Newt Gingrich Does Not Want to Party Like It's 1899

Newt Gingrich, Innovator

by Finbarr Curtis

It's not clear why Newt Gingrich hates the 1890s so much.  Maybe he's still seething over the decade's proliferation of agrarian populists and urban progressives.  Maybe he has been too busy to revise speeches he wrote in the 1990s that employed a familiar rhetorical trope of attacking policies by denouncing them as a century out of date.  Whatever the sources of Gingrich's 1890s loathing, his love letter to innovative education focuses mostly on how much the schools sucked.  As he explains:

Teachers lecture, students sit and some listen. Class happens at the same time, with the same material, and at the same pace for everyone. This is an 1890s model of education -- teaching to the "average" student, rather than the individual.  In an age when most information and knowledge is transmitted digitally and is increasingly personalized—think about how Netflix, Pandora, Twitter and Facebook work— we should be able to do much better than that.

Well, I'm thinking about Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook, and Gingrich has a point that these work nothing like education in the 1890s.  Now that I think about it, they work like no model of education anywhere at anytime because these corporations do not do the difficult work of teaching.  Some of you might object, of course, that a lot of important conversation happens in these spaces.  You could probably get pretty snarky and note that the only reason you are reading this piece right now is that you followed a facebook or twitter link posted by yours truly.  And you'd be right.  People can make all sorts of interesting uses of different media.  What Gingrich cites as worthy of emulation, however, is the most anti-intellectual quality of Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook: the apocalyptic promise of "increasingly personalized" knowledge.  While we have access to more information than in the 1890s, our social media habits sort through all this to help us live at the center of our own mediated worlds.  By using your tastes to shape what you see, networks of surveillance and distribution bring you information in familiar narratives that confirm your biases, assumptions, and prejudices.  The leviathan is you.

We Are the MOOC

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and Locutus of Borg

by Finbarr Curtis

While there are lots of views about whether Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) should supplement or replace classroom instruction in higher education, at least everyone can agree that MOOCs are bad.  And I mean everyone. Every single person who has ever defended or attacked MOOCs agrees that they are bad.  We might even say that the most widely shared proposition in all of higher education would be these three words: MOOCs are bad.

The main reason we know that MOOCs are bad is that even those people who try to promote and defend them tell us that they are bad.  Take this defense of MOOCs:

Schools like MIT should not be forced to dilute the power of their brand by being forced to give their regular degree to students who simply take some of their tuition-free online courses. However, it is equally inappropriate to give no value to the online learning that occurs in a MOOC, particularly if a student can complete a high-quality, rigorous course and then prove mastery of the material on a separate, proctored, certifying exam.

In other words, schools like MIT know perfectly well that MOOCs will "dilute the power of their brand" but MOOCs are fine for less prestigious educational institutions (ie., schools that failed to develop "brands" because they were preoccupied with the work of teaching students).  But while there is unanimous agreement that MOOCs are bad, we are called to support them because they are "innovative." Take these recommendations by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:

Encourage accrediting bodies to be flexible in response to educational innovation. PCAST recommends that the Federal Government urge regional accrediting entities to be flexible in setting standards for online degrees to accommodate new pedagogical approaches and to avoid stunting the growth of a burgeoning industry.

So MOOCs should be allowed to compete.  But MOOCs cannot compete because MOOCs are bad.  Therefore, accrediting bodies need to lower the standards so that MOOCs have a chance to compete on a level playing field.  And by level playing field we mean that the MOOCs will offer bad education and we will decide that this just as good.  If this logic doesn't make sense to you, then you are one of those benighted intellects that fails to understand innovation.