Homage to Jerry Uhl

I was always taught to respect my elders and I've now reached the age when I don't have anybody to respect.
George Burns
US actor & comedian (1896 - 1996)

All of us appreciate precision in expression, ideas so well articulated that they cause reconsideration of our own held position or, when we’ve not yet thought it through, bringing our vague intuitions into sharp focus. Whether spoken or in writing matters not. Giving a well crafted voice to ideas provides illumination. It is helping others to see with crispness that counts.

Searching for clarity in what we ourselves see when operating without the guidance of others might form a matching imperative. Experience, however, shows it does not. Sometimes that is because the object clouds the view. Maureen Dowd, in a recent tongue in cheek column about the deficiencies of High Definition Television, argues that this particular technology is gender biased. Men crave it, particularly for viewing sports. Women, especially those who might appear in front of the camera, detest it – every pimple and blemish, hidden by makeup and not visible even when face to face, appears to get revealed on the flat screen. Beauty resides in the mind’s eye of the beholder and in our culture, prurient as it may seem at times, we’re taught not to lift the veil unless we first turn out the lights.

It may not be vanity that causes the object to conceal. Seeking to retain control when the situation starts to get out of hand provides a powerful motivation to keep truth from view. This appears to be what has been happening in Iran recently, the totalitarian and brutal suppression of the right to assembly in non-violent protest accompanied by a blockade of independent journalists, with state sanctioned pronouncements in lieu of investigative reporting. Some commentators, such as David Ignatius of the Washington Post, argue that the inner workings of the Iran regime are fractured beyond repair and that the voices of the Iranian people that have been heard across the globe the past few weeks and prior to that in the run up to their presidential election are sufficient causes to create fundamental regime change. It is hard to tell. Whatever the public utterances of Ayatollah Khamenei, one would think that he is not entirely self-deluded and that he and other hard liners in Iran truly believe the current crackdown can work. I fear that he is right.

Mostly, however, it is not the object that blocks the view. Rather it is the watcher who sees things unreliably, due to deteriorating function of the senses – straight lines appear wavy when the macula degenerates, current views tie into memories that have been altered and thus distorted with the passage of time, caught up in thought and unable to multi-process we miss what is happening right in front of us – or worse, the cause is an ego that needs to be stroked, so supporting evidence is prized while conflicting information gets entirely disregarded without a moment’s pause. We are all subject to this particular form of delusion from time to time.

The problem becomes particularly acute when we are both subject and object, trying to understand ourselves, what makes us tick, identifying strengths and weaknesses. For me, where self-reflection has become the primary way to gain insight about learning, the problem is absolutely diabolical. Has a new truth been uncovered or only some fanciful deception been rendered, an unintended prank on self to give ambition its comeuppance and restore the requisite sense of humility? Patience and careful verification can help, but there is no sure way because at core there is no certain answer to the kid-in-the-back-seat-of-the-car question, “Are we there yet?” My method to address the issue is to look outward as well as inward, try to force comparison with other cases where I can be more objective, a kind of benchmarking if you will. It too is not foolproof, but I am more confident in the results when taking that approach.

* * * * *

This is a true story. When I came to Champaign for my recruiting visit in spring 1980, I took the train down from Chicago. I was met at the Train Station by two Assistant Professors in the Economics Department, John and Larry. I had already eaten dinner on the train, so they took me out for dessert – cheesecake was my favorite then. We went to a place on Sixth Street just south of Green called The Manhattan. (It has changed ownership several times since and is now called The Clybourne.) We had a nice dessert and good conversation. When it came time to pay the bill, one of John and Larry, I can’t remember who, pulled out a credit card. The waiter said they didn’t take credit cards. Neither of them had any cash. As a rule I always try to be with at least some cash, so I ended up paying. The next day as I was about to meet with the Executive Committee of the Department John comes into the conference room, though he wasn’t on the Committee. He gave me a twenty dollar bill, right in front of the others, no explanation offered. It was reimbursement from the night before, a bit embarrassing but I suppose the timing couldn’t be avoided. Larry and another assistant professor did take me out for Chinese before the train ride back to Chicago, but John missed that meal. The faux pas was part of the attraction to me. These were down to earth people I could relate to. It was the main reason I took the job.

The Assistant Professors were a pretty tight knit group. We did a lot of socializing together. Almost immediately, Larry and I became best friends. I’m not sure what, in particular, started that but a strong bond quickly formed. I was only twenty five when I began that fall and though I was nerdy and possibly intellectually intimidating about economic theory, there was another part of me that really enjoyed “boys will be boys” kind of fun. Larry must have figured that out right off. He’s only a few years older so by rights he too was indulging adolescent tastes as an adult and getting a big kick out of it. He was married and I was single. We hung around with another Assistant Professor, Francoise, who lived a couple of doors down from Larry. Most of our dinners we ate together and since they were in East Urbana and my apartment was in West Champaign, and they really knew how to cook, only rarely did I host. Larry liked New Wave music. I was malleable in that department. So we listened to the Vapors, Devo, the Talking Heads, Blondie, the Pretenders, and other groups of that era.

Larry got me to play golf, something I hadn’t done much before, but the rest of them didn’t play tennis, which had been my main sport. I wouldn’t have guessed that ahead of time, but I really started to like golf. In the winter months we played handball, a god-awful activity that can really brutalize your hands, even though you wear gloves to take some of the shock from contact with the ball, but a very good workout because you use one hand or the other depending on whether the ball is to your left or your right and there is a lot of whole body movement to get into position to hit the ball and to get ready for the return. Learning to hit the ball with your left (we were all right handed) was an interesting mix of will and practice to overcome the unnatural.

Remembering back to that time and comparing that experience to how I interact with and view Larry today I have the sense that how we were brought up mattered not too much then. What mattered was that we all recently had gone to Econ graduate school, we all were fairly close in age, we didn’t have much if any pretense in our manner (as compared with some other junior faculty we knew in other departments who were much stiffer and more formal in their social interactions), and we had a common share in departmental politics because by the governance structure at the time the Assistant Professors had a representative on the Executive Committee, who had a right to vote on tenure, promotion, and salary increases of faculty at higher rank!

This coming academic year will be my thirtieth at Illinois. Commonality of recent experience is less now with Larry and I because each of us has gone on to do somewhat different type of administrative work and with families with teenage kids, we socialize at most one night a week, on the weekends. In our behavior as more mature adults, how we were raised matters more and in that we couldn’t be more different.

Larry grew up on a farm in North Central Illinois, in a very small town, Manlius, not too far from Rockford. I grew up in New York City, Bayside in Queens to be more precise. Because Larry’s dad was a farmer, work and family were part of a larger whole. Larry learned farming (he told me he wasn’t very good at it but he did do it). So he had both a regular father-son relationship and a master-apprentice relationship with his dad. Further, he is much closer in age to his dad than I was with mine, who was forty one when I was born.

My dad was a lawyer and worked in Manhattan. He took a bus to the subway and then rode that to work. His work was literally outside family existence, totally invisible to the goings on at 56-04 212th Street. We didn’t see him all day till he came home and had his dinner and then didn’t interact that much afterwards – he would read his newspaper much of the time. We did spend a lot of time together on weekends doing yard work, playing association football where he played with us kids while the dads of my friends who were in the game did not, occasionally doing some arts and crafts activity indoors, playing family tennis, or doing some other stuff. So I certainly don’t begrudge him in participating in family activities. He actually did a lot of that given the circumstances. But I never had the master-apprentice type of relationship with my dad that Larry had with his and except for two rather fleeting years after I arrived at Illinois, I also didn’t have much experience with both of us as working adults, where we could talk from an equal perspective.

My dad retired in 1982 and because of my mom’s disability they soon became snowbirds in Boca Raton, Florida living in a relatively large condo development, Century Village, where life revolved around that. So having adult conversation with my dad was like two ships passing in the night. The event that marked the change happened in 1979, while I was still in grad school at Northwestern. My mom was having her first hip replacement. Previously, she had been radiated for what she thought was cancer but what I’m fairly certain was arthritis. (She did have breast cancer in the early 1960s). The radiation caused her bones to be brittle. Since she played a lot of tennis, which puts severe stress on joints from time to time, that fun activity amounted to playing Russian roulette with her skeletal system. My mom’s oncologist was at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, so that is where the hip replacement was to be done. My dad, who was a brittle diabetic, couldn’t possibly drive back and forth to the hospital and deal with the emotional strain from this surgical procedure for my mom by himself. So I took it upon myself to help him and be his chauffeur. I quickly transitioned from being the kid who wanted to run away from home (it is quite a long car ride from Bayside to Chicago, a trip my parents never made) to the devoted son of senior citizen parents, who needed care and attention.

As with my family life, in my work in economics I never had the master-apprentice relationship with me in the role of apprentice, learning at the hands of the expert by working with him. I did have an advisor at Northwestern whom I liked and had talks with on occasion. But the style then was to let the doctoral students work on their own and only come out of their cubicle when they wanted to give a talk about their work. I had a better chance for this as a young faculty member at Illinois. There was a senior theorist, Lenny, who took an interest in me. We co-taught the general equilibrium course that is part of core for first-year grad students. And we ended up playing tennis together and some basketball too. But we never wrote papers together. Twenty five years later, I’m scratching my head wondering why.

I’m incredibly slow at initiating interactions with people I know that would step up the relationship in a meaningful way. I create imaginary blockades for myself. I want the goal, but I don’t know how to get around the blockade. In this case with Lenny the blockage was a doozie. I can best explain it by reference to the movie A Few Good Men. The question at hand in that film was whether soldiers should exercise their own discretion and directly disobey an order when they believe the order to be wrong and unjust and that carrying it out could possibly cause great harm.

The question as I posed it seems to have one unambiguous answer, disobey the order. But now overlay on the situation as depicted in the movie that the soldiers had chosen to be marines and did so because they wanted to live by a code. Under the code, a soldier does not disobey orders, ever. Of course the Jack Nicholson character also violated the code by issuing an unjust order that ended up going sour. Most of the blame was on him, but not all. The soldiers had responsibility too. Obeying a senseless order was not a perfect defense.

Think of the underlying issues in the movie, but cast them in a non-military context, making the identification “showing respect” with “living by the code.” In both there is a surrender of self to a larger whole. How can one surrender oneself and yet retain discretion on important matters? I’ve never figured that one out. The apprentice does surrender himself to the master, doesn’t he? The arrangement is not permanent. While it lasts the two are most certainly not equal. Surrender happens in this vertical phase. Equality is not attained till later, after the then apprentice has ventured out on his own.

I did not know how to be an apprentice to Lenny. So I never approached him about writing a paper together. Ironically, Lenny did teach me something that cut the other way, a lesson I saw much later when reading the book about John Nash, A Beautiful Mind. Lenny thought you should work on economic models that were driven entirely by trying to answer your own posed questions, rather than spending too much time with the literature and basing your model on what came before. Doing that would cramp your space and not give you freedom to explore. It is an interesting lesson. I didn’t really take advantage of it with the economics, but I have embraced it with learning technology.

While I never have understood the role of the apprentice, I’ve had no trouble whatsoever in the role of colleague. As a colleague I could critique the papers that Lenny wrote with his students. Surrender is not required for a colleague. We can be ourselves, voice our opinions, enjoy the back and forth, including the occasional disagreement. Collegiality is a value I embrace, something very important in the university setting. But I know colleagues aren’t born that way and I struggle in thinking how fledgling scholars should go from here to there.

The only place where I was consistently willing to surrender myself to a larger cause not of my own making was in visits to my parents in Florida. If you were going to be with them, that was the only way for it to turn out harmoniously. So I accepted being with them on their terms. It is not that I don’t understand devotion altogether. Rather, it is that devotion as prime imperative exists for me only in a limited domain.

I believe Larry envisions that domain as much larger than I do. He is a well liked and respected leader because others can readily see he is fully dedicated to the betterment of the College and the Campus. In contrast, I view work to be mostly about self-expression and discovery; novel ideas are the goal and only indirectly will the work support the larger cause, if and when any of those ideas take root and prove effective.

* * * * *

I was very fortunate to have turned to online learning at the right time. The Campus had a wealth of prior work in the area, marked by excellence and diversity in approach, with many champions of great accomplishment. Then, too, I was ready. My second son had been born earlier that year, with only a twenty month difference in age between the two boys. After being more subdued about work at school so I could amplify my time with the family, and it clear that we didn’t intend to have a third kid, I was ready to resume a more regular commitment to work. I was about to turn forty and had been around the block once or twice. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, having spent the vast majority of my academic life with other economists, I had a hunger to interact with faculty from different backgrounds.

Larry was my conduit into this new world. He was an award winning teacher and served on a campus committee for undergraduate learning where he met other players who were deeply committed to excellence and improvement in the way we teach. He had the pulse on new initiatives in this area. When the time was ripe, he got me involved. At the outset, this was just an experiment, something to try, nothing more. As with my going to grad school in economics, I didn’t make an irreversible commitment to it until I was well immersed in the activity.

Two events mark the initiation into this new career. One was a session held in Lincoln Hall, as I recall in December 1994, targeted at those on campus who would get grants in the Sloan Project led by Burks Oakley. Larry and I, participating in a joint project, were one of the grantees. There were presentations and technology demos done by Burks (along with Roy Roper who interacted with Burks from another site), Joe Hardin, who is now at the University of Michigan but then was at NCSA, and Robert Alun Jones, who was spearheading an evaluation of the Sloan Project that eventually aborted for political reasons. Bob headed up a technologies-in-the-humanities program called the Advanced Information Technologies Group. I will talk more about what I learned from Bob below.

I recall very little of the specifics of that session. What sticks is tone. There was a sparkle and an intelligence which emanated not just from the presenters but from those in the audience as well. The technology offered promise; the sense that it could enhance learning was palpable. Anyone who had been at that session would want to be part of the effort. It went beyond the technology itself. The others in the room had a vision of what the technology could accomplish and how they would harness it in their own projects. This intelligence, intoxicating in its aura, attracted me.

The other event occurred when my then department head (she soon stepped down from that role after which she too became involved with online learning), Larry, and I took an afternoon to visit the computer lab for Chemistry run by Stanley G. Smith and the computer lab for Calculus with Mathematica run by Jerry Uhl. Stan had been involved with Plato and had designed extensive and innovative coursework in that system. He labored over the next several years to convert his creations to Web delivery, the Internet obviously more ubiquitous, a big plus but, to the uninitiated and therefore less obviously, the Web was insufficiently interactive to match the pedagogic requirements that Stan demanded be satisfied, a significant minus. (Ajax technology now delivers much of what Stan wanted via the Web, but of course Ajax was not available in the mid 1990s.) Jerry’s stuff was designed in Mathematica notebooks, not the Web, which his group used merely to transfer the content and to enable Q&A between student and tutor.

As with the first meeting, I recall little of the subject matter in these conversations. Mostly I remember it as getting to meet these two and their colleagues. Yet it must have made a strong impression on us. Soon afterwards Larry and I planned to use Mathematica as the basis for our project. We’d develop content in it. Ultimately we didn’t follow through with that idea. I recall chatting with Larry on the way to lunch one day, asking him how we were going to deliver on what we promised in the proposal, given that we didn’t have the technical wherewithal of some of the other grantees. Mastering the technology, such as Mathematica, seemed a non-trivial undertaking and then getting some vision of how to use it for the economics appeared equally daunting. Larry’s response was that we could be entrepreneurs rather than designers. Our role was to assemble a team who would put together the content under our direction. Indeed, that is how Larry operated for much of what he did initially. I embraced the approach too, in part, because I was insufficiently far along to invent another alternative. But, for my own need to have some control in course design, I wanted to design the online content as well. Ultimately, I did this with Excel, inventing the idea called Excelets, and developing interactive exercises with Excel.

Eighteen months after this beginning, I took over running the Sloan project from Burks and subsequently had a different sort of interaction with Bob, Stan, and Jerry. I learned lots of things from them including some fundamental ideas about online learning, really fundamental ideas of learning pure and simple without need for any additional modifier. All these years later, with a somewhat more mature view of the technology and how it might positively impact education, I don’t think that one can explain online learning simply through appeal to a core set of principles in the same way that one can do that for a subject like microeconomics. Online learning is not that reducible. Teaching with technology is an applied art, where continual recalibration is necessary to adjust to the students, the tenor of the times when the course is offered, and the changing demands posed by the subject matter. In making these adjustments, the instructor exercises substantial discretion. Nonetheless, there are basic notions that can inform the choices the instructor makes. Rather than call them principles, I use a different term to refer to these fundamental ideas. I call them knowledge nuggets. Knowledge nuggets should be prized highly by the instructor. As a teacher, one ignores them at one’s own peril. I picked up a knowledge nugget from Bob and a different one from Stan. Jerry gets the nod in my title because I got two from him.

* * * * *

One of my current personal themes is to look for non-proximate causes, factors that probably matter a lot but that are readily ignored at first analysis owing to the temporal separation. Though Larry and most of the faculty in the College had PCs, when I got started I bought a Mac. The PC users in the department at the time were mostly using it for statistical applications, or so I thought. I was a theory guy. I worked through models. I didn’t do data, so there was no need to have a computer for computation purposes. I bought my SE/30 as a lark on the recommendation of Bruce Hannon, an Engineer by background who was doing ecological “energy theory of value” models. These were in essence the same as Leontief models I studied in my first year of graduate school, so because I understood the economics (really the math) of that, Bruce and I connected. His recompense was to turn me onto the Mac.

I saw Bruce only now and then. He did give me occasional computer advice (I recall him telling me to get off Bitnet and for email to use Eudora, which had been invented on my campus). Mostly I was on my own to learn how to use it. One of the attractions of the Mac then was the much of the use was self-teachable. A couple of years later I learned about Gopher. I used Gopher to get a software package called OzTeX. TeX is a high falutin software package to enable publisher quality typesetting of mathematical content. OzTeX was a Mac compatible version of TeX. (Most of the folks who used TeX did so on Unix based work stations. Those with PCs used Word or WordPerfect or yet some other alternative.) I had a very practical reason to learn this.

I wrote papers with lots of equations in them with symbols that weren’t part of the regular keyboard. I would hand write drafts of those papers on yellow ruled paper and then send to the College’s Word Processing Center. The lags to get something back were interminable, often two weeks or more. And when it did come back the document would be full of errors because the typists had no clue what they were typing so proof reading was too much of a challenge. If I could do this myself I’d lower the lag substantially and do a better job of reducing the typos. TeX seemed like the way to go since my work had all this math in it. (Ultimately I learned to compose papers directly in TeX, including the equations.) TeX offered a further advantage, it helped with co-authoring in that the document files themselves were quite small so one could share those as email attachments, even though the bandwidth requirements were stark at that time. TeX is quite complex. I certainly didn’t learn all of it. I learned enough of it so I could do the functions that were necessary to me.

Knowledge acquired through self-teaching, particularly when the goal is to master an instrument to support a different activity, seems ordinary and unexceptional, not something to remark upon or make note of. It is only when we watch others who struggle because they are not in possession of that knowledge and who lack self-confidence as a consequence, because they are aware they don’t know while equally aware they have need of the instrument, that we come to realize we are fortunately situated for having mastered the tool but, more importantly, that we have earned a sense of confidence that other tools can be mastered as well.

When I got involved with online learning, I had six or seven years of prior experience self-teaching on my Mac (by then I had a Mac LC and the Sloan Program gave out Power PCs to those grantees who wanted them.) When it came time for Burks, Larry, and I to explore FirstClass, which Larry and I both used in our courses in the Summer 1 session, 1995, I was ready. Burks chose FirstClass because it could be used on both Macs and PCs and because it supported the then relatively new communication standard, TCP/IP. We were the first users of it on Campus. Via learning by doing, I became an expert in that system, the conduit to the next step in my career.

Sometime in fall 1996, after I had taken over SCALE (Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Enivronments), I initiated a conversation with Bob. Curiosity helped to overcome my initial shyness. I wanted to know Bob’s take on the history that surrounded SCALE and the cause of the infamous breakup. I also wanted to know whether Bob’s prior experience with Burks would extend to me by association. (It didn’t.) We met over coffee and as I recall had a long and quite wonderful conversation, sharing stories about faculty development and experiences with technology.

Bob directed the Hypermedia Lab on Campus and was an avid user of a system developed at Brown University called Intermedia. He gushed about the wonders of hyperlinking and maintained it offered lots of potential that had yet to be fully exploited. I can’t recall whether it was at this initial discussion or at a later session, but at some point Bob talked at length about his work with Rand Spiro and encouraged me to read some of that, which I duly did. Bob was an expert in the French Sociologist, Emile Durkheim, and taught courses where students read ancient texts. He argued that students read those texts differently than he did. He carried a rich set of associations to other works that, as an expert, were instantaneously available to him. Reading one work would immediately and effortlessly trigger associations to many other works. The context seemingly suggested itself. Students did not have this sort of intellectual environment within themselves while reading. The work being read was an island unto itself, disconnected from any other.

The Jones and Spiro piece argued that the author of a text could create context for the student through hyperlinks, by providing links to the appropriate references at the proper juncture in the reading. The diligent student could track down these links and gather the set of requisite associations in the process. It is an intriguing hypothesis. The approach reveals an enormous optimism in its creators, expressing faith in the students to produce the context for themselves once the path for them has been duly lit by the expert author. Contrast this view with what I take to be more typical view of the academic, that students’ lack of prior knowledge acts as a harsh constraint on what can be taught to them, for example as expressed in this recent paper on the difficulty of teaching critical thinking. The author of this piece, Daniel Willingham, argues that critical thinking must be done in the context of some discipline of study. I concur. Then he goes on to argue that the instructor is often forced to move away from a focus on critical thinking, simply to get the students sufficient familiarity with the subject matter. Often by the time that is achieved, the course is over. There ends up being little or no time to fit critical thinking in. Jones and Spiro would respond, I believe, by arguing that context can be built up while engaging in critical thinking simultaneously.

I had my own reason to be skeptical about what Bob was saying. In the Intermediate Microeconomics course I was teaching, I would do a segment called Economics in the News. I’d ask students to read a particular piece from the New York Times and then discuss it, either online in FirstClass or during the live class session. The experience created disillusionment for me. I became convinced that many students were incapable of reading these articles. They would distill from their efforts the opposite meaning to which the author intended. Soon thereafter, as part of my work in SCALE, I befriended a natural resource economist whom I knew previously from our serving on some dissertation committees together for students in Ag Econ. He said the same thing about his students’ inability to comprehend pieces in the New York Times. At least, I wasn’t simply making this up.

We know skepticism can be healthy. Nonetheless, one must challenge one’s own skepticism and not let it harden into dogma. Later, when I began to teach smaller classes, I started to create context for my own students, not by hyperlinking, which I used perhaps unimaginatively to let students follow ancillary and optional references that might intrigue them, but rather by coming to the economic theory from stories of very real world experience and by designing experiential learning for them so they could see for themselves the effects of incentives. This might seem a complete no brainer to other Econ instructors, though I suspect that to many like myself, who came to economics for the elegance in the theoretical abstraction, the idea of needing to provide real world context would appear entirely alien. In the small classes I taught once I became a full time administrator, I could better see the consequences of teaching innovation on the students. My students reacted very positively to these efforts to provide context for the ideas they were being exposed to. Based on that, I believe all instructors should strive to give students appropriate context for whatever the subject matter under consideration. Doing so is one of the more important things a teacher can accomplish.

Yet I’ve not come around completely to Bob’s way of thinking. I’ve come to understand from reading Russel Durst, Arthur Levine, and others that most kids come at their studies with an extremely practical orientation, looking either for the most obvious way to get a good grade in the course, or to identify the take-aways they expect to get from enrolling in the course, and then to focus on one or both of these. The benefit of context is non-tangible, especially to the uninitiated. Consequently students might not see the benefit. Bob’s approach requires diligence from the student. If the student doesn’t see the benefit from diligence, there is no reason to expect diligent behavior. So I’ve come to believe the instructor needs to be a little sneaky. Trick the student by exploiting his instrumentalism. Get him to do things for which the purpose he understands not. Let the purpose reveal itself after the fact, once the context has been created, the Aha! moment generated. Randy Pausch in his last lecture calls the approach misdirection, borrowing the term from football. I believe some misdirection is essential because the student isn’t yet ready otherwise. Perhaps it is less necessary once the student has been through it once or twice before. The need for context may by then be apparent to the student. Consequently, Bob’s more overt approach might prove effective at that point.

I suspect, however, it is harder than that. My friend Barbara Ganley, she of slow blogging fame, has commented to me that most of the people who visit her blog don’t follow the hyperlinks. Of course some of the visitors are there just because they did a Google search and that’s where they ended up. But those repeat visitors who arrive at the blog, including some of Barbara’s former students, do so for their own enjoyment and edification. What explains not following the links with them? Mostly, I believe, it is a matter of habit. When online there is so much reinforcement for darting, flitting back and forth between many different conversations, all of which are ongoing. Persisting within a single narrative framework seems terribly old fashioned, even while we may understand that persistence is the path to depth of understanding. The persistence habit doesn’t form because most of the time depth of understanding is not needed. All that is necessary for the transactional, which seemingly occupies so much of our time, is to be mildly acquainted with the subject.

For myself, I find I’m betwixt and between in my online reading, occasionally reading rather lengthy papers in pdf online without printing them out, paying close attention and focusing only on what I’m currently reading, but often jumping to look at email as it arrives or checking my Bloglines account for newly arrived postings from the blogs I track or having two or three pdfs on unrelated topics open at the same time and bouncing between them. I believe there is some merit to the Nicholas Carr argument that Google is making us stupid. It is a great relief for me when with a book or my Kindle away from the computer, with less temptation to follow the immediate, though tempted I remain. My Blackberry is both blessing and curse. Sometimes I forget to bring it with me. Then my wife criticizes me because I’m out of touch. Perhaps, subliminally, that is what I want. Depth of understanding demands solitude.

To be fair to Bob, the always-on-always-connected nature of online communication nowadays wasn’t the reality when I got to know him. He could very well have been right then. He might still be right now. Certainly, he is correct in the insight that the teacher should provide context for what is being studied, a very important lesson.

* * * * *

The subsequent academic year I became a member of the now defunct Ed Tech Board, then a campus level committee primarily with faculty membership, aimed at discussing and advising on all matters related to educational technology, and administering a small grant program for the purpose of spurring faculty innovation with learning technology. Dave Liu, then an Associate Provost, chaired the committee. I had substantive business interactions with him the year before, which I believe is how I got onto the committee. In a private meeting set up at his urging, he and I agreed that the SCALE project would contribute one FTE (full time equivalent) of staff support for the software Mallard, as there was increasing demand from instructors on campus to use that application. For his part Dave committed two FTE of staff from the campus computing organization, which was called CCSO at the time. One FTE was to be split between support of the applications CyberProf and the Virtual Classroom Interface while the other FTE would be for general server administration necessary for all three of the applications. Dave was also committing substantial cash for a large Unix server to host all of these applications.

Each of these applications had been developed on campus, two as faculty originated projects. The place was a hotbed for creativity of this sort, contributing to the sense of excitement in those times. But there was no good way of going from this creative initiation phase of software development to sustainable broad support for the software (the issue was further compounded since Illinois was home of the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, and certain folks in the administration saw other Web applications as potential money spigots, which ended up inhibiting their tech transfer) nor was it clear, even if we could get there, where the responsibility for that broad support should reside. At a now infamous more public meeting on the matter held a couple of weeks after Dave and I had met, the then CCSO representative, with apparently no chagrin about upstaging and embarrassing Dave, informed the rest of us that in fact CCSO would commit only one FTE of staff time to the effort. This stinginess created faculty enmity toward CCSO and had a marked impact on how learning technology subsequently unfolded on campus, with us ultimately losing our place of leadership nationally and becoming quite ordinary in our subsequent efforts.

Partly based on that experience, and partly because I had a general sense that Campus bureaucracy served as an inhibitor of individual creativity, with a load of other experiences mostly unrelated to online learning supporting that point of view, I had much trepidation when I joined the Ed Tech Board. I thought it might crimp the style we had become accustomed to in SCALE. Those fears proved groundless. Indeed several of the members were faculty who had received SCALE grants. Collectively, the committee members formed a good cross section of the most innovative faculty with learning technology on Campus. As a consequence, the discussion at the ETB was interesting and lively.

Stan Smith was the senior member. He was hugely knowledgeable about the technology itself, with a wealth of prior experience. Stan took the opposite tact that Larry had advocated for; Stan did it all himself. I learned later that Stan had been a professional photographer. Though he taught organic chemistry, he had a highly developed eye for visual communication. But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here, so let me return to that point.

It was still two years in the offing before the Campus would have a Center for Educational Technologies, a recurrent commitment to what the SCALE project was already doing on soft money, but even by fall 1997 I had some intuition that I’d be part of whatever the Campus would be doing with online learning, so I sensed I needed to have good relationships with all the players. Also, I knew I was still green in a lot of areas. I needed to remedy that. Even in other places where I had substantial experience, I nonetheless needed to have my views corroborated or refined with others who had the expertise to do so. Stan appeared to be the right guy on both counts. (Sometime later, I remember talking with Bob about his interactions with Stan and Bob saying he always got something out of their exchanges, which was interesting yet puzzling to me because discipline-wise they seemed to be on opposite ends of the galaxy. It turns out that discussion of how technology can help with learning ends up being pretty universal.) So I arranged a meeting with Stan at the desk in his lab. Thereafter we mostly met over coffee but it was good to have this first meeting on his turf.

Once you get to know him, Stan is a sweetheart and a very good and supportive colleague. Before the relationship develops, he might seem a little intimidating. He could be sharply critical of practice he didn’t approve of. While I had seen a fair amount of that sort of thing among the Econ faculty, it was much rarer to observe with folks across Campus, particularly among those leading up innovative learning technology projects. (Later I learned the two worlds were not as different as I had originally assumed, but still, there was more idealism expressed about teaching and learning with technology than I had ever seen within the Economics Department.) SCALE had been funding an instructor who taught in the General Chemistry sequence. Stan taught Organic Chemistry, a more advanced course, so he was not directly involved in the SCALE-funded activity. However, Stan was the force behind the Chemistry Learning Center, a computer lab where students could do their work and receive consultation to address a misunderstanding. The space was used by students in a wide variety of Chemistry courses. General Chemistry had their students use the space to do the online homework for the course. So Stan had a vested interest in General Chemistry.

I heard through the grapevine that Stan had some issues with the SCALE-funded project, so I was a bit more apprehensive than usual before our meeting. As with joining the Ed Tech Board itself, my trepidation was based on some unfounded assumptions. In fact, we got along very well. Stan could tell right off that I wanted to listen to his views. We ended up having a very open exchange on issues that pertained specifically to Chemistry and other issues that mattered across Campus.

It turns out Stan and I had some very important things in common. I understood deeply from an online forum that SCALE supported and in which I participated quite vigorously just how valuable it is for faculty to exchange ideas about their teaching with technology. That forum went full bore for about six months and then continued on for another six months or so before it died out. Nothing else appeared in its stead to replace it. Stan had similarly been involved in rather intensive and intimate exchanges with peers at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory, but that had closed down some years before, again with nothing to replace it. So we understood the need for collegiality to advance diffusion and serious uptake of learning technology on Campus and that was something lacking that needed to be provided. We also had a strong sense of the impediments that prevented the diffusion and uptake from arising naturally on its own. This was a time when many faculty were just getting their toes wet in teaching with technology. A felt need for collegiality emerges naturally from one’s own explorations of this sort. Having a novel experience, one wants to share it. In reflecting on that experience, one benefits from the reflection of others. But some information technology providers want control of the IT environment which, unfortunately, ends up blocking the faculty exploration. Stan was very big on tone, especially in support of faculty who were just getting started. It’s well nigh impossible for a support provider to exercise control and exude warmth at the same time. For a community based in sharing ideas about teaching with technology to emerge, it’s the latter that is necessary. We were witnessing way too much of the former.

Stan and I also had a similar dilemma as teacher regarding the motivation of the students we taught. He taught non-majors. Organic Chemistry is the make-it-or-break-it course for pre-meds, students known to be mercenary, if diligent, about their studies. Intermediate microeconomics is part of the core Business curriculum here. Many of the students in my class were in Business and they tended to be extraordinarily skeptical that there was anything of use to learn. They saw the course as a hurdle, not an intellectual foundation for everything else they’d take, which was the intended purpose for the requirement. Unlike Stan, I did have Econ majors in my class. We didn’t have separate sections for majors and non-majors. The bulk of the Econ majors, however, had no real interest in economics. At the time Econ was the proxy major for students in Liberal Arts and Sciences who wanted to transfer into Business, but didn’t have high enough standardized test scores to get into Business when they were applying for admission, nor did they have a high enough GPA as students here to have already effectuated the transfer. There were very few real Econ majors who were serious about the subject. Consequently, some of the Engineering students who took the course, to satisfy the social science distribution requirement, had better preparation and purer motivation than the majors.

Stan taught me that, student motivation notwithstanding, there were some advantages in teaching non-majors. Colleagues in the department had less of a proprietary interest in what non-majors were taught. So there could be more freedom to experiment on topic coverage and mode of presentation. Further, one could be empirical in the approach, learning from the students whether it was working for them, making adjustments when it wasn’t. When the topic coverage is prescribed and the instructor adopts the attitude, “I’m teaching it this way because it’s good for you, like taking medicine when you’re sick,” there really is no room to be empirical about the instruction and the instructor can end up blithely indifferent to the consequences of the approach for the students.

A big issue I had at the time, I’ve come to terms with it now, is how difficult the material should be that the instructor requires. When I first heard Burks talk about using a discussion forum where students post queries about how to do circuit problems (Burks course was an electrical engineering class on circuit design) and either Burks or other students would post responses, I confess I didn’t understand how this would work for the lurkers who might not have even tried the problem and yet would readily be able to see hints of how to proceed toward its solution. Don’t they have to struggle through the problem on their own to really understand it? That was my thinking then. It took quite a while to alter my view. I’ve subsequently learned that student persistence is by no means guaranteed and indeed that early success encourages later persistence. Also, it became evident that given some variation across students both in latent ability and in prior preparation, Burks’ approach appears far more democratic than mine. If you think of the issue from the perspective of the underlying social contract, how can we instructors be elitist in our approach, especially in core undergraduate courses? Doing so would appear contrary to the Campus mission.

Burks’ practice was not sufficient to fully address my issue. The part of what Burks did that I eventually imitated in my class was only about giving students help online. What about the content that we were asking the students to learn? How hard should that be and should it be presented in an opaque or transparent way? Is student learning deeper if they struggle that much more? There is much tradition in teaching economic theory based on the notion that students learn the economics by working problems. If they still don’t understand have them work more problems. This was really more myth than reasoned argument. We never explained how when a student doesn’t understand how to do problem 1 what insight the students will garner from also having to do problem 2.

Stan was very big on the idea of making tough concepts as transparent as possible. Organic Chemistry is a course that most students find difficult. That’s a given. What possible advantage could there be in making it seem even more difficult? Making things even harder is apt to cause discouragement among the students, nothing more. Students want to gauge their own learning. When the material is transparent and students feel they understand the assessment they are asked to complete and can see for themselves they are getting the assessment questions correct, that is a source of confidence that they are indeed mastering the material. Instructor efforts to present intrinsically tough content in as simple and transparent a way as possible, efforts that are noticeable to the students because such efforts are witnessed rarely in their other classes, show the students that the instructor is on their side. So there is the direct effect that the particular content is more penetrable and an indirect, potentially much more powerful effect from energizing the students because they care about what they are learning.

Over the years I made numerous presentations with Stan at various events for new faculty, Stan was to show them what was possible with the technology and I was there to talk about how the Campus might assist them with their early efforts. In the course of doing these joint presentations, I got to watch Stan demo his video clips of actual experiments, showcase pictures of the apparatus for performing these experiments, and see how he set up the assessments his students did. There was elegance to his approach. He was quite sparing with the multimedia, just enough for what he needed to demonstrate, nothing more. There was not too much text on any one screen, with large font that could be easily read. His visual approach encouraged intellectual access to the content. Students liked what they got. Stan would show survey results where the students reported overwhelmingly that they liked doing the quizzes. In many other classes that use computer facilitated assessment, the students were not so favorably disposed toward the approach. But, of course, in these other cases the authors of the online content were no Stan.

I will never have the eye for the visual that Stan has, but I’ve embraced much of his message in places where I can have an impact, such as in things I write for students to read or in the way I present an idea in the classroom. I call the approach I’ve come up with “bring it down before bringing it up.” Student access to ideas is primary, making transparency an instructor imperative. Once that access is already in place, the instructor can become more subtle on the issues and go into greater depth. Doing so before the intellectual access has been created, however, makes all the ideas opaque. The students see none of them, including the basics. It’s important to put first things first. Thank you, Stan.

* * * * *

Some obligations you search for. Part of the benefit from choosing an academic career is to have the ability to set the agenda for those activities that become the focus of your work. Yet even in academia, sometimes it’s the other way around, the obligations find you. Others have set the agenda. You find yourself tied at the hip to these folks. You’re a team player. So you throw yourself into the fray.

The Interinstitutional Faculty Summer Institute on Learning Technologies, FSI for short, found me. I became the Head Facilitator for the first one, held on Campus right after Commencement in 1997 and I continued playing the Head Facilitator role for ten years, well after the initial purpose of the grant had been fulfilled. For the first several years FSI was grant funded by the Illinois Board of Higher Education with matching funds from the four-year public universities around the state, each sending attendees to FSI. (The grant paid for the conference – meals, facilities, honoraria for speakers, and tech support while the matching funds were to give each attendee, 10 per campus, a stipend for getting started with learning technology after the conference had concluded, using what they had learned at FSI as a basis.) I was not part of writing the grant, but I gathered the thrust through participation on the Steering Committee. The Illinois Campus was a known hotbed for online learning, as I’ve indicated, and the goal was to diffuse that knowledge to the other campuses in the state, developing a critical mass of enterprising faculty on each campus so they could spearhead further efforts locally.

In that first FSI, the decision was made to select faculty who taught in a handful of specific disciplinary areas, with a further focus on the General Education courses from within those disciplines. A big part of my job for FSI was to identify and then coordinate with the various facilitators of the disciplinary groups. Jerry Uhl and his sidekick Debra Woods became the facilitators for the group in Math. That’s how my conversation with Jerry began.

That gateway into talking with Jerry helped a lot with what came next. Frank Mayadas, the Sloan Foundation Grant Officer behind all their work in online learning and the benefactor of SCALE, was pushing us to deliver on the promise we made in the original SCALE grant proposal, that ALN (what Frank called online learning) would lower the cost of instruction. In response to this pressure, I came up with the SCALE Efficiency Projects, the outcomes of which are described in this piece in the Journal of ALN while the details behind the impetus for the project are described in the first section of this post. Jerry became one of the grantees for an efficiency project. He and I scratched each other’s back, me by giving him SCALE funding, him by doing a project in Differential Equations that would deliver on several of the outcomes Sloan wanted to see.

Jerry had been involved with NetMath for quite a while before this SCALE project started. NetMath was essentially self-paced learning using the same Mathematica notebooks that had been developed for the on campus Calculus & Mathematica courses. The NetMath students, some in rural high schools that didn’t have AP Math courses, others who were adult learners, would be assigned a tutor, an on-campus student here who had taken the course already and done well in it, with whom they could interact by email. If the NetMath student got stuck or got a low grade on a completed assignment, showing he didn’t understand how to do the work, he’d contact the tutor. Otherwise he’d just proceed on his own. Jerry wanted to try the NetMath approach with on-campus students. The self-paced approach wasn’t simply an affordance to accommodate online learners. It made sense pedagogically in its own right. Indeed, it was the lecture that was questionable for the math. Perhaps some demonstrations done by the professor would aid the students. But math is a subject where the students have to figure it out on their own. There is essentially no learning of math in the absence of the required head scratching that students must do. Illuminate the path for the students, sure. That’s what the Mathematica notebooks did. The professor, however, couldn’t traverse the path on behalf of the students. Attending lectures (and taking notes during lecture) is not the way to traverse the path and it may not be a good way to ready the student for the trip because as a thing in itself it obscures the need. Self-pacing, in contrast, makes the need obvious.

What Jerry came up with was a bit irregular because it worked far better in the spring semester than in the fall. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating idea. Engineering students have to take Differential Equations as part of their degree requirements. Many of them don’t like it and quite a few drop the class, only to have to take it again sometime later. Jerry’s idea was to recruit from among those who had dropped the course already, very soon after they had dropped, and offer them the alternative of taking the NetMath-style version of the course instead. The hook here, I don’t know if Jerry marketed this to the students or not but I do know that it came into play quite a bit with those he successfully recruited, was that the students could get an incomplete in the class and finish it after the semester had concluded because they didn’t need to be on campus to do that. In this way Jerry got a high percentage of these students to complete the course, with them giving decent performance in the process. The approach worked better in the spring because the summer break is much longer than the winter break, so students were under much less time pressure then and could complete the course at their own convenience.

Ultimately Jerry ran afoul of some folks in the College of Engineering administration, who said this approach with the incompletes was unfair to the other students who took Differential Equations the usual way and had to complete the course on time. The counter argument, which made sense to me, was that in the absence of Jerry’s offering the students who dropped would have to defer taking Engineering courses that required diff-eq as a prerequisite, thereby potentially screwing up these students down the road and extending their time to degree. I don’t believe he went after other students who hadn’t yet dropped the regular course. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to make that argument to the Engineering administration people. All I did was to provide moral support for Jerry.

On Friday afternoons after work, Jerry liked to go out with his student workers for some beers at Joe’s. He’d invite me to those and on occasion I’d join him. As an Assistant Professor, my cohort would go to Coslows for beer and popcorn or nachos after work on Friday. That stopped either because Coslows closed down or we got older and then too wrapped up in family stuff for the happy hour thing to remain a priority; I can’t remember which came first. Either way, going out with Jerry’s folks was a throwback to my earlier years. Mainly, those Friday afternoon sessions were where he and I would talk, the classroom of the future so to speak. Once in a while I would see him in Altgeld Hall, home of the Math Department.

Jerry had taught math the traditional way before getting involved with Calculus & Mathematica. He understood both sides of the abyss. And he had his own distinct style in expression. He’d say things that were unusual, at least for me. I enjoyed those exchanges, partly just for the collegial interaction. I got something of substance from them as well.

Jerry was the first person I had heard who talked about learning and failure as two sides of the same coin. I must have nodded my head in agreement when he first told me that, but I was probably bluffing. I doubt the point sunk in immediately. My metaphors at the time were different. Egocentric as ever, I considered learning mostly from the perspective of myself as student. So my metaphors emphasized that bright kids should be able to figure things out on their own and do so quickly – the kid in science class who masters concepts easily, the avid reader who learns like a sponge sucking it all in, the kid who always raises her hand in class to the point that the instructor strains to get others to chime in. All that seemed like learning to me. Where was the failure in it? If Jerry was right, I had to find a way to reconcile these two distinct views.

Inexperience is one significant cause of failure. If we try something that is truly novel, we’ll flail at it till we figure it out or we give up. Think of a toddler learning to walk. The kid falls down, often. If he lands on his rump, no worse for wear, he’ll get back up in a moment and try again. If he falls forward and bumps his head, surely he will cry. But the pain soon goes away and the memory of the fall causing the pain doesn’t harden. Soon he’s back on his feet, giving it another go. There is improvement, more steps between falls. Perhaps some kids are in better position to learn, so their improvement is rapid. This doesn’t mean that falls don’t happen for these kids, only that they fall less. The story of a kid learning to walk offers one possible reconciliation, a reconciliation based on degree of readiness. We who watch the learning make comparisons across kids or between one particular kid and a perceived norm for kid behavior. The focus is on the success only, especially if the failures are few and far between, all the more so if we have a vested interest in the kid’s learning as a parent and maybe even as a teacher.

This story, however, is far from complete. Experience offers no guarantee against failing. The wrong sort of experience can offer very little learning. Ignorance can self-sustain. Fundamental knowledge doesn’t get established. Stasis rather than progress becomes the norm. I’m this way with learning foreign languages. I fought with my mother growing up and she taught foreign languages as her profession. I shunned her teaching at home and in school treated the French courses I took as something I had to take, nothing more. I never got the basic skills to pick up rudimentary vocabulary and grammar in anything but English. I once spent a month in Portugal as a visiting scholar at the New University in Lisbon. That entire month I learned two words only, “cerveja” and “obrigado.” My hosts spoke English so I didn’t need to learn it for my Economics interactions. When I was out and about on my own, I was like a mute, alone, pointing to items on a restaurant menu because I couldn’t pronounce them. I found books in English to buy and went to see American movies where fortunately they used subtitles (in Portuguese) that I could ignore. Maybe this is an example of the male gene at work. I often won’t ask for directions when driving in a place where I’m not familiar with the locale and without a GPS, though as I’ve gotten older I’ve worked to overcome that tendency. The point is that experience in itself yet absent an open effort to improve will come to naught.

The reverse is also true. One can learn fundamentals very deeply. Then, situations that apparently are new end up a familiar refrain. Grasping concepts quickly happens when the concepts reaffirm an already held world view. Most of the pieces of the puzzle have already been assembled; so the last few snap right in. I’m thankful for the type of economics training I received in graduate school, because they prized learning fundamentals deeply. I embraced that value. Sometimes I see connections quickly, before others do, because I was taught to look for them in a certain way. In some domains we can be very rapid learners while in others we are slowpokes, where our fundamentals are poor. This is a second possible way to reconcile the two views. Strong prior learning can make molehills where others see mountains and vice versa.

We talk about the fear of failing, but that is something of a misnomer. It is the scorn and derision of others that we fear – the insults, glares, and mockery stemming from our inept performance and the cruelty or impatience of the audience. No longer a toddler, the memory of the event causes pain and embarrassment. Worse still, we can’t get it out of our mind. We may then try only when by ourselves and out of view from those who can hold us in contempt or we may try with friends or family we know we can trust. Oftentimes, however, we find ourselves in situations where we are in no man’s land, with people who are less familiar to us. Jerry’s admonition about repeated failure can be taken as a call to befriend the strangers. Do so by showing you are willing to try. Failure can be endearing. A know-it-all appears standoffish. Being open to failure requires courage. Repeated acts of courage become habit. Then it is less painful to try. Doing so becomes part of your personality.

Sometimes we project this fear into circumstances where it is not warranted. Performance anxiety ensues. Students who are comfortable talking with the professor when there are other students around can get painfully nervous when in a one-on-one with their instructor. Likewise faculty may be comfortable talking with a distinguished scholar in the context of a seminar but may be much less so in private conversation with the great thinker. Authority intimidates, irrespective of whether the respected person is gentle or a tyrant. The intimidation emerges solely from the projections of the less accomplished. People who are otherwise quite similar in background can nonetheless be quite different in how these projections manifest. In the identical circumstance one may be perfectly relaxed, the other extraordinarily nervous, with varying performance for those reasons, rather than from any difference in ability. Do note that on occasion it is the nervous one who achieves the high performance. A relaxed individual may not produce the requisite intensity. Mostly, however, we envision it cutting the other way. Cooler heads prevail.

On occasion we can be taken with our own performance, especially when it appears to outshine the performance of our peers. Things may seem effortless for us, a struggle for them. Soon, however, those ego rewards wear thin. What we find effortless happens only where we are no longer learning. Then we can become bored with encore after encore. Ambition takes hold or our attention turns elsewhere out of curiosity. We strive to go beyond our known capacities, to do something fundamentally new. We may have forgotten what failure feels like, expecting to satisfy our ambition too quickly, not trusting ourselves to learn for real. Some people are broken by their past success and the inability to live up to them by learning anew (Gay Talese and Truman Capote come to mind). Most of us have not and likely never will produce a magnum opus. We can’t afford to rest on our laurels and in our hearts we really don’t want to. Jerry reminds us that periodically we need to work hard to get beyond ourselves. That is where our own real learning lies, especially as we mature and have an established bag of tricks that we can resort to when amusing others.

What role should the teacher play regarding the student’s failure in learning? As I wrote in Chapter 1, my approach to emphasize guessing and in that way developing student intuition is motivated in good part to make failure an integral part of the process. Yet that is too easy an answer, one that works at 30,000 feet. It doesn’t tell us what to do down on the ground.

The last time I taught a course in the Campus Honors Program, I had one student in particular who seemed to glom onto the extra-curricular stuff I was pushing – seminars to attend, articles to read; she was an engineering student so the economics we were doing was a brave new world for her. But she was also very concerned about her grade for her within course work. She treated this other stuff outside the trappings of the formal class like intellectual entertainment, on a par with a good movie if you will. I wanted her to get beyond that, to make some leaps in her thinking, to take a stab at making her own synthesis of what she was being exposed to, although I knew her initial efforts would be awkward because of her inexperience. It didn’t get that far. It was her choice to move beyond the intellectual entertainment stage, not mine. During the summer after the course had concluded she first read and then had others in her family read a book I had recommended, a way for them to bond over something she had been exposed to at school. But when the following fall semester arrived, she returned fully to her engineering studies and that was that.

What then of students who are not so precocious, perhaps offering up no overt displays of enthusiasm for the subject matter whatsoever? Should we teachers be ambitious for them too, encouraging them to go beyond themselves though we feel it likely they will respond by sitting this one out? And what type of critic should we be for the work each of the students produces for the class, regardless of whether they are precocious or otherwise? Do we need to be a cheerleader to boost their enthusiasm or a scathing reviewer so they don’t delude themselves that an early failure really is a success? I wish I had good answers to these questions. I don’t. My intuition is that the instructor has to be a bit of a pied piper to draw the students in. That much probably is true regardless of the course.

But the Pied Piper role is just one piece. It doesn’t offer a full roadmap of what the instructor should do. In that class I was non-communicative about how their efforts translated into course grades, because I thought such communication would contaminate rather than inspire. (I gave numerical scores for each piece of work they completed and informed them about the maximum possible score, they had a few big projects, but didn’t give a formula for how those scores translated into a final course grade.) For these kids, getting an A was the normal expectation. If they were to go beyond themselves, something else would have to motivate that. But I could only get away with this because it was an Honors class with about fifteen students. The approach doesn’t generalize at all. Jerry had it made on this score in his SCALE project class. The performance standard was fairly objective and readily communicable to the students. He completed his Pied Piper bit once they had enrolled. With self-pacing, the instructor is mostly out of the picture. I do think Jerry really nailed it from the student’s view. We could use some of his insight for those cases where the instructor plays a larger role in the conversation.

Although Jerry limited access to the diff-eq course in his clever like a fox way, I believe he thought the Calculus & Mathematica approach superior and wanted all students to take their math courses in that manner. He had me read a study done by Kyungmee Park and Kenneth Travers (only some of the pages of this article are available at the link) that supported Jerry’s contention. Jerry did report that the Engineering folks wanted the students to be able to do calculations and feared that while C&M was good conceptually it was weak on training students to do calculations. Jerry claimed, to the contrary, that C&M was as good as the regular approach for the calculations.

My take away from this was not so much about the superiority of one approach or another but rather that even among the math faculty themselves, once you included folks from the different ways Calculus was taught, you couldn’t get agreement on the right way to assess whether one approach was superior to another. They’d write different sort of tests, demonstrating that what they valued in student learning varied by approach. My prior going in was that Calculus is pretty cut and dried and consequently there should be less interpretation about what students are supposed to know than in most other courses we offer. If the experts in Calculus couldn’t agree on what to assess, God help us to come up with a standard method of evaluation of knowledge in other subjects.

Jerry wrote his own essay, quite a thought provoking piece, on Why I gave up long lectures. This part captivated me.

Another piece of wisdom from Ralph Boas: "Suppose you want to teach the 'cat' concept to a very young child. Do you explain that a cat is a relatively small, primarily carnivorous mammal with retractable claws, a distinctive sonic output, etc.: I'll bet not. You probably show the kid a lot of different cats saying 'kitty' each time until it gets the idea. To put it more generally, generalizations are best made by abstraction from experience."

I have treated this idea as truth ever since. It has dramatically changed the way I teach. And I’ve become far more critical of how the Economics discipline presents itself as a consequence, particularly about the presentations in the leading textbooks, because they invariably introduce the theory first and then follow with the examples to illustrate. They’ve got it backwards.

Indeed, this idea of leading with examples and letting the theory flow from that ties very nicely into the Russel Durst notion that the students are extremely practical in their orientation. We teachers should appeal to that orientation, not circumvent it. The idea also connects nicely to Stan’s theme about making the entry point to the subject transparent and even Bob’s point about applying context. I’ve got my own spin on this with the Economics because of the following dilemma.

On the one hand, when teaching Principles or even Intermediate Microeconomics, you as instructor really want to hammer on the basics; a student who understands only supply and demand and opportunity cost but who does understand those fundamental concepts in a deep way has a big take away from the course. On the other hand, students want to understand the incentives at play in real world economic institutions. Some of those incentives are fairly subtle and to tackle them with formal economic models really requires graduate level training. So I do something else. I discuss these real economic institutions and try to bring out the subtleties in the incentives that way, but I don’t model them, because that would be too hard. I let the discussion of the real world economic institutions happen in parallel with the exposition of the more basic theory. They are two separate strands. Students have intrinsic motivation for the the real world stuff. The approach gives them motivation for the theory they do learn, where the real world discussion extends the theory rather than competes with it. So this is not exactly Ralph Boas point, but it is very close. In my own head, one leads with examples that are of interest to the students, because that is where the motivation lies. Good teaching appeals to and leverages student motivation.

I’ve recently learned another way to think of this from the book Made to Stick. This is about the teacher (really any presenter) demonstrating respect for the student (or for any listener). The student is not a blank slate. There is much less work to be done by the student if what is presented ties readily to what the student already knows. The child knows the concept kitty if not the word “cat.” The explanation introduces the new vocabulary, but does not alter the already developed concept the child has. If with the examples we introduce the students already have prior conceptual knowledge it will be easier for us as teachers to make progress because it will make the students more comfortable. They’ll have the feeling , “I know most of this already.” In contrast, presenting abstractions up front is alienating, because it is hard for students to tie what they know to the abstractions. Doing that requires skills that many of the students may not possess.

As much as Jerry’s idea of leading with examples supports Bob’s and Stan’s themes, I’m afraid that Jerry’s other knowledge nugget about tying learning to failure does not. False starts, unsure steps, drawing the wrong conclusion from the information, or stopping prematurely along a path that actually leads to a favorable conclusion, all are part of real learning. Most of what we instructors are trying to do is remove impediments for the students out of fear that the blockage will remain permanent and no further learning will happen thereafter. Sometimes that is right. Other times, however, the student needs to find her own way to recover from the failure. That is where creativity can be found. The good instructor wants the students to create for themselves. It is art to find the right balance, when to remove the blockage and when to leave it in place.

* * * * *

I have benefitted a great deal from knowing Bob, Stan, and Jerry, each helping me to mature in my thinking about how students learn and about what practices we teachers can embrace that best assist the students. I now find myself in the position of elder in the field of Learning Technology, feeling a need to pass along some of this acquired wisdom to the next generation. If I can be only half as effective for this next generation as my predecessors were for me, I will have accomplished a lot.