2.5 Million Homes Remain Without DTV After The Transition | Nielsen Wire
What is interesting here is that 4.4% of the "Under 35" households were not ready as of June 14, vs. 1.1% of "Over 55" households. Perhaps this indicates that the younger crowd may have spurned broadcast television, in which case the DTV transition is irrelevant.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Work
I always set aside a little time to read new explorations about the nature of work, both to understand my own sense of work and to muse over just what my students are facing in their own future endeavors. I discovered two new interesting books on the nature of work.
The travel writer and social commentator Alain de Botton has written an engaging inquiry into work in his The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009). Some of this resonates with my own experience. In the last few years I have taken up landscape painting. In discussing little-known painter Stephen Taylor, de Botton writes: “Taylor found his teachers on museum walls. The great dead masters are generous instructors: it is not uncommon for one of them to impart a piece of technical wisdom to a pupil born five centuries after him. Works which ordinary gallery visitors might regard as inert entertainment are, for artists, living prescriptions” (p. 176). I understand this better myself, as now when I wander into a museum I find myself having a new appreciation of the work of long-dead artists, as I try to examine more closely how they achieved what they did (although I have found museum guards eyeing me more suspiciously as I peer more intently at the paintings).
De Botton also provides insights into the routines of work, encompassing even the mundane activities of the academic world. “To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history,” de Botton muses, “to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to neglect the pressures of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked ’11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break,’ to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle – maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom” (pp. 124, 126). He later continues, “Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble” (p. 136). It all sounds like a typical academic’s day of faculty meetings, encounters with students, and the filling in of forms.
Another book gets closer to us because it is written by an academically trained individual who, in part, is reflecting on work as defined in our knowledge era. Matthew B. Crawford has a Ph.D. in political philosophy, prepared for an academic career, and gave it all up in order to run a motorcycle repair shop. I guess it is not altogether surprising that he has written a book on manual work and its value in our society -- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). Crawford critiques the notion of knowledge work, in part because he finds “manual work more engaging intellectually,” and his book is his effort to “understand why this should be so” (p. 5). Crawford explores the notion of what a “good job” entails, and he puts some of this into a historical perspective (for example): “White-collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same logic that hit manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers – clerks – who replace the professionals” (p. 44).
So, as you might imagine, Crawford has a lot of uncomfortable things to say about our ideas of the information society, the knowledge era, and computer literacy. He wonders if it isn’t the case that “college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality” (p. 147). Crawford hasn’t inspired me to take up tools and build something – I am a total failure at this, but he has made me reflect a little more on the relationship between the theory and practice aspects of what we deal with in our classrooms.
The travel writer and social commentator Alain de Botton has written an engaging inquiry into work in his The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009). Some of this resonates with my own experience. In the last few years I have taken up landscape painting. In discussing little-known painter Stephen Taylor, de Botton writes: “Taylor found his teachers on museum walls. The great dead masters are generous instructors: it is not uncommon for one of them to impart a piece of technical wisdom to a pupil born five centuries after him. Works which ordinary gallery visitors might regard as inert entertainment are, for artists, living prescriptions” (p. 176). I understand this better myself, as now when I wander into a museum I find myself having a new appreciation of the work of long-dead artists, as I try to examine more closely how they achieved what they did (although I have found museum guards eyeing me more suspiciously as I peer more intently at the paintings).
De Botton also provides insights into the routines of work, encompassing even the mundane activities of the academic world. “To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history,” de Botton muses, “to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to neglect the pressures of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked ’11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break,’ to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle – maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom” (pp. 124, 126). He later continues, “Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble” (p. 136). It all sounds like a typical academic’s day of faculty meetings, encounters with students, and the filling in of forms.
Another book gets closer to us because it is written by an academically trained individual who, in part, is reflecting on work as defined in our knowledge era. Matthew B. Crawford has a Ph.D. in political philosophy, prepared for an academic career, and gave it all up in order to run a motorcycle repair shop. I guess it is not altogether surprising that he has written a book on manual work and its value in our society -- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). Crawford critiques the notion of knowledge work, in part because he finds “manual work more engaging intellectually,” and his book is his effort to “understand why this should be so” (p. 5). Crawford explores the notion of what a “good job” entails, and he puts some of this into a historical perspective (for example): “White-collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same logic that hit manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers – clerks – who replace the professionals” (p. 44).
So, as you might imagine, Crawford has a lot of uncomfortable things to say about our ideas of the information society, the knowledge era, and computer literacy. He wonders if it isn’t the case that “college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality” (p. 147). Crawford hasn’t inspired me to take up tools and build something – I am a total failure at this, but he has made me reflect a little more on the relationship between the theory and practice aspects of what we deal with in our classrooms.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Journal Publishing
Kate Maternowski, “Who Profits from For-Profit Journals?” Inside Higher Education, June 12, 2009, http://www.insidehighered.com/layout/set/print/news/2009/06/12/journals, reports on discussions at this week’s meeting of the American Association of University Professors about publishing in non-profit or for-profit venues. Issues of access, citation, and compensation. “A few alternatives to completely commercially managed journals the speakers mentioned included self-managed, non-profit, open-access models (like ACME, where Engel-DiMauro serves on the editorial board); self-managed, nonprofits with fee-restricted access (Human Geography: A New Radical Journal is one); pooled control, free access journals (SCOAP3); or even – though Engel-DiMauro admitted they can be too pricey for academics -- corporate-owned journals that provide free access but charge the author (Open Geography Journal).”
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Plagiarism
Susan D. Blum, My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)
Susan Blum demonstrates that plagiarism is a confusing topic, far more complicated than it first seems, in her book on the subject. However, this is about far more than plagiarism, with its focus on the university college, especially relationship between students and faculty. I had expected to find a book mostly about student writing. What I discovered was a book exploring the nature of teaching and the expectations students bring with them into college (and by extension, graduate school). While Blum offers actions that can be taken, her acknowledgement of the complexity of plagiarism in this student culture lead to highly involved recommendations that I found less useful than her characterization of why problems such as plagiarism persist and may even be growing.
Blum gives us a vivid glimpse into the world of students, considering some matters with direct implications for what we do in an I-School. Here is her assessment about what students’ use of Wikipedia suggests about why plagiarism may be so prevalent: “If faculty are attempting to force students to individual authorship while a non-authorized work is at the top of most Google searches, this constitutes another mismatch between authentic and performance selves, between the generation of teachers and administrators and that of today’s college students. The prohibition on plagiarism – the unacknowledged use of material by a named author – makes no sense in a context in which unnamed series of people offer their work free of credit, free of charge, free of attribution” (p. 71). Hence, this is why plagiarism is so much more complicated than simply using without attribution another’s work.
What I found most useful is Blum’s exploration of student culture, and how it impacts on issues such as plagiarism. Drawing on extensive interviews with students, she notes, “Students even justify cheating, at least in the abstract, out of ‘need.’ If education is regarded by students at elite universities as putting in a certain effort to attain the desired end – a good grade, a degree, fun – then knowing how to achieve that goal is a measure of their competence” (p. 81). While I have not had direct experience with students plagiarizing, I have had considerable experience with students who seem to think that any aspect of required work (especially reading and class participation) as a burden. And Blum addresses these issues as well: “I have read hundreds of student evaluations of teachers when hiring new colleagues. Some questionnaires ask how much time the students spent on the class. The average seemed to be about four hours per week per class, even at first-rate universities. Sometimes students responding that they worked as little as three to four hours complained that the course had too intense a workload or had too much reading for them to finish” (p. 118). While this is an observation about undergraduate students, I think it applies just as much to many students at the graduate level, especially in professional schools where an emphasis on credentials seems more intense than in other university programs.
This study also suggests some of the reasons why faculty members have such a difficult time relating to their students. Blum notes, “The era when it was considered cool to sit up all night discussing Nietzsche and Marcuse is long gone. It is no wonder that faculty, who tend to be of that idealized earlier generation, lament the absence of ideas in student life” (p. 122). I admit that it is hard to understand why so many students seem uninterested in learning, even resistant to it. Blum offers this explanation: “Education specialists distinguish intrinsic motivations for learning (a love of knowledge for its own sake, or a need for knowledge in application) from extrinsic motivations (good grades, teachers’ or parents’ praise, a diploma, a job). Students who value the work of learning for its own sake are less likely to cut corners, to rush or cheat, because they savor the experience itself” (p .125). The nature of professional schools put such notions to the test because the students come there for particular credentials and exposure to practical knowledge, but my sense is that the university, in its rapidly evolving corporate mode, is becoming more like professional schools. Where once commentators on higher education often discussed professional schools as square pegs in round holes, now it seems unnecessary to characterize the relationship in this fashion.
Blum also has a lot to say about teaching and its evaluation. Here is her assessment of teaching evaluations: “Grades reward students; teaching evaluations reward teachers. Teachers who are known to give high grades are popular, while those who give a broader range of grades are avoided, or receive less positive course evaluations from students. Many who study teaching evaluations argue that there exists a clear correlation between average student grade and the evaluations student make of their professors” (p. 126). It might seem silly to worry about such issues in an environment where even the mechanics of teaching evaluations are problematic, but I think Blum’s observation clearly demonstrates why teaching evaluations have to include far more than students’ immediate reactions to their classroom experiences. She connects such matters to why plagiarism occurs: “In these circumstances plagiarism might strike many students as a logical option: for those who are focused entirely on external goals such as high grades, a degree, or admission to the next level of education; for those who are in college to have fun; for those who whose notion of education involves checking item off a list rather than reveling in a process of discovery; for those who are busy with other activities and obligations; for those who lack the ability to earn their rewards to which they feel they have a right” (p. 140). My sense is that such issues are going to get worse in our current problematic economic situation. Blum notes that students coming into the university have often been long accustomed to getting high grades, and they become averse to taking any risks in learning because they are under great pressure to find jobs down the road. This is getting even worse as we watch the economy tank and good jobs become scarcer.
Susan Blum demonstrates that plagiarism is a confusing topic, far more complicated than it first seems, in her book on the subject. However, this is about far more than plagiarism, with its focus on the university college, especially relationship between students and faculty. I had expected to find a book mostly about student writing. What I discovered was a book exploring the nature of teaching and the expectations students bring with them into college (and by extension, graduate school). While Blum offers actions that can be taken, her acknowledgement of the complexity of plagiarism in this student culture lead to highly involved recommendations that I found less useful than her characterization of why problems such as plagiarism persist and may even be growing.
Blum gives us a vivid glimpse into the world of students, considering some matters with direct implications for what we do in an I-School. Here is her assessment about what students’ use of Wikipedia suggests about why plagiarism may be so prevalent: “If faculty are attempting to force students to individual authorship while a non-authorized work is at the top of most Google searches, this constitutes another mismatch between authentic and performance selves, between the generation of teachers and administrators and that of today’s college students. The prohibition on plagiarism – the unacknowledged use of material by a named author – makes no sense in a context in which unnamed series of people offer their work free of credit, free of charge, free of attribution” (p. 71). Hence, this is why plagiarism is so much more complicated than simply using without attribution another’s work.
What I found most useful is Blum’s exploration of student culture, and how it impacts on issues such as plagiarism. Drawing on extensive interviews with students, she notes, “Students even justify cheating, at least in the abstract, out of ‘need.’ If education is regarded by students at elite universities as putting in a certain effort to attain the desired end – a good grade, a degree, fun – then knowing how to achieve that goal is a measure of their competence” (p. 81). While I have not had direct experience with students plagiarizing, I have had considerable experience with students who seem to think that any aspect of required work (especially reading and class participation) as a burden. And Blum addresses these issues as well: “I have read hundreds of student evaluations of teachers when hiring new colleagues. Some questionnaires ask how much time the students spent on the class. The average seemed to be about four hours per week per class, even at first-rate universities. Sometimes students responding that they worked as little as three to four hours complained that the course had too intense a workload or had too much reading for them to finish” (p. 118). While this is an observation about undergraduate students, I think it applies just as much to many students at the graduate level, especially in professional schools where an emphasis on credentials seems more intense than in other university programs.
This study also suggests some of the reasons why faculty members have such a difficult time relating to their students. Blum notes, “The era when it was considered cool to sit up all night discussing Nietzsche and Marcuse is long gone. It is no wonder that faculty, who tend to be of that idealized earlier generation, lament the absence of ideas in student life” (p. 122). I admit that it is hard to understand why so many students seem uninterested in learning, even resistant to it. Blum offers this explanation: “Education specialists distinguish intrinsic motivations for learning (a love of knowledge for its own sake, or a need for knowledge in application) from extrinsic motivations (good grades, teachers’ or parents’ praise, a diploma, a job). Students who value the work of learning for its own sake are less likely to cut corners, to rush or cheat, because they savor the experience itself” (p .125). The nature of professional schools put such notions to the test because the students come there for particular credentials and exposure to practical knowledge, but my sense is that the university, in its rapidly evolving corporate mode, is becoming more like professional schools. Where once commentators on higher education often discussed professional schools as square pegs in round holes, now it seems unnecessary to characterize the relationship in this fashion.
Blum also has a lot to say about teaching and its evaluation. Here is her assessment of teaching evaluations: “Grades reward students; teaching evaluations reward teachers. Teachers who are known to give high grades are popular, while those who give a broader range of grades are avoided, or receive less positive course evaluations from students. Many who study teaching evaluations argue that there exists a clear correlation between average student grade and the evaluations student make of their professors” (p. 126). It might seem silly to worry about such issues in an environment where even the mechanics of teaching evaluations are problematic, but I think Blum’s observation clearly demonstrates why teaching evaluations have to include far more than students’ immediate reactions to their classroom experiences. She connects such matters to why plagiarism occurs: “In these circumstances plagiarism might strike many students as a logical option: for those who are focused entirely on external goals such as high grades, a degree, or admission to the next level of education; for those who are in college to have fun; for those who whose notion of education involves checking item off a list rather than reveling in a process of discovery; for those who are busy with other activities and obligations; for those who lack the ability to earn their rewards to which they feel they have a right” (p. 140). My sense is that such issues are going to get worse in our current problematic economic situation. Blum notes that students coming into the university have often been long accustomed to getting high grades, and they become averse to taking any risks in learning because they are under great pressure to find jobs down the road. This is getting even worse as we watch the economy tank and good jobs become scarcer.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Unjust Deserts
Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, Unjust Desserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance (New York: The New Press, 2008).
These authors, while acknowledging that generally now economic and other experts interested in economic issues understand that present knowledge derives from contemporary and historical sources, go one step farther and assert that “by far the most important element in all this is the knowledge that society contributes over time” (p. 15). They argue that “we (today) contribute relatively less and less as time goes on, but obtain more and more. Most of what we produce is generated – increasingly – by what we inherit, not by what we add to the inheritance” (p. 37). There is ample discussion about how we inherit this knowledge, through various means of creating repositories (such as journals and journals in libraries) and communicating (from oral to online means). For example, “The fundamental change occurred with the expansion of symbolic access across multiple external memory devices, beginning with written records and extending to today’s vast library holdings and electronic databases. The invention of books, journals, libraries, databases, and other systems of symbolic storage constitutes an essential (and still expanding) ‘hardware’ change in humanity’s cognitive architecture” (p. 47). They mention the importance of classification and cataloguing approaches, the role of universities and their faculty in creating canonical materials and conveying knowledge over time, and other issues of interest to a school such as ours. This leads them to believe that the “average high-tech millionaire today has essentially the same basic mental capacities as his predecessors. . . . The real difference is that he (and his colleagues and rivals) inherited much, much more knowledge, and much better-organized knowledge, with which to work” (p. 54). Building on this argument, Aperovitz and Daly conclude that “society as a whole . . . has a primary moral claim to that (very large) portion of wealth that the inherited knowledge it has contributed now creates” (p. 127). Obviously, they then use such notions to question how we approach the unequal distribution of wealth in our society.
These authors, while acknowledging that generally now economic and other experts interested in economic issues understand that present knowledge derives from contemporary and historical sources, go one step farther and assert that “by far the most important element in all this is the knowledge that society contributes over time” (p. 15). They argue that “we (today) contribute relatively less and less as time goes on, but obtain more and more. Most of what we produce is generated – increasingly – by what we inherit, not by what we add to the inheritance” (p. 37). There is ample discussion about how we inherit this knowledge, through various means of creating repositories (such as journals and journals in libraries) and communicating (from oral to online means). For example, “The fundamental change occurred with the expansion of symbolic access across multiple external memory devices, beginning with written records and extending to today’s vast library holdings and electronic databases. The invention of books, journals, libraries, databases, and other systems of symbolic storage constitutes an essential (and still expanding) ‘hardware’ change in humanity’s cognitive architecture” (p. 47). They mention the importance of classification and cataloguing approaches, the role of universities and their faculty in creating canonical materials and conveying knowledge over time, and other issues of interest to a school such as ours. This leads them to believe that the “average high-tech millionaire today has essentially the same basic mental capacities as his predecessors. . . . The real difference is that he (and his colleagues and rivals) inherited much, much more knowledge, and much better-organized knowledge, with which to work” (p. 54). Building on this argument, Aperovitz and Daly conclude that “society as a whole . . . has a primary moral claim to that (very large) portion of wealth that the inherited knowledge it has contributed now creates” (p. 127). Obviously, they then use such notions to question how we approach the unequal distribution of wealth in our society.
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