Making work count

Sigh. I just realized it's been more than a month since my last post...

I was having a conversation this afternoon about effective educational methods with a bright young colleague who is very dedicated to teaching (it is sad how rare this kind of conversation is at a University!) During the course of the conversation, I came across a little nugget of wisdom that I thought worth posting. He was telling me about a discussion he had with some one from Red Hat, on incorporating open-source projects into programming classes.

I think this is a great idea that generalizes nicely to other kinds of classes, at least in engineering. A wonderful way to provide students with a source of self-motivation for the work they do in the context of a class (home/in-class assignments/projects) is to make their work available and useful to others. This makes the work meaningful in itself, not merely something done to get the grade.

As mentioned above, if it's a software class, they could contribute to an open-source effort. If they do some experiments or projects that may be of interest to others (in academia, industry, or even hobbyists), they could be asked to post and showcase the results online. This will also motivate students to do a good job of documenting and communicating the work they do. They could also do assignments that are directly documentary in nature, e.g., write a tutorial, create or contribute entries for a wiki on a topic related to the course.

The assignment/project could also be a real-world problem that is of direct interest to some external party. Two years back, I got freshmen students to look into and propose energy-efficient alternatives to lighting for buildings on the USC campus based on real data on the current lighting fixtures that I obtained from USC Facilities and Management Services (FMS). Many of the students were excited about the project and came up with great ideas for upgrades, taking into account the lighting needs of the buildings, potential energy savings, and the material and labor cost involved in upgrades.  I then forwarded the student reports and recommendations back to FMS for consideration in their future plans for upgrading the lighting. The project was not just "make-work" but "real" in the sense that folks at FMS were actually interested in what the students came up with.

The Valedectorian and the Piano Teacher

I came across two wonderful articles today.

The first is the valedictorian speech given by Erica Goldson at her high school graduation . There's also a video of her speech online.

Erica says (italics mine):

Some of you may be thinking, “Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn't you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I'm scared. 

Erica is remarkably mature to have already come to these conclusions about the price of success in a conventional school. I am only just starting to understand the implications myself.

***

The second wonderful article I came across today was part 2 of a Piano teacher's response to the Amy Chua article, titled "Beyond Carrot and Sticks: How to Motivate Children (Or Why It's Not Necessary)". In this incisive commentary, she diagnoses (correctly, in my opinion) that the core problem with our societal attitude towards education is that it is based fundamentally on the presumption that most children are "lazy":

This vast disconnect between what we expect from children (laziness) and what’s actually there (energy, creativity and curiosity) goes right to the heart of what’s wrong with our educational system today. Our society has a collective idea that Learning Is Boring. “Obviously” children are not going to want to learn about negative numbers, write stories or practice piano on their own initiative, right? So either we have to bribe or coerce them.

She argues that both these approaches are flawed. She advances an alternative theory in five points, that I would summarize and rephrase in three as follows:

1. Children are naturally creative, curious, and enjoy learning.
2. But they won't learn in a vacuum; It is essential for the grown ups and others in their lives to interact with them and expose them to a wide range of possibilities through natural experiences and activities.
3. Learning is not about passively accumulating information and doing well on tests, it's about actively exploring the world, finding out how it works, and developing passions. Towards this end, educational tv shows (or traditional classroom lectures!) are not effective and can actually dampen curiosity.

She adds:

Children do not need to be “motivated”. They come that way naturally. The danger is that they will become “demotivated” – either through passive TV-watching (usually when both parents work outside the home) or through an educational system that emphasizes “right answers” and “good marks” over intellectual curiosity. But, if they are given the tools that will let them pursue their passions, they won’t be spending six hours a day on Facebook

As a college teacher who encounters many such "demotivated" students each year (students who have been trained by the system to be motivated in a classroom setting only by the carrots and sticks of grading), I can tell you that the damage done to their spirits, their creativity, their sense of passion for learning, is deep and hard to reverse.  There has to be a broader recognition of how harmful this widespread "lazy kids" prejudice is.

Impostor

I was reading an article in the NYTimes by Roni Rabin, which talks about an increasing trend towards young people valuing self esteem above other desires; it ends with the words:

“The idea has been that if we build their self-esteem, then they’ll do better in school and in relationships,” said Dr. Twenge, the “Narcissism Epidemic” author. “Well, that puts the cart before the horse. When you break down the research you see that kids who behave well and get high grades develop high self-esteem — not the other way around.”

Somehow, this rubbed me the wrong way. Setting aside the question of what it means for kids to "behave well", I can tell you that getting high grades does not always result in high self-esteem.

There is a well-known phenomenon known as the impostor syndrome, that affects many bright students in college and beyond, often precisely those that get high grades. It consists of a track of thought that loops continuously through these students' heads that says "I don't deserve to be here. All my grades and accomplishments to date were somehow a fluke. They will discover soon enough that I am a fake and an impostor, and then I'll be shamed and booted out."  It is a particularly insidious form of self-doubt, because it is precisely at moments of achievement, say doing well in a course or getting an award, that it raises their anxiety levels ("oh no! I've managed to fool them once more!").

The following article in Science Magazine describes the phenomenon well:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/2008_02_15/caredit_a0800025

It notes:

Clinical psychologist Pauline Clance and colleague Suzanne Imes coined the term "impostor phenomenon" in a 1978 paper in Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice. They gave this name to high-performing but inwardly anxious women who were among the professionals attending Clance's group-therapy sessions. "These women do not experience an internal sense of success," wrote Clance. "They consider themselves to be 'impostors' ” despite scoring well on standardised tests, earning advanced degrees, and receiving professional awards. Early on, this phenomenon was associated with women, a belief that persists today. But subsequent studies, including another by Clance, have shown that men are affected in equal numbers.

I first heard of this term directly at a workshop on college teaching while I was a grad student at Cornell, organized by Prof. Richard Felder from NCSU. Felder is a well known educator, who wrote an article about this titled "Impostors everywhere" that is worth reading.

I remember heaving a sigh of relief when I heard him mention this phenomenon and thinking "Oh, so it's not just me."  Merely knowing that this unhelpful thought pattern had a name, and was not a burden I carried alone, made a big difference for me in ameliorating its impact, though it did not quell my voice of self-doubt completely. (For the record, I'm a lot better now. I still feel clueless at times, but am comforted that I'm not much more clueless than many of my peers.)

Having given the matter much thought over the years, I feel that what exacerbates the impostor syndrome, or perhaps even gives rise to it in the first place, is adopting the world view that ties one's sense of self-worth to one's achievements and treats achievement as the goal of one's efforts.

Conventional wisdom (as captured in the quote by Dr. Twenge I started this note with) propounds a chain of reasoning that goes as follows:   hard work => mastery => success and achievement => self-esteem. This achievement-driven philosophy of life sets success and achievement as the desirable ends of hard work, and asserts that self-esteem would be a natural product of such achievement.

In the academic world, where one's professional identity is formed entirely of one's achievements (just read the bio of any speaker's talk announcement), this is certainly the dominant discourse. And I do not deny there is some logic to it. We know from experience that there is a variation in quality, and such lists of achievements, particularly in the form of peer-reviewed awards and honors, provide a short-cut when forming a judgement about the quality of someone's work. Nevertheless, there is something fundamentally unhealthy about accepting this discourse uncritically.

There is a different way of viewing the world, that doesn't put achievement first.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna admonishes Arjuna:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।  मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोस्त्वऽकर्मणि॥

To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction.  (2:47)

This philosophy, referred to sometimes as Nishkam Karma (desireless action), has much in common with the practices of Zen Buddhism, as well as Stoicism. See, for instance, the following related quote from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations:

If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to prevent this. (3:12)

I think the deepest self-esteem arises naturally if one follows such a philosophy and consistently values learning, hard work, and service as meaningful  in themselves, and not merely as the means to achieving success or avoiding failure. It is challenging to adopt such a mindset in our competitive, achievement-driven world, but let that not stop us from striving.

Focus on effort, not talent

Yesterday, I wrote about Amy Chua's self-congratulatory article in the Wall Street Journal on her authoritarian approach to parenting. I came across a wonderfully well written response to that article today in a blog by a Piano teacher:
http://contrapuntalplatypus.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/a-3rd-way/

I agree with this blogger wholeheartedly that the other extreme of ascribing success to talent instead of effort is not a helpful approach to parenting either. It reminded me of the following article by Carol Dweck that appeared in the Scientific American in 2007, which makes this very point nicely:
http://homeworkhelpblog.com/the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids/

Carol Dweck writes that what distinguishes successful learners from unsuccessful ones is a growth-oriented mindset that focuses on effort, not talent:

Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

We validated these expectations in a study published in early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blackwell of Columbia University and Kali H. Trzes­niewski of Stanford University and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, we assessed the students’ mind-sets by asking them to agree or disagree with statements such as “Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t really change.” We then assessed their beliefs about other aspects of learning and looked to see what happened to their grades.

As we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard, believing that the more you labored at something, the better you would become at it. They understood that even geniuses have to work hard for their great accomplishments. Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.

Such divergent outlooks had a dramatic impact on performance. At the start of junior high, the math achievement test scores of the students with a growth mind-set were comparable to those of students who displayed a fixed mind-set. But as the work became more difficult, the students with a growth mind-set showed greater persistence. As a result, their math grades overtook those of the other students by the end of the first semester—and the gap between the two groups continued to widen during the two years we followed them.

Dweck concludes that the key to raising smart children is to inculcate in them a growth-oriented mindset. She writes that "people also communicate mind-sets through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up a child by telling him or her how brilliant and talented he or she is, our research suggests that this is misguided." She argues that it is far better to commend them for their effort, to emphasize the brain's ability to grow, and share with them stories of people (e.g.,  mathematicians) who are successful because they pursue their interests with passion and hard work.

I also recommend another recent book that makes the same point: Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, by Geoff Colvin.

Authoritarian Parenting

An article by Amy Chua, a professor at Yale law school, in the Wall Street Journal, titled "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior," defends an approach to parenting that is about as far from the humanistic, freedom-oriented, model of education as you can get.

The style of parenting she advocates essentially consists of the parent deciding what they want their children to be good at and forcing them to work extremely hard to become good at it.  I don't dispute that this approach to raising superstar kids can work in getting them to be stellar at violin or piano. Or chess --- the famous Polgar sisters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polg%C3%A1r) are a good example of the results that can be obtained.

Nor do I dispute that a genuine desire to see one's children excel and do well in life is what lies behind such an approach to parenting.

But it is, nevertheless, deeply disrespectful of the child as an individual. She writes:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. 

I can think of a lot of things that are fun even if one is not good at it. Like attending sleepovers, having playdates, being in a school play, watching TV or playing computer games, choosing one's own extracurricular activities. All  choices that Amy gleefully reports that *she* chose to deprive her daughters of.

What it really boils down to is this. Does the end justify the means?  And is that end (of raising kids that excel at the piano or violin or chess or whatever other difficult skill you can think of that requires tens of thousands of hours to become very good at) fundamentally desirable in the first place? Why?

Parents considering this model should ask themselves: having never owned the momentum of their growth, having never set their own path, how will kids raised in such an environment chart their own course when they grow up? What kind of citizens will they make? What kind of world will they shape, whose own freedom has been subdued by will and violence, in the name of excellence or some other lofty goal of another's choosing?

As a college faculty member, I have seen too many failed products of precisely such a regimented approach to parenting. Timid young men in their twenties who write on their graduate school application that they know they should go to do a Ph.D. because their parents believe they should. Students who are brilliant at accomplishing a given task and getting A's in courses, but utterly unable to make progress independently in research unless given a lot of structure and external motivation. Students who are unable to bring themselves to question authority or mainstream ideas, who therefore find it difficult to think and act out of the box. Self-centered students who never volunteer or propose (without prodding) to do something that might benefit their peers, or be of service to others, or change their environment for the better in some way.

As the parent of children with a Chinese mother, who is nothing at all like her, I am particularly dismayed by the stereotype that Amy chooses to promote and propagate with her choice of words. What she is describing is better referred to as authoritarian parenting. I do not recommend it to you, regardless of your national or cultural background.

Advice on Ph.D.-level Research

In September 2002, while the memories of my own graduate school experience at Cornell were still fresh, and I was just starting out my career as an Assistant Professor at USC, I wrote this document offering advice to new Ph.D. students in my group.

I had nearly forgotten all about it. I stumbled across it this morning, and thought I'd share it here.

Experience has taught me that it's hard to give one-size-fits-all advice, but much of what I wrote then still seems reasonable to me. One sentence I would certainly change in the document, though, is "Always, always, focus your research on problems not tools..." I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking of when I wrote this. Although I have been generally more problem-oriented in most of my own research on wireless networks, in recent years I've gained much respect for research on developing and enhancing theoretical tools that can address a wide range of problems. For instance, in ongoing work, we have developed an algorithm for linear combinatorial optimization with unknown random variables. I'd consider this one of the most satisfying pieces of research I've worked on, precisely because it provides a theoretical tool that is broadly applicable to problems in many disciplines beyond my own.

Happy new neural connections

Oliver Sacks has a nice Op-Ed piece this morning in the New York Times, titled, "This Year, Change Your Mind". In the article, Sacks urges us to engage our brains in challenging new tasks and activities, and keep learning even as we age. Though we may tend to lose the motivation to keep trying out new experiences over time, and have less time to set aside from work, he notes that we're not so limited by our biology.  He writes:

While some areas of the brain are hard-wired from birth or early childhood, other areas — especially in the cerebral cortex, which is central to higher cognitive powers like language and thought, as well as sensory and motor functions — can be, to a remarkable extent, rewired as we grow older. 

He cites a number of examples of neuroplasticity (the ability of our brain to strengthen and create new neural connections) in adults, including this one:

I have had many reports from ordinary people who take up a new sport or a musical instrument in their 50s or 60s, and not only become quite proficient, but derive great joy from doing so. Eliza Bussey, a journalist in her mid-50s who now studies harp at the Peabody conservatory in Baltimore, could not read a note of music a few years ago. In a letter to me, she wrote about what it was like learning to play Handel’s “Passacaille”: “I have felt, for example, my brain and fingers trying to connect, to form new synapses. ... I know that my brain has dramatically changed.” Ms. Bussey is no doubt right: her brain has changed.

From an academic standpoint, I think these findings suggest another direction in which we should rethink our present system of education, which emphasizes learning only for children and young-adults, and  provides relatively fewer opportunities for life-long learning among adults in their thirties and beyond.

Anyway, I sure do look forward to continue changing my brain this year, and wish you many new neural connections too.

Unschooling

I'm sure you've all heard of homeschooling. The most extreme version of homeschooling, inspired by the writings of John Holt, who coined the term, is called "unschooling". One practitioner of this radical approach to education is Sandra Dodd, who maintains an excellent collection of articles and resources on this subject. I often browse them using her random page server. 

Not only do unschoolers keep their children out of school, they also don't follow any regular schedule to  teach at home. They give the kids enormous freedom to follow their interests all day so they can learn whatever they wish to or need to on their own, through self-driven activities like playing games, reading, talking, watching tv, listening to music, traveling; in other words, by living rich and fulfilled lives, unrestricted by any externally imposed notion of a curriculum. It should be mentioned that unschooling parents are not completely hands-off in that they do try actively to expose their children to a very wide range of activities and experiences, and are always there to answer their children's questions and help them, but this is all done in a non-interfering, non-controlling manner.

The fundamental premise of unschooling (which I believe because I have experienced it myself) is that children given such freedom do not abuse it, but rather exercise their natural desire to grow and learn autonomously.  But an essential key to its success is something Sandra calls "strewing", which consists of actively and continually exposing the children to a wide array of interesting materials and experiences.

The main goal of an unschooling parent is not to "teach" their children, but to help them "learn" in a very natural setting. In "What Teaching Never Can Be", Sandra Dodd clarifies the essential distinction between learning and teaching:

If I want to teach someone how to use quotation marks, I can talk, show them, make jokes, draw stick figures with speech-balloons, and I could maybe sing songs about it. So IF the person who's in the room "being taught" is thinking about how to file down that one piece of a machine gun that can turn a legal semi-automatic into an illegal automatic, and how to hide that part really well, disguised as something altogether different, what am I doing?

I'm talking, writing, drawing, dancing, and singing. But I'm not teaching. I'm reviewing for myself something I already know. I'm just performing a play of sorts, without any audience. I'm playing with myself. I'm ...well, you know.

So if I'm reading a magazine about machine guns and someone comes and says, "How do I punctuate a quote within a quote?" I can show them. If they don't totally understand, I can draw pictures or give other examples. When I perceive that they have learned the thing they wanted to learn, I should shush up and go back to my magazine, because the action is completed. .

They learned. I helped them learn. I was "the teacher" but I didn't do the work that resulted in learning. The learner did that in his own head. I could put ideas in the air, but only he could hear and process and ask more questions. Without his active work, no teaching can possibly take place.

Sandra writes that it is key for an unschooling parent in the beginning stages to "see learning as a separate process from their own song and dance. In advanced stages there is teaching, but it is compassionately and competently facilitating another's learning." 


I would argue that this is valuable advice to teachers everywhere.

Learning at your own pace, online

I saw this article about Western Governors University (WGU) today in the LA Times (the print version was titled "Nonprofit takes new approach to education" and had essentially the same text as the online version.)  WGU is an online university, in which each student is assigned an individual mentor. The article, appearing in the personal finance section of the newspaper, emphasizes the low cost of this program ($2800 a semester for undergraduate classes). It points out that students can also go through courses at their own pace; in particular, they can finish a course faster if they already know some of the material or can learn it at a quick pace. Apparently, the average WGU graduate earns a BA in 2.5 years, further reducing the overall cost-to-degree.

The article gushes about this online university in glowing terms. It highlights the McGraw Prize in Education received by the President of WGU, Robert Mendenhall, which cited the university's "flexibility, accessibility and affordability"; it notes that Time magazine once called it "the best college you've never heard of" (the original quote was, actually, "the best relatively cheap university you've never heard of"); and it quotes words of praise by the chief executive of the nation's largest education foundation (Lumina Foundation), Jamie Merisotis, who calls WGU  "a 'disruptive innovator' that's likely to push the entire education system to change in positive ways." The article further mentions that the "National Study of Student Engagement, which rates both traditional universities, showed WGU as performing equal to or better than other private, nonprofit universities not directly supported by governmental bodies. The ratings were based on academic challenge, quality of advisors and overall educational experience."

Intrigued by all this positive press, I dug around a little further on my own. From looking at the course offerings described on WGU's own website, it seems to be geared primarily towards working adults looking to complete a bachelor's degree so they can list it on their resume. The offered majors are not very diverse, and what is on offer focuses less on mind-broadening education than on "marketable/market-oriented" subjects, such as business and teacher's education and narrowly defined information technology domains. For example, most closely related to my area of networks is their degree of B.S. in Information Technology - Networks Design and Management. Their description of this degree reads:

Our network design degree will launch your network systems engineering career. The B.S. in Information Technology—Networks Design and Management will give you leading-edge networks design and engineering skills that employers demand along with eight recognized industry certifications including your Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) Enterprise Administrator certification. You will become a better networks designer and network systems engineer.

I also found some online reviews of their program. While there are indeed many positive comments, there are also several very dissatisfied students (with complaints ranging from the degrees not being recognized in their work environment, to lack of serious classes, to arbitrary changes in schedule and content, and so on). In the context of the IT program, in particular, one of the reviewers notes: 

I enrolled in the WGU IT program in September 2008. Unfortunately I wasn't told that there weren't "real" IT classes, but that I would be working on getting certificates... So if you want to attend WGU, take all the certifications on your own, and then transfer them in. You could save over $6000+! Also be aware that you won't get basic CS foundational courses such as OOP, Data Structures, etc. It seems that they don't have any of their own curriculum, and everything is outsourced. ... This can be a good school, but be careful, and ask a lot of questions before you enroll. However, because of the lack of advanced classes (Calculus, etc) I don't think you would be a first pick by an employer.

Based on these, I don't believe WGU's IT programs, though they are certainly much less expensive to complete, and are more market-oriented, offer the same breadth and depth as a B.S. in computer science program at schools you have heard of. Nevertheless, I think the article about WGU raises some good questions about one of the major trends in higher education --- the wider adoption of online learning. 

I should note that USC's Viterbi School of Engineering, where I work, has long had a well-subscribed distance education program (I believe it dates back more than 35 years, to 1972, well before WGU was founded; originally using satellite TV transmissions). I myself have taught many classes in this program, in which my lectures are taped and streamed in real-time on the web, and students are able to do homeworks and even take tests remotely. The opportunities for outside-class interactions with the instructor and TA are not always as good for off-campus students as they are for on-campus students, but in my experience faculty/TA's often do make an effort to respond to off-campus student queries in a timely manner, via email or online discussion forums. 

I very much like the free models exemplified by MIT's open courseware and Stanford's iTunes U courses, which allow anyone to see lectures and materials from courses at these universities. I think they get close to the very heart of education.  But they neither provide a framework for evaluation, nor (understandably) for any degree of direct interaction with faculty or other students.

So, we have an open question: is it possible to design high-quality, interactive, online learning programs, with evaluation, that are also self-paced? 

Such a program could go beyond traditional classrooms by allowing for much more personalized and self-directed learning. But, I think, it can never make the brick and mortars version of the university completely redundant, because real spaces and physical interactions provide a rich sense of community in the context of learning --- an essential, albeit intangible, benefit, that cannot be obtained in the virtual world. 

I myself am most interested in how a well-designed online-learning program can be made to complement live interactive experiences at a university, so that we can combine the best of both worlds.

Teaching kids to speak

I shall certainly be quoting John Holt a lot in these pages. As someone who extensively observed children, his writings are a collection of deep insights about the learning process, though they are sometimes hard to digest given how counter they run to our systems of education. I was reminded of the following passage from his classic "How Children Learn" when I posted yesterday on Paul Lockhart's article, which starts in similar vein.

Bill Hull once said to me, “If we taught children to speak, they’d never learn.” I thought at first he was joking. By now I realize that it was a very important truth. Suppose we decided that we had to “teach” children to speak. How would we go about it? First, some committee of experts would analyze speech and break it down into a number of separate “speech skills.” We would probably say that, since speech is made up of sounds, a child must be taught to make all the sounds of his language before he can be taught to speak the language itself. Doubtless we would list these sounds, easiest and commonest ones first, harder and rarer ones next. Then we would begin to teach infants these words, working our way down the list. Perhaps, in order not to “confuse” the child—“confuse” is an evil word to many educators—we would not let the child hear much ordinary speech, but would only expose him to the sounds we were trying to teach.

Along with our sound list, we would have a syllable list and a word list. 

When the child had learned to make all the sounds on the sound list, we would begin to teach him to combine the sounds into syllables. When he could say all the syllables on the syllable list, we would begin to teach him the words on the word list. At the same time, we would teach him the rules of grammar, by means of which he could combine these newly-learned words into sentences. Everything would be planned with nothing left to chance; there would be plenty of drill, review, and tests, to make sure that he had not forgotten anything.

Suppose we tried to do this; what would happen? What would happen, quite simply, is that most children, before they got very far, would become baffled, discouraged, humiliated, and fearful, and would quit trying to do what we asked them. If, outside of our classes, they lived a normal infant’s life, many of them would probably ignore our “teaching” and learn to speak on their own. If not, if our control of their lives was complete (the dream of too many educators), they would take refuge in deliberate failure and silence, as so many of them do when the subject is reading.