Dan Ariely’s Course on “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior” Open for Enrollment!

Next week, I’m giving a presentation to forty CEO’s and CIO’s from Fortune 100 companies on how the science of attention blindness can help us make decisions.  These “10 Rules for Smart Decisions (Despite Our Attention Blindness)” distill all the funny stories, serious experiments, and pretty hilarious examples.    Feel free to add your own!

1.    Be aware of the brain’s structural limits (it won’t fix them but gives you a fighting chance).

2.    Remember expertise has its own blinders.

 3.   Only call the errors you have to call (referee’s logic:  call the errors everyone sees).

4.   Reward the court jester (you need someone who will say there’s a gorilla in the room).

5.    Exhale fiercely (the calming inhale follows naturally and will take care of the rest)

6.    Divide attention strategically.

7.    Embrace distraction as your friend (it helps break old habits).

8.   Model unlearning.

9.  Maximize risk, minimize exposure (skunkworks still work).

10.   Be humble (there’s far more we don’t know about the brain than we do).

Duke Today featured “Surprise Endings” the undergraduate class that Cathy is co-teaching with Dan Ariely on its website.  You can read the full text of their article below, or view the original story here.

February 11, 2013 | By Eric Ferreri  

DURHAM, NC - For Cathy Davidson, flipping the classroom isn’t enough. She’d prefer, as she likes to say, to make it do cartwheels.

That’s the general idea of the new course she’s co-teaching this semester with behavioral economist Dan Ariely.

 In “Surprise Endings” – an exploration of both literature and social science — the students help select course topics, pick their own projects and ultimately create their own version of the class to be offered free on the Internet. They do lots of work between classes on a public blog, and as of yet haven’t told the professors what their final projects will be.

This level of student empowerment is one cornerstone of the course, which Davidson is calling a meta-MOOC because of the product expected at the end. All semester, students are piecing video segments together based on class readings and exercises. Collectively, those video segments will be freely available on the web, much like a Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, which is a new style of online learning that’s gathering momentum at Duke and across higher education.

“You learn best both by doing and by teaching someone what you know,” says Davidson, an English professor and expert in digital learning. “It puts them into the role of teacher, and they learn far better that way.”

It’s a level of responsibility that Sarah Du, a freshman, hasn’t experienced in a classroom before.

“It’s a little scary,” she says. “You’re putting a lot of responsibility in the hands of college students. It’s great they trust us with it.”

Of course, the students aren’t entirely on their own. Ariely and Davidson armed them with a website filled with resources and advise the students as they conduct their group work. A professional videographer and a team of graduate teaching assistants are on hand to assist.

In one recent class, the 32 students wore red, an ode to the upcoming Valentine’s Day and its themes of love, romance and relationships, which the class is exploring through readings and blogging.

Davidson has dressed for the occasion as well, with a red blazer over a black skirt and black stockings.

And Ariely? The red-and-black striped smoking jacket from the Hugh Hefner collection is the tamest thing he has on. He is also wearing mismatched, striped socks and orange and blue sneakers. A pair of bright green, oversized heart-shaped sunglasses are perched on his head.

Again, this is not your normal college classroom.

Ariely conducts two class exercises that illustrate the norms and awkwardness of dating. In one, each student affixes a sticky note with a number to his or her forehead; without knowing their numbers, students are directed to seek out the highest numbers — 5s — on other foreheads. The 5s represent the most attractive people. The drill shows how people determine their relative worth and attractiveness.

In Ariely’s second exercise, each student is given 10 dollar bills and told to pair up with a student of the opposite sex, using the money as bait. The problem is there are 15 men and 13 women, which means that two men will be left dateless — much like a high school dance.

The students who ended the exercise with money got to keep it.

Later in the same class, Ariely and Davidson toggle between their expertise areas in fielding a far-ranging swath of questions from students. A business professor who specializes in explaining human behavior in plain language, discusses how love influences how people behave. When he pauses, Davidson — the English professor — dives in with a literary analogy.

There’s an ease in this give-and-take that Davidson and Ariely say comes naturally, in part, because their areas of expertise are so often intertwined.

“Social scientists reflect on life, and people in literature reflect on life,” Ariely says. “It’s just from different perspectives.”

“The point of turning the classroom around is to get away from thinking that attention is always something hierarchical that someone makes you do and [to] make you a little bit more mindful of your own learning,” she told Frank Stasio during the interview. “Once you know something and have to teach it to somebody else , it’s a different level of learning than when you just regurgitate it on a test.”

You can listen to the full program here.

The academic conversation on MOOCs is starting to polarise in exactly the talking-past-one-another way that so many complex conversations evolve: with very smart points on either side, but not a lot of recognition that the validity of certain key points on one side does not undermine the validity of certain key points on the other. 

I regret this flattening of online learning into a simple binary of ‘politically and financially motivated greed’ on the one hand and ‘an opportunity to find out more about learning’ on the other. Some of both in different situations can be true.

It’s always hard to be able to hold two complex and even contradictory ideas in one’s mind at once but, well, that’s life. Both can be true. And there is so much to be gained from a sustained conversation on every side and from each side’s learning from the other, without assuming the other side is being naive or callous in its concerns.

Here’s a case in point: although I’ve not done a data count, I would say that, about a year ago, the majority of articles on higher education in the mass media in the US ran the gamut from snide to extremely negative, often spring-boarding off entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s offering cash rewards to students choosing not to go to college.

The rhetoric of so many articles seemed to be “is higher education really worth it?” These articles (I bet there were dozens if not hundreds) were often filled with hard data about the soaring costs of higher education and horrific student debt pitted against anecdotes of unemployment among the college educated.

It was virtually a meme; that if you are fool enough to go to college, you end up deeper in debt and unemployed and therefore college isn’t worth it. The tone in the press emphasised that latter point, demeaning the importance of higher education, laughing slyly at anyone who thinks higher education is a worthy goal. 

Enter MOOCs

Enter massive open online courses: MOOCs. Whatever else one may think about MOOCS, their vast popularity proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that very many people want – really, really want – more not less higher learning.

Has anyone else noticed that the tone of the conversation has now shifted from “is college worth it?” to “how can we make necessary, important, invaluable learning available to the widest number of people for the lowest cost?” I certainly have. 

Those who hate MOOCs and reduce them solely to a device of the neoliberal rich to diminish the role of the tenured professor, should at least be using the vast popularity of online courses to argue the value of a college education. It’s demonstrable. It’s massive.

And those same people who see MOOCs as a way to diminish the role of the tenured professor (from both sides) should also be thinking about who is actually taking MOOCs. 

Often, they are not the same students who sit in the classrooms of tenured professors, themselves a constantly diminishing percentage of all those who teach in higher education – a situation that existed long before MOOCs.

There is no evidence that students are dropping out of brick-and-mortar universities in droves in order to enrol in online courses. On the contrary, the typical online course student is someone who would not otherwise have access to higher education.

The ridiculous (and pernicious) University of Virginia trustees who forced a president to resign because she wasn’t moving fast enough on MOOCs, as if that would drive down the tuition costs for the university’s elite public cadre of students, simply didn’t know the numbers.

There is no evidence MOOCs will do much if anything to change the tuition costs of higher education except for those taking MOOCs. Period.

At the same time that there is a lot of bad economic reasoning by those who think MOOCs can solve the crisis of high tuition costs in higher education, there is equally bad economic thinking by those who blame MOOCs for declining public support for higher education. 

That process began long before MOOCs existed. The University of Michigan, for example, currently receives only 6% of its funding from the state of Michigan – and MOOCs were not in the picture to make that happen. 

Disparities 

Nor are MOOCs the source of the vast economic disparities that beset America’s contemporary higher education (and school) system.

If anything, MOOCs illuminate the terrible economic disparities of higher education (worldwide) by offering a cheap, massive alternative – not to those sitting in the classrooms of tenured professors, but for those who have no opportunity to be in those classes.

MOOCs work, for example, for those seeking to retool their learning to prepare for new professions when their own no longer exists, who are seeking a second career, or who want simply to enjoy the benefits of learning but are not able to participate in actual face-to-face classroom learning.

To have the time and be in a location where you can actually attend college physically is pretty rare in a world of two-career families. And community colleges (where tenured professors are rare indeed) do a great job, but they too require face-to-face engagement and cannot begin to serve all the students who want to take courses.

Sadly, higher education is more and more becoming priced for the global 1%, a trend that began long before MOOCs existed. It is often noted that tuition costs have risen far faster than inflation. True. But they have not risen faster than the kinds of goods and services designed for the global 1%. 

In fact, private university tuition costs (and, increasingly, out-of-state public tuition costs) are quite in line with the escalating costs of such things as elite tax services, financial advisors, hedge fund managers, elective surgery, luxury travel, and luxury goods in general. They are also in line with the costs of private preschool and elite boarding schools. 

Indeed, in many cases MOOCs will not solve the problem of the high cost of tuition fees at face-to-face institutions; but, in the end, they may help more people who have never conceived of attending a ‘real’ college participate in the higher education that, the numbers show, is coveted, prized, valued, sought after.

And thus – for MOOC lovers and MOOCs haters alike – an important rhetorical point we should all be emphasising, in every conversation: in the complex, changing world in which we live, advanced learning is necessary. Not a luxury. It deserves the public support of other necessities. Advanced education is far too important to price out of the market for all but the global 1%.

If the question is, “is higher education worth it?” we know from the massive enrolment in online courses that the answer is a resounding “yes”. It is also significant that world history courses are enrolling as many students as Python’s open source software. People want higher learning.

Whatever else one may think of MOOCs, they are an important game changer in the anti-higher education conversation that raged not so long ago.

* Cathy N Davidson is co-founder of HASTAC, a 10,000+ network committed to new modes of collaboration, research, learning and institutional change. She teaches at Duke University, where she co-directs the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. She is author of The Future of Thinking: Learning institutions for a digital age (with HASTAC co-founder David Theo Goldberg), and Now You See It: How the brain science of attention will transform the way we live, work, and learn (Viking Press). She is co-principal investigator of the HASTAC-MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions. In October 2012, she and David Theo Goldberg were named Educator of the Year by the World Technology Network.

* NOTE: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and not of HASTAC. This is an edited version of the article, “If MOOCs are the answer, what is the question?”.

And then they spend the rest of the semester creating an engaging online unit about their topic, whether love or dishonest or social defaults or obedience and resistance.

At the end, we will reassemble a whole course, putting all the resources and materials together with the blog discussions, the formal interviews, and the course content.  Next year, our PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge will add assessment metrics and we may even see about offering the course for credit.

And next year I hope to teach a MOOC on The Past and Future of Higher Education and this student-created MOOC will be the “text book” for the online MOOC.

What goes around comes around.  You are what you teach, you are the people you reach:    It’s what we call “connected learning.”  It’s why I believe it helps everyone if we learn in public.   Dan talks about the predictably irrational aspects of human nature, and hopes that, by recognizing our patterns, we will have what I call a “Now You See It!” moment which allows you to switch the paradigm, change the pattern, break the habit, change your course of action.

Here’s the great Duke News article by Eric Ferreri about “Surprise Endings”:  http://today.duke.edu/2013/02/davidsonariely   Plus the delightful video: Looking Into Love

The programming problem was in my brain.  Not the first time.  Not the last.

I begin with this anecdote about my personal learning disability because it is extremely difficult for the “able brained” or “normal brained” to be able to fathom what it really feels like to be “differently brained.”  Even friends who think they know, do not.   It falls upon the “differently brained” to have to translate a reality that the “normal” typically cannot comprehend.

Take a recent Facebook conversation.   A wonderful teacher writes in frustration about one of her students, “For the record. This will surprise no one, but I feel that documenting this will help me not go insane. Syllabus: Read Books 1-6 of The Iliad. Student email: Are we supposed to read the first 6 books of The Iliad?”   Predictably, the long string of comments, many of them from our mutual friends, great human beings and sympathetic and caring teachers, commiserate in empathic and often extremely witty ways with the frustrated teacher having to deal with this obtuse, lazy, stupid student.

I wanted to hug the student.   I wanted to congratulate that student for having the courage to write to a prof to clarify an assignment that seemed confusing.  As confusing as, say:  “Username:  Guest    Password:  Guest@0000.”

I wrote the equivalent of the above in the Facebook Comments.  It wasn’t a great thing to do since it disrupted some mirthful empathy exchanged among beleaguered teachers who had had to answer one too many emails from seemingly lazy students.  To her great credit, this teacher understood what I was trying to say.   She understood that, if she had been harsh and judgmental to that student (she hadn’t been, btw), she could have, well, put a roadblock in the educational career of someone who would turn out to be a successful teacher, author, educator one day.     I am filled with admiration for this teacher who turned her own views around.  It is as difficult for the able-brained to understand the differently brained as it is for me to read the instructions and manage to type in “Username:  Guest    Password:  Guest@0000.”

I am lucky.   When I was in preschool, Chicago gave all three and four year olds an innovative new math test that claimed to sort out potential “math geniuses” and nurture them.   Apparently I did well, because I spent my childhood whisked into an array of special programs, competitions, new kinds of challenges and tests, and math camps, always designated for the “smart kids,” and always a surprise since I was barely a C student in school, including in math.   All my teachers knew I was this “math genius” (I despise the term but it’s the one I heard growing up); they also saw that I could make sense of large amounts of complicated, even contradictory information quickly (the skill I have relied on most in my adult life).  Because I could do such “higher order” thinking, they assumed the areas where I didn’t perform were evidence of “obstinance,” a word I heard even more frequently than “math genius.”

There were so many things I could not do in school.  They all branded me “obstinate.”  If Facebook had been invented back then, one of my frustrated teachers would have posted about me in order to delay her mounting insanity over this obstinate student of hers who refused to read out loud or to recite anything from memory, who claimed she couldn’t sing the words to songs or comprehend the meaning of a sentence that had both words and numbers in it.   A “math genius,” who can solve a sequence of equations, numbers, symbols  . . . but only if there are no  words in the sentence?  Come on!  It can only mean one thing:  Obstinate!   (Note to adult self:  please don’t try to write your own checks, Cat!)

If I hadn’t taken some experimental test designed by some psychologists at the University of Chicago convinced they could separate out future mathematicians from the common herd of kids who could do calculation but would never be able to handle abstract numerical complexity,  I probably wouldn’t have graduated from high school.

****

There are lots of steps in between that little preschooler and my present career.   I’m not going to enumerate all of those here, but, because I’m differently brained, I hate to end without throwing out a lifeline to someone else out there who might have similar learning issues and who might be struggling with some basics.  So I’ll let you in on my best tricks for succeeding in a world that is mono-brained and that requires extra navigational skills from those of us differently-brained.

Also, I find that my “normal brained” friends find the example of my personal success-tactics useful in understanding how differently someone else can think.  Keep this in mind: Most teachers are not differently brained.  Most teachers are those who, not surprisingly, have made it through the educational system smoothly enough to replicate it, even when they think of themselves as radical reformers of that system.   Especially English teachers.  English teachers are the gatekeepers to the normal brained.  (I see this all the time when I am hanging out with my computer and technology pals.  I no longer remember much math but, when I’m with them, my blood pressure goes down, and so does theirs when I assure them that, although an English teacher, I’m dyslexic.  Whew.  I can feel the relief.  Whew.)

So what’s my best trick?  How have I pulled off this pretty stellar career as an educator despite having an unusual learning style? Team work. Finding the right partner to work with.  I have lots of other tricks but that is my best one by far, the most essential one.  In my field, that means I’ve always, from my very first job, volunteered to do complicated administrative, bureaucratic, or leadership tasks that no one else wants or can do.  As an assistant professor, I ran a program for nearly a decade without ever having my name on the masthead because the director was arrogant enough to want the glory but not ambitious enough to do the work. (I know, maybe he was “work disabled.”) In any case, he had a wonderful coworker (in HR terms an “assistant”) who did not possess the same learning issues I have.  Together, she and I made an amazing team.

So that’s it:  The single most important key to my success has been, first, identifying, recognizing, and being willing to find workarounds for my different brain, understanding that the normal-brained have no idea what it feels like, on an everyday level, to be differently brained. This is a much harder step than you think because everything in our society mitigates against this self-awareness. It’s why I wanted to hug the student who asked my Facebook friend if s/he was correctly understanding the assignment. There is so much stigma, so much assumption, and so much lack of awareness among the normal-brained.  Attention blindness again.  You literally can’t see what you can’t see–so the able brained can’t see beyond their own abilities to realize those are not universal.  Since I do see, it is my task to be able to make the bridge from the way my brain works to theirs.  They don’t get it, they won’t be able to make the bridge themselves, so I have to take charge of the situation.

So, second, I have always teamed up with someone really smart and non-judgmental (the word “obstinate” is not acceptable).  These are rare individuals (you know who you are out there:  thank you, thank you!),  who have deep human insight and respect without prejudice  . . .  and who are able to pull off flawlessly, seemingly effortlessly, even automatically, what, for me, is virtually impossible:  “Username:  Guest    Password:  Guest@0000.”

I have been lucky to work with talented, insightful people throughout my career.   Together, we move mountains.

———————–

————–

Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century (Viking Press)

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK!

Purchase on:  Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound

It was probably inevitable that any group of people who sought, however tentatively, to define “the rights, responsibilities, and possibilities for education in the globally connected world of the present and beyond” would find themselves accused of excluding important parties, of being “top-down,” and of hubris.

But the cadre that drafted “A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age” — which included scholars such as Cathy Davidson and Jesse Stommel, technologists such as John Seely Brown, and entrepreneurs like Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun — thought that amid all the hubbub about massive open online courses, “it would be useful to have some kind of document that describes the broader vision for where digital learning can go,” and for ensuring that the needs of learners themselves, rather than of institutions or providers or instructors, are central, said one of the authors, Peer 2 Peer University’s Philipp Schmidt.

And while the authors drew significant praise Wednesday in many quarters for the thoughtfulness of the document, they also absorbed the expected critiques on various fronts, especially from those noting that the group lacked obvious any representatives of individual learners themselves. In response, the authors reiterated more forcefully a point they had sought to make in initial document: that it was meant to be the fledgling starting point for something repeatedly revised and ultimately much more broadly representative.

“If the result is a big conversation that gets people engaged and involved, including self-learners, then it’s a success,” said Schmidt. “This is not intended to be anything remotely like a final version.”

Petra Dierkes-Thrun, a lecturer in comparative literature at Stanford University (who is also, as she puts it, “married to the MOOC,” as Sebastian’s wife), said that she and her husband had gathered the dozen invitees in December with the goal of crafting a “manifesto” of sorts to put into context the hysteria that has evolved around MOOCs, specifically, and online learning more generally as a result. 

As they talked, the manifesto concept morphed into an attempt to initiate, for the digital age, the kinds of student bills of rights that others had created before them. The effort embraced the idea, she said, that the digital age is different, offering both possibilities — “a powerful and potentially awe-inspiring opportunity to make new forms of learning available to all students worldwide” — and dangers, with massification also making possible greater exploitation.

And the bill of rights they crafted acknowledges both positives and negatives. It cites the prospect that digital forms of education can broaden student access to high-quality learning (“online learning has the potential to ensure that this right is a reality for a greater percentage of the world’s population than has ever been realizable before”).

But it also recognizes the risk that massive amounts of data on students will be collected (and possibly misused) and that students deserve financial transparency (“the right to know how their participation supports the financial health of the online system in which they are participating,” including for “free” courses) and pedagogical transparency, so they know whether a course will lead to a credential or not, and if so, what its authenticity and value are.

“Students have the right to care, diligence, commitment, honesty and innovation,” the authors write. “They are not being sold a product — nor are they the product being sold. They are not just consumers. Education is also about trust. Learning — not corporate profit — is the principal purpose of all education.”

As Silicon Valley and venture capital money flows into the online learning market (and the MOOC space, including for Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity), one might expect Thrun and other entrepreneur types to bristle at, rather than sign on to, calls for significant financial transparency. But Dierkes-Thrun said her husband fully believes in “holding providers accountable,” and that the document represents the “12 of us speaking together.”

Amid the cheers of “Well done, folks” and other praise for the document in blogs and on Twitter, some critiques emerged. In an e-mail message, Cable Green of Creative Commons tweaked the authors for implicitly contributing to the mania about MOOCs by failing to note that while they are “open” in the sense of who can enroll in them (by virtue of being free), many of the course materials are not openly licensed so they can be used and reused in the public domain.

And Anya Kamenetz, an advocate for truly open and do-it-yourself learning, noted that while a “bunch of educators got together to write a ‘bill of rights’ for online learners,” the problem was “they didn’t ask any learners what they wanted.”

Several of its authors, in blogging about the process and its result, went out of their way to acknowledge those limitations and to make clear that they didn’t intend for theirs to be the last word.

“We want lots of people with lots of different groups to remix it, edit it, make it their own,” said Schmidt.

You can read more, at Inside HigherEd. 

Panelist Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, tackled a different aspect of “access” in her talk, contending that — in contrast to the current craze for MOOCs, which “massively scal[e] an outmoded model of education” — academics “should be massively remodeling our institutions for contributive, connected participatory learning.”

But Davidson — herself the founder of HASTAC, a decade-old online and in-person network of scholars and others interested in the transformative potential of new technologies for teaching, learning, communicating, and conducting research — also argued that the digital humanities are intrinsically connected to ideas about breaking down barriers and undermining hierarchies. 

In its early days, Davidson said, “the field was largely, though not exclusively, about digitizing and scaling and making ‘available’ existing archives. The rhetoric, too, was about access in a fairly narrow conceptual sense: digitizing existing knowledge so more people could use it.”

But as their work has grown and evolved, Davidson said, “digital humanists have seen that, once you change access, you open the floodgates to a range of other questions about content, authority, hierarchy, and power that you may not even know you were asking.”

To read the full article, visit Inside HigherEd.

Multiple Choice Exam Theory (Just In Time For The New Term)

January 10, 2013, 8:00 am

By Prof. Hacker

–

I finished reading Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It yesterday afternoon. It is brilliant. Extremely well-written. Nearly impossible to put down. I love the way this woman thinks. This is a beautiful book.

Have you ever watched the television series Eureka? The characters get trapped in a virtual reality environment and when the force field gets hosed, the picture jiggles and sometimes what you thought was the real world begins to pixelate and morph into little cubes. Your eyes are pried open by the reality shift. That’s what I experienced reading Now You See It. The world’s not quite what I thought.

We all suffer inattention blindness. Humans have low bandwidth. When we pay attention to one thing, we don’t register lots of concurrent alternatives.

Our culture is leaving the industrial era. It’s not accidental that we began to imagine our brains were linear, machine-like, inflexible, and subject to decay a hundred years ago; we came up with the assembly line and time clock at the same time. We’ve got to see that for what it is and then cultivate the distraction to take another perspective. Oh yeah, those aren’t chickens; they’re ducks. Classrooms discourage learning. Grades and multiple choice and standardization are obsolete.

“We need to be thinking of interconnected, not discrete, twenty-first-century skills. Instead of testing for the best answer to discrete questions, we need to measure the ability to make connections, to synthesize, collaborate, network manage projects, solve problems  and respond to constantly changing technologies  interfaces  and eventually  in the workplace, new arrangements of labor and new economies. For schools this means that in addition to the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic, kids should be learning critical thinking, innovation, creativity, and problem solving, all of the skills one can build upon and mesh with the skills of others.”

She gets there, in the words of a reviewer for The Times Educational Supplement by

“…taking us on a tour through a welter of psychological theories and principles as she explains how learning happens. Along the way, she considers the Hebbian principle of neuronal pathways (“neurons that fire together, wire together”), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Asperger’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, Stanford-Binet intelligence testing, Freudian psychodynamics and a galaxy of other psychological theories and themes in order to illustrate and hammer home her point that education, as it is currently conducted, is preparing young people for the past, not the future. She critiques many of our tried and tested assessment methods as obsolete and in need of replacement, and argues that formalized learning environments fail to model new modes of working, many of which are ambient and untethered, arriving at the conclusion that we need to “question whether the form of learning and knowledge making we are instilling in our children is useful for their future”.

I recall someone at IBM’s Almaden Lab once lamenting that “We look at the world through industrial-age goggles.”

“Whether applied to life on the assembly line or inside the new skyscrapers, efficiency was a harsh taskmaster. It required that humans be as uniform as possible, despite their individual circumstances, talents, or predispositions. Working regular hours, each person was assigned aplace an a function; doing what one was told an not question the efficacy of the process were both part of the twentieth=century work. But a problem increasingly reports  in the modern offericce was self-motivation. With os much control exerted by others, there wasn’t much reason for the office worker to think for himself, to exceed expectation ro to innovate. Regularity and regulation do not inspire self-movitated workers.”

The first time I read Frederick Taylor in the original, I was outraged. How could he think so little of his fellow man? What gumption it must take to tell someone, “You’re not paid to think.” As I reflected on the value created in industrial age and the comforts it showered upon us, I tempered my feelings. Taylor wanted to increase production so there would be more for all to share. However, at the end of the day, whatever you think of Taylor and his one best way, he’s dead and those days are over.

We need a new set of tricks. Davidson asks,

“Given the new options in our digital world, why exactly, would we want to do thing the way we did them before? Why would we choose to measure the new possibilities of the digital age against a standard invented to count productivity in the old industrial regime? Given the newly interconnecte world we all now live, learn, and work in, given the new ways of connecting that our world affords, why would we not want to use our options? They question isn’t which is better, the past or the present. The question is, given the current possibilities, how can we imagine and work toward a better future?”

Ceci n’est-pas une pipe!

What confuses the brain delights the brain. I love this” “The mind always wanders off task because the mind’s task is to wander.”

“We currently have a national education policy based on a style of learning — the standardized, machine-readable multiple-choice test — that reinforces a type of thinking and form of attention well suited to the industrial worker — a role that increasingly fewer of our kids will ever fill,” she writes. Thanks mainly to the Internet, “their world is different from the one into which we were born, therefore they start shearing and shaping different neural pathways from the outset. We may not even be able to see their unique gifts and efficiencies.”

One thing I don’t get yet is the IBM-in-Second Life thing. The big section on Chuck Hamilton and his avatar pals got me to skipping pages. Maybe I’m an old fuddie duddie. (Or need a corporate sponsor to fund my technology needs.)

The Wall Street Journal Review neatly summarizes that the “….central argument of the book: that since every individual is bound to miss something, by working together people can cover one another’s blind spots and collectively see the big picture.”

In a review for The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Chabris trashes Davidson’s thesis by saying there’s no proof of what she proposes. “No hard evidence.” The reviewer also studies inattention blindness. In fact, he corrects Davidson for calling the phenomenon attention blindness. The “Now You See It” of Davidson’s title gives away the theme of the reviewer’s book, which is about the famous gorilla-sighting video. Sour grapes?

Budges? We don’t need no stinking badges.

“No hard evidence”

The Times reviewer’s putdown reminds me of a run-in I had with an American academic at a conference in India earlier this year. He had opined that 70-20-10 was hogwash — spurious figures somehow derived from a misinterpretation of Archimedes. I flipped out and challenged him to a debate at the conference. He said he wouldn’t dignify this totally make-believe myth because it had never been verified and reported in a peer-reviewed journal. Specifically, he told me six PhD students who combed the past 50 years of peer-reviewed articles couldn’t find any empirical research to back it up. He said the numbers were therefore meaningless and the issue was not debatable.

This is the sort of nonsense Cathy Davidson warned us about” using yesterday’s yardstick (50 years!) in an attempt to measure today’s reality. It’s not apples and oranges. It’s apples and black holes. Nothing to compare.

And guess what? When you’re on the cutting edge, there isn’t any proof yet. Maybe there’s an emerging pattern, but there’s no “hard evidence.” That goes with the territory. Otherwise, you’re not on the edge. Given that the entire world is getting edgier (you can quote me on that), you better get used to it.

The book reviewer finds Davidson overly optimistic. I share her pronoia — the feeling that the world is conspiring to make our lives better. Davidson’s stories will inspire you to think highly of the future of learning and work. You got a problem with that?

I’m an advocate of common sense. Davidson gives us lots of ponder.

#eyeopener

#justsayin

#wakeupcall

#dreamland

#itateam

For academe’s future, think mash-ups not MOOC’s

–A virtual classroom with hundreds of thousands of participants who will never meet each other. The professor on a screen or, better still, behind one. Tests graded by other students.

It sounds like a dystopian education nightmare.

But in 2012, the future of the university has arrived. Radical change is in the air. From the pot bangers of Montreal to high-powered thinkers in Silicon valley, the traditional model of the university is under attack.

The digital revolution – which has upended journalism, publishing, movies and music – is poised to storm the ivory tower. Under enormous financial pressure, and facing a strong push to “democratize” knowledge, the university is being asked to re-imagine itself. In question: the very nature and purpose of higher education, at a time when demand for it has never been greater.

Ira Basen - our virtual frontiersman – peers into the future and explores what’s at stake. His documentary is called The Big Disruption: Universities in the Digital Age.–

Link to audio content.