I love Apple’s design aesthetic. I see it in the simplicity of their physical and software UIs, although usually not in the baroque nature of their business processes. What frustrates me is the lack of parity among the Apple-born technologies. I don’t just want a good experience on one device, I want it on, between, and among all my Apple devices!

Case in point, a few years ago I submitted a note to Apple suggesting that they had missed the boat by not having the iPhone earphone controller/mic work on their notebook line, too. That is, I wanted to be able to iChat using the iPhone earbuds as my earphones and microphone. Sure enough, the latest MacBook Pro models have that feature. I’m not saying it was me! I’m sure many people had a similar idea, and told Apple about it, and I’m thankful for it. What I am asking is, why didn’t Apple notice it? Are their development efforts so siloed or their release cycles so offset from one another that it’s not possible?

Another, current, case in point: the push for ebooks. I have my iPad (thank you, Steve!) and I loaded iBooks on it. I like it. I like the upgrade even more. And there are more features I expect will come soon. However, it’s frustrating to not have iBooks parity between the iPad (/iPhone/iPod touch) and iTunes on my MacBook.

• on the iPad, I can’t easily manage my collection (gather new books, other than from the iBookstore, (and that’s yet another frustration!), although it’s slowly getting better with the “open in…” capability.
• on my MacBook, in iTunes, I can’t read the ebooks I’ve collected.

Or the jumble that passes for document management in iWorks for the iPad, or for the Notes app on the original iPhone, or… or…

If Apple truly wants devices like the iPad to be devices for everyone, then the user experience on different Apple devices really needs to be in parity from day-zero.

Don’t make me think twice.

Recently, several students commented that I seemed to have a lot of classroom rules. This is an old refrain in my life, and, in a sense, it’s true. However, the rules I have are all just special cases of my basic three rules, which I share on my About Me page.

1. If you are going to break the rules, don’t be obnoxious about it.
• If you can’t be engaged, don’t distract others. It’s unfair to both you and them.
2. Don’t disappoint me.
• Don’t promise to focus, but fail to do so. Instead, acknowledge whatever is distracting you and address it.
3. Be aware.
• Know what questions your classmates are asking.
• Recognize which questions are related to tweaking the solution and which are related to a different problem context.

A full sized version of my rules diagram

I think my biggest failing in the classroom is that I’m uneven in the application of the rules, which is perceived as me being arbitrary. Inconsistency and randomness seem very similar to the outside observer.

I sometimes let feature creep take over the problem statement, which can lead to unintentional complexity or student confusion as the problem changes. I need to spend more time up front specifying the problem completely with students so that it’s clear to them and me what the invariants are.

I also find it difficult to ask a student actually to leave the classroom. I’m forever optimistic that the unfocused student will find moments of clarity and engage with the course material. Often, they do, but unfortunately, while I’m waiting for that to happen, the class as a whole is affected and, generally, material isn’t covered as concisely, clearly, or completely as might have been the case otherwise, thereby disadvantaging the other students who could have gone further, faster. Such is the nature of a set of random people with diverse metacognitive skills and needs. Still, I’m certain that I could serve better both ends of the spectrum.

It strikes me that co-work spaces and coffee shops are similar, but… not. Your typical coffee shop grudgingly offers moderately useful WiFi (can we get rid of the 20 minute timeouts and required “accept terms” pages, please!) and a few power outlets and has yet to figure out what to do with all these individual patrons taking up so much table space for so long. In short: lots of coffee, little access to power or high speed WiFi.

Co-work spaces have more than enough power outlets and Wifi, usually high speed and reliable (if not, find another co-work space!), but very little coffee. People are expected to come in, spend time without buying anything, and slurp all the Internet they can.

Could we have a coffee shop-style chain of co-work shops with space, meeting rooms, power, and WiFi and sell day passes/memberships? What’s the critical population/entrepreneurial density to sustain it?

Clay Shirky posted yesterday about the Collapse of Complex Business Models. In short, businesses add one complexity after another with each new complexity adding value to the system… to a point. Initially, each addition brings with it significant marginal value. But eventually, the value added of a new complexity diminishes to zero or, worse, goes negative. Businesses, the argument goes, can’t adjust to the new reality and resort to the most radical simplification possible: collapse.

I realized almost immediately that I’ve been having a version of this conversation related to educational funding for weeks… years, in fact, but the economic turns of the past 12-24 months have brought the difficulties of how we fund education and research (in an academic setting) to the forefront for me.

At a recent conference, I was speaking with a federal agency program officer about funding opportunities. One of the issues on the table was my home institution’s federally negotiated overhead rate: greater than 50%. In other words, if I were lucky enough to be awarded a 200,000$ grant, only about 90-95,000$ would be passed on to directly support the research, pay participants, provide resources, etc. In addition, out of that 90k$ pool, any faculty member participating in the grant would have to be paid based on a percentage of their current annual salary. For long-standing, experienced researchers, this can amount to 10-20,000$ per person. I think you can see where this math is taking us: there’s a paltry amount left to actually do the research!

Observation 1: as a young researcher trying to establish a research program, I’m simply not competitive when it comes to the larger available grant awards.

Observation 2: for the grants I can be competitive on with respect to skills and outcomes, the complexity of the institutional funding structure means that I can’t produce a budget that would convince a grants review committee that enough of the funds would be going to appropriate research activities.

I wanted him to contradict me, to point me in the direction of available funds that were targeted at young researchers, or to point out some flaw in my reasoning. Instead, he agreed. He had heard it before, had seen these forces in action, and admitted that there was no obvious way through. His suggestion: get the institution to waive or greatly reduce the overhead rate.

I admire his gumption, but it brings me to the second part of the problem: there is no sustainable funding model in American higher education at the moment.We’ve been waiting out the economic downturn, more or less intact, by living off of grants monies and endowments that were in place before the crash. Now, as those begin to run out, institutions have spent their metaphoric savings accounts, but there’s still no improvement on the horizon.

In other words, my home institution is laying off staff and faculty, increasing teaching loads, reducing resource availability, requiring unpaid furlough days, deferring maintenance, and generally cannibalizing itself to keep the doors open. Their incentive to waive what they perceive as free money to the institutional coffers is, essentially, nonexistent. In the long run, it’s cheaper for them to fire young faculty (or never hire them into a tenured position in the first place) than it is to waive overhead on federal grants.

Similar issues can be seen playing out in K-12 education in the U.S. at the moment as districts layoff staff and faculty and close schools while enrollments are up.

Meanwhile, there’s genuinely important work waiting to be done. But maybe I’m just trying to add complexity to an already exhausted system on its way to collapse.

2010 April 03 UPDATE: Apparently, I’m not the only one thinking about these issues this week. Stan Katz has posted an article titled Can We Afford Our State Colleges? at The Chronicle of Higher Education that parallels some of my comments.

According to a recent AAUP report, 68% of all faculty appointments in American colleges and universities are non-tenure track; over 50% are part-time, so-called contingent faculty. I am one of them and, while I love teaching and, by many accounts, am pretty darned good at it, I’m still a part-time employee, subject to chance, and that causes problems both for me and my students.

Contingent faculty include those who are hired to teach on a temporary basis, usually on a semester-to-semester basis. Among other things, this means that we’re only employed for 14 weeks at a time. We’re offered the opportunity to teach a class just a few days or weeks before the class is scheduled to begin. If there is low enrollment or a budget short-fall, the offer can be revoked without warning, and we’re left unemployed for 14 weeks. This happened to me recently when I received the “maybe next term” email. Polite as that email may be, what it really says is, “take (at least) three months off, unpaid, and without benefits”. 50% of American higher education faculty are teaching in fear of that email. Any rational person would understand that such things will have an affect on the teaching that does take place.

Because of the last minute hiring process, I will, almost by definition, not be part of the curriculum development or textbook selection for a course. I’ll also miss the deadlines for requesting software, computing, or other resources for the course, which typically are set 8-10 weeks before classes are scheduled to begin.

Instead, I and many other contingent faculty are left dealing with a curriculum that is new to us, with a textbook that may or may not suit our teaching and classroom styles, and without institutional resources that might benefit our teaching and our students’ learning. We’re expected to do instructional planning on-the-fly and to understand the intended learning outcomes of the course and the relationship of the course to the rest of the curriculum on a plug-and-play basis; we’re a cog in a wheel and can be easily replaced, we’re told in terms both implicit and explicit. It’s no wonder that so many contingent faculty work by trying to stay just a few chapters ahead of their students. It’s no wonder that students notice.

If lucky, one may be on the “short list” of people who might be offered a course. If no permanent faculty member wants to teach the course; and if the course isn’t being used to support a graduate student, who can be paid even less; then you might be offered the course, if the budget permits. This is the very definition of contingent.

Moreover, the job opportunities for contingent faculty are limited by the number of colleges and universities that are within driving distance and that offer courses that one is reasonably qualified to teach. It’s unreasonable to think that someone would pick up their life, their family, and their home to move to a new city for a 14 week appointment or, for that matter, even a year-long appointment, with no chance for stability. Yet that’s how many contingent faculty live.

For their services, contingent faculty are typically compensated $2,000 – $5,000 per course. Working at a large state university, I’m offered $3,000 per course, regardless of the number of students in the class. This has meant that I’ve taught as many as 600 students spread across three courses in one semester for the kingly sum of $9,000, before taxes. That’s $18,000 per year; take home pay: approximately $12,000 per year, from which I’m expected to pay living expenses and, somehow, try to reduce my own student loans.

We’re also the low hanging fruit. When budget cuts are required, we’re the least secure employees with the least bargaining power. It’s convenient to reduce head count, even as it decimates- sometimes literally- course offerings to do so.

But we do it. We do it because we love teaching. We do it because we love working with students, and learning, and knowledge.

The reality, I believe, is that it affects us. It diminishes us each time we’re told that we have to provide our own paper and our own chalk. It diminishes us when we have to tell students that we can’t be their advisors because we’re not on the permanent faculty. It diminishes us as we struggle to do the thing we love and pay our bills, too.

In every way that being contingent affects us, it affects our students, as well. We’re stretched thin: we either don’t have or must share an office on campus in which to meet with students; we’re less engaged with campus life, because we’re rushing off to our next paying gig; we’re less available and less plugged in, and our students notice.

But, to borrow a phrase from General George S. Patton, “God help me, I do love it so”.

So, What Do We Do About It?

These are not new problems, but they haven’t been solved. In the current economy, it’s critical to address these issues as institutions cut budgets and scale back faculty. It seems to me that there are three categories of possible solutions: tenure, reality, and the unknown.

We could re-embrace the tenure model and immediately begin hiring contingent faculty into tenure-track positions, effectively reversing the trend toward contingency-as-the-norm. There are serious issues with tenure, however, that are well articulated elsewhere: it’s a long, difficult process to which not all academics want to subject themselves; it imposes long-term financial and cultural burdens on departments and institutions; and it hasn’t lived up to its promise of ensuring academic freedom; to name a few. At many institutions, tenure involves an evaluation not only of ones teaching, but also ones research and publications track record and community service; all proxies for the value one brings to the intellectual life of the institution, the discipline, and society at large. It’s likely that many contingent faculty would not want to compete in all of these areas.

Alternatively, we could acknowledge the shift in our culture from life-long employment toward a more mobile workforce and redesign our institutions, processes, and expectations to match.

• Our campus resources (information technology, administrative support, etc.) could address contingent faculty needs more aggressively, reaching out to and supporting last minute hires as a matter of course, rather than viewing them as temporary annoyances to be ignored. For years, I could not authorize my notebook computer for use in my own classroom for use during lectures, because I wasn’t on the permanent faculty.
• Institutions could ensure a living wage for contingent faculty.
• Institutions could adopt longer-term contracts (say, a few years, with the possibility for renewal) to promote stability, institutional identity, and synergistic benefits to both the institution and the individual. Teaching-track positions are one way this facet is being addressed, although too few institutions are embracing this, so far.
• We could encourage contingent faculty to bring their own course designs with them to our institutions. Many contingent faculty have courses they would love to teach, but since they’re not part of the curriculum design process, those courses will never be offered. I’ve personally been told by top-level administrators that, if I want my course designs to see the light of day, I should remove my name and put a permanent faculty member’s name on the proposal. Intellectual dishonesty apparently knows no bounds.
• Publishers could remove institution-oriented policies for obtaining review copies of textbooks (requiring an institutional office address for shipment, e.g.). Additionally, reduce the time it takes to get a desk copy (usually it takes a couple of weeks to receive the instructor copy of a textbook that has been adopted for classroom use).
• We could, as a society, shift from employer-based health insurance and pensions to portable instruments that are employee-based. As it stands, contingent faculty have to re-qualify for health insurance with each new institution and, sometimes, with each new semester, enduring the waiting period before coverage begins each time. Contingent faculty are often required to pay into pension plans in which they have no hope of ever vesting. Since contingent faculty are often considered part time employees, it could take 10-20 years of continuous service to vest!

Finally, there are the great unknown options; at least, unknown to me! The ideas I haven’t thought of, haven’t heard about, and so haven’t considered. I’m open to new ideas and encourage lively debate on how we can meet the needs of institutions, faculty, and students.

This image represents the frequency of tags I’ve used to bookmark resources using Delicious.com, a social bookmarking service that allows you (and others) to access your bookmarks from any web-connected computer. It was created using Wordle.net, an interesting visualization tool that will let you feed it a word list, a URL, or a delicious username in order to generate a tag cloud like this. Larger words represent tags used with greater frequency. Since I started using Delicious.com to share links with my students, the map is weighted in favor of course- and programming-related terms.

Click to see a larger version

Every once in a while, I manage to say something that resonates with people. They come up to me some time later or send me email and riff on how what I said inspired them in some way. Here are a few of the phrases that people accuse me of having uttered that they’ve felt compelled to comment on.

• “At least this won’t affect me” should never be uttered to justify a failure to stand on principle.
• If you have shallow questions, then shallow answers suffice.
• It’s a crime that laws, conceived in order to ensure an abundance of creativity and creation, are now used to enforce an artifical scarcity.
• Expect students to act ‘as’ professionals, rather than ‘like’ professionals, and amazing things WILL happen.
• We should ‘expect’ our students to engage, not ‘allow’ them to. A teacher believing that ‘allowing’ students to do anything is the first step to good education is a sure sign of the end of good education.
• Sometimes the most effective way to teach is to step aside and get out of the way of students’ learning!
• I am altogether too frequently reminded of the many people who think ‘teaching’ is about the teacher… they’re wrong, of course.
• We forget that it’s not about what we know is right, but rather what we know right now.
• abide not willful ignorance
  embrace silliness
  and have the wisdom to tell the difference
• of knowledge I can say only this:
  I found nothing I was looking for,
  but more than I dreamed possible.
• We teach students about answers, and so they think that the discipline is about answers. However, answers are easy to come by, once you’ve got a good question and reasonable methods. Good questions are difficult to come by and are the core of what we do. We need to teach people how to find good questions.

I often begin reasoning from first principles of which I may not initially be aware; they unfold to me as I explain my thinking over minutes, days, and weeks. I don’t see this as a matter for concern. I follow in the step of many writers who have expressed the idea that they learn what they think as they write and re-write it.

However, this can lead to the impression that I’m not trying to be precise or decisive. Quite the opposite is true. My willingness to continue refining my thoughts, often times in private and slowly, is just that: my attempt to be both precise and decisive, albeit in the face of imperfect information.

How can any of us claim to be honestly engaged in conversation if we’re unwilling or unable to refine our thoughts?

I’ve been inspired by a recent reminder of the old story about Hemingway and how he was asked to write a complete novel in only six words. I immediately began thinking about how I could distill advice to educators down to just six words. What can you say about assessment (as opposed to grading), instructional design, program evaluation, classroom management, and so on in just six words?

My first shot: Don’t solve problems students don’t have.

What six-word guidance do you have for educational best practices?