The Goal of Higher Education: Remarks at the BSU College of Sciences and Humanities Dean's Honor Reception

By virtue of receiving the inaugural Teacher of the Year award from the College of Sciences and Humanities, I was invited to give some remarks at the Dean's Honor Reception. The reception is later this morning, and these are the remarks I intend to give. I will be working from notes, not this written form, so the precise delivery will certainly vary, but these are the main points. Also, the original title for the talk was "The End of Higher Education," which was a pun on the two meanings of "end," but it was softened to "The Goal of Higher Education."

EDIT (Feb 2): The talk was well received. I have edited my original post to contain a few turns of phrase that I used spontaneously at the time.

In preparation for this talk, I read through two of the notebooks I keep whenever I read a book. It was purely delightful: it's like someone wrote a book that contained only things that I find fascinating, inspiring, or challenging. I hope that you also keep notes when you read. It will bring you joy to read them later.

I searched my notebooks for an answer to the question, "What is the goal of higher education?" I am sure you have your own answers, perhaps dealing with careers or impact on the world. In the Republic, Plato asserts that the goal of higher education is to love what is beautiful. I think he's right. 

You might ask, "How do we come to recognize beauty?" I put it to you that beauty is already there, that it's a transcendental property of the world around us. The question then becomes, "How do we fail to recognize beauty?"

In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum was not free to recognize beauty. Gollum could only see the One Ring. Because he was distracted by this created thing, he was blind to the beauty around him. He elevated this created thing beyond its station, and this led to his downfall. Tolkien scholar Joseph Pierce talks about how we can all become Gollumized. We can become so distracted by things that we fail to see beauty.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote that we are not free if we believe that technology is morally neutral. Heidegger recognized that humanity has always used technology, but he said that we are not free if we think of this technology as neutral. Take the humble hammer as an example. With a hammer, I can pound nails, but remember the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." It's true. The hammer has moral agency. That is to say, the hammer affects the moral decision space that you are in. With a hammer in hand, striking things with it becomes an option. The hammer has moral agency. How much more so the smart phone?

Canvas is a technology. Canvas affects your moral decision space. Canvas color codes your grades so that you "know how well you are doing." Canvas gives you notifications, so that you stop what you are doing and pay attention to it. Canvas gives you confetti when you turn in work on time. Beware. Larry Muller, in his brilliant book The Tyranny of Metrics, writes about how the calculative is opposed to the imaginative. 

How is one to recognize beauty while tempering the calculative? I have time to share with you three stories.

My friend Dannie was an undergraduate architecture major here back in the 1990s. He asked one of his professors, "How am I doing in this course?" expecting a quantitative answer. The professor took out a piece of paper and, along a line, drew an egg, a tadpole, and then a frog. He pointed to a spot on the line and said, "You're about here." Now that is a midsemester grade!

Last weekend, I ran Global Game Jam here on campus. This is an event where people get together and, in 48 hours, create original videogames. We had over 40 people attend, mostly Ball State students but also students from other places as well as community members. There was no judging, there were no grades, there were no prizes, there was no competition, yet at the end, we had made eight original videogames, which are now available to the world for free. We made them for the joy of creating them and the pleasure of sharing them. This event is a global event, and all together, this community created over 11,000 games, just for the sake of beauty.

I regularly teach a required sophomore-level programming class. In this class, I use a system called "achievements", inspired by video games, that let students earn course credit by doing things that are outside the normal course expectations. One of the options is called, "Detox," and it requires a student to go 24 hours without looking at a screen. Every semester, a few students try it, and the beauty of their essay responses would make you weep. Students have told me how they walked across campus and really heard the birdsong for the first time. Others write about how they reflect on their life, how they got to where they are, and their hopes and dreams. My favorite story is of a student who, instead of doomscrolling on Instagram, took her grandmother for coffee. There is nothing better than that.

I put it to you that beauty is all around us—well, unless you work in the Robert Bell Building, like I do, but we're doing our best. 

Look at the people on stage here. They are beautiful. Look at the people sitting next to you or behind you. Really! Do it! They are beautiful.

Speaking for myself, I don't care what grades you get. I want you to find your One Ring—because we all have them—cast it into the fire, and then join me in life's great adventure of loving beauty.

Thinking about High Impact Practices

I have been selected to be part of my university's High Impact Practice Implementation and Assessment Task Force. The task force chair has been good about sending agendas along with work for us to do in preparation for the meetings. In preparation for a meeting next week, we were asked to prepare responses to a few questions. I decided to write my responses here on the blog, in the spirit of No Wasted Writing. (Of course, I am doing this after having sent a novella of an email back to a student, so clearly, I need to be more prudent about No Wasted Writing.)

For some context, it's important to know that the university's strategic plan has defined High Impact Practices to include undergraduate research, immersive learning, study abroad or study away, and societal issue or global challenge. This is a subset of those talked about as HIPPs by AAC&U.

I'll typeset the questions in italics and then give my answer to each below it.

What is the purpose of high impact practices to you? To you, what do high impact practices endeavor to accomplish?

High-impact practices engage students in authentic knowledge work. Student learning is strengthened and deepened by having it take place in the context of meaningful work. The credited learning experience becomes focused on an extrinsic, persistent goal rather than an intrinsic, ephemeral one.

The goal of the experience remains learner enrichment rather than community impact. If external audiences benefit from high-impact practices, this is of course beneficial. However, our real focus is on the transformation and enrichment of the learner. This perspective allows us to form partnerships and accept risk, rather than recruiting clients and becoming risk-averse. My experience has been that students often learn more from failure, and that the transformations in the students far exceed any extrinsic benefit.

What are THREE strengths of BSU's high impact practices? (You might have hundreds of ideas—please identify the top three)

1. The Provost's funding for Immersive Learning projects gives faculty support to experiment with new ideas prior to formalization in the course catalog.
2. Many of the faculty involved in high-impact practices are talented and committed scholars who want the best for their students.
3. There are resources devoted to celebrating the success and spreading the word about projects, for example, through the Immersive Learning Awards program, Community Partner Awards program, Immersive Learning Showcase, and other university marketing efforts. These frame this work as important to the university's identity and narrative.

What are the THREE weaknesses of BSU's high impact practices?

1. Creative projects are subject to the tyranny of higher education conventions such as 15-week semesters, scheduling around other courses, letter grades, and the inability to "fire" students from a team. These directly contradict most of what we know about how knowledge work gets done.
2. There is dissonance between the message that we value high-impact practices and the advice that is given to junior faculty.
3. Departmental and college control over the implementation of high impact practices is a disincentive to multidisciplinary collaborations. The de facto standard is to design experiences for your own majors, regardless of the problem being addressed. Anything else requires inordinate, unrewarded effort.

Bonus answer: Failure to hyphenate the adjective phrase "high-impact".

When students (undergraduate and graduate) graduate from BSU with at least one high impact practice...

1. What do we want them to know?
2. What do we want the students to be able to do?
3. What do we want students to value?

I assume the author wants discipline-agnostic answers rather than discipline-specific ones, which makes this a little challenging to address. However, I was able to pull from my notes about my own department's search for a vision, and this gave me a way to frame my answers.

We want them to know:

• Fundamental concepts, vocabulary, and techniques of their academic majors and minors.
• Some advanced topics within their academic majors.

I realize that these items are not clearly related to high-impact practices: they could be said of any student who graduates. It was originally unintentional, but upon reflection, I think it is right. The high-impact practices should strengthen and secure a student's knowledge—even if that is because the experience made them question or doubt it.

We want them to be able to:

• Self-correct
• That is, a student should be able to reflect on what they are making or doing, identify their assumptions, and change direction based on this analysis. This is the competent level of the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, and it is an indicator of reflective practice.
• Communicate ideas clearly and effectively to different audiences.
• Ask good, clear questions.
• Work respectfully and productively on a multidisciplinary team.

We want them to value:

• The responsibility they have to their team, their employer, and their community
• The dignity of the individual
• Lifetime learning
• Virtuous living: that virtues are habits of the mind developed through intentional practice and self-mastery. Essentially, this is beatitudo, the classic question of what is good in life.

Please feel free to share your own responses or reactions in the comments.

Workshop on Gamification in Higher Education

Several months ago, I was asked by the Division of Online and Strategic Learning if I would be interested in leading a faculty workshop on gamification of higher education. They buttered me up by telling me that "several people" had suggested to have me give a workshop on this topic. I am dubious that such people exist, but I decided that this would be a good and appropriate form of professional service for me. I took some issue with the intended title, given that "gamification" has a negative connotation in many academic circles. However, I decided that if this is what people asked for, then this would be an appropriate title to use, and I could wrap whatever I really wanted to share within that heading.

I reached out to a few friends in person and online who have done similar work, and I was able to get some good ideas and feedback. I was hoping to share a draft on my blog and get some constructive criticism from these folks, but actually designing the workshop ended up taking priority over writing about it. The workshop was offered in two one-hour sessions at noon on October 29 and November 5. There is a third workshop in the series run by somebody else; that session will focus on how to do some gameful practices in Canvas, but I have really nothing to do with that part.

What I would like to do here is share the outline of what I covered, describe the activities I led, and share a bit about what worked. This way, if I am ever asked to do such a thing again, I can always come back and check my notes. Also, who knows, maybe this will even be useful to you, dear reader.

After spending a lot of time writing ideas on index cards and shuffling them into different stacks, I decided on an overall structure that would have Day 1 focused on the questions: What is play? What is a game? Why do people play games? Day 2 then focused on these questions: How do we design games? How do learners experience gameful designs? Finally, should we gamify higher education?

I created a deck of slides to help keep myself on track, and I've made them publicly viewable. In text, I will walk through the main points and activities that we engaged in.

We opened with introductions, in which I asked everyone to share their name, department, and—reusing a technique I use in my game design classes—a summary of their last great play experiences. As with students, many faculty conflated "play" and "game", but not all of them did. One participant explicitly drew upon the question to talk about renovating his bathroom, describing the visceral feeling of slamming a hammer through the wall, and he spoke of "playing" with the materials.

I briefly explained how "gamification," "playful learning," and other terms are used differently by different communities of practice, as I alluded to in the introduction of this post. I pointed out that higher education is already a game: there's a clear start and end, and we assign points and celebrate victory. This helped to establish that I was looking at games, play, and design as ideas that integrate into what we already do.

We got into the slides, and I started with the question, "What is play?" I drew upon Huizinga's Homo Ludens and then Caillois' Man, Play, and Games here. For the latter, I described the four categories of play he defined (being agôn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx) as well as the ludus-paidia spectrum. I put up a table of the four categories and the ludus-paidia axis, and I asked the participants to name activities we already use and to place them into this table. This activity had good participation. The biggest surprise to me was when a participant brought up public speaking requirements as an example of ilinx (vertigo). So many students are afraid of public speaking that our making them speak in front of the class is tantamount to our putting them in a state of vertigo.

From here, I moved on to the question, "What is a game?" I always like to invoke Wittgenstein here and his description of "game" as a word that we cannot define—but that hasn't stopped game design theorists from doing their best. I walked through a curated list of some of my favorite thought-provoking definitions, including those from Chris Crawford, Sid Meier, and Bernard Suits, before landing on my personal favorite from Raph Koster, "Games are just exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up." This allowed me to go on a brief aside about Koster's seminal Theory of Fun for Game Design and its observation that the "fun" in games is often because of learning.

The next question to cover was, "Why play games?" I explained that to a game designer, "fun" is too broad a term compared to other, more specific concepts such as fiero, schadenfreude, naches, and kvell. With those terms on the board, I asked the group to think of activities we do in class that invoke these different kinds of fun. This also led to a positive discussion, with examples mentioned of all four. One of the more interesting was sharing or discussing bad student work as something that invokes schadenfreude: if a professor mentions that many students made a particular mistake, it can give a bit of coldblooded "better you than me."

I brought up Bartle's Player Types: Acting-Interacting against Players-World, to get the quadrants of Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers. I made sure to point out that Bartle wrote an excellent chapter about how people have misused his taxonomy, but that I was pretty sure we were OK to move forward with our exercise. I asked the participants to consider the kinds of activities we use in class that favor different kinds of "players." My recollection is that they generally agreed that most of our work focused on Achiever types, and we talked briefly about what it might mean to explore other areas of this domain.

This wrapped up the first day, although I had originally planned to talk about Flow on the first day. I had just enough time to give them a handout with homework, which drew predictable groans. The handout lays out five different learning paths a participant could choose for next time:

• Explorer: Play a new board game.
• Reader: Read Paul Darvasi's exemplary chapter, "The Ward Game" (from Teacher Pioneers), in which he describes transforming his high school English class into an insane asylum to teach lessons from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
• Maker: Design your own game.
• Analyzer: Analyze an activity you use in class using one of the lenses introduced in the first day of the workshop.
• Sustainer: Bring delicious snacks for Day 2 of the workshop.

As we started Day 2, after brief introductions, I asked them to share their work along the learning paths. Two or three had played new games and shared that experience. Unfortunately, the Ward Game chapter had not been mailed out until that morning, so no one had even seen it yet. It gave me an opportunity to give a summary of the chapter, but it really deserves a thorough reading. One participant has been working on his own game for some time, and he was happy to say a little about it when I asked if anyone had done the Maker exercise. One person shared what they admitted was a shallow analysis of their in-class activities from a games perspective. Tragically, no one took up the Sustainer, although this gave me an opportunity to explain how I use compulsory treat-bringing as a punishment for being late to my studio courses. I think of all the stories that I told over the two hours of the workshop, this may have been the one where I had their attention most clearly.

All told, maybe half the participants shared anything during this period, so I think it's fair to say that the exercise was not taken seriously. However, I don't regret it, because the handout and discussion provided a concrete example of how one can design multiple, different, equally-valid paths to understanding an idea. We came back to this later on. 

We jumped back into the slides with my giving an overview of Flow. Only 25-30% of the participants had heard of Flow before, and I shared with them some quick bullet points about the properties of a Flow state and the conditions for getting into one. I showed the diagram that I tend to see come up in discussions of game design, which plots Skill against Challenge. I explained that my understanding of the psychological literature was that this wasn't actually quite right: it's not Skill against Challenge, it's Perceived Skill against Perceived Challenge. From a teaching point of view, there's an enormous difference between these two, particularly considering that there's essentially no correlation between students' self-efficacy and actual ability.

Then we did a little exercise that I thought would be more interesting than it turned out. The idea was to trace the path of a student (or a student persona) through the flow diagram. I had tried it myself and found it to be an interesting challenge. Here's the relevant example:

I explained that when I teach CS222, I frequently get a category of student who did well in the prerequisite courses because of their high school experience, and this gives them an inflated sense of their programming abilities—that is, high Perceived Skill. As the course continues, the challenge goes up and they start to see their skill as being lower (shown in green above), moving rapidly up into anxiety. I believe that with the right interventions in the course, I can help these students have the blue line experience instead, where their sense of their own skill "catches up" with the challenge to put them into a Flow experience. Note that the blue line starts and ends at about the same value of perceived skill, but by the end of the course, it's actually aligned more with their actual skill.

I wondered if this exercise would be interesting to the participants, and so I tested a variation on it in my game design class. I had them draw their own path in the diagram, considering the "game" of designing their final game project. I showed the students my path through a project, and then I asked them to share their stories. As they shared, we started looking for different kinds of shapes that they had drawn, looking for patterns and similarities in their stories. It was a great exercise for them I think. For the faculty in the workshop, though, I think only one person shared what they saw in their diagram. In his case, he observed that there was high anxiety but not because of what he had designed: it came from external factors, specifically the fact that he was teaching education majors the semester before their student teaching.

We moved on to another kind of analysis, this one inspired by one of my heroes, Dan Cook of Spry Fox. He wrote an essay a few years ago about arcs and loops as fundamental components of game design. I came across it when preparing for the workshop, and it inspired me to think about the loops and arcs in my course design. I drew up two examples, the first is from my CS222 Advanced Programming class.

The course has three arcs, which are the first three weeks of the class. It then goes into a series of loops, whose relative importance is depicted by their size. The two-week project is followed by three three-week iterations of the final project, each one with more weight and importance than the last. At the end, there's a little arc to represent the final exam.

The other example I gave was of my current semester CS315 Game Programming class. It is composed of a series of arcs of increasing weight, these comprising the two-week mini-projects that are designed to teach concepts of increasing complexity. At the end of the semester, students work in teams on a project in two iterations. The two iterations are the same size, so there's only one visible loop.

I pointed out that the loops were where students had the most opportunity to learn. I acknowledged that the nature of my material lends itself to loops, but that teaching programming is a bit like teaching writing: good work is done by iteration and feedback. I asked them to consider the loops and arcs in their own classes and to share their stories. One participant described how he has his students work in a portfolio, where each assignment is done once but the portfolio writing process is covered each time; we agreed that this might be a multidimensional drawing, with a loop spiraling up out of arcs. Another participant said that she teaches solely in arcs, but she was interested in considering how she might use loops to enhance students' learning.

I had one slide on Self-Determination Theory, but I neglected to ask how many were already familiar with it. For each of the categories of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, I called back to examples we had discussed before or shared new examples from my own work. I showed them how in CS222 I use achievements in order to foster different aspects of Self-Determination Theory, and they seemed interested in this approach. I also showed the specifications grading that I am trying in Game Programming this semester and explained this as an approach that helps with a sense of competence since it eliminates black-box grading. Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity here to gauge how many were already familiar with specifications grading. It would have been interesting to know for how many people this was an introduction to new ground vs. showing an application and contextualization of something they have encountered before.

We only had a few minutes left, so I had to make a judgement call between finishing up or opening the floor for questions and discussion. I decided to move forward, because this is something that's been on my mind—not to mention being in a half-written, still unpublished blog post. The last question to address, then, is the dangers of gamification.

I mentioned briefly that much of game design is based on extrinsic motivation: we give the player points, eye candy, and social experiences so that they will enjoy our games. However, we know that extrinsic rewards diminish intrinsic motivation. Is it worth adding extrinsic rewards to courses if it reduces students' desire to engage in these activities themselves? As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out. There are not enough longitudinal studies on the effect of higher education. (This is one of the reasons we should abolish the core curriculum: we have no evidence that it meets its design goals. But I digress.)

The final point I made is the one that I've really been struggling with in my quiet moments the last few weeks. A friend recommended I read Make it Stick, and I don't want to spoil my future post, but there was something in that book that really rattled me: Immediate feedback is better for short-term retention and worse for long-term retention, but delayed feedback is worse for short-term retention and better for long-term retention. I think game-based learning takes it for granted that immediate feedback is good, but the research cited in the book doesn't match that. It seems to me that we, designers of educational experiences, can choose whether we want students to get a good grade now and forget the material later, or get a worse grade now and remember the material later. What, exactly, is the goal of higher education?

With that uplifting challenge, I thanked them for coming, reminded them about the third session that I was not involved with, and wished them a good day.

Overall, I am happy with the workshop. Some of the activities didn't go quite as well as I hoped, but it was hard to tell the difference between quiet contemplation, confusion, self-consciousness, and apathy. No one complained or threw rotten vegetables, so that's something anyway. Thanks again to my colleagues who shared their ideas and feedback with me, especially Scott Reinke, who kindly shared his experience and helped with a few ideas over email.

Answering three student questions about Computer Science, Internships, and Industry Trends

One of my students sent me an email last week with three thoughtful questions in it. Following the principle of no-wasted-writing, I decided to share my answers here on my blog. The questions are in bold, and I did not edit them for posting here. I'm going to encourage the student to consider his own answers before reading mine, and you, dear reader, may try the same.

What really defines if a student successfully completes the undergraduate CS program at Ball State? I’m not talking about the program and university degree requirements, but rather if they got everything they are meant to out of the CS program. Is there a “tipping point”?

That's a great question, and there's a couple of different ways to answer it. I will start with the structural approach that is conventional in industrialized higher education.

For most of its history, the department operated with implicit objectives, but almost ten years ago, we formally agreed to a set of five. These were adapted from ABET's accreditation criteria, and they define what a student should be able to do after graduation. They are:

1. Mathematical foundations, algorithmic principles and computing theory: Given a software task, the student will be able to choose an appropriate algorithm and the related data structures to efficiently implement that task. The student will be able to do an asymptotic analysis of the chosen algorithm to justify its time and space complexity. 
2. Design and development skills: Given an appropriate set of software requirements, the student will be able to formulate a specification from which to design, implement and evaluate a computer-based system, process, component or program that satisfies the requirements. At a minimum, this must include the ability to design, implement and evaluate a software system using a high-level programming language, following the conventions for that language, and using good practices in software design to satisfy the given requirements.
3. Ethics, professional conduct and lifelong learning: The student will behave consistently with the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. This includes developing the capacity for lifelong learning in order to maintain professional competence.
4. Communication skills: The student will be able to communicate effectively through oral presentations and written documentation, including well-organized presentation materials to explain software concepts to non-technically oriented clients, clearly written software specifications and requirements documents, design documents, and progress report.
5. Teamwork skills: In order to contribute effectively and meaningfully to any team development effort, each team member must be able to think independently and arrive at creative and correct solutions to problems. This includes the ability to find and evaluate existing solutions to similar problems and adapt them to solve new problems. Each team member must be able to communicate ideas effectively to other team members and cooperate with them in integrating the solutions of subproblems to accomplish the team's common goal

In theory, then, a graduate should have all of these qualities, and our departmental assessment should tell us to what extent we are meeting our goals. We have done a fair job over the past several years of conducting mid-major assessment: after CS222 and CS224 (Advanced Programming and Algorithm Analysis), we use a formalized assessment process to determine if students appear to be making progress, particularly toward departmental objectives #1 and #2. For example, we were able to see no measurable difference in CS222 performance before and after our change in the intro course from a conventional CS1 approach in Java to a media-centric approach in Python, and we were able to push down some critical concepts earlier in the curriculum, like good naming and functional decomposition.

The upper division courses and capstone assessments have, unfortunately, been inadequate for any practical purpose. Put another way, the department agreed upon these objectives as guideposts, but we have not done due diligence to see if we are meeting them—much less making modifications to ease us toward better performance. I think a CS student in any program can look at this list and think of how conventional higher education privileges some aspects over others. Our own two-semester capstone course should be a proving ground for practically all of these, but we lack meaningful assessment data to draw defensible conclusions. Note that your particular question about a "tipping point" should be measurable if we had a clean mapping of these objectives to particular courses and curricular activities, but right now the best we have is anecdotes.

There's another, more holistic way to look at your question, and it tends to be the approach I favor despite its being arguably less measurable. Students who have taken my CS222 class should be familiar with the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. It is a descriptive model for any set of skills, where aptitude can be measured in categories of Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient, and Expert. Anyone can become a Novice with very little effort, and raising to Advanced Beginner generally takes some education and practice. However, a defining characteristic of Advanced Beginners is second-order ignorance. That is, they don't know what they don't know. This aligns with the psychological phenomenon of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where Advanced Beginners misclassify themselves as Experts. Overcoming second-order ignorance allows one to truly become Competent, which includes a measure of intellectual humility—a recognition of how much more there is to learn. That, then, is my shorter answer for what it means to earn a bachelors degree in Computer Science: students should have climbed the Peak of Mount Stupid and come back down to recognize the need for lifetime learning.

Incidentally, I learned about the Dreyfus Model by reading Andy Hunt's Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. He and I had an email exchange about it, and we agreed that, broadly speaking, we should expect a bachelor's degree to produce Competent skills, a master's degree to produce Proficient skills, and a doctoral degree to produce Expert skills. In practice, I don't think that higher education has assured that this is the case, but I think it's a worthy consideration if nothing else.

What makes an internship worthwhile?

This is another great question. Let the record show that I have never had the responsibility of deciding whether or not a student internship is worthy of course credit, so I am speaking from a position of educated opinion and not (as above) as an academic trying to do a competent job.

The conventional structure of higher education is one of analysis: the breaking down of complex wholes into manageable parts. You can see this from course and textbook organization all the way up to administrative organization. It is a convenient model for many reasons, although it falls into the fallacy that my analysis should work for you. All analyses are really design projects that have to be evaluated for fitness. Turns out, grouping academics by similarity of department works well for peer evaluation in conventional situations. It doesn't always work though, such as with interdisciplinary problems like the game design and development work that I do: some of that work looks like Computer Science, some looks like humanities, some looks like communications, education, art, etc. Who should evaluate whether or not I am fulfilling my scholarly role in such cases? The administrative structure imposed by the analysis becomes dysfunctional.

Let me bring this back to internships. Higher education structures are pretty well ossified. There are a few calls to enhance multidisciplinary education, such as our own campus' laudable immersive learning projects, but at the end of the day, it's the administrative structure that determines your budget, and it's the budget that allows you to operate. So, a good internship is one that exposes a student to a different analysis—a different way of breaking down a complex world into workable parts. In a way, it's like the idea of having two majors or picking up a minor that is different from your major: learn to see things in a different way.

There's a secondary goal of an internship, which is to engage in legitimate peripheral participation in a field where you would like to work. There can be enormous advantages to this, but I think a lot of them deal with the property I mentioned above: seeing people doing their practice teaches you about the culture of that practice. Students, by and large, are watching faculty do our practice, but our practice is really strange. There are relatively few people who do the work of higher education—especially in higher education. [rimshot]

Anyway, that's what entered my head when I read your question. Take it for what it's worth. If I had the chair's job of evaluating whether or not an internship was worth major credit, I would probably have to deal with things like authentic mentorship and learning objectives, but I think I can get away with my more epistemological stance for now.

What are your thoughts on AWS (Amazon Web Services). It seems like a lot of companies are transitioning to AWS, but do you think this is what we are transiting to as an industry or just the latest bandwagon a lot of people are jumping on?

This is not in my field of technical expertise, though I've read some and talked to alumni and friends doing this kind of work. It seems to me that there are great gains to be had by adopting microservice architectures, from a maintenance point of view in particular. Distributed processing can lead to significant performance gains. Also, there's a very high initial cost of setting up a proprietary, globally-distributed network of reliable servers. If someone else (Amazon, in this case) has already done that work for you, then it seems reasonable to rely on their expertise here. So, it appears to me to be a natural transition rather than simply a bandwagon. The people I know who are doing it are being very careful, from a business and technology point of view. Of course, there are implications for security and accountability as well.

As for me and my projects, we choose Firebase.

That's the end of my responses. I hope that sharing them here was of interest to my readers. Feel free to leave a comment to share your thoughts, as always.

On Interdisciplinarity

Author's note: I was asked to write an executive summary about interdisciplinarity for an internal report regarding our strategic planning process. I share it here for your consideration and comment.

Interdisciplinarity is the response to the observation that problems don’t obey traditional disciplinary boundaries. We organize our higher education structures around disciplinary boundaries for a variety of practical and justifiable reasons, but such structures make it easy for us—and more importantly, our students—to fall prey to the fallacy that we understand the whole because we understand the parts. The real problems of the 21st century, such as ethical use of digital data, education reform, global climate change, and post-work economics can only be addressed by exploring the intersections of traditional academic domains.

In 1968, Melvin Conway observed that organizations are constrained to create systems that reflect their own internal communication patterns. This is clearly manifest in the conventional curricular structures of higher education in general and Ball State University in particular. These conventions long predate our contemporary understanding of how people learn. We know that individuals learn by connecting new knowledge into an active network of prior knowledge. We know that context matters—context that includes the place, time, community, and content. We know that learning happens when students bring all their senses and skills to bear on problems that they are motivated to solve, in teams, in connection with a network of experts, with rapid and honest feedback. Most importantly, we know that the world our students already inhabit is constantly connected, containing ubiquitous and chaotic information. An interdisciplinary approach to higher education is therefore not merely an option: it is an ethical necessity for any who think deeply about our role as educators.

A corollary of Conway’s observation is that we can change how we create educational systems by altering how we communicate with each other, and this can point us toward an enlightened future for higher education. By enshrining interdisciplinarity in our university, we align ourselves and our students toward addressing significant contemporary problems. We have taken important and pioneering steps through programs such as the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry and the Immersive Learning program. However, these are pushed to the periphery of the student experience rather than the center. We can instead embrace the challenge of facing interdisciplinary problems--as scholars, in our teaching, research, and service—and the strategic plan can shine light onto our path.

Books that influenced my teaching

A colleague is undertaking a sabbatical project that involves collecting books related to teaching in higher education. I was honored to be asked to provide some for his list, and in the spirit of last week's post, I figured I would share them here as well. He was asking specifically for books about teaching in higher education, which I'll start with; he also clarified with me over email that particularly inspirational disciplinary books may also be of use to him, so I'll share some of those as well.

General Teaching Books

Without going back through my old notebooks, here are the books that I remember reading and enjoying. I've provided Amazon links mostly to remove any ambiguity, not because I have any particular need for people to shop there.

• How People Learn is an excellent overview of what is known about learning, and I remember that reading this helped me build a better understanding of some core educational concepts. Like most professors, I had practically no formal education in how to teach, and I had picked up a lot of folk wisdom; this book was useful for turning this ad hoc understanding into something more rigorous.
• How Learning Works, I read this about the same time as the previous one, and I remember it covering similar ground but with more emphasis on higher education. Since I read these at the same time, and many years ago, I may have muddled some of their influences, but to me that's okay: I believe I have internalized most of the main premises into my action, and that was the goal.
• Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. This book was recommended to me by a colleague, and it was fundamental in helping me shape my current understanding of learning as a social process. I have directly drawn on the ideas of this book in designing my game production studio courses. If anything, I wish I could use more of the ideas in this book: my main annoyances in higher education are precisely those conventions and structures that make it hard to follow the patterns of LPP described here.
• Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn provides another overview of the science of teaching and learning, framed and supported by the Visible Learning meta-studies. This is a fascinating piece, and in some ways it is a quantitative counterpoint to Situated Learning's qualitative perspectives. It's fascinating and well-supported, and yet the authors' apparent disdain for non-quantitative work left me feeling uneasy. (For what it's worth, I came across this book by reading Grant Wiggins' blog, where he points out one of the most important contributions of Hattie's work: that there are many easy classroom practices that have a higher effect size than students' socio-economic status. Also, in digging up that link, I just found out that Wiggins died in May 2015, over a year ago, and now I am kind of bummed. I knew I had missed his writing; I didn't know he had passed away.)
• Speaking of Wiggins, Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding focuses on what I consider the most fascinating aspect of Understanding by Design: framing inquiry through essential questions. Longtime readers will know that I have been tinkering with EQs as a method to frame my courses for a few years, and now I feel like they are a critical tool to my course design and evaluation process. In fact, now I often prefer to describe courses in terms of their questions rather than their content.
• Although I have not read their entire book, I will point out Papert and Harel's chapter "Situating Constructionism" from Constructionism. I think I may have read this more times than any other article. I find it fascinating, and when I am pushed to state what educational philosophical camp I belong to, I would have to say constructionism. (Of course, then I usually have to explain that I didn't just say "constructivism," and people give me blank stares. Hence, I include this chapter here, because anybody interested in effective higher education philosophy should read it.)

Other Inspirational Books

There are several books I have read that are not about education in particular, but that reading them greatly informed and influenced my teaching practice. Here are some:

• Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate and Scholarship Assessed, which I read in my third year as an assistant professor, gave me a much broader view of what it meant to be a scholar and a professor. Relevant to this post, it helped me to see how my teaching was scholarship, not just something that produced scholarship. This fundamental observation from Boyer's classic work is still something I find broadly misunderstood in academia. The counterpart by Glassick et al. provides a well-known six-stage framework for assessing scholarship—a framework I use not only in my own work, but which I worked to incorporate into my department's promotion and tenure documents.
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design. For those who are not familiar with Koster's amazing treatise, this is not a book about how to design games but rather about why we design games. The fundamental thesis presented here is that learning is fun, or put another way, fun arises from learning. I read the first edition of this book shortly after becoming an assistant professor, and the ideas of game design here strongly influenced my course design.
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game. The title of this book hints at its thesis: that software development is a cooperative game—not engineering, not modeling, but a game. Internalizing this principle has allowed me to apply my research on game design directly into my teaching work. 

I hope you find this list useful. Please feel free to share your feedback or your own favorites in the comments!

DeMillo wrote this post for me already

I have been reading and enjoying Rich DeMillo's new book, Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities. I am planning to read the final chapter tonight and had intended to post a summary afterward. However, on his innovate-edu blog today, DeMillo posted his comments to the Joint Education Subcommittee of the Georgia Senate, and these provide an excellent summary of the book. This link will get you there.

Continuing Academically Adrift

I was excited to read the final chapter of Academically Adrift, entitled "A Mandate for Reform." Although I enjoyed reading it, the final chapter was neither as revolutionary nor as specific as I hoped. The authors discuss several inhibitors to change, the most daunting of which is the lack of demand for learning, which I wrote about a few days ago. Their suggestions match much of what my own Future of Education Task Force concluded: we need a greater focus on student learning. This support must take the form of both respect and rewards, since as long as teaching is institutionally considered a lesser responsibility to research, then there will be no change.

Let me be clear that I enjoyed reading the book and consider it a significant contribution to the field. Perhaps it was unfair of me to expect that their conclusions would be more immediately actionable, since their stated goal was research, not reform. Consider, for example, the authors' suggestion that effective reform needs to happen from within the current system, allowing actors to innovate within the existing space of higher education. This compares to my Future of Education Task Force recommendation for what we called "The University Sandbox," an initiative that would be authorized to work within the university while ignoring conventional assumptions of higher education. Our recommendation was not codified to the point of being immediately implementable, but I was hoping that Academically Adrift would provide more examples of how institutions might consider approaching the problem of fostering educational innovation.

In the final chapter, the authors to begin to fall into the social science trap of claiming their results are broader than what they actually found. Their study used the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to look specifically at critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing, measuring a cohort as they entered college and as they finished their sophomore year. They found that individual studying improved students' scores while group study did not, and the last chapter begins to conflate CLA achievement with learning in general. This matches my experience and intuition: a student's ability to individually write an essay should only be improved by that individual practicing writing essays. However, they neglect to mention that CLA-measured skills are not the only skills that need to be learned. For example, there is a body of research in Computer Science education that has shown that pair programming—undeniable a form of group study—improves learning and retention. The authors clear bias for individualized rigor could have been balanced with a caveat that there are disciplinary idiosyncrasies.

The final chapter's message could be summarized as, "Be deliberate about fostering student learning in higher education." The criticism of cargo-cult active learning was refreshing, given how many papers I have reviewed and presentations I have heard where the researcher has not demonstrated any significant understanding of the fundamental tenets of learning. I also appreciate their argument for more widespread teacher-training within doctoral programs. The crux of their argument is that for the foreseeable future, many more Ph.D.s will be adjunct faculty or in teaching roles than tenure-track at research-intensive schools.

There is one immediately actionable recommendation for faculty that the authors return to time and again: be rigorous. Their own study and several related studies have shown that rigorous coursework improves student academic achievement. This may seem obvious to those outside the ivory tower, but those of us on the inside have seen how easy it is to trade away rigor for easier teaching. This comes back to the delicate equilibrium I wrote about the other day, in which learning is generally not considered worth institutional sacrifice. The good news is that students are hungry for it.

Despite any nitpicking, I do strongly recommend the book, especially to anyone who is just starting to dip their feet into higher education reform. It is probably best read in conjunction with a book more specifically about learning, such as How People Learn, How Learning Works, or, for like-minded technocrats, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. (NB: I have not yet read the second book mentioned above, but I have heard good things about it.)

Academically Adrift and the Status Quo

I am nearly finished reading Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. In case you are not familiar with the book, here's the short version. The authors studied 2000+ students from 24 four-year institutions of higher education, giving them tests that measure general (as opposed to discipline-specific) skills that practically all colleges claim to enhance: critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. The tests were given before starting college and halfway through the sophomore year, and so they were focusing on the effects of common core curriculum experiences. The results were dismal, with the average gain being very low and about 45% of students showing no improvement.

The fifth chapter is entitled "A mandate for reform," and it makes an important point about higher education: there is no crisis. There is no crisis because there is nothing that, right now, is threatening the existence of higher education as an institution. All of the stakeholders are in good position to maintain the status quo. Parents grumble about tuition but continue to pay it in exchange for credentials for their children. Students readily seek out courses that provide little challenge, require minimal work, and allow for plenty of time for social activities, while still maintaining progress towards credentials. Professors minimize interaction with students, exchanging unchallenging courses for high course evaluations and therefore more pay, while also gaining more time for other scholarship—which also leads to more pay. Administrators keep students happy in order to improve recruitment and retention, focusing on revenue streams. Legislators and other politicians gain a credentialed citizenry, improving metrics against competing states, nations, etc.


This gives me another perspective on why it has been so challenging to try to push for learning reform within higher education: "learning" is completely absent from the status quo. There is nothing about the current balance of powers that supports, rewards, or encourages undergraduate learning, and in fact, to do so would upset the balance.

From page 127, "Many higher-education administrators and faculty today have largely turned away from earlier conceptions of their roles that recognized that providing support for student academic and social development was a moral imperative worth sacrificing for personally, professionally, and institutionally."  There were some on the Future of Education Task Force who were willing to bring up the concept of institutional sacrifice, but I have yet to see this manifest on the Strategic Planning Task Force.

Looking at it positively, this book gives me more ammunition to support what I believe is the moral imperative to fundamentally improve the higher educational system. The book is well-written and contains plenty of references to supporting literature.