In the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article on outsourced grading to India, Singapore, and Malaysia is causing controversy. Academics and others are chiming in on the issue, with many deriding the practice, some claiming that it’s a “scam” and others defending the practice.

Even if the “quality” issue were settled, I get a sense that many would still balk at the practice. In a sense, isn’t outsourcing grading and providing feedback on papers an outsourcing of what should be a core competency of an institution? Although, try this on. With the advent of assessment fever that can result in rubrics that specify (a) what is expected of the students, (b) the criteria with which they will be evaluated, and (c) the metrics that comprise a grade, isn’t the grading and feedback just a simple matter of execution? That is, the heavy lifting and the value-added is in the rubric, not the labour?

I’m not so sure. In some contexts, having someone very familiar with the material and the classroom interactions doing the grading makes a lot of sense. I will say that I think that in certain other contexts, the use of outsourced grading doesn’t compromise quality. In fact, it may actually increase quality in some settings, as I’ve seen shockingly bad feedback, memos, and letters—written not by grad. students, but by faculty. When I was a TA for an MBA Global Business course, I checked the math of students calculating exchange rate agios and applying various formulae. If this were outsourced, I don’t think this would be a travesty.

Here’s the experience at a rural California community college in the sparsely populated west San Joaquín Valley::

“Acceptance has been a little easier at West Hills Community College, in Coalinga, Calif., which turned to Virtual-TA to help some students in its online classes get more feedback than instructors for such classes have typically offered. The service is used for one section each of three online courses—criminal justice, sociology, and basic math. Instructors can use it for three to five assignments of their choice per student…The feedback from Virtual-TA seems to make the difference between a student’s remaining in an online course and dropping out.”

Should there be policies on who does what in higher education? Not just the grading, but on who does the teaching? I think there needs to be more transparency and more information provided about the delivery of education. What should be guiding these decisions from an institutional or policy perspective is how costs and efficiencies are being balanced with the value-added experience of higher education. I think distance learning and online programmes will test the limits of how the educational experience should be defined.

Those in higher education should watch how these issues evolve, as it’s showing how labour dynamics of skilled work are being addressed in a globalized world of supply, demand, cost efficiencies, and values.

Twitterversion:: Should outsourcing of higher education overseas be regulated? Cost efficiencies need to be contextualized in the value-added experience. @Prof_K

Song:: M.I.A.-‘Paper Planes’

José has a great post on privacy, Privacy Schmivacy, which highlighted how algorithms can infer information about you rendering privacy settings in a certain context obsolete. The implication is the public-private divide and as José aptly puts it::

“This poses a paradox…if people freely give this information to a web site in exchange for the pleasures of friendship/connection, then are we obliged to regulate how the information is used by others? Isn’t a central element of connection the fact that you’re ‘putting yourself out there’ in public. Being public poses risks. Can we have the pleasures of the public with the protections of the private?”

I’ve been following developments on the semantic web, Web 3.0, which is all over the personal information and data about us that’s out there and can be used, as in Facebook profiles, and computers talking to computers to anticipate our needs. Ideally, it’s a benign Skynet from the Terminator movies.

While there have been discussions of a privacy ontology, this one from way back in 2002, the sticky wicket is that most users don’t understand the ramifications of using sites as we move towards the semantic web. For example, last July, Facebook’s algorithms were tweaked to be able to scour your contacts in your address book. You can opt out of this, but what about all the address books that you’re in? I’ve noticed that one’s Facebook friends list could construct one’s social graph for quite some time now, so I’m not surprised that social networks and profiling of users under lockdown can be done so readily and relatively accurately. That said, I think that users need to be more aware of the risks of engaging social media and not be lulled into a false sense of privacy. In terms of policy, I think more can and should be done to {a} limit what information is accessible and {b} companies and organizations need to be more up-front about what information is accessible and to whom, along with the ramifications of this. I firmly believe there is a knowledge gap between what users know and the reality of privacy on the web.

Should there be more regulation or more strict privacy policies by companies and organizations? I think that’s an interesting question. The stakes are the benefits of interacting with your identity, but the risks are the use of that information constructing that very identity. My initial reaction is no, but with a twist. I think there needs to be more information presented to users in lay language on the implications of using social media as the contextual web becomes more ubiquitous.

A more interesting issue, to me, isn’t the privacy issue, but how the semantic web can alter the social world and policy, which encompasses privacy and the nature of data in everyday life. One area in particular is what I see as an intrusion of the economic sphere on the personal through the use of data::

• Should your employer be privy to your credit rating or driving record?
• Should they be allowed to use public information about you {from databases or on social networking sites} as a condition of employment?
• Where does one’s role as a employee end and a private citizen begin? In other words, is speech less-than-free if you want to keep your job?

You can pose similar questions regarding the intersections of the personal and the political, the social, etc., with the main point being that these intersections are altering our everyday lives.

The semantic web is the churlish love child of Foucault’s surveillance and Derrida’s deconstruction.

Twitterversion:: Will the semantic web destroy privacy, given current policies & trends? How will it affect everyday life? #ThickCulture

Song:: Camera Obscura, ‘I Don’t Do Crowds’

Erik Hayden at Miller McCune links to a study done Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
that reveals how easy it is to create a profile of you from your Facebook contacts. Using alogrithmic magic, the team was able to create profiles for thousands of students at Rice from their profiles and the profiles of those they had “friended.”

the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that “with as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy.

Hayden sees this as a problem:

Not to seem alarmist (“privacy” on the Web has always been overrated), but if these researchers could develop a limited algorithm that can infer rudimentary attributes off locked profiles, the possibilities seem endless for others to harness advanced software that could render current privacy controls completely useless.

This poses a paradox…if people freely give this information to a web site in exchange for the pleasures of friendship/connection, then are we obliged to regulate how the information is used by others? Isn’t a central element of connection the fact that you’re “putting yourself out there” in public. Being public poses risks. Can we have the pleasures of the public with the protections of the private?

Should higher education be thought of as a public infrastructure?

While in many European countries, higher education was often treated as a public good, a market ideology is increasingly being allowed to allocate access to it. The rationale is that higher education is well-suited to market mechanisms. It’s scarce, not everyone wants it, and is often available at a price. Recent trends towards market capitalism and neoliberal economics have globally hastened the transition towards a market-based view of education. Is this a good thing? Are there market failures?

First, there are political pressures in many countries to reduce public expenditures in higher education. Exploring configurations of public-private funding makes sense. In terms of market failures, or potential failures, one big issue with respect to higher education is the uncertainty of outputs. Higher education offers no express guarantees or warranties. One of its characteristics is that it has “credence qualities”, i.e., those which are hard to gauge even after purchase. Many services have credence qualities, such as consulting or legal or medical advice.

While assessment tries to address this quality issue, Mark Granovetter’s work on embeddedness shows that auditing functions are often subject to social and political forces. In a sense, assessment is really only as good as the localized culture.

Impacting the quality issue are market forces. Higher education institutions compete for students and there is a upward limit on price. The “business” of higher education tries to increase efficiencies to lower costs, by increasing “productivity” {e.g., larger class sizes} or utilizing part-time labour, graduate students, or lower-wage online instructors. The Nordic experience is one where national quality assurance agencies allow universities to develop their own quality initiatives, factoring in the multidimensional nature of quality and institutional contexts. The result is a diversity of approaches that allows flexibility, but also has sanctions for non-compliance.

I think one of the worst places for higher education to be is having an identity crisis with factions supporting radically different views. Teaching versus research can be a dichotomy, but I’ve also seen institutions struggle over going from having regional status versus national status, i.e., “we want to be great.”

Twitterversion:: Higher education & regulation.Does market ideology & the “business model” clash w/quality & accountability?#ThickCulture http://url.ie/5o75 @Prof_K

Song:: Bishop Allen-‘Charm School’

The Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is currently under fire from some by renewing a tradition ignored by his Democrat predecessors by declaring April as Confederate History Month. Ah, perhaps someone will take a droll jab with a T.S. Eliot reference to April being the cruelest month .

My take is on this is what’s the Governor’s approach to recognizing Confederate history? It is a celebration or a sober reflection? If one thinks about it, the month could be coöpted by those with a less celebratory take on that era.

It was about a year ago, I was working on a project and in the background, this “odd” documentary came on IFC. Odd, in that I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It happened to be the 2004 “mocumentary”, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. It was a tongue-in-cheek early 2000s look at what if the South won the Civil War, told from an outside British perspective. The idea is that the film was so controversial, it was banned. Now {in 2004}, the ban was lifted and can be shown on network television, with more Confederacy satire. Not surprisingly, the Weinstein Company had a hand in this Kevin Wilmott film {part 1 of 9}::

Parts 2-9 are on YouTube and the DVD is available at Amazon.

Not to get all postmodern, but this is an example of how the metanarrative is dead. While there may be power in the term of “Confederacy” and its iconography, ultimately that meaning is up for grabs and can be contested and subverted. Although, it also matters in how symbols are used, e.g., to intimidate or alienate, which is a whole different Oprah.

Twitterversion:: VA Governor declares Apr. as Confederate History Month—controversy ensues.Is this a matter of perspective? #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: Luda-‘Welcome to Atlanta’ {I still think Jermaine Dupri sounds like a bit like Urkel}

Should higher education be regulated?

If someone were to ask me this question in 1990, I would have said, “absolutely not.” I was an undergraduate in business and economics and self-regulation as a preventative measure to regulation was the code of the day. Regulation creeps in when there are market failures.

Fast forward fifteen years and I had a dean who was making a big deal out of regional accreditation, stating that without it, the Federal government might step in to regulate the higher education industry. This was in an era between Enron and the subprime mortgage meltdown and I wasn’t so sure about self-regulation in higher education. Why? Over the past few years, I’ve thought about higher education as an institution with multiple stakeholders. The university not just a place to get a degree or obtain pre-professional skills, but a site of lifelong learning that’s integrated into a larger local and regional community. In light of this, I’ve thought about how distance learning factors in the mix and have seen these and “industrial park” programmes pass for higher education that are suspect at best. I began to wonder if the higher-education model may be broken? I’m not sure I’ll go that far, but I have concerns about the value-added and the shift of higher education towards being a business. Given this, I’ve been wondering if there should be some standards in place and who should develop them?

I’m not interested in a standardization of education or a regulatory body making curricular decisions, but one of the things that can make a university a unique place for developing and disseminating ideas is a sense of community that’s embedded within an organizational culture. I get a sense that many institutions of higher education are struggling with how to remain relevant and viable, in light of looming global and domestic competition for students. Perhaps a good first step is to develop guidelines with respect to channel {mode of instruction}, structure {organizational}, and governance {decision-making} in light of all of the stakeholders. The question remains is who should develop this? Accrediting bodies, which are comprised of member universities, or the government?

When I was at the University of Oregon, the doctoral students gathered around regularly, shared a beer, and discussed what they were working on or challenges in the classroom {we taught independent preps of undergraduate courses}. I now realize that that type of “community” is quite rare and The Chronicle of Higher Education has hundreds of articles on the solitary toil of the academic. Is community the answer and can community help to restructure or regulate higher education?

Twitterversion:: Should higher ed. be regulated in light of distance learning & industrial park programmes? Does academic community matter? @Prof_K

Song:: Steely Dan-‘My Old School’

In an interesting turn of events, Comcast won a court battle to thwart regulation that’s paving the way for the FCC to respond in a way to increase regulation. This all stems from a court case where in 2007, Comcast “throttled” its users by blocking access to filesharing service BitTorrent. Net neutrality, which is supported by companies who rely on the Internet for business, such as Google and Amazon, is the absence of such throttling. Wearetheweb is an activist group fighting for net neutrality. The FCC stepped in, using the doctrine of “common carriers”, i.e., networks used for the public good. The broadband providers argue that they’re the ones spending billions on the infrastructure and therefore should be able to manage their systems in a manner they see fit. Comcast argued that the FCC rules had no teeth and are not the same as law, therefore the FCC order to stop throttling was illegal. The FCC has two courses of action at its disposal::

1. Request Congress to give it explicit authority to regulate broadband.
2. Appeal today’s decision.

Ben Scott, policy director for the public interest group, Free Press, noted::

“Comcast swung an ax at the FCC to protest the BitTorrent order…And they sliced right through the FCC’s arm and plunged the ax into their own back.”

Companies and industries tend to bend over backwards to regulate themselves to some extent or another, in order to thwart regulation. I find Comcast’s war with the FCC to be poor strategy and adding fuel to the fire of consumer dissatisfaction with telcos and broadband providers. This court case paves the way for the FCC to up the ante and given the FCC and the Obama administration support net neutrality.

As for Derveaux, here’s more on her story.

Twitterversion:: FCC loses case on net neutrality against Comcast, but will this just cause them to reclassify broadband? Possible strategic Comcast #fail. @Prof_K

Song:: Manish-‘Series of Tubes {Net Neutrality Dance Mix}

I read several articles about a Tory surge in the polls in the UK, but this Guardian article says it might be overplayed. Brown dissolved Parliament and an election has been set for 6 May, a mercifully short election season, when compared to the US. Labour, in power since 1997, back in the heady days when Tony Blair was the face of a new Labour party, ending the 18-year run of the Conservatives. I’ve read that after 18 years in power, the tories were in disarray and parallels have been drawn between the Thatcher-Major era and W’s 2000-2008 presidencies.

Labour is saddled with a sagging UK economy and the public is tired of politicians and being perceived as an outsider will be beneficial. The economy is the major issue, although immigration, unemployment, and the deficit are also issues voters care about. The overall voting intent paints a grim picture, but the election will hinge upon what happens in the ridings and which party gets a majority of seats::

If no party gets a majority, the result will be a hung parliament and parties working in coalitions, which some say makes investors uneasy and can make enacting economy-fixing policy difficult. This article echoes these sentiments and interprets the polls as pointing to a hung Parliament.

The expectation is the election to be hotly contested and there will be American-style televised debates for the first time. There will be three themed debates in different parts of the country. Frontrunners typically eschew elections. Since Labour is behind in the polls, allowing debates may allow Labour to redefine itself and come across as “outsiders” out to reform government. The scuttlebutt says that Conservative Leader, David Cameron, has a winsome manner in the spirit of Blair, with a message of compassionate conservatism. {The Conservatives have tried to shed the reputation of being “nasty” and have embraced gays, women, and ethnic minoriries, at least at the surface.} Brown has the reputation of being scholarly and a tad dry. This may remind Canadians of Stéphane Dion, the immediate-past Liberal Leader.

Without digging deep into the poll numbers, my 40,000′ take is the winner will be the party who appears most credible with the economy. The financial crisis stung the UK and rank-and-file workers are still fuming about “fat cats”. Given this, a Keynesian approach {addressing unemployment} in concert with finance reform should give Labour quite a bit of mileage. Both the Labour and Conservative parties supports involvement in Afghanistan, which may be increasingly tough sells, given domestic spending and deficit concerns.

Update {6 April 2010, 6:10PM EDT}:: My blog post on rhizomicon has video clips of PMQs, where Cameron and Brown are going toe-to-toe in a Q&A.

Twitterversion:: @gordonbrown’s Labour {UK}, in for a fight with upcoming elections against David Cameron’s @conservatives. #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: George Michael-‘Shoot the Dog’ {2002}, backstory here.

The NYT’s Bits blog introduces us to unvarnished, a site where you can “review” another person anonymously.

Here is how it works. For now, you must be invited by an existing user, and to formally register, you must first write a review of that person. Any member can review any other member, and if someone does not have a profile on the site, you can create one for them without their permission.

The person being reviewed has very little control over what is written; they cannot delete a review, but can offer a written response, or perhaps ask their friends to contribute more positive portrayals.

Facebook has a similar application called Honesty Box that allows you to leave anonymous assessments of those with a facebook page. I guess this application brings the scathing critque “straight to you”!

My initial impression is that no good can come of this. It does raise the question how we perceive our digital obligations onlines. Ilana Gershon gave a great talk at the MaCarthur Foundation’s 2010  Digital Media and Learning conference I attended last month in San Diego.  Her talk was called “Keepin’ It Real: Facebook’s Honesty Box & African-American Verbal Artistry.” The gist of the talk was that there were key differences in how White and Black students viewed “honesty box.” While White students Many white students saw the app as an unwelcomed opportunity to “say mean things” while African American students preferred to know if people out there had negative assessments about them.

While I haven’t read the paper, it brings up an interesting puzzle for me.  Should I confront negative assessments of me on the part of anonymous others.  For example, before this post, I had no idea if I am on Rate my Professor.com.  I didn’t want to know.  But since I was writing this post, I went on anyway and got this:

a really stand up prof! used the book a little but the majority of the work was online. he is funny and can ignite class discussions that make going to class a joy. go to this class and feel free to voice your opinions. marichal is one of the best teachers at cal lutheran.

Whew! So far so good. But then I also got this.

he never followed the syllabus so it was insanely confusing! He made it sound like we were going to cover all kinds of relevant current events, but we stayed on one topic for almost 6 weeks. By the add/drop dealine, there were NO grades in the gradebook. We were let out of class late everyday.

Ouch! But here’s the thing…is the anonymity liberating students to be authentic and thus confront me with at the very least a valuable perspective on my strengths and shortcomings or is the anonymity a unwelcomed invitation to “be mean.” If the web affords us these venues to give unsolicited and unattributable assessments of others, then how should we be in these venues? Do we give them over to spiteful nastiness? Do we try to steer them towards “authentic” critique?

So a side hobby of mine is trying to figure out what this President Obama guy is up to politically.  I might be proven wrong, but I have a strange sense about this president’ political skills, backed up with very little empirical evidence (health care notwihtstanding).  These is something unique and mercurial about his political style than I think is an outlier in studying trends in American politics.  Maybe it’s his mixed-race, multicutlral background or his age or his intellect, maybe it was David Plouffe, amybe it was the Internet but I have a sense that this fall isn’t going to go as my political science brain tells me it should, with big off year gains for the Republicans.  So I’ll go out on a limb and say that the Dems lose fewer than 10 seats in the House this fall. 

All I’m saying is, anybody who can reference a song which contain lyrics that say “If you’re feeling like a pimp, …go on brush your shoulders off” and make it work is playing a different game than the rest of Washington.

The problematic lyrics notwithstanding…it is a meme in his approach to opponents. What I get from his first year and a half in office is that he’s happy for the opposition to get all exercised about socialism and death panels and the like while he waits to expend his political capital when it really counts, like two weeks before a vote on health care. Play it cool, recognize that you’re in charge and strike carefully and methodically. He’s the first hip-hop president and it might work for him.

Here’s a good example, Ezra Klein. is puzzled as to why the administration is opening up offshore drilling opportunities in the face of its own environmental interest groups. Frankly I am too….is he “feathering the bed” for a big victory on cap and trade? What about immigration? Is he going to act on this to energize the Latino base? Whatever he does, he’s going to let his opposition get all angered and annoyed at the “government takeover” of something or another and slowly build the coalition necessary to get things done. He’s playing another game, or as Jay Z would say —

“I’m not a business man. I’m a business. Man! Let me handle my business, damn!”