My friend Bob was kind enough to invite me to Town Hall last night to hear Joseph Stiglitz speak about the recent economic meltdown – or, as he puts it in his new book, the “freefall”.  It was my first visit to Town Hall and I was really impressed with the venue – it’s rolling in old-school neo-classical accents and in fact started out life in the 1920’s as a Christian Science church.  It’s got pews and is broad and open and airy.  The crowd appeared to be a mixture of old liberal Seattle money, younger liberal bourgeois intellectuals, and even younger starry-eyed hyper-liberal students.  Extra bonus points if you correctly pick which category I fall into.

So – about the talk. Stiglitz spoke for about 50 minutes on who and what was responsible for the 2008-2009 economic decline and what we can do about it.  He pulled very few punches, giving out sharp raps to Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Wall Street, the anti-regulation crowd on Capitol Hill, free-market fundamentalists, and even Robert Rubin.  Economics is not my forte, but I gather he’s a sort of a contrarian sort, the smart-as-hell guy who sits outside the clubhouse and doesn’t let relationships or tradition get in the way of facts and evidence.  He’s sort of charming in a professorial way, not a fire-breather by any means, and talked simply but not patronizingly about a very complicated set of subjects.

What to make of it?  I came away thinking about a few things: corporate governance; what are known as the “agency problems”; the role of the old-boys’ network in ignoring and/or fomenting the mess we got ourselves in; and his obvious distaste for the blindly obedient invisible-hand adherents.

Interestingly, he didn’t once talk about individual decisions that people made to take on more debt than they could afford; matching, I suspect, both his personal views as well as that of most of the audience.  I’m not sure that a fully-fleshed out argument can accurately leave out personal agency as a contributing factor to the mess.  I mean, someone can offer me free heroin, but I still have to inject it.

I also found out last night that Dr. Stiglitz has a family connection with someone whom I used to work with and still admire very much; meaning that I’ll be following his talks and writings more closely than otherwise.   Context and personal relationships still matter in this day and age of stateless interwebs.

Got a spare $36,000 for me to get a master’s degree in Applied Positive Psychology through the LPS school at Penn?  If so, pony up:

Rooted in the work of Dr. Martin Seligman, world-renowned founder of positive psychology and Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, the MAPP program explores the history, theory, and basic research methods of positive psychology. This new branch of psychology focuses on such issues as the empirical study of positive emotions, strengths-based character, and healthy institutions. You’ll learn to apply these aspects of positive psychology in your particular professional setting.

I would love to take these courses – I’m a positive guy at heart, and have enjoyed Dr. Seligman’s writings and talks on positive psychology.  I think it would be awesome.

Unfortunately, that $36K price tag ($18K per semester!) is a little steep.  Applied Positive Psychology < Applied Real-World Budget.

Attention district administrators: why should you consider a social media / networking strategy to supplement your standard virtual learning program?

First, let’s talk about the goals of a virtual learning program.  Ultimately the primary goal is student achievement. Quite often other supplementary goals come into play, such as being able to provide access to educational resources that students could not otherwise receive, because of geography, disability, or lack of local instructional expertise.

There are four ways the implementation of a social media strategy can help a virtual learning program.  The first is that you can more easily establish and maintain connections between and among students and teachers via a social media program.  By supporting multiple modes of access, outreach, information dissemination, and community-building, you’re more likely to keep students involved, engaged, and aware.

The second helpful effect is that students can more effectively collaborate with teachers, mentors, and other students.   Interactive tools and techniques like virtual whiteboards, real-time document sharing, instant messaging, and project repositories can all help teamwork, participation, and ultimately course effectiveness.

Improved communication is the next benefit.  Virtual learning programs have relied heavily in the past on e-mail distribution lists – aka “listservs”.  We can now add blogs, wikis, threaded discussion boards, Twitter, SMS notifications, and voice-enabled applications to the mix of techniques that we can use to keep communication clear and continuous.

Finally, a good social media strategy will leverage supplemental resources out on the web that are relevant to the coursework.   Government, news, and non-profit websites, YouTube, university programs, online library resources – everything may have a place in a well-designed curriculum.  Students are already comfortable traversing the breadth and depth of Web 2.0 information overload, and a good virtual learning program should work with students in new ways.

Andy Carvin, the Social Media Strategist for NPR, has a presentation up on SlideShare titled Social Networking and Education.  He lists a couple challenges, including (a) that students don’t necessarily expect social networking to be educational, and (b) the focus/filtering problem – keeping things on topic and effective.

Now let’s take a look at some of the representative ways that schools are using Web 2.0 social media and social networking resources to supplement their educational efforts.

Facebook:

Anchorage School District uses Facebook to post memos, photos, event information, and more to their “fans”, and they try to encourage discussion.  Their social media philosophy appears to tend toward the marketing side, as evidenced in the following link share:

LinkedIn:

Troy School District in Michigan uses LinkedIn groups’ bulletin-board or “News” functionality, but not very effectively:

Few pageviews and zero discussions, even with school starting up in just over a week.  It should come as no surprise that the primary education-related use of LinkedIn is by alumni groups.

Twitter:

Samantha Morra has a presentation titled Introduction to Twitter for Educators up on SlideShare.  She positions Twitter as a push mechanism; a way to distribute information.  See the following slide:

For my money, this emphasis misses one of the best features of twitter – the two-way public conversation.

A current search for “school district” on Twitter doesn’t bring up many results.  My empirical observation is that districts aren’t leveraging Twitter in a big way for virtual learning purposes.

Non-Twitter Microblogging Alternatives:

One big concern that districts may have with Twitter is the public nature of the conversation, and the attendant privacy issues.  To resolve these issues, districts may consider so-called “private microblogging platforms”, such as Yammer, which is a SaaS offering, or Laconi.ca, which is the technical platform underneath the so-called “Twitter clone” Identi.ca.

Privately-Developed Portals / Wikis

Examples are Ning.com, hosted SharePoint, WetPaint, etc.   All give you the ability to restrict membership to invitation-only, but the feature sets vary widely, as do the technical/administrative requirements.  Some offerings are free; others charge a flat or per-user fee.

Pros: private, invitation only. Cons: requires administrative time to set up.

Listservs / E-mail discussion lists:

Pros: Proven, reliable, private, invitation-only.  Cons: asynchronous. Old media.

Instant Messaging:

Pros:  Immediate connection.  Video available with newer systems.  Whiteboard.  Invitation only.  Can do group chats.

Cons: Fragmented universe of IM protocols – AIM, Yahoo, GChat/Jabber, Windows Live, etc. Information overload?  There are sometimes limits to how many participants there can be in a single group chat.

YouTube:

Teachers can post course video.  Cons: public.  The more likely use of YouTube in a primary education setting is as a video encyclopedia, with teachers linking to appropriate and relevent material.  PBS, for example, has their own YouTube channel.

SlideShare:

Gives teachers the ability to post slide presentations for consumption by their students.  Cons: public.

Given all these resources, it’s wise for educators and administrators to start to evaluate how to include the Social Web in their virtual learning programs.

You can download the C# 3.0 Pocket Reference, written by Joseph and Ben Albahari, for free courtesy of Red Gate Software.  Normally this book goes for $11.99 USD.

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They’re trying to get you interested in the ANTS Performance Profiler, so you might want to consider the free 14-day trial of that product.

I’m reading a great series of articles (thanks be to the hyperlink!) that have rekindled my on-again, off-again interest in the problem of the precipitous decline in the number of computer science graduates – nationally and internationally.

Let’s sum up the key popular arguments:

• CompSci isn’t hip enough for students.
• Nobody needs a CS degree to do 90% of the professional work in the field.
• Java is responsible, an argument put forth in considerable detail by (among others) Dr. Robert Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg of ADACore.  Joel Spolsky put in his two cents a couple years ago as well.
• K-12 education is giving our students an aversion to, or insufficient exposure to, computer science.
• Worries about the job market are turning kids off.

That last one is obvious bullshit.  Every day you can go to Monster.com and look up thousands of programming jobs, at top salaries.  A job in software development is among the most portable, and highest paid, of any profession. And believe me, a key thing on the mind of almost every college kid is “how much can I make when I graduate?”

Regarding Java: Mark Guzdial, in a well written post on the subject, writes:

The curriculum did not change that dramatically from 1997 to 2002, but that’s when the enrollment changed so dramatically.

Hm.  Wasn’t that when Java adoption in CS programs really took off?  Remember when Java was the Next Great Thing, the Grand Unifier, the Language to End All Languages?  You couldn’t walk 10 feet in a Barnes and Noble without somebody’s Java book falling off the shelf and knocking you silly.

I was EXTREMELY fortunate to start my computer science education with Ada. I haven’t programmed in Ada in 15 years, but the lessons learned there have served me well in all subsequent parts of my career. Java? I’ve never liked Java. Java is a language for people who lack rigor in their thinking processes.

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The thing that concerns me the most, however, is that the examples of truly innovative computer science programs are few and far between – at least they don’t get enough exposure. I see a lot of defensiveness among university educators about the issue, but no one seems to be grabbing the problem, Tom Peters style, and leading the charge. One might infer that (some) university CS programs are risk-averse; one might also suppose that the administrators of said programs are obtuse, obstinate, or supercilious.

What’s my personal opinion on the key factor that is leading to the decline of undergrad CS graduates? Twofold:

1) Programming qua programming is unsexy. Point #1 above. When your leading lights in the software world are this guy and this guy, you see my point.

How to fix this? Expand the curriculum. Include gaming, multimedia, cross-disciplinary majors, and track the sexy related topics like bioinformatics, clean energy, citizen journalism, etc.

2) Programming is fucking hard. Nobody likes hard. That’s why there are about 100 times as many communications majors as there are math majors.

How to fix this? At some essential level, you can’t. It’s a complex subject, and software is – as somebody points out every few minutes – the most complex thing ever created by humans. You don’t hear talk about “the singularity” for nothing.

However, there are steps that the universities can take.

1. Make tutoring an essential part of any CS curriculum.
2. Get the tool bullshit out of the way and don’t make students struggle unnecessarily with the ramp-up chores.
3. Encourage or demand internships where students will get real-world, hands-on, ten-hours-a-day experience doing actual programming.
4. Encourage and foster communication among the students, but don’t puss out and do “group projects” exclusively because to do otherwise would hurt student’s feelings.
5. On the other hand, don’t choose arcane topics, languages, or tools on the theory that “if the witch sinks, she’s not a witch”.

Interested to hear your comments.