tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42757234380199403412024-03-13T00:17:05.243-07:00randomlearning"randomlearning" seeks to spread the progressive educational principles of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky to online education, especially at the tertiary level. Randomlearning is eclectic and a bit eccentric; conversations and discussions are encouraged.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-347436929678998812010-10-24T08:01:00.000-07:002010-10-25T06:03:55.599-07:00Election 2010--Open Letter to Democrat and Independent FriendsI sent this letter to our local newspaper: the Plattsburgh <i>Press-Republican</i> but seems worthwhile to offer to others across America: <br />
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An Open Letter to my Democrat and Independent Friends:<br />
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With a little over a week before Election Day I thought it useful to reach out to my fellow Democrats and Independents. I’m concerned about our nation’s future if this election goes to the Republican Party bolstered by its Tea Party extremists. As I talk to old friends, often liberals and independents, I am struck by how little enthusiasm they display for this President and the achievements of the last two years. Many say health reform was too compromised, others are upset that the stimulus package offered more help to banks than beleaguered home-owners; many are upset that we haven’t seen a new CCC or jobs program to provide needed jobs to the unemployed; more complain that President Obama has not acted more decisively to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Fair enough. Cogent points all. I agree with these reasonable cravats. <br />
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Yet, speaking as an American historian, this President, this Democratic Congress, has faced the most difficult moment in American history since the simultaneous onslaught of the Great Depression and the foreign threat of the Nazi fascists and Japanese war lords. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, used the vast power of the American government to bring our nation out of the horrific crash caused by unregulated, unrestrained, Capitalism. In so doing he saved Capitalism. As Democrats have done once more, moderate, middle of the road, American democrats, have once more saved the American enterprise system from its own excesses. The Party of No brought us to this point of collapse, as they did in Hoover’s day. Now they and, the leaders of the Know-Nothing Tea Party, complain that Obama is leading us down the road to Socialism. Former NY Governor Pataki was in Plattsburgh, NY in recent days complaining about Big Government and the threat of Socialism. What a joke. <br />
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Yes, it’s true, this President, with a razor slim working margin in the Senate, passed legislation that brought our financial system back from total collapse (supported even by Henry Paulson, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Treasury); he also built on the social safety net begun by FDR and expanded under Lyndon Johnson (it’s amazing to see all those Tea Party folks cashing those social security checks and using Medicare to pay their private hospital bills); he passed historic new regulations for the banking and financial system; he brought combat operations to an end in Iraq (the insane war brought to us by the lying Bush administration) and President Obama has given us a date for the beginning of a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan (in contrast to the “secret” end of the War in Vietnam promised us by Republican President Richard Nixon). <br />
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I say to my Democrat and Independent friends, to all the citizens of northern New York as well as in this country, that while President Obama has perhaps not done enough to clean up Wall Street, to bring us a single-payer health system, to end both wars in the dangerous Middle East—nevertheless, he has done much--and he needs our support. We need to get out and vote, stop sitting on our hands, and, in NY's 23rd congressional district, support Bill Owens for Congress. All the other progressive Democratic candidates running for office in this country need our contributions now: send a few dollars, go door-to-door, get your friends out, get your neighbors out and, make sure you vote. <br />
Corky Reinhart<br />
Plattsburgh, NY <br />
October 24, 2010corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-1473819510495517052010-10-18T04:31:00.000-07:002010-10-18T04:31:38.089-07:00Mining History Association Meeting Dillon, Montana June 1-5, 2011Looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones at the next Mining History Association Meeting in Dillon, MT June 1-5, 2011. Here is a link to the meeting website: http://www.mininghistoryassociation.org/meeting.htm.<br />
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The Call for Papers: <br />
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CALL FOR PAPERS/PROPOSALS<br />
<br />
In 2011 the Mining History Association will meet on the campus of the University of Montana-West in Dillon, near the historic gold rush towns and districts of Bannack, Virginia City and Alder Gulch. The Program Committee invites proposals for papers, presentations and panels on any aspect of mining history in any era or location around the world. Related fields may include science and technology, law and governance, labor and social history, industrial archaeology, business history, preservation, reclamation and environmental history. In celebration of the Idaho-Montana gold rush, 1860-1865, proposals on any mining-related aspect of that era are especially encouraged.<br />
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Each proposal should be submitted by e-mail, and contain an abstract of no more than 500 words, along with a brief c.v. that includes the address, phone number and e-mail for each participant. The Program Committee assumes all listed individuals in a session proposal agree to participate. Deadline for submissions is December 1, 2010.<br />
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Proposals and inquiries should be sent by email directly to either of the following members of the Program Committee:<br />
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Ronald H. Limbaugh, limbaugh@mcn.org<br />
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William W. Culver, william.culver@plattsburgh.edu<br />
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Cathleen Norman, cathleen.norman@donning.com<br />
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Corky Reinhart, corkyreinhart@gmail.com<br />
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Please consider joining us. My own experience has been wonderful. These MHA meetings have proved to be great places to share information and research on topics Anne and I are interest in and to learn a great deal from the amazing research done by others. Hope to see you in Dillon this June. corkycorkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-45385492690230255092010-06-07T22:34:00.000-07:002010-06-07T23:19:45.244-07:00Summer Porch SwingsPorch swings evoke so many memories: for me, my grandmother’s porch, hidden amidst the old Dutchman’s Pipe vines (Aristolochia gigantean); seeing but not being seen. Mostly, you have to travel to America’s small towns and byways today to sit and visit with old or new friends. The gentle rhythm of the swing, the creak of the chains and hooks lubricate our tongues, opening our closed interiors to family, friends and strangers alike. We listen a little better, allowing others to interrupt, to join our internal dialogue so often closed to any but our own insistent voices. <br />
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Such were the memories and new thoughts evoked by a lovely morning spent talking, chatting, with Linda Gross, the owner of Cedar Hill B&B http://www.cedarhillaz.com/Welcome.html located in the happy heart of the old mining town of Globe, Arizona. Linda came to Globe from corporate America to be with and care for her mother; she stays on to care for herself and to help look after Globe and all the small towns America is doing its best to ignore or discard. We need more folks like Linda, working to restore the small towns, urban neighborhoods, quiet swings and vine-draped front porches of a healthier America. <br />
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My wife, Anne, and I were delighted to share Linda’s interest in her small community with its large mining history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe,_Arizona). Linda introduced us to the fascinating role played by Chinese immigrants as mine workers, merchants and shop owners in nineteenth and twentieth century Globe.<br />
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For Globe, Arizona panorama, 1917 see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe,_Arizona<br />
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Evidence of old mining efforts can still be seen on the hills surrounding Globe and its nearby mining neighbor Miami, Az. Likewise, Globe’s historic district still lives and has great small restaurants run by a wonderfully diverse community of peoples. Be sure to visit with Roberta (and her daughters) at the wonderful Mexican Restaurant, Chalo's, 902 E Ash St. in Globe. <br />
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Linda Gross can be found most often hard at work as reporter, photographer, layout editor for the GlobeMiamiTimes or taking a breather in her swing at her lovely Cedar Hill B&B (1 -928-425-7530) 175 E Cedar Street, Globe, Az 85501 linda@cedarhillaz.com.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-18000332136241509542009-06-02T07:15:00.000-07:002009-06-02T07:16:41.107-07:00I'm not writing so much as to start a new thread (but you are all welcome to comment here as you see fit)--Afton has got us off to a good start this week--but rather just to say hello as I travel to my mining conference in Creede, Colorado. My friends and I arrived in Jerome AZ last night just before dark. Early enough to take a look around this historic old mining community.Taking copper ore out of this mountain, Jerome was the leading ore producing site in north America for many years until its death in the mid-1950s. From the 50s to the mid 70s it remained a classic ghost town (really nearly abandoned) and then "hippies"move back in and soon "hippies" became artists and a massive restoration was underway. I'm sitting in a little park overlooking the old blast furnace and below me the valley that stretches as far as the eye can see. Jerome is at 5500 feet--a mile high as the local cafe advertises. It is a also described as one of the "wickedist" towns in the west, saloons and brothels marked Jerome's "best" years.<br /><br />But, like most of American history--and the history of the slave trade--its only when we get closer to we see the interesting and varied threads that make up the whole cloth. I'm off to Creede, another former mining ghost town, to discuss the contributions of a former slave and black man--Fred Coleman--to the discovery and mining of gold in--yet another--former mining town (now restored)Julian California. As these old towns--ghost towns--rediscover their pasts they are also rediscovering the interesting and diverse population of people who contributed to their original development. Fred Coleman's history--his contributions to Julian-- has only in recent years been acknowledged. The slave trade snuffed out millions of lives and disrupted--destroyed the cultural fabric of west Africa, but it also brought (however unwillingly) millions of black people to north and south America--people who have made an enormous contributions to the "American"cultural fabric. From my park bench in Jerome, I wish you folks a good day and fun with your researching and our discussions.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-17231280866889134282009-05-04T02:31:00.000-07:002009-05-04T02:36:15.258-07:00Outstanding Paper AwardI'm proud to report:<br /><p><b><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; font-weight: bold;"><span class="il">Emerald</span> Literati Network </span></span></b></p> <p><b><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; font-weight: bold;">2009 Awards for Excellence</span></span></b><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">Every year <span class="il">Emerald</span> invites each journal’s Editorial Team to nominate what they believe has been that title’s Outstanding Paper and up to three Highly Commended Papers from the previous 12 months. Your paper has been included among these and I am pleased to inform you that your article entitled <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Constructing the Cafe University Teaching and learning on the digital frontier</span></b> published in On the Horizon has been chosen as an <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Outstanding Paper Award Winner</span></b> at the Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2009.<br /></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">The award winning papers are chosen following consultation amongst the journal’s Editorial Team, many of whom are eminent academics or managers. Your paper has been selected as it was one of the most impressive pieces of work the team has seen throughout 2008.<br /></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;">Further information regarding the Awards for Excellence can be found at the following site:<br /></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana;"><a href="http://info.emeraldinsight.com/authors/literati/index.htm" target="_blank">http://info.emeraldinsight.<wbr>com/authors/literati/index.htm</a></span></span></p>corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-87595475468390345632009-05-04T01:08:00.000-07:002009-05-04T02:41:37.699-07:00Rum, Slaves and Molasses: Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Americas<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU05hS3E9-HpIERpJUQihaP3UtPaEwfYZg5qxgGzr7LSrhPU1oDUgh5ROk5jBYgbEpyUpphIoJN1Tcp6Z3OqNEfyEv2wBGh5XrPhGf9Ksy1kSpYaqlv2AuUfOwfiqKoGvGyBKEy5R3wiA/s1600-h/BHTwinMills2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU05hS3E9-HpIERpJUQihaP3UtPaEwfYZg5qxgGzr7LSrhPU1oDUgh5ROk5jBYgbEpyUpphIoJN1Tcp6Z3OqNEfyEv2wBGh5XrPhGf9Ksy1kSpYaqlv2AuUfOwfiqKoGvGyBKEy5R3wiA/s320/BHTwinMills2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5331885002538803570" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);font-family:georgia;" >Been a little while since I've had occasion to return to my blog and share thoughts with friends and colleagues worldwide. I'm beginning a new online term with students at St. Edwards University in Austin, TX this summer 2009. The course is one of my favorites: Rum, Slaves and Molasses: Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Americas. I love to teach it. The course grew out of my much older, more conventional course devoted to slavery and incidentally to the slave trade offered at several institutions but especially St. Lawrence University the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. After opening an extension of the University Without Walls program (Skidmore College) in the beautiful Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda my interest sharpened to the African slave trade to the Americas but especially the Caribbean. My wonderful students on Antigua introduced me to new ways of viewing the trade in human cargo and to the languages and folkways left in the wake of the horrific trade in humans. People make the best of difficult, horrible circumstances. The peoples carried off the many coasts of Africa, the African Diaspora, survived--indeed, prospered. Their experience and their survival merit our attention and admiration.</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);font-family:";font-size:11;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"> I'll have more to say and share as the course gets underway next week. </span><br /></span></span><span style=";font-family:";font-size:11;" ><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style=""> </span></span>corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-80518947974442111962008-10-24T22:32:00.000-07:002008-10-24T22:35:43.923-07:00Ulysses Alfred Lord TennysonI cannot rest from travel: I will drink<br />Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d<br />Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those<br />That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when<br />Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades<br />Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;<br />For always roaming with a hungry heart<br />Much have I seen and known; cities of men<br />And manners, climates, councils, governments,<br />Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;<br />And drunk delight of battle with my peers,<br />Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.<br /><br /><br />I am a part of all that I have met;<br />Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’<br />Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades<br />For ever and for ever when I move.<br />How dull it is to pause, to make an end,<br />To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!<br />As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life<br />Were all too little, and of one to me<br />Little remains: but every hour is saved<br />From that eternal silence, something more,<br />A bringer of new things; and vile it were<br />For some three suns to store and hoard myself,<br />And this gray spirit yearning in desire<br />To follow knowledge like a sinking star,<br />Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-75756062130575990032008-10-02T08:05:00.000-07:002008-10-02T08:55:04.811-07:00Adult Higher Education Conference 2008 Mobile, ALAs usual, another wonderful Alliance conference, this year's held on lovely Mobile Bay in Alabama. Elliott <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Lauderdale</span> has done a great job organizing the conference well supported by the University of South Alabama. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">AHEA</span> is by far my favorite conference--always warm and even intimate, fabulous conversations about learning and especially adult learning styles.<br /><br />This year Alan <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Mandell</span>, Xenia <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Coulter</span> and myself facilitated a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">preconference</span> workshop devoted to the question about the future of "progressive" pedagogy in the digital age. The group of interested and interesting educators that met together numbered about 20 or so, grappling with the question of whether John Dewey and Lev <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Vygotsky's</span> ideas could be successfully brought forward into the digital learning future. People wondered if Dewey's remarkable insights into learning, themselves arising out of a revolution in thinking (what Morton White aptly called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Social-Thought-America-Against-Formalism/dp/0195198379">"the revolt against formalism" </a>) at the turn of the last century (circa 1890s-1930s) could remain cogent and vital in this new age of standardization of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">syllabi</span>, platform creep i.e. Learning Management Systems, and (too often) <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">objectivist</span> assessment criteria. The impetus for the workshop grew out of a book with the same themes being edited at this moment by Carla Payne longtime Alliance member and retired member of the Vermont College and Union Institute faculty. <br /><br />Despite the enormous lip service paid to "student-centered" learning, the folks at our workshop raised questions about the real role of "constructivist learning" in the traditional classroom setting where one still sees all too much "straight" lecturing and little meaningful discussion or involvement by students in their own learning. Of greater anxiety to all, was the growing power of "platforms" (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">LMS</span>) to dictate through their architecture the manner and flow of the learning process. For some persons, concern was also raised regarding the genuine viability of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">LMS</span> or even the asynchronous discussion board to create the passion and deep learning sometimes achieved (at its best) by face-to-face discussion. As we argued and debated, pondered these weighty questions it seemed useful to me that perhaps we could use this blog with comments to see how we might use one of the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">instruments</span> of the digital learning future to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">deepen</span> and extend our workshop (and conference) conversation and dialogue. So, I invite all the participants of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">AHEA </span>Mobile 2008 <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"></span> conference to add your thoughts and ideas to this blog; we'll see about linking this digital and f2f discussion to the <a href="http://www.ahea.org/conference/annual.htm"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">AHEA</span> </a>website as well.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-11922554993104283172008-09-04T12:05:00.001-07:002008-09-06T14:00:42.198-07:00The Café University: Teaching and Learning on the Digital Frontier<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhIxYQJ55SUCt27kVO_Mgh9SC9LEKoz3j8t9zQjbnQY2VyLDCLF4PffmD8qLLgJkE3QIjLUngTQnbY7PVmYWsR5GiZu4XOop2zjDGcNAQRAcyfDI3cqy7OyoFJnEup4AH4s8IhFjvIFvc/s1600-h/Oxfordslide.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhIxYQJ55SUCt27kVO_Mgh9SC9LEKoz3j8t9zQjbnQY2VyLDCLF4PffmD8qLLgJkE3QIjLUngTQnbY7PVmYWsR5GiZu4XOop2zjDGcNAQRAcyfDI3cqy7OyoFJnEup4AH4s8IhFjvIFvc/s320/Oxfordslide.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243015960799816882" border="0" /></a><br /><span xmlns=""><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>I and several colleagues wrote articles for a special edition of the digital journal <span style="font-style: italic;">On The Horizon</span> </strong></span>Volume: 16 Issue: 1; 2008<span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>. I have linked one of the pieces in the edition here and will link and copy the others in subsequent blogs. I do so because Emerald (the publishing house for OTH) has a high subscription fee and higher firewall to get the relevant pieces (unless you have a corporate or university subscription). I have secured the necessary copy permissions and have linked the articles in RandomLearning for your use and comments:<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong><span style="font-style: italic;">Constructing the Cafe University: Teaching and Learning on the Digital Frontier</span>: Cornel Reinhart (see below)<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=6B6E3302C77DA9B99D1E30798A83B339?contentType=Article&amp;contentId=1657896<br /></strong></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><strong><span style="font-size:14;">Constructing the Café University</span><span style="font-size:12;"><br /></span></strong></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Teaching and Learning on the Digital Frontier</strong><br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Cornel J. Reinhart<br /></strong></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Consultant<br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Centre for eLearning and eLiteracy<br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >CeL<sup>2<br /></sup></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Bloemfontein, SA<br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >http://randomstrands-corky.blogspot.com/<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Please do not quote without permission of the author.<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Commons copyright, April 26, 2007</strong>.<br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Abstract</strong><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">Constructing the Café University: Teaching and Learning on the Digital Frontier<br /></p><p><strong>Author:</strong> Cornel J. Reinhart<strong><br /></strong></p><p><strong>Article Category: Conceptual Paper<br /></strong></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;"><strong>Purpose<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">This paper examines changes occurring in the organization and delivery of learning at the level of higher education, and argues that it is possible today to envision the shape and structures of the future Digital University.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;"><strong>Approach<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">Beginning with a history of the basic organizational paradigm underlying the traditional university, this paper systematically explores the impact on this paradigm of new technological and pedagogical innovations: learning management systems (LMS), learning objects, iPods, blogs, student e-mail, wireless connectivity, Google's search capacity, distance (web-based) education and blended learning on the pedagogy of tertiary education<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;"><strong>Findings<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">The physical structure of the university is a consequence of the hierarchically organization of knowledge, the predominant model from the late Middle Ages through the Industrial era. As knowledge becomes more extensive and complex, the old organization is proving inadequate. The organization of knowledge in several dimensions will bring a massive restructuring of institutions of higher education. The new digital university will have the web rather than disciplines and the library at its virtual center with (nearly) infinite access to the larger peripheral world. No longer holding a monopoly on information, the post-modern Café University competes with commercial, for-profit institutions of learning offering traditional and new adult learners immediate access and enormous learning flexibility. We can expect students of all ages to find and aggregate their learning experiences from any connected institution, commercial or traditional, located anywhere in the world.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;"><strong>Originality/Value of paper<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;">As a comprehensive and systematic consideration of the impact of digital tools and processes on the contemporary university, this paper offers guidance to university administrators, faculty members and others involved in the educational process. I<br /></span></p><p style="margin-left: 18pt;"><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 18pt;"><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 18pt;"><br /></p><p style="margin-left: 18pt;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><em>That literacy is a social practice is an insight both banal and profound. It is banal, in the sense that once we think about it it is obvious that literacy is always practised in social contexts and that even the school, however 'artificial' it may be accused of being in its ways of teaching reading and writing, is also a social construction.</em> (Street 2001, p. 18)<br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Introduction<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Commenting on the conjuncture of Martin Luther's theology and the Gutenberg printing press, Eric Erikson warned: "it would be fatal to underestimate the degree to which the future always belongs to those who combine a universal enough new meaning with the mastery of a new technology" (Erikson 1962, p. 225). Assuming the truth of Erikson's observation, it seems fair to ask: to what extent has evolving digital "technology" influenced the forms and structures, indeed, the "meaning" of the modern university? How has "technology" transformed the learning process itself? What, for example, constitutes literacy today? What are the goals of educators, the goals of the contemporary university? Can the university remain competitive in the delivery of information? When does the modern university become a post-modern institution?<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Fraught with complexity, the answers to these questions challenge the university's deepest organizational structures, the beliefs and routines of faculty and administrators, and the prejudices of those of us raised in an earlier academic world. Have we, to paraphrase Erikson, combined a sufficiently new universal meaning, a new learning pedagogy, with the mastery of digital technology? While this essay addresses these questions, I am primarily interested here in the learning goals and teaching processes of higher education. Teaching and research necessarily overlap; still, as far as possible, my remarks are devoted to the university as a pedagogical institution.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >We are experiencing an economic and cultural transition every bit as revolutionary and dislocating as the movement from feudal to industrial society. The World Wide Web now gives us the capacity to reach individuals directly, point-to-point, for marketing, access to data, and for educational purposes. However we might feel about these developments, as educators they are going on with or without us. Students who just ten years ago had little computing or internet literacy come to us now reasonably sophisticated users of both. The post-modern Café University permits faculty, administrators and learners of all ages to gather in their local coffee shop connected horizontally to the internet, to their colleagues and to the world; an unprecedented array of digital tools for searching and analyzing, for teaching and learning, lie as close as the next cappuccino. We can argue whether the changes confronting our older educational institutions are "revolutionary" or "evolutionary," but it seems clear that profound changes are taking place. <strong><br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>The Oxbridge Model<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Thomas Kuhn suggested that when the weight of new information grows too heavy for the prevailing scientific (or ideological) theory to support and integrate, it collapses in favor of a new paradigm. Perhaps, in this context, we can take a moment to sketch the outlines of the modern university. Volumes have been written about the emergence of the Western university, its appearance in the late middle ages, its structures and organizational architecture, its functions (see, Rashdall 1936, Brooke 1993 and a useful collection of web sources http://www.beloit.edu/~hist190/universities.html). From Cambridge University's <em>A Brief History</em> comes this interesting description:<br /></span></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><em><span style="font-size:85%;">"Meanwhile during the late fourteenth century and after, the University began to acquire property on the site today known as Senate-House Hill, and to build on it a group of buildings called the 'Schools' - some of which survive today as the 'Old' Schools. Here were the teaching rooms of the higher faculties, where lectures and disputations were held, the chapel, the library, and the treasury, with its chests and muniments. Most of the land and buildings in the town was still in private hands . . . although from the late thirteenth century much was already passing to the new institutions called Colleges."</span><br /></em></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><span style="">Western academics recognize readily these ancient institutions. The forms and structures of the modern university were accreting their powers and privileges in the early thirteenth century. We see in this one sentence all the familiar structures of the contemporary Western university: "<em>here were the teaching rooms of the higher faculties, where lectures and disputations were held, the chapel, the library, and the treasury, with its chests and muniments.</em>" This model: the library, the colleges, the lecture halls, the administrative building, faculty governance (eroded, in time, to be sure) all remain today. The physical architecture of the contemporary university demands these buildings with their associated functions: the paradigmatic architecture. The core of the model however is not physical, it is rather an ancient learning paradigm: the master scholar, disciplines organized by faculties, the lecture, the text and rare manuscripts housed in the library, all erected to serve a specific locale: Bologna, Cambridge, Oxford, Wittenberg, Leuven, Glasgow, Harvard (to serve New England elites), the Sorbonne, the University of Heidelberg, the University of the Free State. Today, of course, these universities, like others worldwide, attract students from across the globe—but they remain <em>residential</em> institutions in their core mission.<br /></span></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Our concern here is primarily with the present organization and delivery of learning at the contemporary university and college level.<sup><br /></sup> It is possible today to begin to envision the shape and structures of the new digital university. For years, especially as distance education became more popular for administrators and faculty alike, we heard cries of alarm and joy alike that the older university of brick and mortar was soon to be displaced, bulldozed onto the scrapheap of history. Those calls proved to be premature, the old buildings still stand and more important the older teaching structures and routines continue apace.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >The central organizing feature of the traditional "Oxbridge model" learning complex was the lecture (and disputations), the face-to-face meeting between the master and his students. The text lay close at hand to be read and studied, written about and discussed. The earliest examinations were oral with written work, theses, dissertations, essays and articles following. Soon thereafter, scholars organized themselves, and, most significantly, <em>their specialized information,</em> into disciplines, into faculties, to verify master's licenses while establishing and maintaining their discipline's standards (University of Cambridge 2004, <em>The Medieval University)</em>.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Administrators appeared almost simultaneously with disciplines and colleges; their titles remain familiar today: chancellors, vice chancellors, deans, registrars and a host of lesser denizens. Administrators and administration were as essential to the Oxbridge Learning Model as the master and lecture (University of Cambridge 2004, <em>The Medieval University)</em>. Lectures (particularly for undergraduates and in the more democratically "open" universities), had to be scheduled, buildings synchronized with schedules, students needed to know where to go to meet their professors, their masters.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Industrialization heightened and intensified these organizational imperatives. Time, efficiency, economies of scale were as important to good administration as learning—yet, despite some tension they reinforced each other. One major change was that the geographical organization of the university gradually became more extensive and complex. The Oxbridge model required lecturers and lectures; the university served a local market disseminating information to residential students, the text resided in the university library and each institution competed to amass the largest collection of volumes and rarest of manuscripts.<br /></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark"><strong>Information: Organized and Disseminated</strong><br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark">What were these scholars, the masters, and their universities attempting to do? The end of the medieval period or beginning of the early modern is distinguished by the French Encyclopedists valiant effort to amass and organize all known information in the <em>L'Encyclopédie</em> project (Berthier 1752, Pannabecker 1994 and Darnton 1979). The early modern university structures, disciplines and faculties, were organized to collect all the information deemed relevant to their discipline, understanding that the master would memorize the appropriate information, and its sources, then serve as a font of learning for his students. Disciplines were organized hierarchically and vertically, into, for example, the science or humanities faculties and further sub-divided by specialized areas of knowledge into biology or physics, philosophy or history. Denis Diderot, the most prominent of the French Encyclopedists, described <em>disciplines</em> in his article ART in the first volume of the <em>Encyclopédie</em>:<br /></a></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><a name="bookmark"><em>We began by making observations on the nature, service, usage, qualities of beings & of their symbols; then we gave the name of science or of art or of discipline in general, to the center or unifying point to which we related the observations that we had made, to form a system of either rules or instruments, & of rules tending towards the same goal; because that is what a discipline is in general</em> (cited in Pannabecker 1996).<br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">On the different approaches of Rousseau and Diderot to their common interest in the <em>L'Encyclopédie</em>, Pannabecker writes: "Diderot's approach was to represent the mechanical arts as disciplinary content; he felt this content needed to be better organized, systematized, written down, and illustrated in order to facilitate dissemination, critical thinking, and progress" (Pannabecker 1996, 33/4). Human development then, for Diderot and Rousseau, was dependent upon proper collection, organization and dissemination of information:<strong> "</strong>Diderot probably contributed as much to popularizing the rational systematization of the mechanical arts as Rousseau did to popularizing the importance of the stages of human development in their relationship to pedagogy." (Pannabecker 1996, 33/4)<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark">At Cambridge, the introduction of new disciplines advanced rapidly after 1850. The natural sciences and moral sciences were approved:<br /></a></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><a name="bookmark"><em>as early as 1851 and before 1900 Triposes in law, history, theology, Indian languages, Semitic (later oriental) languages, medieval and modern (European) languages, and mechanical sciences (later engineering) were all established. To develop these new branches of learning a number of new or remodelled professorships were established by the University and by private benefactors, the earliest being the Disney Professorship of archaeology in 1851. The numbers of other established teaching posts remained small, and most undergraduate teaching was done by lecturers, appointed and paid by the Colleges, or by private coaches. As numbers of students grew during the last half of the century (matriculations increased from 441 in 1850 to 1,191 in 1910), much accommodation was added to existing Colleges . . . </em>. (University of Cambridge 2004, <em>The Revived University of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries</em>).<br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">The lecture served as the critical point of contact between masters and students. As universities grew in size, so also did the lecture hall and class size. Martin Luther's development as a young lecturer at the University of Wittenberg provides a glimpse into the early modern scholar's institutional role. "Luther the lecturer," Erikson observes, "was a different man from either preacher or monk. His special field was Biblical exegesis. He most carefully studied the classical textbooks . . . and his important predecessors among the Augustinians; he also kept abreast of the humanist scholars of his time and of the correctives provided by Erasmus's study of the Greek texts and Reuchlin's study of the Hebrew texts" (Erikson 1962, p.198). Similarly, Luther utilized the latest technologies of his day to disseminate his revolutionary (and later counter-revolutionary) ideas: "Literacy," Erikson writes, "and a conscience speaking the mother tongue—these pillars of our present-day identity had long been in the building. But Gutenberg had, as it were, waited for Luther; and the new technique of mass communication was thus available to Luther's theological performance, which so attracted the charisma, the personality cult, of a nation." (Erikson 1962, p.225)<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">Of course this organizational model persists today, with junior lecturers handling the great mass of undergraduate students in large halls while senior "masters" pursue their own research, offering specialized disciplinary seminars to small numbers of elite post-graduates. Tragic, but instructive, lecturers today in large American universities, as elsewhere in the world, encounter students in a single lecture class routinely numbering from the hundreds to a thousand or more. Despite these daunting statistics, administrators and faculty continue to affirm the benefits of face-to-face contact.<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">Like Diderot and the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment, educators (and the public alike) living and working in the Digital Age confront the monumental task of organizing and disseminating information. Our new digital Encyclopedists are busy creating algorithms they hope will categorize, identify and bring to our laptops information requested a scant second ago. Google's momentary primacy lies in its capacity to organize a nearly infinite range of discrete bits of data, bringing the scholar or layman those "facts" most relevant to their search. We've known since Socrates, and before, that information is not knowledge. Knowledge is something more, at its most profound a philosophical and pedagogical mystery. But for the purposes of the Oxbridge learning model, it was sufficient to believe that information<span style="color:red;"><br /></span>organized by disciplines and masters yielded knowledge and could be disseminated to undergraduates and post-graduate students in time-honored ways.<span style="color:red;"><br /></span></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">Today, however, we are awash in information, each digital search yielding thousands of references to the requested information point. Each of these myriad bits of data is linked to an equally voluminous set of new and interesting references—some scholarly, some ridiculous--but in the end nearly impossible to research and organize exhaustively as scholars were expected to do just a decade ago. As Martin observes, "the infinitude of information that is now accessible through the internet dwarfs any attempt to master a subject – it is simply no longer possible to know what is to be known in any area. The responses are to focus on ever narrower or more esoteric disciplines or interests, or to admit that all that can be done is to sample the field."<em> (</em>Martin 2006, draft version 2.5, p. 7).<br /></a></span></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">Birkerts deplores the educational and philosophical results of digital overload:<br /></a></span></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark"><em>The explosion of data … has all but destroyed the premise of understandability. Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of information that stretch endlessly in every direction, we no longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture. Instead of carrying on the ancient project of philosophy – attempting to discover the 'truth' of things – we direct our energies to managing information. </em>(Birkerts 1994, p. 75).<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark"><strong>Where To From Here?<br /></strong></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">The Old Oxbridge Learning Model seems increasingly unable to bear the weight of the social and technological changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Old Model antedated Guttenberg's printing press and survived, indeed flourished, after adopting mass printing to its own purposes. Oxbridge also adapted to the industrial age, since the end of World War II becoming more and more corporate in its language and structures.<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">What strategies will, or can, faculty and administrators develop to confront these new challenges to Oxbridge: from challenges to the university's regional hegemony posed by the internet's global reach, to pedagogical problems caused by a rising flood of information and the increasing irrelevancy of the lecture and disciplinary master. Still, these daunting issues haven't slowed student demand for a higher education: student numbers grow exponentially as adolescent and adult learners, South American, Asian and African, acquire the technology and resources to demand a university education. Relevant humanist and digital literacy is, arguably, more necessary now than at any other period in human history (Golden 2006). <span style="color:red;"><em><br /></em></span></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">In the last thirty years, the academy has been roiled by repeated waves of educational curricular reform: great books, the old (dead, white, male) canon, the new (feminist, diversity, voice and identity) canon, post-modernism, writing across the disciplines, interdisciplinarity, and the most current and, perhaps comprehensive, the universal calls for active or student-centered learning with the application of rigorous assessment processes to higher education. These curricular clashes suggest (despite the occasional hyperbole of each wave's adherents) that content may not be central to the learning experience. Nor, it seems, is discontent with the Oxbridge learning model exclusively a technological phenomenon.<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">The lecture has been dying a slow intellectual death for some years now. It is widely and loudly denounced at most contemporary academic conferences and meetings. Active-learning strategies have long since swept the field, now taken up by most accrediting institutions as the standard for excellence in learning. Assessment discussions and institutional assessment plans likewise feature active-student engagement as a core principle for learning in higher education. Technology certainly has played a role in accelerating these trends but it is not the sole driving force.<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">Norm Friesen, in an extraordinarily insightful essay has explored the divergent, and later, convergent, paths traced by the Anglo-American term didactic and it's similar but different German (and northern-European) concept: <em>Didaktic.</em> At the turn of the twentieth century, John Dewey's notions of instructional theory closely paralleled the Germanic <em>Didaktic</em>, a broad, humanistic understanding of learning and human development. By century's end, however, Edward L. Thorndike's behaviorism had eclipsed Dewey's pragmatic and "experiential" philosophy, carrying "didactic" away from <em>Didaktic</em>.<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">Friesen sees these two different learning traditions now converging, partially as a result of developments in learning technology: specifically, as both traditions struggle to incorporate microlearning scenarios characteristic of much web or computer-based instruction. "In other words," Friesen explains, "learning displays a contextual and organizational complexity that is irreducible to the 'generalized structures' of pre-defined classifications and sequences." By "pre-defined classifications and sequences" Friesen means: Learning Object Metadata, Simple Sequencing and Learning Design among other "components" presently engaging Anglo-American researchers interested in "re-arranging small, recombinant resources to constitute given instructional sequences. . . ." (Friesen 2006, p. 9) Similarly, and ironically, other educators and technologists, borrowing from the <em>Didaktic</em> model are busy trying to "recontextualize" these same resources: "microcontents," Friesen concludes, "cannot be <em>recontextualized </em>simply in accordance with the established sequences of a given Web Didaktiks. What is important instead is that these same contents should not be so completely <em>de</em>-contextualized that they cannot be recognized as relevant and put to use in highly contextualized circumstances" (Friesen 2006, p. 10).<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">How do Friesen's insights help us bridge the transition from the ancient lecture model to web learning? I would suggest that understanding the struggles of the older learning paradigms, either didactic or <em>Didaktic</em>, to incorporate digital learning, offers us a point of departure from which to evaluate the learning usefulness of current or future digital instructional tools, such as learning objects, learning object metadata and learning management systems (all Anglo-American efforts to "decontextualize" "granular" learning resources).<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark"><strong>Changing of the Guard: Paradigmatic Change?</strong><br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">"Technology," in the form of web-based or online learning, grew out of the adult education movement that created numerous distance programs in and outside major residential universities and colleges beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In America, these years saw the appearance of the College Park division of the University of Maryland (actually created after WW II to serve American military personnel and their families serving abroad), some twenty-five Ford Foundation funded University Without Walls programs, Empire State College in New York, and many similar adult outreach programs for adult learners across the nation (Maehl 2000).<br /></a></span></p><p><a name="bookmark"><br /></a></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><a name="bookmark">In Europe, similar pressures to educate adults free of residential requirements led to the appearance of Great Britain's world renowned Open University and similar institutions on the continent. Most of these efforts, however, necessarily focused on <em>individualized</em> studies. With adults scattered by geography, work and the pressures of family life, the only viable means of reaching these non-traditional learners was by mail and telephone (later by fax and e-mail). By the late 1990s, the appearance of the internet created opportunities for genuine classroom experiences using first the synchronous chat room and quickly after the asynchronous bulletin board to create a seminar and learning community experience for adult students at a distance (Reinhart 1998, </a><a href="http://www.aln.org/alnweb/magazine/maga_v2_i1.htm">http://www.aln.org/alnweb/magazine/maga_v2_i1.htm</a> and Reinhart 2005).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >While traditional residential enrollments in the U.S. are virtually stagnant, the number of online, non-traditional students is exploding. At UMass Online enrollments have quadrupled to 9,200 students since 2001. The majority of these online enrollments are non-traditional students between the ages of 25 and 50; 30% are from outside Massachusetts—this despite paying slightly higher tuition than their residential counterparts. Pennsylvania State's online program is also growing rapidly with a total of 5,691 students in 2006 up 18% since last fiscal year. Noting the rapid expansion of American public universities into the online environment, Gary Miller, associate vice president for outreach at Pennsylvania State, a public land grant institution, asks, : "the question in our case wasn't, 'Should we do this?' but 'How do we do it right?'" (Golden 2006). "Doing it right," may be as much, or more, a pedagogical question than an economic one: to put more precisely, online pedagogical choices, online "environments," may have as much to do with economic outcomes as student learning.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Skidmore College's University Without Walls program offers a useful instance of these significant technological and pedagogical developments. From its inception, Skidmore College has been one of America's small but prestigious residential colleges, in its earlier years serving elite young women from America's most distinguished families. In the late 1960s, a slim majority of progressive faculty members decided to support an unusual experiment—to create an individualized studies program offering Skidmore College's bachelor's degree to adults living at a distance. The resulting University Without Walls program was funded for a short period by a Ford Foundation grant (the same funding source for over twenty other UWW programs at large and small colleges and universities) then later formally adopted by Skidmore College in 1972. Until 1997, all of UWW's adult students, scattered around the globe, were served by surface mail, telephone, fax, and e-mail. During the spring term 1997, UWW offered its first online course, <em>America in the Sixties</em>, abruptly revolutionizing how UWW worked. Suddenly, the technological means were at hand to create genuine "classes" of widely dispersed students; learning communities grew from individual students meeting and talking with each other, first, in a single class, later from contact in numerous learning experiences. Currently, UWW has expanded its catalog of online courses to well over 100 (a tiny fraction compared to larger adult distance programs like Empire State College, University of Maryland at College Park, the SUNY Learning Network, UMassOnline, or Penn State, to name just a few).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Borrowing from John Dewey's notion that information is not knowledge, indeed, that knowledge is socially constructed; the UWW asynchronous seminar was from the beginning quite successful. UWW's pedagogical and <em>Didaktic</em> approach sought to duplicate--online--the seminar experience of a quality post-graduate education (Reinhart 2005). <strong><br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Asynchronicity<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >UWW built its online learning architecture—the core of its new learning paradigm—around the asynchronous "bulletin board," consciously rejecting lectures as simply another reading online, eschewing as well the use of the then more current synchronous "chat room." For adult learners, the synchronous "chat room' simply makes no sense whatsoever: it requires adult student learners, not in residence at the college or university, with jobs, family responsibilities and, yet more difficult, scattered over disparate global time zones, to be at a computer at a specific time, a "synchronous" moment convenient only to the instructor. More significantly, the "chat room" was a dreadful learning environment—it offered the worst possible metaphor for an Oxbridge "face-to-face" discussion imaginable. Student and faculty comments and questions could not be handled with deliberation or any degree of reflection; facilitator and students alike crowded onto a queue that crawled inexorably "up" the page until good comments and suggestions simply disappeared. If anyone, including the instructor, couldn't type, or think sufficiently quickly, the entire "learning" experience became a nightmare of hoping to get a word or phrase into the conversation, somewhere, somehow (Payne & Reinhart 2004).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Despite these apparently overwhelming obstacles, the "chat room" seemed for many faculty and administrators most like their familiar Oxbridge model. The resulting struggle at UWW yielded a compromise: faculty who wished to use the "chat room" could do so, but as an "office hour." In this way, students could "arrive" voluntarily at the faculty member's "office" and, with fewer learners in attendance, actually expect to have their questions answered. Later, valued dialogue from this "office hour" could be sifted, copied and posted to the asynchronous bulletin board for other students' more thoughtful, less pressured consideration and comments. It is interesting how unsuccessful the chat room as pedagogy is, while students engage continuously in instant messaging!<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Learning Management Systems<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >UWW also chose to build the remainder of its prototype web course site—the first Skidmore College online course:<em> America in the Sixties--</em> from the raw language available then to create applications for the web: HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). Quickly however, the first commercial Learning Management Systems (LMS) appeared on the market to "facilitate" better student and faculty administration with a promise to create online architecture congenial to good learning. Blackboard and WebCT (now merged) rather quickly came to dominate the marketplace. Almost as quickly, a range of criticisms emerged from faculty, students and administrators alike about these commercial products. From an economic perspective, they were hailed as inexpensive until the first, and subsequent, contract renewals came due. Likewise, they "branded" their "LMS" product to the larger exclusion of the college or university client. More troubling from a pedagogical point of view, they were often boring, clumsy to use for students and faculty and suffered from template rigidity, so inflexible that faculty could not find ways to create their unique individual "voices." Having trained faculty at an enormous social cost it seems useful to allow them to express their specialized creativity. Likewise, entire disciplines found the LMS almost useless for learning in their areas, especially true for the arts, humanities and history faculties.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >In this context then, Norm Friesen's valuable observations regarding didactic and <em>Didaktic</em> instructional traditions help us to reconceptualize the learning goals, architecture and implications of contemporary "learning management systems." Friesen calls our attention to Lucy Suchman's observation (1987) that plans serve only as rough guidelines for activities, gaining their full meaning only when realized in action or, expressed differently, human plans (read LMSs) only attain their full potential when they shift from "control structures that universally precede and determine actions, to discursive resources produced and used within the course of certain forms of human activity" (Suchman 2003, p. 299 & cited in Friesen 2006, p.10). </span><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Characterized as "tools," the early LMS was typically designed by persons with excellent technical skills but little understanding of learning, practical or theoretical; in effect a "didactic" tool designed without a clear understanding of its broader contextual purposes. The rapidly expanding interest in open source LMSs draws its vitality from the dissatisfaction experienced by both faculty and administrators with the host of problems associated with commercial LMSs. Moodle in Europe and Sakai in America seem for the moment to be the most viable open source systems and will undoubtedly grow and flourish as additional colleges and universities come to adopt either system.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >In a short time, the less than perfect learning "systems," the early core of an emerging digital university model, came to dominate the adult distance education market springing up not only all over America, but—as another manifestation of globalization--around the world as well. Despite deep reservations on the part of some faculty and administrators, LMSs, especially WebCT and Blackboard, were soon being used by residential institutions and faculty to supplement their face-to-face lecture format. This variant on distant education (and the Oxbridge model) was quickly popularized as <em>blended learning</em>. At first, blended "classroom" instructors found web connectivity useful primarily to post assignments, make announcements and offer reminders. Soon this early pragmatic utility gave way to seeing the pedagogical value of opening one or more asynchronous bulletin boards so that students could discuss with each other ideas perhaps already raised in the lecture but where time and numbers precluded fuller discussion. Similarly, in the most recent use of the LMS, lectures, once the centerpiece of the Oxbridge learning model, are posted, archived, as "learning objects" for students to download and read at their leisure while the course increasingly proceeds online in small discussion sections created and facilitated by one or more instructors. In effect, the early adult education distant programs, characterized by individualized asynchronous studies, flexible schedules, and non-residential student learning became the learning frontier for the new digital university. To shift metaphors, the LMS adult education <em>snake</em>--<em>swallowed</em> its lecture-centered, residential, fixed buildings and rigid schedule--<em>tail</em>.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Several useful examples of these general observations can be taken from the experience of lecturers at the University of the Free State, a residential institution of 25,000 students located in Bloemfontein, South Africa. At a recent WebCT faculty development workshop, two presenters discussed interesting "cutting edge" uses of <em>blended learning</em> in their own residential classrooms. Nel, from the Department of Computer Science and Informatics drew her audience's attention to the crucial need for purposeful online course design, building in student-faculty interactivity: "interpersonal interaction can only be effective if it is intentionally designed into and integrated into the course" (<span style="color:black;">Nel 2005, and cited in Nel: Strijbos, Martens, & Jochems 2004). </span><br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Thomas, from the Economics Department, described the overwhelming task of instructing 1400 residential students registered for her fall term 2006 Introduction to Economics module/course; imagine 1400 students for a single face-to-face learning experience! With numerous regional languages in the Free State province, the University offers all modules in two languages (English and Afrikaans) and, in this instance, in twice daily sessions (day and evening). For the University, these concerns create an enormous scheduling challenge. For Ms. Thomas, the difficulties are equally daunting. Since many students fail to see the value of sitting in a cavernous hall, they gradually stop attending; only a tiny fraction of those actually enrolled are physically present. Likewise, Thomas, as any good instructor, wants to believe her students are learning and her efforts are not in vain. From necessity, and wishing to deepen her student's learning, Thomas turned to the University's LMS, WebCT, to solve these complex logistical problems.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >After several false starts, Thomas currently prepares two weekly lectures (once in English, largely for black students and again in Afrikaans, for white students) as posted reading items—essentially "learning objects" that all students can access whenever convenient, ending the absolute necessity for all students to attend scheduled classes. Thomas meets with those students who do come to the twice weekly "lectures" but now these once mandatory classes have the "feel" of an authentic learning experience—a give and take between facilitator and interested learners. Only those students truly interested come and those participate more fully, asking questions and exploring ideas with Ms. Thomas.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >These extreme face-to-face conditions help us to understand why the intellectual center of the module gravitated to the small group discussion sections Ms. Thomas organized on her own initiative. Thomas reassigned her upper level student tutors, originally designated grading assistants, as discussion facilitators. Now, each tutor is given several small "discussion" groups (10-20 per group). Yet, even here, the complexity of time and available physical spaces is overwhelming. Thomas' solution utilized a bulletin board with each junior facilitator meeting their group asynchronously. It is here, with Ms. Thomas monitoring in the background and periodically meeting with her numerous "discussion facilitators," that the difficult questions regarding macro and micro economic theory, bell shaped curves, supply and demand interstices and related complexities are expressed, discussed and ultimately transformed from "information" to "knowledge" (Thomas 2006).<strong><br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Simulations<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Recent innovations (or challenges) to the Oxbridge lecture model have also proved to be useful and exciting pedagogical experiments for online learning. Simulations have been around for some years in residential classrooms, the most famous and widely adopted in America being the highly successful Model UN and Model OAS. Perhaps not surprising, given the resistance of higher education administrators and faculty to bend or transform the lecture-centered format, these exciting simulations of real world diplomatic institutions were introduced in America by high school and elementary level teachers. Simulations, of course, grew from the felt need of many teachers and some university educators to directly involve their students in the learning experience, to move from unidirectional lecture to multidirectional interactivity; to allow students to bring their own interests, research, diversity and complexity to the center of the learning activity, in short to move from passing along information to socially creating knowledge.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >The creation of a Harvard University Model UN course, bringing numerous high school Model UN programs to Cambridge, Massachusetts each year, immediately lent legitimacy to the simulation as valid pedagogy. Still, limitations of classroom architecture and the challenges of synchronous scheduling create difficult logistical (putting aside traditionalists' pedagogical concerns) barriers to the wider use of these powerful simulations.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >While the drama of the General Assembly session remains and will probably always remain a wonderful learning experience for students, nevertheless, a common website and useful simulation software could greatly enhance simulations like the Model UN and Model OAS. The internet's capacity to connect classrooms widely scattered around the globe, coupled with the computer's enormous capacity to build models, to design interactivity, to access and maintain data, makes for an extremely valuable tool, enhancing existing face-to-face simulations while equally successful entirely online simulations evolve. Many of these same remarks apply to online service-learning modules or courses (Naudé & Reinhart 2005).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Another exciting example of the potentialities of online simulations is evolving at Second Life (<a href="http://secondlife.com/">http://secondlife.com</a>) a website developed by Linden Lab. Launched in 2000, Second Life counts among its key investors, <span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar</span></span>. <span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >(Newitz, September 2006), <a href="http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/7ba1af8f3812d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html">http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/7ba1af8f3812d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html</a> also Siklos, 2006). Linden Lab offers educators a discount to host their classes or modules on Second Life servers and "inside" its software architecture. Educators are free to use Linden Lab's model creation tools or to find and purchase "inside" Second Life (using Linden dollars), the models or simulations already created by other educators (or Second Life subscribers). This concept has enormous educational potential. Imagine for a moment that Second Life was the sanctioned creation of a real world university or consortium of universities, legally certified to grant educational licensees, certificates and degrees. Safely ensconced inside the software boundaries of Anywhere State University, Second Life faculty and students meet to create virtual worlds, bringing their own "real world" experience, scholarship and research to their learning, in the process creating stimulating educational models: historical, medical, biological, geographical, chemical, anthropological or other disciplinary or transdisciplinary exercises.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Imagine further, a "course," or synonymously, a "world" where slavery exists. A world populated by the diverse characters, "avatars," involved in the pernicious trade in human beings, a legal trade spanning four centuries and encompassing the entire globe. Learners can be expected to develop, elaborate and give context to their avatar's "identity," drawing upon real world historical records, primary and secondary. We encounter in our virtual world: the captains of <em>slavers (</em>slave ships); merchant traders from Bristol, Glasgow, Boston, Providence, Porto, (among many other old and new world harbors) shipping to the coast of Africa and beyond; plantation owners from Brazil, the Caribbean and the American South; African kings, their kingdoms and empires; slave-owning priests and evangelical slave traders; black and white abolitionists; individual slaves, field hands and house servants; industrialists and financiers. Given an opportunity to develop their characters personalities, to play roles within the limits of historical validity, learners can be expected to identify with their characters and interact passionately with the other avatars populating their self-created world, a world made by slaves and slave-owners alike (Genovese, 1969).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Such a simulation offers opportunities for true <em>transdisciplinary work</em>, testing the skills and developing the digital literacy of all its learner inhabitants, teaching the tools and perspectives of historians, geographers, anthropologists, economists, the skills of business, graphic arts, cartography, music and drama. Similarly, the student and faculty participant-creators of this virtual world might represent every region of our real one: some, hailing from former slave trading ports of Europe and America; others, growing up near the great Portuguese "castles," the several west African "Doors of no Return;" Afro-Caribbean and African American descendents of slaves. <strong><br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Student Group Web Projects<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >The internet also offers instructors and students opportunities to create and share research assignments—group web projects. Like simulations and journals, educators have utilized group projects for years, especially at the elementary and high school levels. Educators at the university level assigned group projects with some regularity from the mid-to early 1960s. Like simulations, group projects created structured occasions for direct student class participation; instructors knew, from experience, that students learned more by discussing their research findings together and, as an educational bonus, developed useful social cooperation skills. Group projects in synchronous class situations also demand that instructors devote considerable classroom time to project presentations. Asynchronous web projects solve many of these logistical problems while permitting learner teams to share their work globally.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Blogs and Other "Learning Tools"<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >As quickly as tools and terms emerge from new digital technologies, educators now are adapting and adopting them for their own pedagogical purposes. In fact, students bring them to the traditional classroom faster than instructors discover them. "Blogging," like the use of the iPod and wireless connectivity is creating yet a new generation of pedagogical possibilities in this already revolutionary digital age. Since at least the mid-1960s, students have been asked to keep journals. As with simulations, innovative faculty members sought new methods to "talk' with their students, to broaden one-sided conversations. Increasingly, instructors asked students to record their more private, introspective reflections on their formal learning. Typically, instructors' evaluations were quite broad, ranging from simply noting their occurrence to structured reflective exchanges. The single failure of these innovative pedagogical exercises was journal observations created at best a two-way dialog, better than a monologue, but marginally.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Amazingly, the online journal (blog) turns this seldom used pedagogical innovation on its head. Offered an opportunity to "blog," students create enormously interesting learning edifices willingly sharing wonderful insights with fellow students and instructors. Since students choose what to include, and share, issues of confidentiality fade away. Learners employ their blogs as personal spaces to record sorrows and joys, the death of a grandparent or friend, a career success, a life milestone. Building camaraderie and lasting friendships, these postings "soften," personalize and communalize the online classroom. As important are the learning "threads" students build—unimagined by the instructor and perhaps unimaginable at course's outset; students blog to bring new information—initially perhaps of unique interest only to themselves—to the entire class. By sharing with others, students begin constructing knowledge, socially; they create new conversational threads--the sinews of learning. These conversational threads, discussion tracks, can be viewed, switching metaphors, as laying new neural tracks in the brain itself. Yet acquisition of information is crucial but not sufficient; the process of acquiring and reflecting on new information marks only the first stage in learning. It is in the sharing and discussion of acquired information (new or old) that students begin constructing knowledge. (Dewey 1996 (edn), Winn 1997).<br /></span></p><p>The major caveat to blogging's heuristic value concerns the possible loss of spontaneity and authenticity occasioned by instructor-assigned blogs. Steven Downes worries about the loss of creativity:<br /></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><em>It seems clear that although blogging can and does have a significant and worthwhile educational impact, this impact does not come automatically and does not come without risks. As many writers have noted, writing a weblog appears in the first instance to be a form of publishing, but as time goes by, blogging resembles more and more a conversation. And for a conversation to be successful, it must be given a purpose and it must remain, for the most part, unconstrained</em> (Downes 2004).<br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><br /><strong>Electronic Portfolios<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Only recently have educators begun to consider the usefulness of electronic portfolios for individual students. Limitations of computer memory and the absence of adequate database tools precluded serious consideration of creating and maintaining learner electronic portfolios. Already students maintain digitized records of their curricular and extra-curricular activities. Soon educators will routinely admit students after evaluating electronic portfolios; institutions at all levels will be asked to facilitate student digital work and we can expect portfolios to be internet-stored and accessed.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Even now, as more robust databases become available to institutions of higher education (similar to the capacity and organizational power of corporate databases), we see growing interest by faculty and administrators for creating individual portal accounts allowing learners access not only to routine administrative functions like registration, fee payments, schedules and university news, but as importantly, to maintain a record of their writing, research and creative work. At its most exciting, individual portals afford students opportunities to assemble their own learning tools from among many of those considered here but also from a range of emerging digital learning resources: a student's digital "kit" arrayed in the service of a constructivist learning paradigm.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Podcasting<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Portable and wireless technology continues the digital erosion of the Oxbridge model. A recent survey of American college students indicated that 25% (up from just 15% in 2005) owned Apple Computer's market dominating music delivery system, the iPod. Ironically, but not surprisingly, recording lectures and making them available for downloading from Apples iTunes Music Store is the first genuine educational use for this enormously popular portable technology. Apple has set up an exclusive section at iTunes--iTunes U-- available only to students and faculty of participating universities. Apple officials have also hinted that they might sell textbooks, course packets or other educational products through their rapidly evolving iPod U ('Information Technology', 52/27, p. A28). The BBC reported on its website and in its video broadcast, the then cutting edge news: "LECTURER DROPS LECTURES FOR PODCASTS." "Some lecture classes have 250 students," said Bill Ashraf, a microbiology instructor, "so I question the effectiveness of a didactic lecture for an hour" (Donald Spicer [<a target="WMLink44764DC9" href="http://webmail.skidmore.edu/MBX/creinhar/ID=4475D1E0/CREATE?dspicer@usmd.edu">dspicer@usmd.edu</a>] on Sloan-C list-serve, BBC 26 May 2006).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >While podcasting offers extraordinary flexibility and immediate visceral appeal it remains crucial that it, like similar valuable digital tools, serve the learning purposes of the contemporary age, the active-learning strategies of the Constructivist Digital University. Portability is extraordinarily important, but as a mechanism to deliver lectures—even as "learning objects"—it has limited utility. The crucial missing element is interactivity; allowing students to record and share their self-created learning experiences with facilitators and, more importantly, with fellow learners. Any effort to recreate the Oxbridge lecture model, either online, with iPods, or in any other fashion, is doomed to failure if it runs counter to the constructivist pedagogical movement of the last half century. Technology must serve the goals and purposes of educators, not the reverse.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Other "Cutting Edge" Resources<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >We are running out of terms to describe the depth and speed of new technologies. It might be useful here to consider briefly a thin slice of the "learning object" notion. When the concept first appeared it was difficult to understand and did not seem immediately useful, precisely for the "contextual" objections raised by Friesen. Placed in the context of constructivist pedagogy, the value of learning objects becomes clearer. Since thousands of instructors in residential universities and colleges, teach the same or slightly modified course or module every term, it seems obvious that if we can archive the "standard" Psych 101 lecture so that other faculty members can use it for their course, we can save thousands of hours by eliminating duplication, often taken from the same text and reference works. MIT's decision to put all of its lecture materials online is already a major step forward in this regard. (online at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm) While frightening to some, the reality is that this material is often not worthy of copyrighting; the time to prepare these introductory lectures could be better spent on creative enterprises. Similarly, the lecture as "learning object" is now made available for students to read (or listen) at their leisure, asynchronously and without the necessity to attend a classroom to hear the same material presented to fifty, a hundred, or more somewhat bored students.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Murray Turoff, an early digital learning pioneer, recently offered an interesting illustration of these exciting learning opportunities in a discussion thread appearing on Sloan-C, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation website, http://www.sloan-c.org/. Struggling with the typical array of conflicting state regulations, university policies, enrollment and disciplinary restrains, Turoff creatively advertised four separate special topic courses: two at a distance and two face-to-face, encompassing both graduate and undergraduate learners. The combined "course," <em>Design of Emergency Management Information Systems</em>, quickly enrolled a total of twenty-eight students, sufficient to satisfy the minimum of 15.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Recording his face-to-face classes, Turoff divided the lectures into 30 minute segments. Using his SONY editor, he converted the proprietary audio files to wave files, then utilized "itunes" to convert these to an MP3 format. Lastly, these files were "uploaded" as attachments to a WebBoard entry. Students could view Turoff's PowerPoints and/or listen to the lectures and face-to-face discussions on their PC or could download the audio to their iPod. Not satisfied with simply podcasting his lectures,Turoff's most innovative active-learning strategy involved creating an asynchronous bulletin board requiring all students, face-to-face or at a distance, graduate or undergraduate, to participate in a common learning conversation (Turoff 2006, working draft, posted on Sloan-C list-serve, May 16, 2006).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>The Constructivist Digital Model<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Taken together these illustrations provide a glimpse of the emerging digital classroom. The web will supplement or replace the traditional classroom, and do so rather quickly. The current struggle over the form, function and texture of learning management systems will sort itself out and (one can only believe) the victory will go to the most open-sourced, flexibly designed, learner-centered environment (commercial or open source). The extension of the asynchronous seminar (bulletin board) space, pioneered by distance learning instructors, to traditional classroom settings holds the promise of engaging the majority of learners</span><span style="font-size:8;"><br /></span><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >in meaningful written exchanges with fellow students and the professor alike. Likewise, collaborative student projects seem to be an obvious use of the web, both for creation of team activities but also for sharing their productions with other students (and observers) locally and worldwide. Blogs, simulations and archived student efforts, that is, ePortfolios that travel with students during their entire academic careers, begin to sketch the outlines of a new learning paradigm, a non-residential Constructivist Digital University offering asynchronous flexibility and enormous opportunity for creative active-learning strategies.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >While we seem to have acquired the necessary digital tools to see the faint silhouette of post-modern tertiary learning, we are still some distance from reshaping, reconceptualizing, the Oxbridge university model. Perhaps the two most significant remaining barriers to fundamental change are the university library and the ancient disciplines. Both of these hoary Oxbridge units appeared virtually simultaneously with the University d<span style="color:black;">uring the late fourteenth century </span>(as previously noted<span style="color:black;"><em>,</em></span> University of Cambridge 2004, <em>A Brief History</em>)<span style="color:black;">.<br /></span></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >It is ironic but fitting that Cambridge University's Library now leads the effort to open source all or most of its library holdings. The ambitious objective of the DSpace@Cambridge Project is to develop an institutional repository to preserve and disseminate digital materials created or associated with Cambridge University. The project utilizes DSpace™, an open source digital repository software platform developed jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (online at <a href="http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dspace/index.htm">www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dspace/index.htm</a>, 2005). We are still a long way from Alexander of Macedonia's dream of collecting all the knowledge in the known world in one location, the Alexandria Library in Egypt, or the similar goal of the Enlightenment's Encyclopedists, still, never before could humans envision a time when the collected works of the world's largest and most important libraries would be available to scholars, students and the lay public alike. Using the powerful search tools currently deployed by Google, with the near certainty of newer search technologies emerging, the world's entire repository of knowledge will soon come to the individual researcher rather than he or she having to travel at great expense to local repositories, primary and secondary. The need for each and every institution of higher learning to acquire significant library holdings to support student and faculty research and study is, in truth, already behind us.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Like the library, disciplines (schools, colleges, faculties, departments) lie at the organizational heart of the Oxbridge university model. Authority flows from the universities vertically-organized disciplines; faculty lines are embedded in dean's and chair's budgets. As refined by Wihelm von Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century in his plans for the University of Berlin (now HumboldtUniversity), which became the model for the modern research university, there is also a hierarchy of disciplines with Philosophy at the apex. This is intended to give cohesion to the separate areas of study, integrating all knowledge into an elaborate pyramidal structure. Work across the lines of disciplines has tended to undercut this organization, and for that reason it is condescendingly regarded as "speculative" (Humboldt 1963).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Evolved to collect relevant information, the issue for disciplines today is not can we gather sufficient information or support a faculty with adequate library resources, but rather too much information. For some time now, the central administrative fault line runs between the ancient disciplines' pedagogical authority and budget dominance and the insatiable pressure for transdisciplinary "projects," academic enterprises and funding that cross traditional research and pedagogical boundaries (Sax, 2006).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >The essential problem confronting contemporary administrators,steeped in Oxbridge traditions, but often ill-trained digitally, is that information—its collection and dissemination--is now a multi-dimensional enterprise. Data arrives and departs from multiple nodes, an almost infinite variety of web-accessed or distributed information, processed with a perplexing array of digital tools, hardware and software, requiring specialized knowledge and training. We are drenched in information; the web allowing each of us to follow "facts," data, wherever our interests and research imperatives take us. The web's hyperlink capabilities offer horizontal and vertical discovery; we routinely track information across any and every disciplinary boundary. As the logic of the discipline-centered university erodes, the remaining organizational vestiges inhibit the growth of replacement structures.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Disciplines will no longer behave as vertical towers of information gathering and dissemination, as organizational entities with exclusive budgetary and decision making responsibilities. Still, the elevation provided by standing on the wreckage of the "Old Schools" doesn't allow us to peer far enough into the future to see clearly the organizational structures of the new university. Yet, sifting through the accumulating ruins of the "Old Schools" can perhaps offer useful insights and delineate contextualized trends.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >The extraordinary capacity of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), for example, to layer and spatially-relate disparate databases, models the infusion of digital mastery into a traditional discipline. At a recent GIS conference, Professor Barker argued that the traditional geographical curriculum provides the framework, the <em>grammar</em>, which all geography students, first year to doctoral, must master to earn their disciplinary degree. He noted, however, that the <em>vocabulary</em> of contemporary geography is GIS (GIS Conference, Bloemfontein, SA, August 22, 2006).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Provoked, the delegates debated the essential nature of GIS software: was GIS simply another "tool" like Microsoft Word or Excel or was it an integral part of the "real" curricular imperatives of the discipline, at bottom concerned primarily with imparting spatial relationships to students. Clearly, GIS software has so infiltrated the processes and products of the traditional geographers' craft that they are inseparable. In less than 15 years, the entire modern geographical disciple, dating from the mid-nineteenth century, has undergone fundamental transformation. Once tiny bastions of academic enterprise, with faculty and students laboring over maps and drawing tables, today geography departments are awash with students of all ages clamoring to attain the GIS literacy requisite for professional employment.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >More important for illustrating university-wide trends, GIS is increasingly a vital <em>transdisciplinary</em> tool for sociologists, anthropologists, historians, criminologists, urban planners, indeed any practitioner, academic or otherwise, trained in a traditional discipline that wishes to organize and/or represent data spatially. Facts are no longer gathered, transmitted and disseminated only vertically, up or down, the disciplinary tower. Rather, the post-modern Café University encourages administrators, faculty, and learners to work in their local coffee shop connected horizontally to the internet, to their colleagues and to the world. Their wireless laptops replace the text and the library carrel; an unprecedented array of digital tools for searching and analyzing, for teaching and learning, lie as close as their next cappuccino. If form truly follows function, as it must, we can safely predict that the new university will organize itself along the lines of its emerging structural imperatives, following the <em>lateral vista</em>s produced by the infusion of digital processes and digital languages into the informational heart of the "Old Schools" (Birkerts 1994, p. 75).<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>Conclusion<br /></strong></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >While we continue to grope for a completely satisfactory new teaching/learning and technology paradigm, perhaps the outlines of the new digital Café University are becoming clearer. If information collection and the "Old Schools" are no longer at the center of the new university, what is? The web's capacity to archive and access information, to serve as a repository for enormously powerful software tools and processes, suggests a useful organizational metaphor: like the spider's web it harkens, the internet allows a digital structure: a central organization with infinite points of contact on the periphery: total, non-residential interconnectivity. The new digital university will have the web, rather than disciplines and the library, at its virtual center with nearly infinite access to the larger peripheral world.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >What might the "periphery look like? Most likely, we will see an extension of the array of contemporary institutional forms, but with evolutionary advances. Undoubtedly, the major well-established research institutions will continue, but with increasing cross or transdisciplinary work. Programs rather than disciplines will continue to garner a larger share of budgetary resources. Absolutely certain, we can expect a proliferation of the online extension of university programs, certifications and courses to traditional and non-traditional students alike: By early 2008, Lois Romano reports in the Washington <em>Post "</em>about one in 10 college students will be enrolled in an online degree program" (Romano, Washington Post, May 16, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/15/AR2006051501496.html) Adult learners, graduates and professionals especially, will look increasingly to university centers for online certificate programs to develop or renew professional skills.<br /></span></p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >University (and smaller institutions') library budgets will be devoted increasingly to digital resources (journals, search engines, digitization of collections) or diverted to the university's eLearning unit. We can expect increasing globalization of library materials along the lines of DSpace@Cambridge; Goggle and/or others will reach deeper into library archives to digitize older print, manuscript and analog collections. The regional university, once serving a locale, will now compete, as well as cooperate, globally with other large research institutions for students and learners, extending its specialized information via courses, workshops and online conferences to individuals and communities everywhere in the world. The University of Wisconsin, to take one example, will continue to serve Wisconsin and the Midwestern states of the United States, but it's History Department and associated unique collections held at the Wisconsin Historical Society <a href="http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;color:blue;" >http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/</span></a> will become further available to scholars and students around the world.<br /></span><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Many of these same observations apply to the enormous array of medium to large universities serving American states, other countries, provinces and regions worldwide. These less well known institutions are already under pressure to compete with distant institutions for students and resources formerly theirs by right of location. Often unaware of the institutions already encroaching on "their" traditional territory, mid-level institutions will need to specialize and do so rather quickly in order to survive the next several decades. Already behind in database and other administrative services, institutions in developing nations must further reorganize their administrative and academic sectors to respond effectively to new global competitors.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Small community colleges and similar public institutions will simply find it difficult to survive. In the United States, "Junior Colleges," now called community colleges, were established specifically to meet the needs of under serviced locales—often a county-sized region—and groups: working people and adults (non-traditional learners). However regretfully, it is difficult to imagine how these small institutions can survive in the numbers and form in which they exist now. They will almost certainly be pressured into larger units, aggregating (and reducing) their current face-to-face courses online. The SUNY Learning Network and UMassOnline <a href="http://www.umassonline.net/Home.html">http://www.umassonline.net/Home.html</a> offer such an option now for these two large states with numerous community colleges.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Also at the periphery, we can expect to find increasing numbers of commercial institutions (like Phoenix University) with increasing commercialization of the learning space: a variety of competing LMS, learning simulations ("serious games"), student and faculty digital services, digital portfolio companies, and ubiquitous advertising of numerous products, many not learning related.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Competitive pressures on small private colleges will continue and grow. The most prestigious will flourish as social incubators for the children of elites worldwide; those less favored by reputation and endowment will either meet their competitors' online challenges or close their doors. Equally profound, the Café University, like the disappearing "Old Schools," will no longer hold a monopoly on information. Disciplinary structures provided the university with an invaluable commodity to trade with the local community. The ancient "rights and privileges" granted to the newly capped master, as well as to the town's parochial university, were given by the city or state in implicit exchange for access to the university's monopoly on information, information of enormous utility for the local tradesman, manufacturer, policymaker, agriculturalist and the general public. Digital languages and processes travel both ways; they penetrate the university and the community alike. The Café University already finds itself concerned as never before with service learning projects and community engagement. The new university is competing with commercial, for-profit institutions of learning giving scant credence to the hoary traditions of the ancient academy, offering instead enormous flexibility and immediate access to a host of new adult learners situated globally. We can expect learners of all ages to find and aggregate their learning experiences from any connected institution, commercial or traditional, located anywhere in the world.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Faculties, as individuals, departments and disciplines will have to re-think their approach to their core responsibilities: teaching and research. Despite enormous pressure for disciplinary change, we still hover near, or at, the level of individual "pioneers" (Kobulnicky 1999). To proceed from here, ICT must receive, at a minimum, some recognition in the promotion and tenure review process. To date, at most institutions, and in most disciplines, recognition is granted primarily for disciplinary research (defined in the strictest traditional terms) with evaluation of teaching performance a more subjective process. In either instance, ICT innovations or efforts have been given little, or no, acknowledgement or credit towards either promotion or tenure. Indeed, digital mastery remains for many a technical matter, not really an integral part of any particular discipline except perhaps Computer Science and Geography.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Administrators will need to rethink the necessity for new physical structures in light of their learning purposes. Lecture halls and large lecture spaces must yield to smaller and more flexible arrangements. As students access their instructor's archived lectures, easily finding primary and secondary sources, indeed, information of all kinds, as they engage in interactive discussions from coffee houses, dorm rooms, and home, as they study abroad, talk with fellow students and scholars around the world, they will be able to maintain connection to their "home" institution and its programs. Computer labs with their enormous capital and maintenance costs seem far less useful than simply distributing hardware and software to students directly. Indeed, even these options will likely—and rather quickly—disappear in favor of offering entering students wireless connectivity to the web via a range of emerging mobile digital devices. We can now see an end to the enormous administrative task of scheduling synchronous classes.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >For Steven Downes, an online learning guru and practitioner of radical educational deinstitutionalization, the original web, Web 1.0 was a "reading" web, an enormous archive from which one "pulled" information. Web 2.0, like its learning embodiment, eLearning 2.0, is more interactive, more expressive of human interests, needs, capacities. Web 2.0 permits users to create their own learning environment, their own portals, using search engines and software, RSS feeds for instance, to seek and bring back, "pushing," any information the learner might conceivably desire. Students or faculty interested in the slave trade, for example, can easily request their own search tools, to find everything published, cited or being published (digitally) up to the very moment the request is made. The web is morphing before our eyes into a portal driven experience, an active learner-centered, learner-controlled, digital environment; an interactive, intuitive, extension of our human capacity to acquire, classify, express and retain new information.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Ironically, the Oxbridge model was already showing the paradigmatic wear predicted by Kuhn. The emerging complex of ICT resources, however, strengthens directions long urged by progressive faculty: a student-centered, life-long learning environment. Digital tools have little value unless we harness them to the constructivist learning paradigm of the emerging global Digital University. It's not too early to declare the lecture-learning paradigm—the ancient Oxbridge model—dead, if not entirely buried.<br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" ><strong>References</strong><br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Berthier, G.-F. 1752, February, "L'Encyclopédie" ou dictionnaire raisonné des<br /></span></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >sciences, des arts et des métiers [The "Encyclopedia" or systematic<br /></span></p><p style="margin-left: 36pt;"><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts]." <em>Journal de Trévoux</em>.<br /></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:Arial;font-size:12;" >Billington, R. 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America's racial history caught up with Senator's Obama and Clinton. Obama's appearance on all the talk shows repudiating Rev. Wright's angry diatribes (called sermons) finally brings the boil of ugly American racism, festering since the South Carolina primary, to a head. Too bad and tragic. Tragic for the candidates--especially Obama--and tragic for America.<br /><br />Race and racism have never been far below the surface in American politics. A quick primer reminds us all of the "hanging" of southern populism on the gallows of race baiting and bigotry. The creation of a deep divide between white and black working class voters in the south was not settled until black voters were segregated and denied their voting rights by a variety of legal stratagems. These voters did not return to the political arena until well after passage of Lyndon Johnson's <a href="http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro_b.htm">Voting Rights Act of 1965</a>.<br /><br />Hillary Clinton grew up in the civil rights generation--todays baby boomers and the generation that cut its political teeth on civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam--Rev. Wright grew up in the civil rights generation. Barack Obama grew up in the post-civil rights era, a thirty something, Obama shared his generation's hopes for a multicultural America, wanting to put race aside and begin a hopeful new day--not in--but for American history.<br /><br />Amazingly, he almost made it. Until the South Carolina primary we saw a democratic presidential primary contest based on the issues: substantive concerns about Iraq, America's place in the world, the economy. Both candidates appealed to a broad coalition of voters with younger and older Starbuck voters (the multicultural generation with millions of generational crossovers) supporting Obama and older, dunking donuts voters (the civil rights generation with millions of generational crossovers) supporting Hillary. It <span style="font-style: italic;">was</span> a new day, a hopeful new day in American politics and American history: a black and a woman vying for the democratic party's nomination for the presidency. Eleanor Roosevelt should have lived to see the day.<br /><br />In a tragic and terrible misstep it was Senator Obama, the <a href="http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-705">Brer Rabbit </a>of this story, who first raised race in the run up to the South Carolina primary. In a clever move, Obama accused Senator Clinton of not giving Martin Luther King Jr enough credit for the civil rights gains of Dr. King's era, of Hillary's era, the era of millions of aging white and black folks who lived through those years, who struggled through Freedom Summer, who responded to the non-violent appeal of Dr. King; most, black and white, rejected the divisive voice of Stokley Carmichael and the separatist voices of SNCC. Dr. King was honored as an American hero with a national holiday. Malcolm X was not.<br /><br />Bill Clinton took the bait--grabbed hold of the tar baby. Ham-handed, a little like <a href="http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/H/HarrisJoelChandler/prose/UncleRemus/index.html">Brer Bear</a>, former President Bill Clinton, so often the deftest politician in the room, reacted with understandable anger at charges of racism leveled at his wife, Hillary. Of course it was a political slight of hand, of course it was a sly way to excite and anger black voters in South Carolina, of course, it worked. But, unlike the usual Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear tale, this time, taking the tar baby out of the American closet meant that everyone was destined to get stuck. The tar baby tarred everyone; that particular American closet door was better left closed--especially, in the end, for Senator Obama. In that closet, was an ancient legacy of hatred and bigotry. Lynchings, murders, discrimination--informal and de jure--stood just behind the door. Rev. Wright, as Senator Obama has been at pains to point out, has been shaped by those same forces; Lewis Ferrakhan is another product of those same deep resentments, understandable pain and lasting hurt.<br /><br />Nevertheless, once the tar baby is let out everyone suffers, especially the amazing, hopeful young Barack Obama. Slowly, race came to the fore following the South Carolina primary; each contest since has increasingly been marked by racial identity voting--black and white. Mississippi saw 90% of the black vote go to Senator Obama and in Ohio 1 in 5 white voters indicated they voted along racial lines. The simmering black and Latino divide has also been close below the surface since the first contests in California and the most recent in Texas.<br /><br />But the angry diatribes of Rev. Wright bring these underlying resentments, this legacy of race and racism to the top. The issue, as this is written, is race; the worst possible outcome for Senator Obama and the worst possible outcome for turning a hopeful new page in American history.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-81646254934902371792008-03-04T22:09:00.000-08:002008-03-04T22:40:42.304-08:00Crushing Defeat: Hillary Takes Three Big OnesAmazing. Hillary Clinton has tonight forged a remarkable comeback--once more. Outspent two to one by Barack Obama in these crucial states Hillary pulled out her decisive victories in the last week perhaps last three days. One is struck by the size of these victories--at this moment around 10;30 on the west coast--Hillary has managed a landslide in Rhode Island (18 %) and in the great bell weather state of Ohio--a truly decisive 12 point victory regrouping her critical coalition of white working class men, women, especially senior women, seniors in general and Latinos. In Texas she is leading Obama by nearly 100,000 votes in a contest that attracted two million voters in yet another important general election state. <br /><br />White male working class voters support Hillary in clear numbers. One danger for the democratic party is that the liberal elite wing and its working class base begin to pull apart. Race is still a powerful force in American politics. Latinos and white workers are beginning to coalesce around Hillary; black voters and young multi-cultural 30 somethings are strongly supporting Obama. This is dangerous ground for Democrats: these two broad and important elements of the Democratic party must find a political accommodation in the difficult contested days ahead. If neither candidate can garner sufficient votes to win at the convention without super delegate support then a compromise must be found. Only one scenario works: Obama is young enough to make an excellent Vice President. Hillary is too old to return to the fray in another 8 years.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-43064673705635428822008-02-06T05:17:00.000-08:002008-02-06T05:33:57.403-08:00Clinton v. Obama: Race, Gender and Age, StupidHillary did pretty well in a quite interesting struggle. Here are a few observations sent to other friends: <br /><br />Stayed up here in South Africa until 3 pm last night and only Georgia was in. Woke this morning to a thin but significant win for Hillary (and spouse). Appears to be true for both popular vote and delegate count--NM is still out. Funny to watch the commentators: fearful of discussing the politics of race and gender--this is incredibly interesting: Blacks support Obama, Women support Hillary, Seniors--support Hillary (2 to 1) and Hispanics partially reacting to race and ethnicity also support Hillary in strong margins. Despite taking the white vote and sizable margins among black voters in California, Clinto won by wide margins by putting together an amazing coalition of Latinos, Asians, women and the elderly (over 60!). See this in a terrific article by Mary Ann Ostrom, San Jose Mercury News, <span id="mn_Global"><span id="mn_Article"><p>"In Clinton's larger-than-predicted win, California women came out strongly for Clinton, Associated Press exit polls showed. Obama won an overwhelming support from the state's black voters and took the white vote by a 6 percentage-point margin over Clinton. Men also sided with him. But the surprise was the number of Latinos who voted: a record 29 percent, the exit poll found.</p><p> Underscoring the state-by-state differences in Tuesday's races, Obama won California's whites, while Clinton had leads of nearly 20 percentage points among whites in more conservative Georgia and Missouri.</p><p> Cain said the California results showed the emergence of a coalition of Latino and Asian voters, who made up an estimated 37 percent of the California electorate, and backed Clinton overwhelmingly. Obama had most of the African-American vote, and even won the white vote, but that was not enough to win.</p><p> "It's ironic because Barack Obama comes from an immigrant background," said Cain, noting that the Kennedy endorsement and the Obama campaign's high-profile Los Angeles events did not win over Latinos." <a class="articleByline" href="mailto:mostrom@mercurynews.com?subject=San%20Jose%20Mercury%20News:%20Clinton%20wins%20big%20states;%20Obama%20takes%20more%20than%20a%20dozen%20others">By Mary Anne Ostrom<br />San Jose Mercury News: </a><span id="mn_Global"><span id="mn_Article"><div class="articleTitle">Clinton wins big states; Obama takes more than a dozen others</div><!--subtitle--><div class="articleSubTitle">CONTEST MOVES TO NEXT STATES http://origin.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_8181209</div></span></span></p></span></span> Yet--Obama got the white males--the same middle aged white males always seen as most conservative--in California but not in the South. In this contest however, they appear to be better educated, young to middle aged and liberal.<br /><br />Race and gender have been with us for every election since Harry Truman but not since 1948 and probably never before have we seen this sort of dynamic--not to mention the race and gender of the two demo candidates. Augers well for a Hillary/Obama ticket in the fall; if Gore could accept the bottom of the ticket maybe Obama will also (especially after the pressure grows on him to "united" the demo party)--assuming he loses in the end at the convention. And, wow, the convention--seems certain to be the first one not settled in years--not sure last real contested one perhaps 1960--can't remember if JFK had it sewed up when he arrived at the convention? Anyone awake out there? <br /><br />I was quite surprised by Massachusetts as well. I'm interested to try to figure the dynamics of this race: can't be liberal vs. conservative doesn't fit but neither is it all race and gender (age) but that seems more relevant than any other interpretation ? So far the best journalist and press article I've read is <span id="mn_Global"><span id="mn_Article"></span></span><a class="articleByline" href="mailto:mostrom@mercurynews.com?subject=San%20Jose%20Mercury%20News:%20Clinton%20wins%20big%20states;%20Obama%20takes%20more%20than%20a%20dozen%20others">By Mary Anne Ostrom<br />San Jose Mercury News: </a><span id="mn_Global"><span id="mn_Article"><div class="articleTitle">Clinton wins big states; Obama takes more than a dozen others</div><!--subtitle--><div class="articleSubTitle">CONTEST MOVES TO NEXT STATES http://origin.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_8181209<br /></div><!--byline--><div class="articleByline"><a class="articleByline" href="mailto:mostrom@mercurynews.com?subject=San%20Jose%20Mercury%20News:%20Clinton%20wins%20big%20states;%20Obama%20takes%20more%20than%20a%20dozen%20others"></a></div></span></span> <span style="color:#888888;"> </span>corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-71187524098541502662007-11-08T23:19:00.000-08:002007-11-08T23:25:27.771-08:0013th Sloan-C Conference Nov 7-9, 2007Florida landscape--ironic actually--really more water than land--but to return to the original thought: Florida--land of enormous natural beauty; blue waters at every turn; birds, fish, white beaches, the Okefenokee swamp, palms and lush plants of every variety; yet, slowly, that natural landscape feels bounded, increasingly penetrated by roads and choking cars, the relentless advancing frontier of houses and development: America's now ubiquitous urban sprawl but here especially painful to see, juxtaposed against aboriginal natural beauty. <br /><br />New hotels with ersatz waterfalls decorate their pastel walls with pictures of that older Florida--hoping, I suppose, to remind travelers, tourists, bustling businessmen and women, of the Florida now quickly fading, of an older reality and sensibility, a Florida now morphing into another place, one less pristine, less natural; more cars, more people. The Florida panther lives on but on a smaller patch of land and water, the occasional dog is eaten by the occasional alligator but the gator is quickly caught and "removed" or, if unlucky, shot by local police.<br /><br />I've come to attend the Sloan-C conference one of the nation's foremost venues for discussing online learning. Frank Mayadas' leadership of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Asynchronous Learning Network division has been crucial for co-creating, for shaping, the revolution in American and global learning at the university level. ALN's 13th annual conference is being held this week (November 7-9, 2007) in Orlando (once a tiny backwater in older Florida's vast empty stretch of swamp and--well--more backwater). Its been fun being here to visit with old friends and see the terrific growth of the conference; one speaker reported that the first "conference" was little more than a table full of attendees; today some 1400 educators, professors, web designers, administrators, have come to lovely Florida to talk about the revolution they are collectively creating. <br /><br />A few folks discussed the irony of last week's article by the educational editor of the NY Times acknowledging, while lamenting, that online learning seems to be here to stay. Ironic, I suppose because the editor of the Times education beat is just now! coming to suspect that perhaps the application of technology to higher education is here to stay. It certainly feels that way here in Orlando: its as if the American university complex has reached a tipping point and its many components, stakeholders, are beginning to actually come to grips with the reality of this new world. <br /><br />Similar to my lament for the passing of an older, pristine Florida, the older pristine, face-to-face university--an institution serving the town, state or region: University of Hartford, the University of Wisconsin, the SUNY system; an institution of familiar roles for professors and students, for librarians, department chairs, deans and assorted administrative denizens, is facing an enormous challenge to its existence as we know it today. We've all become familiar with the statistics counting the explosion of online enrollments, but like Florida's everglades its only in the last few years that we are collectively coming to grips with the shape and character of those changes to Florida's swamps and natural environment.<br /><br />Today's panel discussion, aptly entitled "The Role of the Professor: Archetype, Anachronism, or Work-in-Progress," was well attended, filling the room with interested educators, clearly wondering where all this is going. Moderated by Boria Sax, the panelists included Anthony Picciano, Carla Payne, Phylise Banner, Mary Jane Clerkin, and myself. A range of suggestions about the emerging role of the professor in the new university were aired. <br /><br />We heard much about the pedagogical implications of online learning, the need to embrace the current and quite refreshing revival of Deweyian "constructivism," a nod here and there was given towards new active learning strategies (tools) in this new "architecture," the new digital classroom. With others, I raised the possibility that this new "age" might see a renewed interest in professional organizations (national and international) for professors and university professionals. As the older university, the university of locale and state, is superseded by institutions with global reach and aspirations it seems necessary for professors, as other educational professionals, to organize not only to defend their financial interests (especially the accelerating trend to adjunct more courses--piecework)--but also to defend and define their "content" rights (similar to the digital distribution concerns of the members of the Writers' Guild) while working with administrators and web designers to write new policies addressing issues of class size, online support services, pedagogical standards and a host of vexing issues that can only be sorted out by revising and modernizing accreditation standards for the emerging online university; "new" professors all decked out in their ancient academic "garb," but now assigned a host of new digital "rights and privileges."<br />(Let me add a shameless plug: I've written an extended article on many of these same issues, "Constructing the Cafe University: Teaching and Learning on the Digital Frontier" to appear soon in a special edition of the online journal On The Horizon edited by ALN's own Boria Sax.)<br /><br />As educators and learners we are living in a wonderful moment in the history of education. We are fortunate to be able to observe and shape the most momentous changes in the institutions and structures of American and global higher education since at least the Guttenberg printing press. But Florida's timeless landscape is also changing, perhaps has already changed beyond recovery and in ways we cannot bring back. In shaping, in transforming, our educational landscape we need to take this moment to think carefully about our pedagogical goals, to make our educational institutions, increasingly corporate and market driven, yield to learners' needs, student imperatives; to respond to John Dewey's timeless pedagogical goals of constructivism and democratic community.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-66734357099765225072007-10-13T20:46:00.000-07:002007-10-13T22:10:50.066-07:00Gamblers, speculators all! Sat, Oct. 13 pmMy friend Bill sent me this: <span style="font-family:Arial;">Here are a few lines from Douglas taking the train in 1881 through Utah.<br /><br />Bill<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:11;">“…[T]he traveler… has time to think of the strange fate which induced a community… devoted by the very articles of their creed and the rules of their church to agricultural and pastoral pursuits, to plant itself in the heart of these mountains, where its members are industriously reclaiming the desert and tilling every nook and crevice among the mountain’s recesses which will raise a blade of grass, while around them surges a population of restless, reckless miners and speculators – gamblers all – their very opposites in character and pursuits; and one wonders what the upshot will be!”<br /><br />Traveling by car through Utah, New Mexico and today the Texas panhandle, the traveler still has time to ponder answers to Douglas' musing about the fate of the West. Funny, they are all here and all still wildly pursuing their sometimes opposing, sometimes reinforcing </span><span style="font-size:11;">goals. Church and nation, cross and flag now dominate the symbolic visible landscape of western America. A scan of the radio dial yields little more than evangelical ministers calling for a new social redemption and gospel music (alternating ironically with rap and hip hop). Crosses (often lit up at night) have been erected in the fields and on rocky outcroppings illuminating the path ahead for wayward travelers. Yet these same agriculturalists and pastoralists: "</span><span style="font-size:11;">industriously reclaiming the desert and tilling every nook and crevice among the mountain’s recesses which will raise a blade of grass . . ." have become as dedicated to individual pursuit of wealth as their "reckless" mining and speculating neighbors. The "social" gospel of the panhandle and much of the rural west is a gospel of individual wealth--in their parlance--"freedom." These pastoralists now lease their land for wind mills, oil rigs, coal mines, feed lots and every other way they can find to exploit the land for every dollar it can grow, produce or yield. Not sure what Douglas would say today as he looks out upon a landscape where the dollar is the crop of choice.<br /><br />Yet what anger and discontent seethes just below the surface. While pursuing economic change--the main chance--these same good Americans and good Christians are angry at every other kind of change: angry at immigrants, ragheads, the Indian shop keepers who now own or operate every motel and gas station in the West, gays and lesbians, liberated women who refuse to obey their husbands. (Its worth reading </span><span style="font-size:11;">carefully </span><span style="font-size:11;">the news accounts and transcript of the trial of the Utah Mormon tried as a polygamist and rapist, [or was it the reverse], whose vision of good social order placed himself in the center with his numerous wives revolving around his sun.)<br /><br />Yet, ironically the old West--the West that Douglas imagined and was probably never there--has also grown amazing crops of urbanity and sophistication. Places--perhaps outposts or better, inposts--have sprung up in the rural centers; places like Austin, Rio Ranchero, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and more, places that glitter with a sense of community, albeit yuppie middle class technological community, slowly sowing the seeds of social change: "liberalism," god forbid!, and its urban cousin "tolerance" for true individualism, i.e. cultural and individual difference. Amen brother. Written from somewhere in the Texas panhandle where Bush continues to reign supreme.<br /></span>corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-4832058271373105152007-10-13T10:45:00.001-07:002007-10-13T11:56:54.776-07:00TedTom Sat. October 13I'm writing from one of my favorite places: a Borders in Rio Ranchero New Mexico. A day into 64; spent my birthday (my very deep thanks to all of you who sent me notes and called!!) evening under the stars in Chaco Canyon (here is a nice site: http://www.chaco.com/park/), a place I have always wanted to visit for myself. Spent two days and one evening wandering around the valley looking at the ruins of ancient pueblos and ceremonial buildings (perhaps)and structures. Hawks, ravens, lizards, rabbits and birds of many sorts shared the space with me. The damn raven and chipmunks enjoyed my uncooked rice and peck a neat hole in (right precisely in the middle) my plastic gallon water jug--I hope the thirsty devils enjoyed it. But my friend Bill says i have to write more about myself--he says thats what my audience--any audience--wants to know is what the writer is really thinking and experiencing. Probably true.<br /><br />Anyway the best thing that happened on this "small" loop from the Grand Canyon (visited in the morning Thursday Oct 11) to Monument Valley where I spent that evening (and I'm without words to describe) on to Chaco Canyon to celebrate my birthday with the ravens--was, picking up TedTom an older Navajo man sort of hitchhiking on his way to Farmington NM--about twenty miles--to run some errands. TedTom was actually sitting outside the trading post at a small crossroads somewhere south of Mexican Hat (man there is so much to tell you guys about. If you are ever in Mexican Hat, stay at the San Juan Inn and Motel for the evening or week of your life--http://sanjuaninn.net/--do indeed click on this link). Well, old Tedtom and I set off after I bought us both a cup of coffee for the road. I asked only one thing in return for the lift: that he allow me to take his picture--he agreed and off we went.<br /><br />We drove first to his home about 4 miles away where he showed me his horses about to be raced at the Tuba City annual fair and introduced me to his granddaughter whose picture I took with her grandfather--now that cost me 10 bucks which I offered and she accepted. TedTom also showed me his sacred Hogan http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/houses/hogan.html built by his father and replastered a few years before by him and his three sons. TedTom was born on September 22, 1940 which he remembered for being born in the family "Shake" house--a typical regional wooden structure made of small trees and branches--brought at some labor from the nearby mountains--and used for all ceremonial gatherings of the family and friends--births, weddings, parties, and just nice dinners. I felt myself to be quite lucky to be allowed to visit TedTom's home, his Hogan and his Shakehouse. Not many white men--as he called me--had been to his home.<br /><br />Then, off again to Farmington where TedTom had a few things to do. After further conversation I found myself giving TedTom a little money to pay a water and electric bill; afterwards we said good bye. Now, I admit it did cost me 30 dollars to give this old Navajo gentleman a lift but it was the best thirty dollars I ever spent. <br /><br />Well, and now on from here over the Rockies onto the desert (again) of west Texas. The last time I crossed the panhandle of Texas, Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee was playing on the jukebox of the very hostile joint I mistakenly ventured into wearing my hair fashionably long--some might have called my wife and children--hippies but we thought of ourselves as students and respectable folks. Well let's find out how things have changed; I need to add one of those smiley faces here.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-56782309895047034452007-10-09T22:31:00.000-07:002007-10-09T23:45:41.901-07:00Glacier National ParkTalk about missing a few posts! Nobody skips Glacier National Park, the incredible coasts of Oregon and California and the absolutely magnificent Redwood Giants. I did and apologize. I also apologize for not posting my pics. Can't seem to do it for some reason. I have them and will post one day soon.<br /><br />Leaving the Museum of the Plains Indians I started up the eastern face of the Lewis Range (Rt 89) hoping to cross the Park through Logan Pass (Going to the Sun Road) but before reaching St. Mary's I found the Pass closed for repairs (met an amazing woman living on this barren and wind swept Front Range, raising horses and providing lodging for folks in the summer). I was already impressed: the mountains were beautiful and rugged beyond words; the wind was cold and blowing at gale force, snow was beside the road now. Natives said the Front Range always blew but even they said today was severe. A guide mentioned his car being blown across the road on a similar day. Still, it was invigorating, if a little scary. Not being able to cross at Logan I took 89 south again until I found that I could possible take a shortcut to West Glacier by taking Rt 49--also closed but you could take "your chances." It was wonderful. I an another car traveled together over Looking Glass Pass seeing fabulous vistas http://www.glacierparkinc.com/Maps.htm; so glad I took the small risk. At the very top of Looking Glass I met Scott who bicycles to the top of the Pass every day and has since his childhood! Had a great cappuccino at Brownies in the lovely little village of East Glacier and left from there for West Glacier. 55 miles from East to West but what a climate and biology difference! The east face of the Rockies is bitter cold and windy, the 55 miles (here at least) mark more than a continental divide--the western slopes are much, much warmer, more tall pines and greener vegetation--warm and comfortable enough for me to get my tent out and go back to a T shirt. Slept well--proud of myself for getting the tent out and spending the night there. More tomorrow--maybe!corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-12567706878636439252007-09-21T05:43:00.000-07:002007-09-21T07:37:04.988-07:00Chief Joseph and Shaka Zulu: The Great Plains September 19, 20, 07<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:180%;"></span><span style="font-size:100%;">No wonder they call Easterners "effete." </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Once you cross the Red River (of the North) at <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/eng/fkarner/pages/redriver.htm">Grand Forks you enter the Great Plains and the real West</a>--the Old West of legend and the New West of oil, coal, farming, poverty for some, enormous riches for others--especially corporations. But above all it is a big landscape; bigger than an Easterner can appreciate in "one sitting." As Minnesota's endless trees slowly recede into my rear view mirror I'm confronted by rolling hills and flatland, by the Dakota's proverbial "Big Sky," by a growing sense of loneliness and smallness, the puniness of human effort. But that doesn't stop us. Our dreams and grasp grow to accommodate the landscape. Tractors that I thought large and impressive have grown now to 12 gigantic drive wheels (or often equipped with caterpillar threads), outsized chisel plows, enormous cultivators. Ironically, since most old equipment doesn't get destroyed it remains lying about the farms: many farmers have taken to put the old tiny, steel wheeled gas tractor and equally tiny cultivator on a nearby hillside for all the world to see as we pass in our endless ribbon of cars and trucks on old Rt 2 or the ubiquitous interstates. <br /><br />Rolls of hay stretch as far as the eye can see; an eastern farmer's best fields and first cutting would only bring a smile to the agriculturist's of the western prairies. Grass is king. Sure they grow sugar beets (the smell is stifling, suffusing the air of East Grand Forks) and corn, wheat, sunflowers (smiling everywhere but at you) soybeans, who knows what else, but they cut and bunch grass--hay--for sale and for the consumption of their cattle. They graze their animals on it and like the grasses of Africa, like the grass dominating the high veldt of central South Africa, grass creates a culture. The African tribes that pushed south onto the rich prairies of today's South Africa, the Zulu, the Xhosa and others all built their cultures around the grazing of cattle. Brides are paid for with cattle or husbands are bought with cattle; a cow is slaughtered to feed the mourners on the death of even the poorest member of the tribal community--and all are invited to come, feast and mourn. The white Afrikaner eats meat: beef and lamb. Like his black (or coloured) native counterpart he or she eats vegetables to provide a momentary respite from more meat. The "Brai," similar to an American barbecue (which Afrikaans laugh at for cooking hot dogs and hamburgers over an open flame), roasts piles of meat: chops, wursts, steaks, legs; slow roasted and skewered over coals lovingly heaped together after a celebratory wait of at least three hours. My friend Harry says that the brai is over once the meat is put on the coals. It is in the waiting that the Afrikaner celebrates his and her victory over the tribes of southern Africa, victory over a landscape every bit as treacherous, dangerous and immense as north America's Great Plains. Like Afrikaners, white Americans also celebrate their victory over the natives that "roamed," that is, grazed their own "cattle" the buffalo from which they also created a culture and way of life rooted (no pun intended) in the enormous landscape dominated by grasses. <br /><br />It is no inappropriate comparison. The temperate southern part of southern Africa looks like the American West, a rising veltd giving way to the high buttes and arid low mountains of the desert American southwest with the extraordinary Drakenburg Mountains, like the Rockies, looming over both the veldt and (in this case) eastern coast of southern Africa. Both landscapes have eroded out fossils; dinosaur bones continue to come to the surface in the Dakotas and Montana as I found to my delight in Glendive, Montana. In both instances, Afrikaan and American (U.S. Canadian and Mexican), natives "had" to be exterminated or pushed aside; reserves established; cultures twisted into conformity (later I'll devote more time to <a href="http://zar.co.za/shaka.htm">Shaka Zulu</a> and the native peoples of southern Africa). I ended my day (Wed. 9/19/07) in the rugged badlands of eastern Montana in a wonderful state park, <a href="http://www.makoshika.org/">Makoshika State Park</a> in Glendive, Montana--one of 13 stops on Montana's <a href="http://www.mtdinotrail.org/">Trail of Dinosaurs</a>. After a nice hike of about a mile I saw my first </span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:100%;">fossilized</span></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"> dinosaur remains still encased in the red sandstone that engulfed them 65 million years before. Simply amazing. <br /><br />After a long ride the next day (Thurs. 9/20/07) across these same prairies of central and western Montana, I was compelled to stop to visit the Museum housing many of the remnants of the Battle of the Bear's Paw (mountains). The battle marks the end of the "roaming' of the Nez Perce people and their eventual confinement to the "res." Chief Joseph's haunting words of surrender speak for natives' worldwide: </span></span><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;"> <span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana; color: black;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana; color: black;">"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before I have in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. </span></span></p> <span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"> </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;"> <span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"> <span style="font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana; color: black;">Tu-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Here me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." (Found many places but see </span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://www.friendsnezpercebattlefields.org/Battle-Bear-Paw.htm">Friends of Bear Paw, Big Hole & Canyon Creek Battlefields)</a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://www.friendsnezpercebattlefields.org/Battle-Bear-Paw.htm"><br /></a></span></p><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></span>corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-73654385674541867652007-09-18T20:12:00.001-07:002007-09-18T21:05:29.917-07:00Long Lake: Hubbard, Minn. Tues., 09. 18, 07Left logging country--Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox Country--this morning; turned south off Rt 2 heading back in time to visit my Grandfather Neal and Grandmother Elsie's small resort on the east bank of Long Lake in Hubbard County MN. I only visited my grandparents there twice, each time for a single week long after I was an adult. My biological parents were divorced when I was two or three and I lost contact with my father Bud's parents--my grandparents--until I was twenty one. years old In the next ten years or so I was fortunate enough to visit Elsie and Neal near the village of Hubbard at their small resort (their home and 7 tiny cottages on stilts) on Long Lake.<br /><br />I headed there this morning, drifting south about 150 miles from Rt 2, out of logging country into a mixture of farming and small resorts--lots of wild rice and fishing but like most of rural America, more and more decay and decline. I seem to find the old place easily, turning off the main highway onto East Lake Road and suddenly saw my grandparents turnoff. The old garden, so carefully nurtured by Neal and Elsie, was still there at the top of the hill but now just a pitiful remnant of its former glory. All the carefully tended raspberry bushes were gone, the gentle slope that carried the sheep manure mixed with water to the root crops and tomatoes also long gone. Now, on both sides of the old place were new large "camps" typical of the American excesses of recent years--"camps:" really fully insulated houses out sized and out of place for the forested lake shores they now dominate. Neal and Elsie's place was still there-a little run down--but still much the same as I remembered it from a more idyllic time.<br /><br />Finding no one to speak with, I turned north first going into Hubbard looking for the village coffee shop--long gone--another casualty of the decline of rural America. Glad to be moving again, I now found myself in country quickly opening up, larger and certainly more prosperous farms--the Red River Valley --deep black soil, flat land, easy to cultivate; made difficult only by the enormous acreage each farmer and his family has to contend with. Enormous tractors, plows, implements: fields of sugar beets, wheat, sunflowers, corn and field after field full of round bales of hay. Only the high veldt of South Africa compares in my own experience, although the similar pampas of Argentina and Brazil are equally productive I'm sure.<br /><br />A brief but wonderful lunch at Whitey's--founded as a speakeasy by Whitey Larson in the early 1920s--let me revel in the fabulous art deco of the period, so wonderfully preserved in Whitey's, East Grand Forks, Minnesota. The original Whitey's building was lost to the horrifying flood of 1997--6 feet of water in the restaurant--but the new owner, Greg Stennes, lovingly took it apart and put the original magnificent glass and neon back into a new building. Try the famous onion rings washed down with a good beer on tap drawn from the taps in the original magnificent art deco "Wunderbar" built by Whitey himself all those long, exciting, prohibition years ago.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-14360486115370093922007-09-17T20:40:00.001-07:002007-09-17T21:29:24.830-07:00Must Be CrazyI'm too tired to write much tonight; I'm holed up in a clean if cheap room in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Terrific thunderstorm with hail and ferocious lighting. Glad to get in. Long tiring day but more anxious and even scared than exhilarated. After driving down around the top of Lake Michigan I arrived at my dear friends, Ann and Rod's house in Neenah Wisconsin several days ago--Thursday afternoon. The upper peninsula, UP, of Michigan is a long stretch of nearly barren road in the Hiawatha National Forest--today much of it is logged and the few houses one passes have logging trucks or skidders in the yard. The few restaurants and motels are mostly struggling to survive--and mostly failing at that. once one turns south along the beautiful lake suddenly the human geography changes from poverty and extractive industry to manicured lawns, expensive homes looking out on to the lake and the wealth that is middle America today. instead of logging trucks and scattered farms one encounters Hummers and the usual assortment of chains that past for most of America today. Why would anyone buy a Hummer for God's sake? I'm even afraid to give this question much thought. <br /><br />Still, there are small towns that hint at an earlier America: bucolic Neenah is pretty neat all over even though there are working class neighborhoods and quite a few real factories still producing real products. Downtown Neenah has the usual assortment of small retail shops and restaurants owned by local people and hanging on for dear life. Ann, Rod and I went to my favorite: Zacatecas owned by Ruben Hernandez, MaryLou Hernandez and their son Ruben Jr. Wow--what a great place to eat. Fabulous salsa, hot chillies and terrific combinacion platters. Like so much of the Midwest today the Hernandez's came to Neenah a few years ago bringing new tastes and, at least for some, a welcomed diversity. Sadly, some midwestern Americans whose parents and grandparents arrived from Germany and Scandinavia a scant generation or two ago now don't want to make a little room for newer immigrants but the Hernandez's are hard working folks who have built a wonderful restaurant and business in the part of Neenah most vulnerable to decline. I'll post a few pictures when I can get my pictures downloaded. <br /><br />I have to admit that on my way out of town I stopped for coffee at Starbucks happy to find their great flavors there but a little embarrassed that I wasn't giving my business to a local coffee shop on Main Street instead at the interstate exit. Rt. 41 took me north a short way to the rural farms now of central, north central Wisconsin. Hundreds of old barns litter the landscape--almost all in some state of decay. The rural land remains, but the once tiny farms are almost all gone, the farmers working in nearby cities or trying to farm their few acres sometimes producing cabbages, pumpkins, anything but the proud dairy farms they once were.<br /><br />Tomorrow, the Great Northern Woods and the magnificent Muskie fishing of northern Wisconsin. I must be crazy to be doing this--gas prices are unbearable and the old $35 motel is almost gone the way of the little farms, collapsed barns and empty silos; not sure how Americans make a living today but a drive through the upper midwest is pretty devoid of farmers, factory workers, and miners. Every little coffee shop, restaurant, motel that does live on has its own collection of photos of past endeavors--working men and women whose day has come and gone.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-7881810234018762932007-09-12T18:43:00.000-07:002008-12-11T17:04:05.880-08:00Sudbury to Lake Huron<h2 class="date-header">Wednesday, September 12, 2007</h2> <a name="4505959260941379910"></a> <p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYAivUE3WqY/RuiUUjwsYhI/AAAAAAAAAAQ/cHTJQzAjNHI/s1600-h/sudburyenve_02_img0244.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LYAivUE3WqY/RuiUUjwsYhI/AAAAAAAAAAQ/cHTJQzAjNHI/s320/sudburyenve_02_img0244.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5109496858169598482" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.bookrags.com/research/sudbury-ontario-enve-02/"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://www.bookrags.com/research/sudbury-ontario-enve-02/" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Pretty amazing day. With two choices to turn out of the motel in Deep River this morning, I went East. After 9 kilometers I regained my senses, turned around and headed West. Spectacular country: the Near North of Ontario along Rt 17, the King's Highway, is vivid, deep greens, splashed with crystal blue lakes and small ponds, predominately pines and softwoods, endlessly fascinating. Naturally, the logging trucks and trains with cars specially developed for carrying logs can be found here and there on the landscape but without the sense of violence one feels in Oregon and Washington passing mountain sides completely clearcut. The off road reality might be different, but its impossible to see very far into the dense forest cover. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield">Canadian Shield</a> of bedrock to the surface is much in view the entire length of the 300 miles or so I drove today. With glaciation and thin soils, bed rock is exposed almost everywhere--fascinating for the geologist and the interested layman like myself.<br /><br />Lunch found me in North Bay, larger version of the smaller towns and villages along the route, but nestled against Lake Nipissing where I found the most amazing hamburger joint. Hamburger World lived up to its billing. Packed with local folks taking a break from there work , lined 6-8 deep to order the one young man at the flaming grill was yelling orders and his assistants were jumping to bring more plates, more burgers, more fries, more everything. the resulting cheese burger with the works: relish, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, dill pickles sliced thin and longways, hot peppers, ketchup and mustard was fantastic. Sensibly, if stupidly, I ordered a single when i saw the triple burgers! going out I was envious! I beat it before I succumbed to temptation.<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Sudbury">Sudbury</a> helped to suppress my appetite. Nickel and copper have been dug from the rocks here for a long while, smelting, with the <a href="http://www.satellite-sightseer.com/id/1936/Canada/Ontario/Sudbury/Sudbury_Superstack__smoke_stack_">largest smokestack in the western hemisphere</a> (once the largest on earth if memory serves me), has spread toxic wastes mostly <a href="http://www.bookrags.com/research/sudbury-ontario-enve-02/">acid for miles to the east--reaching just to the western outskirts of North Bay</a>. With each passing mile the once beautiful landscape becomes bleaker; the trees more stunted, white birches all broken at the tops more and more exposed black rock. I first passed through Sudbury on my way back to teaching at the University of North Dakota, then it was an absolute nightmare--no vegetation to speak of at all--just soils of a gray clay; no trees and a landscape more akin to the moon. Today its much better thanks to the environmental concerns raised by young people and others following the first Earth Day in the early 1970s.<br /><br />Immediately to the west of Sudbury the landscape shows little ill effects of the acid that follows the prevailing winds to the East. In a few miles, Rt 17 intersects the North Channel of Lake Huron at a place called Spanish. From here to Thessalon, where I'm staying the night, Rt 17 traces its way along the shore of the lake; here and there one is offered glimpses of extraordinary natural beauty. The day, after yesterday's rains, is cold with blustery winds but incredibly bright and sunny. A great day for traveling through the past and present of Ontario. Rt 17 as it winds its way up from Ottawa is also following the Ottawa River for several hundred miles the path of choice for the Voyagers including Samuel D. Champlain who traversed much of the distance by canoe that I followed in my trusty old car today. Was a nice day. See you tomorrow.</p>corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-82234173097888833492007-09-12T03:18:00.000-07:002007-09-12T04:08:25.273-07:00On The Road, September 12, 2007Swept up in the euphoria of the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Jack Kerouac's On The Road I, in a crazed moment, began preparations to drive alone in my new (well, new to me) dark gray--sort of blue--1997 Toyota Camry from Plattsburgh on the shores of beautiful Lake Champlain to California and back. I awoke yesterday feeling a mixture of dread and excitement. Mostly, I ws totally unprepared, practicing lifelong habits of not planning ahead too much. Not sure i understand this part of me: I find myself usually responding to the newest alteration--sometimes crisis--in my plans and that seems to almost always work out for me--anyway, thats the pattern of a lifetime probably too late to change but not too late to reflect on it. I've come to distrust "planning." I mean we need to do something like it but most plans seem to go awry, at best and at worst create chaos if we call them ideology or build our institution's secure future on them. Iraq is another example of the same mix of ideological zealotry (neocons and Bush) and, in this case, weird planning. Somehow believing that government has no role in the life of a society or nation, that after you decapitate the leadership and then fire all the police, army and most of the civil servants the civil state will pick itself up, hold elections and rebuild a nation state--truly amazing. Rumsfeld, Chaney and Bush clung to that plan until Iraq settled back into tribalism and anarchy. <br /><br />So, how did my day go: lack of planning didn't help much either--total chaos. The "last minute" purchases--battery for the camera, bulb for the overhead light in trusty car, and worse, trying to fix the "check engine light" create endless frustration, I agonized as nothing went "as planned." Finally, at 2 pm I set out from the burgh, just happy to be on the road and Free like JK. Stopped to take a few pictures of the amazing windpower plants--windmills--now growing out of the farmer's fields of northern NY--now this is a real crop for which each farmer who allows one of these enormous futuristic corn stalks to be planted is paid a handsome sum. <br /><br />After missing the turnoff to the cross border bridge at Cornwall, retracing my steps I began to relax, the gale force winds were a little tough and the sheets of rain were blinding but still i was underway and beginning to enjoy my adventure. Relaxing best by chewing on sunflower seeds I immediately broke my front tooth on a freaking sunflower seed shell. I'm sorry i just have to say fuck man. How could this happen. I've had this front tooth on-a-post for years it must have withstood far worse than this puny sunflower but maybe this is true sunpower. Anyway, I heard "crack" and knew it wasn't a minor matter. Well it is broke but thankfully stayed in place and even better doesn't hurt--yet. Any kid raised in the 50s knows that what follows cracking sounds in his mouth is--pain--not from the tooth--from the dentist. Nothing in a long life of pain and sorrows is worse than the dread of going to the dentist in 1955! Good God! Shit! The drills were driven by little beltlike rubber bans; as the dentist applied pressure to drill the damn things slowed down to a crawl and smoke and steam came from your mouth. If you moved or tried to cry out he only increased the pressure and nicked you to make sure you stayed immobile. Then, out came the "shot" oh my god , he tried to hide it but any kid knew what was coming: with gigantic needles three times the size of today's little gentle pins these things were like nails --it was better to let him drill without the novocaine than endure the pain of the shot--well a slight exaggeration but not by much. <br /><br />Oh well, about to start day two of my big adventure. After the tooth debacle I made it to a little town called Deep River in southern Ontario--careful planning made sure that I got the last bed to be found in a 100 kilometer radius of the Canadian military base at Petawawa. My goal--what a fanciful word--my goal for today is to make it to a little town on Lake Huron, Thessalon where i intend to eat white fish (avoiding biting in the front) and enjoy the amazing scenery including the recovering landscape downwind from Sudbury's nickel mining and smelting.corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-48233621474068113012007-07-24T03:23:00.000-07:002007-07-24T03:26:06.968-07:00History and Online LearningIn a response to a fellow historian also participating in a <span class="ppt" id="_user_H-OEH@h-net.msu.edu">H-Net List for Online Education in the Humanities <span class="lg"><h-oeh@h-net.msu.edu>,</span></span> I wrote the following and post it here for others reactions: <br /><br /><br />Stephen: I'm also a historian and must say I agree with you regarding the growing sense of routinization of our online courses. For all the reasons you mention, I believe very strongly we need to be employing better constructivist strategies. I'll just mention a couple of ideas that I have used: I try to involve learners in "doing" history rather than being taught history (even by student-led interactions). I require teams to build web sites where they have to go out to those same museums and collections you mention to create their own slice of history. I also have tried several simulations and think they could be used (much better than I did) to develop learner interest. corkycorkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4275723438019940341.post-42690683103912953712007-07-24T03:19:00.001-07:002007-07-24T03:22:38.252-07:00Some thoughts on Online Learning StructuresI have been contributing to a conversation on H-Net for Online Education: <span class="ppt" id="_user_H-OEH@h-net.msu.edu">H-Net List for Online Education in the Humanities <span class="lg"><h-oeh@h-net.msu.edu> and thought it might be useful to share my comments here on my blog for others to respond or comment:<br /><br /></span></span>Hi Boria, Dale, et. al.: I'm enjoying your conversation and find myself agreeing with both of you (Boria and Dale at this juncture)! I certainly share the sense of the early euphoria of teaching in this new environment and developing our own rules and structures. I taught my first online course in early 1997, built from raw html and focused on a chat room converted to an asynchronous bulletin board. Today the same institution, UWW Skidmore College, is still building each course from scratch using Dreamweaver after involving each faculty member in the initial development stage of his or her course. Naturally, some template qualities have appeared but there is truly no structured CMS rigidity. this term I'm teaching again for UWW and another institution using Blackboard. My sense is that some of the problems we face as instructors follow from the learning culture and structures adopted by individual institutions. I am getting better responses from my UWW students than from my other folks and part of that I believe grows out of BB's more structured environment and very likely from the desire of other faculty members to control their learning space. The result seems to be more like what Boria describes: students with a clear expectation of making as few (and least meaningful) postings possible--until pushed, as Dale suggests, to broaden their postings and the range and quality of those interactions. (If I can get a plug in, my colleague, Carla Payne, and I, have written a piece for a special edition of On The Horizon an online journal that Boria is editing, entitled "Can We Talk? Course Management Software and the Construction of Knowledge," which address many of these same issues in more detail.)<br /><br />My sense is that we must move away from CMS's like Blackboard or find ways to make these broadcast CMS's more like the internet itself: narrowband, point-to-point. The individual skills, talents and unique vision of faculty have to be respected--as does the need to get learner involvement at the very beginning, as Dale suggests. Moodle <script><!-- D(["mb","\u003ca href\u003d\"http://moodle.org/\" target\u003d\"_blank\" onclick\u003d\"return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\"\>http://moodle.org/\u003c/a\> or similar Open Source CMS's offer a much better learning philosophy but perhaps not a real great difference in templated structures. \u003cbr\>\u003cbr\>I'm doubtful that we are actually taking learning advantage of the internet itself. We are still in the horseless carriage stage of this new enterprise--borrowing the structures of the past (the horse and buggy lecture) to build the car (horseless buggy BB) of the future. I feel strongly we should be much more concerned about the aesthetics of online learning (color, graphics, images, etc); we should be doing much more serious game playing (simulations); using the internet much more on the fly to reference additional sources and, we need help from our more technically inclined people to build a totally new bulletin board platform. The best I know of now is the latest version of Phorum but it still remains a "forum" (they call them msgs) and "threads" environment. I think we can do better. I hope others will join this discussion--its one of the best I have seen on H-Net for Online Ed. corky\n",1] ); //--></script><a href="http://moodle.org/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://moodle.org/</a> or similar Open Source CMS's offer a much better learning philosophy but perhaps not a real great difference in templated structures. <br /><br />I'm doubtful that we are actually taking learning advantage of the internet itself. We are still in the horseless carriage stage of this new enterprise--borrowing the structures of the past (the horse and buggy lecture) to build the car (horseless buggy BB) of the future. I feel strongly we should be much more concerned about the aesthetics of online learning (color, graphics, images, etc); we should be doing much more serious game playing (simulations); using the internet much more on the fly to reference additional sources and, we need help from our more technically inclined people to build a totally new bulletin board platform. The best I know of now is the latest version of Phorum but it still remains a "forum" (they call them msgs) and "threads" environment. I think we can do better. I hope others will join this discussion--its one of the best I have seen on H-Net for Online Ed. corky<span class="ppt" id="_user_H-OEH@h-net.msu.edu"><span class="lg"> </span></span><span class="ppt" id="_user_H-OEH@h-net.msu.edu"><span class="lg"></span></span>corkyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12534429585639101380noreply@blogger.com0