail in a forthcoming article in this series.) Certainly “personal” and “personalized” showed up in lots of funding announcements, as it’s an adjective that gets inserted quite easily into almost any press release. Even without funding data to underscore its importance, “personalization” can’t be dismissed.

The word is a crystallization of ed-tech ideology: through technology, teaching will become radically individualized as learners’ lessons are reduced to the smallest possible piece of content, then presented to them algorithmically. Moreover, per this ideology, without the aid of algorithms and “personalization” technology, human educators and traditional institutions have historically failed to meet the needs of individuals as individuals. The responsibility for education therefore must shift to technology, away from the institution, to the individual, away from the public or civic.

The ideological and financial shift from public to private is exemplified by venture philanthropy – that is, venture capital investments framed as charity.

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines when he announced he would donate 99% of his Facebook shares to his philanthropic LLC, the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. This investment vehicle is often described as a charity; it’s not. As political science professor Rob Reich recently told Buzzfeed’s Nitasha Tiku in her story on "free market philanthropy,

Wealthy individuals often assume that philanthropic donations should be received in gratitude, Reich said, because it’s better for the public than purchasing another house or another boat. “That’s just false to me,” he said. “It’s an exercise of power aimed at the public, and in a democratic society, power deserves attention and scrutiny, not gratitude.”

The Gates Foundation is perhaps the best known organization for furthering political advocacy through its funding mechanisms. It is a profoundly undemocratic force whereby unelected billionaires funnel money into efforts to reshape public education policies – expanding charter schools, pursuing alternative forms of teacher certification, promoting the Common Core State Standards, encouraging merit-based pay for teachers, and popularizing the narrative that education technology is the key to “personalization.” The agendas of other foundations – big and small – often echo those of Gates. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is no exception.

You can find the list of education technology companies the Chan Zuckerberg has invested in this year at funding.hackeducation.com. The list of recipients of Gates Foundation grants can be found on its website.

In May, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced that Jim Shelton would head its education investment endeavors. Shelton had been named president of the online education company 2U earlier in the year. Previously, he’d been the deputy secretary of the Department of Education. Before that, he’d been at the Gates Foundation. Before that, he’d been at NewSchools Venture Fund. Before that, he’d run a school management company acquired by the charter school chain Edison Schools.

“If You Had $45 Billion, What Would You Do to Improve Education?” The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Goldie Blumenstyk recently asked Shelton. Me, I’d probably take it and divvy it up among the 15 million children who live in poverty in the US, but clearly I’d make a terrible venture capitalist.

Shelton’s hardly the only person who’s gone through the revolving door from the Gates Foundation to the Department of Education to venture capital and back again. Ted Mitchell, the current Under Secretary of Education, was the president of NewSchools Venture Fund. And former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who stepped down from his position at the end of 2015, joined the venture philanthropy firm Emerson Collective – founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow – as a partner in March. (A former basketball star, Duncan also joined the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics this year.)

Among its investments this year, the Emerson Collective funded a $100 million contest this year to “rethink high school,” perpetuating the old and tired narrative that “high school hasn’t changed in 100 years.” Of course, schools have changed – in both substantial and incremental ways – over the last century, while many recent reformers efforts to radically reshape public school have failed. But, as New York Magazine quipped, “Laurene Powell Jobs is undaunted by these facts.”

Venture philanthropists do not need facts.

You can find the list of education technology companies the Emerson Collective has invested in this year at funding.hackeducation.com.

The Elephants in the Ed-Tech Room

For the last five or six years, education technology has been largely talked about in terms of “startups,” something that helps position the industry as an outsider and an underdog. Of course, most of ed-tech is neither. It’s built and sold by giant corporations.

These are the companies that sell the textbooks; these are the companies that sell the tests.

But as I noted above, these two products haven’t been as lucrative in recent years as companies had hoped, and their to “digital” hasn’t been smooth. In part, their struggles are a result of controversies surrounding the Common Core State Standards, which were supposed to streamline and procurement the development of curriculum and assessment. Pushback against Common Core tests specifically and against standardized testing more generally have also prompted states and districts to rethink the kind and frequency of assessments they buy. “The number of states planning to use the new tests dropped from 45 in 2011 to 20 in 2016,” Education Next observed this fall, and many states and districts have opted to use the SAT or ACT instead of those assessments created by the Common Core consortia, SBAC and PARCC.

Schools, for their part, also continued this year to experience difficulties with the move to computer-based testing, some having to revert to paper-and-pen assessments when online systems went down. In turn, states including Tennessee, Texas, Nevada, Indiana, and New Jersey fined their testing vendors, froze their contracts with testing vendors, or claimed their vendors were in breach of contract.

In response to all these ongoing problems with testing, the Obama Administration said in April it would “take action” in order to “ensure fewer and better tests for students.” “Taking action,” in this case, meant releasing some case studies and posting a notice on the Federal Register about how a competitive grant program could provide a more “innovative” way to build assessments.

Everything’s a business opportunity.

The move away from the Common Core consortia for assessment and towards the (Common Core-aligned) SAT has been a boon for the College Board, no surprise, which reported over $840 million in revenue in 2014 (the last year it’s tax forms are available online).

The College Board released an updated version of the SAT this year that it claimed would make the test more equitable – I’ll look at this claim more closely in the final article in this series. The College Board also boasted about its partnership with Khan Academy, which would make SAT test prep materials freely available online. The College Board insisted that this move – free test prep – would also serve to make the assessment better reflect student capacity rather than parental income, something probably belied by the fact that test prep remains one of the most active areas for education technology investment.

The pressure to move towards digital assessments has fueled schools’ investments in hardware and software more than any other argument about the importance of ed-tech. (According to Edsurge, changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will soon be another “win for ed-tech vendors.” So congrats, ed-tech vendors.) Schools do continue to turn away from the iPad as the tablet hasn’t proven to be quite as revolutionary as some predicted. Surprise, surprise. But the rationale for choosing a certain type of computing device is almost always about testing, not about any other benefit the device might offer teaching and learning.

“Personal Computer Sales to K–12 Education Continue to Rise as OS War Hots Up,” FutureSource Consulting pronounced in March. By June, the same market research firm said that the K–12 market was in decline. (In ed-tech, never forget: “The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release.”)

But this notion of an “OS War” shouldn’t be too quickly dismissed. “Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google Are Fighting a War for the Classroom,” Edutechnica wrote in June, with a look at how many colleges have adopted their competing “pseudo-LMSes.” The “war” extends beyond the productivity suite of tech tools and it extends beyond operating system in the classroom. It’s about building brand allegiance with students and/as workers, and it’s about building data profiles to sell ads and other products.

Although Amazon has provided the infrastructure for many education companies for quite some time now with Amazon Web Services, its cloud-based offering, it attempted to make more inroads into education this year: trying to lure college students to become Prime members, reaching a deal whereby Prime would be the exclusive streaming service for PBS for Kids content, toying briefly with the idea of getting into the student loan business with Wells Fargo, becoming the e-book platform for New York City school system, and launching a digital marketplace for K–12 instructional materials (which I’ll look at more closely in the next article in this series).

It’s probably a stretch to argue, however, that – even with their deep pockets and engineering talent – these big technology corporations are, as Edsurge implied this fall, on a “march to replace learning management systems.” Or if it’s a march, it’s a very very slow one – one that I’m going to leave in the capable hands of Mindwires Consulting’s Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein to monitor. If those two say “the LMS market glacier is melting,” it’s probably melting. (I’m not sure how that changes the march, to be honest. Metaphors in ed-tech are so confusing.) Throughout the year, Hill and Feldstein dutifully chronicled all the updates (or lack of updates) to Blackboard, Pearson, Instructure, Schoology, D2L, and the like. (So thankfully, I didn’t have to.) In May, their company began offering a subscription service for a report on the LMS market – a signal, perhaps, that “the march to replace the learning management system” won’t be over anytime soon.

The LMS, of course, needn’t be a permanent line item in schools’ budgets. And its supposed primacy might actually overlook that there’s a great deal of “shadow” technology utilized by instructors who eschew the official LMS for something they find better suited to their classroom needs and goals.

The Procurement Problem

The learning management system is a piece of “enterprise” software after all. That is, it’s built and bought to satisfy the needs of the institution rather than the needs of individual. Purchasing an LMS – or more correctly, signing a contract to license an LMS – requires its own enterprise-level bureaucracy.

But is procurement really why we have terrible ed-tech?

For the last couple of years – at the very least since the resurgence in venture-back ed-tech startups – there’s been a steady drumbeat of complaints that the procurement process at both the K–12 and college levels is broken. It’s inefficient. It’s “dysfunctional.” I’ve heard the complaint from entrepreneurs. I’ve heard it from their investors, many of whom argue that the challenges of selling to schools is one of the things that makes education a difficult market to crack (and in turn ed-tech startups a poor investment).

There’s a lot that’s wrong with the process, no doubt. For starters, the hefty RFP requirements almost by design tilt purchasing decisions towards big companies and incumbent players. The folks who make the decisions about what to buy typically aren’t the people who are using the products in the classroom.

There’s not a lot of transparency in the procurement process; nor is it easy to find out afterwards which products schools bought or use – although that’s not something you hear companies moan about, funnily enough. You’re just supposed to trust them when they brag they’re used in 90% of schools. (USC professor Morgan Polikoff’s research on textbook adoption, for example, has made this painfully clear. He’s sent FOIA requests to school districts, and in many cases they have been unwilling or unable to share their textbook data. And when they do, the data is often a mess.)

In the last few years, lots of consulting firms and organizations have offered their suggested solutions for fixing (what they see as) procurement problems. Last year Edsurge launched a “concierge” service in which it said it would help schools identify its tech needs and then buy things based on those needs (and then take a cut of the contracts, of course), and it continues to position itself as a liaison between startups and schools.

This spring, Harold O. Levy, executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, launched the Technology for Education Consortium in order to offer “price transparency” around procurement. The organization’s first target was Apple, which it found charged different districts different prices for identical iPads. (Apple disputed the organization’s assertions.)

This fall, the EducationSuperHighway released a price comparison tool so that districts could see neighbors’ broadband costs and ideally leverage that information to get a better deal.

(All of these organizations – Edsurge, EducationSuperHighway, the Technology for Education Consortium – are funded by the Gates Foundation. And the beat goes on.)

Some schools made efforts to tackle procurements problems too. UNC, for example, launched a Yelp-like review site for ed-tech tools, where, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “it is asking professors to review and comment on how useful various digital services were in their classrooms.”

But by and large, procurement issues are a problem identified by companies that companies decide they will “fix” in turn: “Try Before You Buy,” Edsurge reported in June. “Clever’s ‘Co-Pilot’ Aims to Help Schools Pilot and Purchase.” Indeed, an increasingly popular service offered by ed-tech companies and ed-tech investors is “research” into how to buy ed-tech and into which ed-tech products are best, which “work” (whatever that means).

(These companies almost all share the same investors too. And the beat goes on.)

One of the ways in which ed-tech startups have found success in getting their products widely adopted is to sell to charter schools, particularly charter school chains. (Again, they often share the same investors.) Charter school chains, in turn, have started to license their products and franchise their models to others. As such, it’s difficult to separate “the business of education technology” from “the business of charter schools” – and why it’s difficult, as I noted in the previous article in this series, “the politics of education technology” from “the politics of education reform.”

It’s a business that, much like the business of for-profit higher education, seems to be poised for growth with the election of President Trump. Shares in K12 Inc, a virtual charter school with notoriously poor performance, are up rather dramatically from this time last year. (The history of the future of ed-tech and venture capital: Oracle’s Larry Ellison was one of the first investors in the company.)

In July, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced a $168 million settlement with K12 Inc over charges the company had published misleading advertisements about the academic performance of students, among other things. “As part of the agreement,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “the attorney general’s office maintains that K12 will forgive about $160 million in debt accrued by the nonprofit schools it manages, which was a result of the fee structure in the K12 contract. The company also will pay $8.5 million to address all claims.” K12 denied any wrongdoing.

California’s virtual charter schools weren’t the only ones that found themselves in trouble legally and/or academically. There were problems in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Idaho with virtual charters. And yet, despite the poor performance, these remain in business.

It’s the business of funneling taxpayer money into private companies. And that is, at the end of the day, the business of education technology.

Disrupting the Culture of Public Education

I’ve argued elsewhere that education technology serves as a “Trojan horse” of sorts, carrying with it into public institutions the practices, politics, and a culture of private business and the ideology of Silicon Valley. This is evident in the ways in which you hear many investors and entrepreneurs talk about what needs to happen to schools – that they need to become more efficient; they need to be more like “lean startups” and redesign themselves as a “minimum viable product”; they need to “unbundle,” “unbundle,” “unbundle”; they need to rename job titles and rethink job roles – “learning engineers” or “entrepreneurs-in-residence,” for example; they need to turn to markets, not politics or publics, for solutions.

Edsurge wrote in March about how schools could bring “Shark Tanks” to their schools. Shark Tank is a reality TV show featuring investor Mark Cuban in which entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of judges, hoping to win some investment. The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a “Shark Tank” contest at SXSWedu this year. One of the entrants was a startup that made it easier to hire adjunct instructors. For what it’s worth,“Shark Tank funds fewer women than men, with less money,” Mashable observed earlier this year, but I’m sure things’ll be swell if schools adopt the practice.

If you’re looking for a quick read – one that’s hilariously awful – about the culture of startups in order to convince yourself this is the last thing we should bring to public education, I recommend Dan Lyon’s book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, published this spring.

What VC Spells for Sesame Street

Last year, Sesame Street made the sad and surprising announcement that it had struck a five-year deal with HBO, giving the premium cable channel the first-run rights to new episodes of the beloved television show. As media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan wrote at the time, “The Sesame Street move is not a horrible thing in itself. After all, the new episodes will show up for free on Public Broadcasting Service stations nine months after HBO viewers got them. Instead, the move is a symptom of how Americans view our collective obligations to each other – especially to our poorest children.” The mission of Sesame Street had, since its founding been to serve underprivileged children, offering them a televised educational enrichment free of charge, free of advertising.

That’s no longer the mission.

“New money has ruined Sesame Street,” The Guardian wrote in January. "In its new format the show’s theme tune is a little brighter and the street scene a little ritzier than one remembers from earlier versions.

The charm of Sesame Street was always in its scruffiness and allegiance to the theory that kids like dirt – or rather, don’t dislike it the way adults do – and Sesame Street’s row of brownstones was clearly the pre-gentrified version."

Now, as the camera pans over Big Bird’s new-look neighbourhood, and in keeping with the times, those houses seem to have been remodelled by developers

Elmo has a new apartment. Oscar the Grouch no longer lives in a trash can. The puppets that are featured the most are the ones with the best-selling product lines. And then there are the humans. Some of those humans – those most dearly beloved humans of Sesame Street, Gordon, Luis, and Bob – were fired (and then brought back due to the uproar).

In February, Sesame Workshop, the maker of Sesame Street, announced it was launching a venture capital arm in order to invest in startups because everything is terrible. It’s first startup investment – a tutoring app. It also invested $53 million in a VC fund run by Reach Capital, formerly NewSchools Venture Fund.

Sesame Workshop has also partnered with IBM, to extract data from preschoolers in the name of “research” into the “personalization” of early childhood education.

Of course, what drives the programming on Sesame Street now isn’t education research; it’s market research. It isn’t “equity” as in social justice; it’s “equity” as in the financial stake a VC takes in a company.

And that’s what “the business of education technology” gets us.

Financial data on the major corporations and investors involved in this and all the trends I cover in this series can be found on funding.hackeducation.com. Icon credits: The Noun Project

Edutech

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December 5, 2016 at 02:05AM

Education Technology and the Year of Wishful Thinking

Education Technology and the Year of Wishful Thinking

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This is part one of my annual review of the year in ed-tech

In 2005, Joan Didion published The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicles her husband’s death in December 2003, shortly after their daughter had fallen into septic shock and been placed an induced coma.

I read the book that very year – and honestly, I don’t often buy or read books in hardcover – shortly after my own husband died.

I needed help in understanding grief – my own grief, my son’s grief. “In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control,” Didion writes. “Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.” I found her book comforting, while its material horrific, in part because it was a book. Didion had found the words to talk about grief and mourning, and she’d written those words down, and she’d published them in a material object I could hold and weep into.

In Didion’s writing, I recognized my own performance of and reliance upon the rituals of “magical thinking,” the omens and interdictions that I believed somehow could undo or stop or assuage the horror of Anthony’s death.

“I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew.” This was what the mother of a nineteen-year-old killed by a bomb in Kirkuk said on an HBO documentary quoted by Bob Herbert in The New York Times on the morning of November 12, 2004. “But I thought that if, as long as I didn’t let him in, he couldn’t tell me. And then it – none of that would’ve happened. So he kept saying, ‘Ma’am, I need to come in.’ And I kept telling him, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t come in.’”

This is the rationality of the irrationality of grief. This is the irrationality of the rationality of death.

Mourn and Organize

I want to start this year’s review of education technology acknowledging grief. This has been a terrible, terrible year. I want to start this year’s review of education technology sanctioning, if such a thing is necessary, our mourning. It is not self-indulgent to mourn. We need not hide our feelings.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day.

I want to start this year’s review of education recognizing what’s been lost. Not just the loss of Seymour Papert and Prince and David Bowie and Phife Dawg and Harper Lee and Gwen Ifill and Alan Rickman and Gene Wilder and Ursula Franklin and Scott Erik Kaufman and Jerome Bruner and Elie Wiesel and Alvin Toffler and Leonard Cohen (and many more), but the grief and the pain that stems from these and so many other losses. So many losses. It is impossible for me to write about education technology in 2016 without noting their passing, without talking about Brexit, Trump, Duarte, Aleppo, Orlando… I could go on… and acknowledging that many of us have stumbled through this year – from tragedy to tragedy (personal, local, regional, national, global) – in a state of shock, in a state of grief.

Grief clouds your thinking, magical or otherwise.

In a society that considers itself highly rational, highly technological, highly scientific, to call something “magical” often serves to dismiss or diminish it – or to dismiss or diminish those who do not sufficiently understand science or tech. That famous Arthur C. Clarke saying and whatnot. That’s not what Didion meant to do, of course. Indeed, she’s quite methodical with her study – her inspection, introspection – of grief. When she turns to “the literature,” she reads medical and psychiatric texts alongside poetry.

But there’s something about how grief in particular ruptures the rational. It makes us want to believe in – cling to, really – unbelievability. We want to believe that it can’t be true. And in the midst of death and horror and suffering, we often find some small piece of comfort there.

I mean, the Cubs did win the World Series in 2016. Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize.

Expertise in an Age of Post-Truth

Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” the word of the year. “Post-truth,” an adjective: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

It’s been over a decade since comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the word “truthiness” on The Colbert Report – his attempt to describe political arguments, particularly those made by conservatives, that need no facts or evidence because they “just feel right.” In other words, we did not suddenly enter a period of “post-truth” in 2016. But facts, evidence, and expertise have taken blow after blow in recent years (at least since President George W. Bush), and the invocation of facts, evidence, and expertise in political arguments (particularly those arguments on social media) is now interpreted as bias rather objectivity.

On the night of the US Presidential election, sociologist Nathan Jurgenson wondered if there wasn’t an equivalent to “truthiness” embraced by those of different political persuasions:

let’s call it “factiness.” Factiness is the taste for the feel and aesthetic of “facts,” often at the expense of missing the truth. From silly self-help-y TED talks to bad NPR-style neuroscience science updates to wrapping ourselves in the misleading scientisim [sic] of Fivethirtyeight statistics, factiness is obsessing over and covering ourselves in fact after fact while still missing bigger truths.

Jurgenson calls “factiness” a belief of the left-wing – one contrary to the “truthiness” on the right. I’m not so sure these fit, quite so neatly, into a political binary. I contend that “factiness” is a core belief of technocracy, which finds a foothold in corporations as often as in academia, in bureaucracy far more often than on the barricades. “Factiness” is, no doubt, a core belief of “elites,” and it’s a core belief of “experts,” and like it or not, these two have become intertwined. Intertwined and despised.

“We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade,” Chris Hayes wrote in Twilight of the Elites (2012). “Elite failure and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society. It structures and constrains the very process by which we gather facts, form opinions, and execute self-governance.”

And here we are. A loss of faith in governments, governance, globalization, pluralism, polling, pundits, public institutions, private institutions, markets, science, research, journalism, democracy, each other.

“If the experts as a whole are discredited,”Hayes cautions, “we are faced with an inexhaustible supply of quackery.”

Education technology faces an inexhaustible supply of quackery.

Education Technology and (Decades and Decades of) Quackery

Education technology has faced an inexhaustible supply of quackery for quite some time – those selling snake oil, magic pills, and enchanted talismans and promising disruption, efficiency, and higher test scores. The quackery in 2016 wasn’t new, in other words, but it was notable. It is certainly connected to the discrediting of “expertise,” whether that’s teachers-as-experts or researchers-as-experts. (Students, of course, have rarely been recognized as experts – unless they fit the model of “roaming autodidacts” that society so readily lauds.)

What do we believe about education? About learning? How do we know, and who knows “knowing” in a world where expertise is debunked?

Psychology, a field of research whose history is tightly bound to education technology, continued to face a “reproducibility crisis” this year, with challenges to research on “ego depletion,” to claims based on fMRI software, and – of course – to the Reproducibility Project itself, that 2015 report that found that the results in less than 40% of a sample of 100 articles in psychology journals held up to retesting.

So who do you believe? The scientists? The engineers? The advertisers? The media?

In January, “brain-training” company Lumosity agreed to pay $2 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it had deceived customers with its claims that its games improved cognitive functions. But despite the settlement and despite what science journalist Ed Yong politely calls “The Weak Evidence Behind Brain Training Games,” “brain training” remains quite a popular product in education technology, with the phrase “brain-based” used to “scientize” all sorts of classroom practices.

Much like “brain training,” “brain scanning” was repeatedly hyped this year as a possible way to improve the efficacy of education software. Hooking up students to headbands to monitor their brain activity has now left the research lab and entered the exhibit hall. Some of the headbands and helmets now on the market deliver electric shocks and promise to boost “performance” or deliver “instant energy or calm.” Some promise to monitor and measure brain activity. “Brain-zapping” is, according to a story in The Observer this spring, a “nascent industry,” even though there’s really no evidence to support it.

No evidence. But a lot of wild claims made in (ed-)tech journalism nonetheless.

“Researchers Create Matrix-Like Instant Learning Through Brain Stimulation,” Techcrunch announced early this year, a re-write of a press release issued by HRL Laboratories, a research center jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors, regarding an article it had published in the February 2016 issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (a pay-to-publish journal). The press release invoked The Matrix. Of course it did. But the press release was misleading; what the researchers had actually discovered about brain simulation: more research is needed. As I wrote then in response,

Whether or not this is science or fiction, let’s consider why “Matrix-style learning” is so compelling. Stories like this seem to emerge with some frequency. (We might ask too, why do neuroscientific claims frequently go unchallenged by the press - but then again, so much education/technology journalism is wildly uncritical. Parroting PR is pretty routine.)

Science aside, let’s think about culture and society. What’s the lure of “instant learning” and in particular “instant learning” via a technological manipulation of the brain? This is certainly connected to the push for “efficiency” in education and education technology. But again, why would we want learning to be fast and cheap? What does that say about how we imagine and more importantly how we value the process of learning?

There’s little evidence of how these products or practices will improve teaching or learning. But there’s a ton of snake oil. And a lot of wishful thinking.

Education Technology and (Decades and Decades of) Wishful Thinking

The promise of education technology, like it or not, is mostly wishful thinking. Proponents of ed-tech insist that ed-tech is necessary; that without ed-tech, schools are outmoded and irrelevant; that “the future” demands it. But as I argued in a talk I gave at VCU in November, “the best way to predict the future is to issue a press release.” That is, the steady drumbeat of marketing surrounding the necessity of education technology largely serves to further ideologies of neoliberalism, individualism, late-stage capitalism, outsourcing, surveillance, speed, and commodity fetishism.

I know many of us wished otherwise.

Arguably the business of “predicting the future” took a bit of a hit this year, what with the failure, as some describe it, of polling in the Presidential election. But “predicting the future” – with or without the mantle of science – is often about pointing to and sanctioning a particular vision of the future. Wishful thinking.

Folks have long made predictions about the future of education and education technology. Such-and-such practice or product will die out. Such-and-such practice or product will disrupt. Such-and-such practice or product will revolutionize. Such-and-such practice or product will soon be adopted and will change everything.

Soon.

Someday.

Or as the Education Week headline described Bill Gates’ keynote at this year’s annual venture capital gala, the ASU-GSV Summit, “Ed Tech Has Underachieved But Better Days Are Ahead.” They always are.

Hype as Wishful Thinking

There’s a long list of technology products that I’m sure will appear on many “2016 Top Ed-Tech Trends” lists:

Chatbots: As eCampus News pronounced in November: “How chatbots will change the face of campus technology.” (I wrote about the history of the future of chatbots in education in September.)

Blockchain: “10 amazing ways Blockchain could be used in education” by Donald Clark. (I’ll write more about the blockchain and certification in a forthcoming article in this series.)

Pokemon Go: “Why Pokemon Go shows the future of learning gamification,” according to Education Dive at least. (Bonus: “5.3 Reasons Pokemon Go will Replace the LMS” by Tom Woodward.)

3D Printing: 3D printing is “Revolutionizing Project-Based Learning,” according to Makerbot. Related: “MakerBot will no longer make its own 3D printers.” And “The MakerBot Obituary.” RIP.

Wearables: “Eye-trackers that detect when your mind is wandering. Clothes that let you ‘feel’ what it’s like to be in someone else’s body. Sensors that connect your heart rate to how engaged you are in class. These are the kinds of wearable technologies that could soon impact how we learn,” says Edsurge. Wishful thinking? Quackery? (I’ll be talking more about wearables and surveillance in a forthcoming article in this series.)

Bullshit or not, the marketing of these products continues – often with a breathless description of “revolution” and “transformation” and “disruption” and ever-growing business opportunities – even if few schools or teachers or students buy the product, can afford to buy the product, or want to buy the product.

Fads fade, of course. Hype wanes. Take iPads, for example. Or the flipped classroom. Or MOOCs even.

Fads fade, and then sometimes they re-emerge, sometimes they re-brand. “Zombies ideas,” as I’ve previously called them.

No doubt, the most wishful of the ed-tech zombies this year was VR.

Virtual Reality as Wishful Thinking

In July, I wrote an article called “(Marketing) Virtual Reality in Education: A History.” The opening paragraphs:

Virtual reality is, once again, being heralded as a technology poised to transform education. I say “once again” because virtual reality has long been associated with such promises. VR appeared in some of the earliest Horizon Reports for example, with the 2007 report positing that virtual worlds would be adopted by higher ed institutions within two to three years' time; funnily enough, the 2016 report offers the same outlook: we’re still two to three years out from widespread adoption of VR.

The history of VR goes back much farther than this – the phrase “virtual reality” was coined in 1987 by Jaron Lanier, but attempts to create the illusion of being somewhere else – through art and/or technology – date back farther still.

“But this time it’s different.” That’s the common response from some quarters to my (repeated) assertion that there’s a substantial history to education technologies – to both the technologies themselves and to the educational purposes for which they’re designed or utilized – that is consistently ignored.

This much is true: augmented reality and virtual reality startups have seen record-setting levels of venture capital in recent years predicated on advancements in the tech (although much of that investment has gone to just a handful of companies, such as Magic Leap). In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR, Google released its Cardboard viewer, and Playstation announced it was working on a VR gaming headset – these have all been interpreted in turn as signs that virtual reality will soon be mainstream.

“Soon.” As the New Media Consortium’s annual reports should serve to remind us, VR has always been “on the horizon.”

In that article – which I’ll refrain from just copy-pasting here – I look at the history of educational uses of stereoscopy, which date back to the Victorian era when a combination of lenses and imagery were used to trick the brain into interpreting two- as three-dimensionality. Many of the products touted as VR today are simply that: stereoscopy with a fancier viewer. (Say, the Android device in Google’s Cardboard Viewer and Expeditions program.)

Virtual reality, at least in its “purest” or strictest sense, requires some very expensive and cumbersome hardware in order to create something more than an “immersive” viewing experience of a 360 degree video. Headsets. Gloves. Sensors. Projectors. Processors. To truly provide a virtual reality, the technology must achieve “sensory immersion in a virtual environment, including a sense of presence,” game developer and VR scholar Brenda Laurel argued in June, listing a series of requisite characteristics almost entirely absent from the multimedia products marketed to schools as VR.

And that marketing, it is worth pointing out, is almost the same as marketing in the early twentieth century urging educators to adopt film as an education technology: “Learn about other cultures.” “Visit faraway lands without leaving the classroom.” “Guided tours of places school buses cannot go.” “Modern pedagogical methods require modern media.” “Pictures speak a universal language.” “This is science.”

(Image credits: Educational Screen, 1924)

So the claims that this is new and revolutionary are dubious. The claims that stereoscopy is VR are dubious. The claims that VR will “reinvent education” are dubious. (According to a report on “The Top 10 Companies Working on Education in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality,” one of the “top” applications “simulates a lecture hall in virtual reality.”) The claims that VR will expand access to education for everyone are dubious. (Despite headlines claiming, for example, that “Anybody can now buy Microsoft’s $3,000 HoloLens,” not everyone and not every school can afford to do so.) The claims that the technology is finally ready for consumers are dubious. (VR still makes people nauseous.) The claims that the technology will enhance empathy are really dubious, particularly in the light of Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey’s financial support for an unofficial pro-Donald Trump group dedicated to “shitposting” and spreading hateful memes about Hillary Clinton. (I’ll have more to say on Oculus Rift and Facebook in the next post in this series – one that will address the politics of ed-tech – as well as in the final post – one that will talk about discrimination by design.)

But the breathlessness about VR persists, much as it has persisted for decades: it will change education forever. It is the next big thing. It’s the future of school (and it’s the future of Facebook). It is a disruptive innovation.

It is all wishful thinking.

Grief and Loss and Education Technology

Perhaps it’s time to ask why – why this is the ritual and the story that education continues to turn to? It has, after all, for at least one hundred years - the promise of teaching machines. What is the loss that we are suffering? What are we grieving? Why are we in this fog of educational make-believe? Why are we so wrapped up in the magical thinking and wishful thinking of education technology? What do we hope the practices of ed-tech will deliver, will relieve? What are we hoping to preserve? What are we hoping to absolve? What might we afraid to admit has died? Why is wishful thinking, in and through and with education technology, a balm for so many of us?

At what point should we just let go...

Financial data on the major corporations and investors involved in this and all the trends I cover in this series can be found on funding.hackeducation.com.

Edutech

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December 1, 2016 at 02:13AM

The Coolest Features You Can Unlock in Android's Developer Options

The Knock at the Door

The Knock at the Door

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Students' legitimate fears that we are in a new era.

 

Edutech

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November 10, 2016 at 08:16PM

How to Use YouTube Live Streaming for Free Lecture Capture

How to Use YouTube Live Streaming for Free Lecture Capture

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[This guest post by Timothy A Lepczyk also also appeared on his own blog, Eduhacker, today. --@JBJ]
When I first heard that Google was discontinuing Hangouts on Air, I panicked. However, that was unwarranted. Hangouts on Air is moving to Youtube Live and you can still use it as a free lecture-capture solution, while saving your institution $20K+ at the same time.

If you’ve used Hangouts on Air before, then you already have a Youtube Channel. If not, then you’ll need to create a channel. Once you are logged into Youtube, click on My Channel.

Then, click on Video Manager in the middle of the page, right above your banner image.

Next, you’ll click on Live Streaming in the Creator Studio panel. It’s annoying that there are all these extra steps getting to the right screen. You can go directly to the webpage through this URL: https://www.youtube.com/live_dashboard.

Counter-intuitively, click on Events in the lefthand menu. Do not click on Stream now. That will take you down the rabbit-hole of needing an encoder and downloading additional software. I did that the first time and it made me doubt Youtube Live as a feasible alternative.

Click New live event in the top right. Don’t click on Go live now, if there is a blue banner right above the New live event button.

This next screen will look extremely similar to the set-up of Hangouts on Air. Give your lecture a title. I often use the course code and date. You don’t need to add a description or tags. You can set the link for public, unlisted, or private. I always use unlisted as I then embed the video into our learning management system (Moodle). Make sure the radio button for Quick (using Google Hangouts On Air) is checked. If you accidentally select Custom, it will take you through the whole encoding set-up, which is a pain to use. Click Go live now once you’ve entered your title and set the permissions. Before using this, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the Advanced settings.

You will now be brought to the Hangouts screen. Click Screenshare and select Entire Screen to capture all of the content on your screen. If you select a specific program it might mess up recording. For instance, if you select Power Point, the presentation does not show up, but instead it will just be the first slide in edit mode. Click Start Broadcast to begin recording. There will be a three second countdown and then recording / broadcasting begins. Make sure to click Stop Broadcast at the bottom of the Hangouts screen when you are finished.

By the time you walk back to your office, the recorded lecture will processed and accessible under the Video Manager link. Have you used Hangouts on Air or YouTube Live for lecture capture? Let us know in comments!

Photo “Quiet Zone, Lecture Going On” by Flickr user (and friend-of-ProfHacker!) Derek Bruff / Creative Commons licensed BY-NC-2.0

 

Edutech

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September 7, 2016 at 08:32AM

‘The Curious Dr. Humpp’: Outrageously pervy 60s softcore zombie sex cult film (TOTALLY NSFW)

‘The Curious Dr. Humpp’: Outrageously pervy 60s softcore zombie sex cult film (TOTALLY NSFW)

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“From every act of pleasure comes an equal act of perversion!”

In The Curious Dr. Humpp, a demented Argentinian doctor (who gets his instructions from a talking, megalomaniacal brain-in-a-jar that is all that’s left of his late...



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August 30, 2016 at 08:03AM

Deal of the Week: PureVPN Lifetime Subscription for $79

Deal of the Week: PureVPN Lifetime Subscription for $79

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PureVPN is a high quality Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider. This week's deal brings you a lifetime subscription to PureVPN for $79 which is quite the good deal considering that you pay $54 currently for a two year subscription to PureVPN.

The service ticks all the right boxes. It allows you to connect up to five devices at once, and offers servers in more than 140 different continents.

PureVPN offers its own software and apps, but supports security protocols such as OpenVPN or PPTP as well.

The company has a strict no-logging policy, does not restrict data transfers or server switches. Other features of interest include IP leak protection, an Internet kill switch, and support for P2P/Filesharing on select servers.

Click here to open the PureVNP deal on Ghacks Deals

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Ghacks needs you. You can find out how to support us here or support the site directly by becoming a Patreon. Thank you for being a Ghacks reader.

The post Deal of the Week: PureVPN Lifetime Subscription for $79 appeared first on gHacks Technology News.

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August 11, 2016 at 06:43AM

NBC Should Really Stop Using This Underwater Camera For Women's Water Polo [NSFW]

Project Arclight: a Digital Humanities Approach to Media Studies

Project Arclight: a Digital Humanities Approach to Media Studies

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A new open-access book came across my social media feed a couple of months ago, The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities. The book itself is a great resource for those looking to get started with digital humanities approaches to doing media studies. What I didn’t realize was that the book is a part of a larger project, which has produced a cool tool, the Arclight app.

The app (and larger project) was developed as a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Concordia University (Canada). From the website’s description of the tool:

The Arclight app will analyze over two million pages of public domain publications derived from two repositories: the Media History Digital Library (MHDL) and the Library of Congress Chronicling America National Newspaper Program. Whereas the MHDL’s search platform Lantern allows users to run keyword searches within the MHDL’s corpus, Arclight reads more broadly for how entities trend across the corpus in comparison to one other.

Basically, it’s Big Data meets Media History. What makes this particular project interesting is that it targets publications specifically related to media. They have a really great Getting Started guide, but if you have ever used Google N-Gram, then you can figure out how to use this tool as well, although it is a much more refined and useful tool.

What I particularly like about this project is that they are publishing academically useful complimentary materials, such as the book, but also through the section they have called Arguments. They are addressing using the tool for teaching, as well as what the tool shouldn’t be used for. They have also made the code available for reuse on GitHub.

How can you see using this tool in your teaching or research?

Edutech

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August 3, 2016 at 01:11AM

Starting off our science fiction reading with The Water Knife

Starting off our science fiction reading with The Water Knife

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On Tuesday I floated the idea of reading a near-future science fiction novel.  The goal was twofold: to get ideas about the future, while having fun. Readers here and elsewhere (Twitter, Facebook, email) voted for their favorites and contributed more suggestions.

After brooding over your comments, here’s my selection for first book: The Water Knife (2015) (publisher link; Amazon; Audible) by Paulo Bacigalupi.  It’s about climate change warping the American Southwest, and how society changes as a result.  It’s also a thriller, with a good heaping of technology and politics.

Schedule: let’s dive in and read this through mid-August.  I can issue a post a week, say one for each third of the novel, to keep you all on track.

After that, here’s the list of titles that received two or more votes:

Madeline Ashby, Company Town
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Malka Older, Informocracy
Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
Charlie Stross, Rule 34
Daniel Suarez, Daemon
Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
Andy Weir, The Martian

Let’s think about which one to read after Water Knife.  I’m leaning towards Company Town.

In the meantime, I’ll reach out to the author on Twitter.  Let’s see if he tweets back.

And happy reading!  Already I’m making sure I have a water bottle to hand…

Edutech

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July 20, 2016 at 08:12AM

Which near future science fiction book should we read? A blog book club query.

Which near future science fiction book should we read? A blog book club query.

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What’s a good near-future science fiction book to read, and would you like to read it together?

This question came up during the New Media Consortium’s 2016 conference (my materials).  I recommended that education and technology professionals pay strong attention to science fiction, and folks got excited, wanting recommendations.  So I’ve assembled some (below).

Why near future sf? Because things are changing very quickly, and science fiction historically has been a fruitful way of thinking about the emerging future.   Much of sf takes place elsewhen, either the far future (think space opera) or the past (think steampunk and alternate history), so the near future gives us the best yield.  As one blogger puts it,

near-future SF keeps things local; earth-bound. The reason I find these stories interesting is that they are a way to look at our own society and technology, only a step into the future. The best books are extrapolations of current technologies and situations that seem like maybe they might already be possible.

I’d like to recommend recent sf, too.  20th-century sf can be fascinating, but has dropped off the calendar too far to be of much use – although I welcome suggestions.  The oldest book I cite below is thirteen years old.

Also, sf can be fun.

It’s also time for another blog-based book club.  So far this blog has hosted discussions of Richard DeMillo’s Revolution in Higher Education and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids.  Previously it kicked off a more distributed discussion of Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows.  Let’s do another one!

Here’s my list.  Alphabetical by author.  I avoided Amazon links because some folks don’t like ’em.  I picked cover images when they looked neat.  I’ve read some but not all.  I’ve tried to balance author’s genders.

Madeline Ashby, Company Town.  Ashby’s a professional futurist, and uses this book to imagine what could happen with biology, technology, and society:

New Arcadia is a city-sized oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bio-engineered enhancements. As such, she’s the last truly organic person left on the rig–making her doubly an outsider, as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire. Still, her expertise in the arts of self-defense and her record as a fighter mean that her services are yet in high demand. When the youngest Lynch needs training and protection, the family turns to Hwa. But can even she protect against increasingly intense death threats seemingly coming from another timeline?

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.  The oldest book on our list (2003), and possibly the most famous.  It’s a dystopia, and then things get worse.  Focuses on biology, consumerism, and the digital world.

It’s hard to make VR look good from the outside.

Ernest  Cline, Ready Player One.  Something of a modern classic, this involves an epically elaborate computer game based on 1980s pop culture.  It’s played by people in a near-future dystopia, who use it to escape.

David Eggers, The Circle.  A look into a giant technology company and its impact on human life, from one of America’s most famous novelists.  (Thanks to Larry Johnson for the recommendation)

William Gibson, The Peripheral.  Part of this novel takes place in the near future, where poor folks and military veterans eke out an existence on the fringes of society.  Another part occurs two generations later, after civilization has been shocked and redesigned.  The two worlds come into contact.  (My review)

Malka Older, Informocracy.  All about a world driven by information and polling.  From the official site:

It’s been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything’s on the line.

With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning (NPR rave review).  It takes place a bit further ahead than the rest of these books, but looks grounded in all kinds of ideas we’re thinking about today.  Lots of world-building with science, technology, and culture.

Nathan Rich, The Odds Against Tomorrow.  About a statistician tasked with predicting near-term futures, with an eye towards disaster.  Then real disaster happens.

Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story.  Takes place in a decaying but technologically advanced America, and features a romance between digitally retro and non-retro characters.

Neal Stephenson, Reamde.  A thriller taking place in a future so near it might as well be the present, the novel involves a massively multiplayer online game, drug smuggling, new computer desks, a Welsh Muslim terrorist, and more.  Almost a caper.

Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End.  This is one of the older books (2006) on my list, but it’s a good ‘un.  The main focus is how education could change in the next generation or two.

…so which ones do you like?  What titles should we add?   If things get out of hand I’ll fire up a SurveyMonkey.

 

Edutech

via Bryan Alexander http://ift.tt/25FGf1H

July 18, 2016 at 04:46AM

Blackboard Learn Ultra: Ready or not?

Blackboard Learn Ultra: Ready or not?

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By Phil Hill

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At this year’s BbWorld16 users conference, Blackboard’s new executive team demonstrated their ability to deliver a much tighter, more coherent message of what they are learning from talking to customers and what the focus of the company will be in the next few years. The “1 Learn, 2 Experiences (Original and Ultra), and 3 Deployments (Self-Hosted, Managed-Hosted, and SaaS)” meme is an example. Words are easy to come by, however, and Blackboard leadership needs to back up their claims, particularly with the Learn LMS and particularly with the long-delayed Learn Ultra.

Michael described the challenges that Blackboard and its new CEO Bill Ballhaus face back in January, with this comment about Learn Ultra [emphasis added]:

Prove that Ultra is real: While there are customers who will not be quick to move off of 9.x (for a variety of reasons), nobody believes that the current platform represents a compelling future for digital learning environments. It is long in the tooth. But schools evaluating LMSs have largely discounted Ultra because they don’t think it’s real and they’re not convinced that it ever will be. Now that the product is a year late, they have increased reason to be skeptical. We have heard that there are schools piloting Ultra, but I am not aware of any public information about how these pilots are going or even which schools are participating. Blackboard needs to ship Ultra and trot out some customers who are willing to speak publicly about their experiences with it. If they fail, they will not get a do-over.

While this inaccurate claim came from the previous executive team, and while I have heard nothing but positive reviews from Blackboard staff about the new CEO, this does not mean that previous claims are irrelevant. And the issue is not what Blackboard told us at e-Literate, it is more what they have told or not told the higher education (and K-12) communities.

Thanks to an interview Michael and I had in April with Bill Ballhaus and Katie Blot, SVP of Corporate Strategy and Industry Relations, I updated our understanding of Learn Ultra’s status:

When we asked when Learn Ultra would be available for schools to actively pilot (real courses, real students, with major integrations to student rosters, etc), it was interesting to hear both Ballhaus and Blot take a very different approach and give what appears to be much more conservative estimates. Learn Ultra should be available for limited-functionality pilots for specific faculty (e.g. for courses not using the LMS heavily) by Fall 2016 and more broadly for institutions in Spring 2017, leading to general availability in Summer or Fall 2017.

This is why I was surprised to see a press release just this week claiming that “Blackboard Learn Ultra Experience Available Now”. At the keynote, Bill Ballhaus said that Learn Ultra was “generally available”, although based on another interview with Ballhaus and Blot later in the week it became apparent that this was inadvertent phrase. The real message is that Learn Ultra is ready for production as described in Katie Blot’s blog post:

Bill told the crowd (40% of whom are attending their first BbWorld) that the highly anticipated Blackboard Learn Ultra experience is now available for production use.

Slide from #BbWorld16 keynote

Did Blackboard just pull a rabbit out of the hat since April and move its general availability of Learn Ultra from Summer 2017 to Summer 2016? Based on interviews and in breakout sessions this week, the simple fact is that Learn Ultra is just now entering the phase for running pilots. While IT language can be fuzzy, a pilot is generally understood to be a test for a subset of the target end users, typically running on the final or production environment, using real-world scenarios, for the purposes of testing the system and determining if the application is ready to go into full production mode. For a higher education LMS, this means at a minimum running multiple courses within an institution with real students taking the courses for at least a full academic term. The very first Learn Ultra pilots in higher education are starting this fall at the University of Phoenix and “a handful” of other institutions.

Last night Katie Blot shared a link to a new blog post from the company – “Where we stand with SaaS and the Ultra experience”.

• And, delivered via continuous updates the Learn Ultra functionality that will meet the needs of many instructors. In fact, at BbWorld 2016 we declared that Learn with the Ultra experience is available now for pilot and production use.

So let’s clarify what we mean when we say that Learn with Ultra experience is available now. Learn with the Ultra experience now has a rich enough feature set to meet the needs of a certain segment of instructors. It’s ready for those who use the fundamental elements of an LMS. Will it be right for everyone? No, but the Original Course View, which can be run side by side with the Ultra Course View in SaaS, will meet the needs of the rest of instructors, those who need the full depth and flexibility the Original experience provides. And over time, we’ll continue to deliver more functionality for the Ultra experience on a frequent and regular basis, just like we have with Collaborate and Bb Student.

This blog post is a good sign of trying to be open and transparent, and the clarification about pilots is important. I still find the language “available for … production use” to be inaccurate. No academic leader in their right mind would skip a controlled pilot testing out this long-awaited LMS re-architecture and go straight into full production mode. And to my knowledge no institution has indicated that they plan to do so.

The message I heard over and over from people who had tried the Learn Ultra “educator preview” matched what SUNY’s Doug Cohen shared in his session where Blackboard asked him to try out Learn Ultra and present his findings unfiltered. There are some nice design features in Ultra, and there have been vast improvements in functionality – both bug fixes and new features – added within the past four months. But as Doug shared, Learn Ultra is not ready to evaluate yet at an institutional level. While he noted in a conversation after the session that this would be an individual campus decision within SUNY and not up to the system office where he works, in Doug’s opinion Learn Ultra will likely be ready for a true test by the beginning of 2017. There are a handful of schools, most notably the University of Phoenix, that are being more aggressive and starting pilots this fall, but I am hearing a consensus that Learn Ultra needs more time before having institutional-run pilots.

The Blackboard team noted in their press release:

Based on user data, the product offers the functionality most instructors need to manage their courses today

The basis of this determination, according to Katie Blot, was driven by analyses such as looking at the courses in a large community college to see which components of Learn 9.1 were used in each course, and then determining if Learn Ultra had those features.[1] There is a real difference, however, between analyzing such course data and asking real people responsible for making campus decisions of whether they would start a Learn Ultra pilot. If the vast majority of customers say that “it’s not ready to evaluate fully”, that does not necessarily mean that they must be waiting for Learn Ultra to have all features present in Learn 9.1 Original View to satisfy all faculty. Most campus administrators I have talked to know that Learn Ultra can be a course-by-course decision after you enable Ultra at the institutional level. The question is whether an institution is ready to enable this course-by-course testing and to support the new capabilities.

One more detail that is relevant to messaging. Once a course is converted to Learn Ultra, it cannot be converted back to Original view of Learn 9.1. You can go back to a snapshot of the course as of the time of conversion, but any course data created or added within Ultra will be lost. In other words Learn Ultra is much more than just an option user interface sitting on top of Learn 9.1, as described in one of the breakout sessions.

Slide presented at #BbWorld16 session

If Blackboard executives want to be open and transparent, which I believe they do, then part of the job is using straightforward, accurate language. Don’t play verbal gymnastics in “ready for production” without letting people know this will be the first time anyone has run live courses with real students. Don’t ignore the company baggage where customers and analysts have been told misleading stories even within the past year.

What Blackboard could have done is used this simple message to their advantage. We told you in April that we would be ready for limited-functionality pilots in fall, and we’re on schedule and making real improvements. The days of Learn Ultra delays are over.

The company has made a lot of progress in the past four months with Ultra, has improved the overall message, and has introduced some useful tools coming out such as Predict and Planner. But the community needs more in terms of open and transparent communication, especially around Learn.

1. I believe they did this analysis from more than one school, but she mentioned this example to point out that they looked across the entire college, at all courses.

The post Blackboard Learn Ultra: Ready or not? appeared first on e-Literate.

Edutech

via e-Literate http://mfeldstein.com

July 15, 2016 at 07:32AM