The president has to be one of the most photographed in history. A look at his active Flickr stream will provide testimony to his ubiquitousness. This is a deliberate strategy by the white house to control message (and put the paparazzi out of business…two birds with one stone!)

But the downside of this visual feast of White House images is that your chin is exposed. Take this image of the president talking with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu:

Innocuous looking? It has apparently created a stir in Israel, presumably because showing the soles of your shoes in seen as an insult in the Arab world (i.e. the secret Muslim is thumbing his nose at Israel)!

Is this just acceptable collateral damage from an administration that bathes us in images? Or is this a signal that the administration needs to be more cautious about the POTUS’ presentation of self?

and I’m not sure how I feel.

With apologies to REM and to Bill Paxson in Aliens “It’s all over man!”  No more stodgy tweed-jacket with the patches lectures! It’s gonna be quick jump-cuts and machine gun guitar solos! Whoooo! Don Tapscott says so:

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

I take a backseat to no-one in my pedagogical “web utopianism.” Just in the past year I’ve used blogs, wikis, twitter, diigo, ning, slide rocket, netvibes, and any other Web 2.0 tool I don’t have to pay for. All this in the service of the “engaged classroom.” And when it’s good, it’s good. Students take control of their learning and blow me away with what they produce. But when it’s bad…look out!

But to me the more vexing question is whether we’re losing something profound when we lose an appreciation for the art of the lecture. I had a class this past semester where students had to sit through a lecture beforehand and to a person they came in jokingly desiring to “kill themselves” after having to sit through such drudgery. The faculty, on the other hand, loved it.

Throughout my life, I’ve gotten a lot out of lectures. I subscribe to a number of lecture based podcasts including UChannel and Big Ideas. To me, there is no substitute for someone who has mastered their subject area and can walk you through a topic in 60 or so minutes.

In all of our haste to embrace the learning styles of “digital natives,” we’ve haven’t adequately stopped to reflect upon what doing so means to education in general. For me, I’ve spend a lot of time emphasizing engagement…. but I don’t want to lose the challenge.

Bummer chart of the day….unless you’re in the military, or a devoted misanthrope.  new data from the 2008 General Social Survey shows declining levels of trust for every institution in the United States except for the military and education.

What accounts for this mass scale institutional distrust?  I think Robert Putnam has a book that talks about this stuff 🙂  One way of looking at all this is to weep for civil society and make the Putnam argument that this is evidence of a decline in social capital.  If we all had each other over for dinner, we’d trust each other more and thus trust the public institutions in which we all have a stake.

I think there’s a lot to this, but I’d offer we also this of this cynicism as increased expectations.  As society has become more inured to mass marketing appeals, we’ve become more desirous of more transparency and more effectiveness from our institutions.  This increased demand that our institutions produce more can be damaging int that they may not be designed to produce at a high level (I’m looking at you California government).  But they can also be the result of a sense of greater agency and efficacy amongst the public in general.

We’ve become a high standards people.  That can redound to our benefit if people back up their high expectations with a sense of engagement.  I fear that our “high expectations” culture is devolving into a flabby grousing about corrupt politicians without any real intention of addressing the problem.

HT: Social Capital Blog

A testament to the power of the contact hypothesis:

It could likely be the “big sort” in play….(i.e. people who are more tolerant of gays and lesbians are more likely to live in urban/metro areas so their tolerance has little to do with knowing gays and lesbians). It would be interesting to unpack this one someday 🙂

HT: The Daily Dish

Apologies for the unannounced two week break. Had to do it!

Guess what? Americans are really into TV.

At least according to a new Nielsen survey on television viewing habits.

What’s interesting to me is the increase in the number of people viewing TV via a Digital Video Recording (DVR) device (my preferred viewing option). 80 million people use these devices to watch programs, a 37% increase from the previous year. Personally, I think the DVR is rewiring my brain. I mostly watch sports and documentaries on TV. Instead of tolerating the lulls in a sporting event (i.e. the 46 minutes of a basketball game you need to sit through to get to the final two minutes), I can zip through to the “good stuff.” I watched this past year’s SuperBowl on my DVR with my trusty “30 second skip” button. I didn’t have to sit through one huddle! Soccer? Fast forward until the ball is in the opponent’s attacking half. I call this the squirrel approach to media consumption where we furiously crack open and discard the shell to get to the nut.

What effect must this be having on our students? Why should they read original sources? Imagine Habermas with a 30 second skip! I had a fascinating conversations with my students who were upset that I had them read something “boring.” Their general point was that the author never got to the point. They wanted to know what was relevant from the passage so they could move on to the next nut… pursuit.

I wonder how much of this is affecting academia? Are we divorced from these larger social trends? Or are we reading more and more to “pull out the nut” rather than to be taken in new, unexpected directions from a provocative argument?

(HT: Lifehacker)

From a Pew/CIRCLE study of the 2008 U.S. Electorate via Social Capital Blog.

Not to turn this into a white privilege blog, but… here’s Time’s Mark Halperin’s tease of his take on Obama’s potential Supreme Court nominations.

Ok…I’m not the biggest fan of scanning the blogosphere for poor word choices and labeling it as racist to enhance my own self concept. But what I don’t get is why an otherwise intelligent guy jumps to a framing of the next Supreme Court nomination process as “another instance of screwing over the White guy.” Seriously? How many instances have we had? You do know that of all 108 members of the Supreme Court, 104 have been White males?

So why is the 109th case going to be different? It gets back to this strange presumption that black people are reflexively in-group oriented whereas White people have no such in-group loyalties and are completely free and clear of any race-based bias. This clarity allows them to make dispassioned, merit-based decisions while the rest of use a pernicious “fuzzy logic.”

I think you Sociology folks call this White Privilege.

He’s a political science Ph.D. you know…

From Andrew Sullivan’s Blog

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them,” – George Orwell.

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm,” – George Orwell.

Finding the right path between those two insights is our challenge. Always.

So says Mark Taylor in a New York Times op-ed.

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

His piece questions the efficacy of graduate education, but many of his prescriptions could also be applied to undergraduate programs.  The gist of his concerns is that we’ve tilted so far in our graduate training toward academic specialization that our product has become idiosyncratic, unrewarding, and irrelevant to the larger society. This graduate training spills over to undergraduate teaching by reproducing a structure that keeps academic work in departmental silos. Here are a few of his suggestions for transforming the university:

Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network.

I personally love the use of the complex adaptive network metaphor. Some of my students are working on a project where they would gather our faculty’s research interests, code them and conduct a cluster or network analysis to determine cross-disciplinary commonalities. From there you could create learning communities of faculty and students that could then be linked to similar clusters around the world.

This complex adaptive system approach to developing a curriculum seems to be where our students live. I’ve had 2-3 students inquire about getting a Ph.D. and they all are drawn to interdisciplinary programs. Knowing what I know about the biases in academia, I’ve tried to encourage them to go for more traditional disciplinary-based programs so that they have more flexibility on the academic job market, but to little effect.

I submit that our challenge is that Web 2.0 has stripped from the academy it’s monopoly on knowledge. Young people’s unfettered access to information (of both dubious and stellar quality) places greater demands on the university as an institution to be as flexible as Google in how we organize knowledge and information. When an institution comes to a student with a major checklist or an undergraduate curriculum checklist, an increasingly common response is to see it as an arbitrary set of hoops to jump rather than a carefully considered set of courses. In other words, it looks like Yahoo circa 1996 (i.e. knowledge organized in pre-selected categories).
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Instead, our students expect the academy to have the same customizability, flexibility, and functionality of the Web searches they do everyday.

Which leads me to Taylor’s second prescription:

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed.

I’m inclined to agree with Michael Berube on this one — we should be careful not to conflate department with discipline. People can still operate within the structure of a department and pursue an interdisciplinary agenda (like a political scientist blog hosted by a Sociology association). I think completely untethering academics from disciplinary moorings is probably a bit too extreme and unnecessary in my view. There are some real benefits to being rooted in a “discipline.” You could accomplish Taylor’s goal by increasing the number of joint appointments or developing “programs” or “emphases” that get at the same objectives. Besides, if we abolished departments, what type of evaluation/peer review process would replace it?

Despite these reservations, I think the academy does require a serious rethink in no small part because the nature of idea dissemination has changed so radically. The larger question might be whether we should try to respond in kind or should we take William F. Buckley’s advice for budding conservatives and “stand athwart history yelling stop”!

I’d be curious to hear what others think.

last one today…I promise. Don’t unsubscribe 🙂

What Americans say the need (from Pew via Felix Salmon)

88% need a car? Take that New Urbanists!  What’s more telling about this poll is the decline across the board in the number of people who report “needing things.”  Although, C’mon only 8% of you say you need your Flat Screen TV’s!  Only 4% need Ipods!  Where are our priorities!