Central blog for all Marlboro College Graduate School program blogs
APLU report cover
“Unprecedented Study Offers Institutions Guidance for Continued Growth of Online Learning
August 31, 2009 – More than one-third of public university faculty have taught an online course while more than one-half have recommended an online course to students, according to an unprecedented study of administrative and faculty views toward online learning released today by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities-Sloan National Commission on Online Learning.”
Just a note that we’re adding our best resources on the web to our links list, see below right.
As I don’t doubt that I’m just sending this blog into the (relatively silent) universe, I’ll use this opportunity to do a shameless plug for the Grad School. This past Thursday and Friday, Caleb Clark, the MAT program director, and I went to the VITA-Learn Vermont Fest 09 conference in Killington. It was a very cool event. I’ll mention at this point that going to events is not as much fun as one might believe. Often they entail standing for a long time and speaking over a general din about your offerings with people who may actually be interested or just feel guilty about walking up to the table for the sole purpose of grabbing a piece of chocolate.
The VTFest was much better. Realizing that most people were not milling about the various tables but actually in the workshops provided (which were excellent), I ventured into said workshops as well, along with Caleb. Being a child of the 80’s, I remember the “Crisis in Education” that we faced as a nation with the rise of Japan and Europe to challenge the US and our schools not being up to said challenge. Those days are not, nor will they ever be, so far behind us that we needn’t be vigilant about the quality of education we are giving American students. That said, I became very excited at what is being done; even here in the tiny state of Vermont (pop. 621,000).
And who is leading this excellence (prepare for aforementioned “shameless plug”)? Yes, Marlboro GradSchool alumni were well represented at VITA-Learn this year. I saw many of our students walking around and met some I didn’t know previously (gimme a break, I’ve only been here for 2 of the school’s 12 years). Moreover, Lucie deLaBruere, an alumna, won the Frank Watson award for ed tech. It was awesome. Check out Lucie’s site.
If you want to get involved, you know where to find me.
Interesting debate brewing as Online Education gather’s steam, and thus money.
Here’s two snipits, one from Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Inititive and one from a Chronicle story with opinions from the “father of online learning,” A. Frank Mayadas.
“The U.S. Department of Education is currently engaged in the process of creating plans for the future of education in America. As part of this process, it is working with leaders in the field to develop a National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) “to provide a vision for how information and communication technologies can help transform American education.” – Source: Open Learning Inititive
Vs
Chronicle Story
When the smoke clears, I think a form of blended learning will emerge as the most effective way to teach “online,” just as we do at the Graduate School here. I see perhaps a in-person meeting for people to meet, followed by regular synchronous online meetings once a week or so for presentations, help sessions or office hours to keep people from drifting away and in-person meetings with sub-groups who live close to each other for study sessions at cafes and libraries. I also see activities such as facilities tours, museum outings and hiking as being very valuable in terms of keeping students engaged. Then perhaps a mid-class in-person meeting, and an ending meeting with presentations.
I was reading an article on TechCrunch that was about a conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The topic was the future of search. Search is the (almost literal) key to finding what you wish to find online. During the conversation, Mr. Google talked about the challenges of trying to create a technology that intuits the desired information of the user. The challenge is made more difficult as the amount of information that is available online continues to increase. More than a needle in a haystack, it’s a specific piece of hay in an ever-growing haystack (not my most elegant metaphor – sue me).
I’m a huge fan of short stories. This passion largely started when I was in University and found Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinean author. If you haven’t read him, do yourself a favor and read the short stories The Garden of Forking Paths, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Lottery in Babylon, Funes the Memorious, and (most relevant to this post) The Library of Babel.
SPOILER ALERT
In the Library of Babel, Borges describes a library that seems infinite but is finite. The library is composed of hexagonal rooms in which two walls lead to hallways with spiral staircases up or down to the next level as well as a continuing to adjacent rooms and the other four walls are filled with shelves (the same number per wall), with the same number of books on each shelf, and with each book having the same number of pages, 410. To go further, each page has the same number of spaces, both vertically and horizontally, and each space can be filled with one of the letters, a space, a comma, or a period. The library contains all the possible permutations, without repeat, of those parameters. People live in this library and they live with the knowledge that, somewhere in that library is a book that tells them their future, past, possibilities, and impossibilities. Not only theirs, but everyone’s. Some try to find their story. Some destroy the books in rage and spite. Some jump through the open vents that run through the center of each room; never hitting ground. It is like Tantalus – knowing that what you want is there but that you must wade through a googolplex randomly generated letters to get to the one piece of information for which you seek – and most likely never finding it.
Written in 1941, it seems prophetic.
I once read a legend about Thor. Yes, that Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, who, along with Loki, was challenged to a number of contests by this king (we’ll call him “Bill”*). The king, Bill, challenged Thor to a foot race but used his magic to make Thor’s challenger the embodiment of Thought, which can’t be outrun. Thor was also challenged to a drinking contest and, although he can put a few down, he lost because that wily king had attached the sea to the bottom of the horn from which Thor drank, and he couldn’t empty the sea (although this became the origin story for tides). Nifty stories, I know. But the one I liked best was when Loki was challenged to an eating contest and the king had made the challenger the embodiment of wildfire, which ate everything including the trough holding the food, before Loki had really started.
This last one is the one that sticks and I see it as a possible metaphor for Google.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to get all “Google is the Beast of Revelations” or anything. Actually, Google is doing some really cool stuff. What I mean by the story is that, having been looking more closely at Google Wave, I see a real potential for it to consume so many different elements of the internet experience: email, chat, collaborative tools, photo-sharing, social networking, forums, learning management systems, blah blah blah. It is both really exciting and kind of terrifying. What will it mean for the user? Certainly, greater convenience. But the management of so much information will require a new way of searching and securing and thinking and reading and writing and seeing…
I think that it will be the future. Open source, free, dynamic, all-encompassing (even Mozilla is supposedly responding with a new product that will be similar-ish, called Raindrop), but it is that “all-encompass-ment” that makes me nervous. I think the title of the poem by Stevie Smith says a lot, “Not waving but drowning.”
*The king’s name was actually Útgarða-Loki, but Bill is easier.
MBA Faculty Guest Blog: “Sustainability MBA Is Not an Oxymoron” (by John Ehrenfeld)
Republished from http://www.johnehrenfeld.com/index.shtml
I have just returned from a weekend participating in the Marlboro College MBA in Managing for Sustainability program. It was a rich and rewarding experience, reminding me of my past experience at The Bainbridge Graduate Institute which offers a similar program. These two programs and a handful of others carry the mission to transform business as the creator, not destroyer of sustainability. An ambitious goal, but a critical one. The students at Marlboro and now at many other schools of business are joining hands within Net Impact which calls itself “a global network of leaders who are changing the world through business.” I addressed these group at the Ross School at the University of Michigan earlier this year and was very impressed with their seriousness and energy.
The Marlboro program is just a couple of years old and will be admitting its third cohort of students very soon. Like its peers it has started by bringing in adjunct teachers like me to supplement a small core of permanent faculty. Roger Saillant, one of the others working this last weekend, has just been named to head the Fowler Center for Sustainable Values at the Weatherhead Business School. During the weekend, I joined an exercise to help shape the school’s brand. The unique spirit of entrepreneurialism and concern for the world that permeates Vermont industry has played a key role in their development.
In addition to giving the students a sound foundation in how to manage along traditional lines, the curriculum adds pieces to challenge the conventional roles of business and build transformational leadership capabilities. Every day of the 3-day intensive begins and ends with a circle designed to build and enrich the community of students, faculty, and other participants. Given the unusual group of students and others who have come to Marlboro and its peers, the conversation in the circle is moving and inspirational.
Sustainability pervades the courses, instigating itself from strategy to accounting and finance. That’s very positive, but not without some problems. Sustainability, the word and concept, has yet to settle into a well understood and accepted meaning. When it is as present as it is at Marlboro, this situation can lead to confusion and cognitive dissonance, and create lots of diversion away from the main task of learning. It can also become a a strength by revealing its multiple personalities and contested nature and by exploring it explicitly. For me, sustainability follows two main streams. One springs from the recognition that we are living in an unsupportable way, using up the human and “natural” resources at a pace that exceeds the sustainable yield from the global system. I use scare quotes to call attention to the common usage that separates humans from the natural system of which we are a part when we talk about the shape of the world. This is one of the roots of unsustainability. In this mode, greening, sustainable development and other labels generally speak to maintaining our present cultural bases, but acting in ways that diminish our impacts and may even restore damaged goods. I usually refer to this conversation as reducing unsustainability.
The other branch refers to sustainability as some form of emergence from our complex, living, global system. In this sense, sustainability is the capacity of the Earth’s system to bring forth and maintain qualities we all want or need to survive. Basic is the property of life itself, that mysterious property that has come forth from the relationships present at some critical evolutionary moment. As we have become civilized, humans have added other essential properties, like freedom or justice, as important properties that define our species. I put all these together under the normative rubric of flourishing.
It is critical not to see these two branches as oppositional. We must move along both. Greenin as representing the first meaning, is critical to restore the mechanics of the human and natural systems both of which are badly out of kilter. At the same time we need to follow the second path and move toward realizing the vision of flourishing. The second is, in many ways, more difficult and challenging that the first. We have been striving for flourishing ever since we had language to express what we mean, but have never quite gotten there. We have experimented with many forms of social life and flourished only in brief periods in our species history. So we still have to seek alternative guides for our cultural life.
Most of our inventiveness is being expended towards the other end, to green our practices and reduce the deterioration everywhere. This leaves little resources and intention for the other branch. We need as many (or even more) efforts and experiments to find restorative cultures and sustainability as flourishing as we need to halt the present patterns of unsustainability. One place to start, among many, is to make these distinctions explicit in schools of business and elsewhere and clear up the fuzziness and confusion around the goals of transformation. Students need to leave with commitments to green and to transform business. The first of these two can spring from the present base of theories and practices that constitute today’s business, but the second requires a new vision of what business is and does. It may and I believe will take more than transforming business. The whole of our cultural beliefs, values, and institutions need a critical reexamination and a new design. Given the power and capabilities of the institution of business, it can and must play an important, maybe the key, role in the transformation.
<!–[read more] –>Posted on October 12, 2009 8:58 PM
by Ralph Meima, MBA Program Director
J.R.R. Tolkien’s elves treasured woods in mystical and practical ways. Peter Jackson captures their reverence in his first Lord of the Rings movie, when the heroes traverse the forest of Lothlórien and ultimately reach the city/grove of Caras Galadhon, deep in the region named the Naith.
Through an accident of history, technology, and the global power balance, here in Brattleboro we live surrounded by forests. In our busy lives, many of us take them for granted. A century ago, however, almost all of them had been cut back to the highest ridges and narrowest valleys, replaced by open crop and pasture land. Old photos of Windham County depict this.
It wasn’t that long ago. It was when the vast majority of our food, feed, fuel, and fiber (the “Four F’s”) came from local sources. In 1900, Vermont’s population topped 343,000. About 85% of the landscape had been deforested to support that population plus nearby states with less productive land per person. Then, the sheep moved to New Zealand and Australia. New transportation and storage/preservation technologies allowed us to buy most of our food from distant places like California, with higher agricultural productivity. We switched from wood to fossil fuels that came from other states and countries.
And the forests grew back, quietly, year after year.
Several weeks ago, I took an all-day hike from my front door downtown through miles of forest, never needing my car. After stopping at the Co-op for trail snacks, I crossed the Hinsdale bridge and climbed the switchbacks to the top of Mount W. From there, I hiked the ridge trail down to Indian Pond, over Daniels Mountain, through Bear Mountain State Forest, and into Pisgah State Park to Kilburn Pond. The round-trip distance was around 18 miles. In a whole day of walking, I met three people. As terrain, soils, and orientations shifted, the trail passed through areas dominated by white pine, hemlock, maple, birch, oaks and hickory, beech, and other tree species. The biggest animals I saw were chipmunks and squirrels, but from my winter trips there, I knew that deer, moose, bear, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, beavers, turkey, owls, raptors, and all the varieties of weasel creatures, rodents, and other small mammals and birds were somewhere nearby. Around me was an extraordinary, contiguous testament to New Hampshire’s successes at land conservation: Mount Wantastiquet State Forest (520 acres), Madame Sherri Forest (488 acres), Bear Mountain State Forest (about 100 acres?), and Pisgah State Park, with 13,668 acres (more than 21 square miles) of wild land. The result is a Lothlórien in our own corner of New England, and that’s before including all the other publicly accessible forests near here.
The fact is, if late-19th Century industrialization had been any guide to the future, those forests wouldn’t even be there. They were almost lost. Luck and the efforts of conservationists saved them.
I’m all for the localization of the economy. Everything I see, hear, and read suggests that sourcing the Four F’s much closer to home will contribute to a saner, more peaceful, and more ecologically healthy planet. But what is clear is that our technology and practices must leap forward again, as much as they did from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, for this to be possible without once again destroying our home forests. With Vermont’s modern population and the resource intensity of our way of life, if we were forced to become primarily dependent on local biological resources again, what has grown back as forest land would rapidly give way to intensive cultivation, grazing, and clear-cutting, and our water quality, air quality, biodiversity, carbon cycle, and the essential quality of our lives would suffer catastrophically. One need only look at Haiti, Madagascar, and regions of China and India. (Most recent studies of biomass supplies, for example, indicate that they could only meet a few percent of a typical state’s total energy needs if used sustainably.)
What’s good for the forest is good for humanity. One of the greatest challenges of the next decades is to find ways to regenerate and maintain diverse, extensive, contiguous forests while obtaining the Four F’s locally. Permaculture, intensive organic farming, higher living density on smaller footprints, net-zero-energy houses and buildings, bioenergy, other renewable energy technologies, dematerialization, recycling and industrial ecology, mass transit, and high-efficiency vehicles all offer pieces of the puzzle. None of them will develop without extensive R&D, public ecological and science literacy, willingness to adopt new ways of living, investment, and – perhaps most importantly – a deepened reverence for the forest we live in, steadily regaining its integrity around us, all by itself.
(In the spirit of “I’m not just the Hair Club president. I’m also a client,” I am also a student here at the Grad School and thought I’d share with you some of the blog that I’m writing for my Tech Fluency course. Enjoy.)
I’m not afraid to admit, and this’ll come as no shock to all 3 of you who’re reading my little musings here, that I have a rather ambivalent relationship with technology. I think that’s healthy but, lucky for you, not the point of this post. The point of this post is the almost osmotic way that I’m becoming sort of more tech fluent-ish-esque. Many of the people who become students at Marlboro GradSchool are the de facto techies at their places of work based solely on the fact that, although they don’t necessarily know much, they know more than everyone else. That’s how it begins (sounds like an illness, no?). After helping countless people and, due to this, trouble shooting countless issues, they become real, live techies. It’s a strange process based on the whole “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” concept.
Being surrounded myself by people of infinitely deeper understandings of technology, I’ve taken the path from the other direction only to find myself at a similar destination. I guess I know more than the average bear about certain aspects of technology. I won’t pull any muscles patting myself on the back for this as I still feel relatively ignorant, but the key word is “relatively.” To extend a previous metaphor, “In the land of the seeing, the one-eyed man is kind of handicapped.” Luckily, I have a visa to the land of the blind where I spend a fair bit of time.
This reality became pretty apparent yesterday while talking to my mother-in-law, who has been visiting with us for the last week. She’s not a stupid woman by any means, but she is a septuagenarian and that gives her license not to be quite as “cutting edge” as others. The conversation went something like this:
Joe: Hilda, we should check the itinerary that the airline sent you to see when your flight leaves.
Hilda: I can call Kim to see if she can look it up, print it, and then mail it to me. I gotta say that I don’t think it’ll make it here by Saturday, though.
Joe: Well, umm… do you know your email info?
Hilda: …huh?
Joe: Ya know, your email address and password?
Hilda: Oh, yeah. I know that stuff but my account’s on Kim’s computer.
Joe: …
Hilda: What?
Joe: Well… uhhhh… lemme see, like, it’s not on her computer because… ya see, there are these things called servers that….
Hilda: (deer in headlights… crickets… tumbleweeds)
Anyway, she thought I was a magician when I pulled up her Yahoo account on our computer. Which leads me to feelings of being really torn. I may try to divorce myself from technology but, as Michael Corleone says, “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.”
Google Wave Logo
There’s some skuttlebutt that Google’s new “Wave”, (see hour video demo) could become a Learning Management System or Course Management System that replaces current tools such as Moodle or Blackboard at higher ed institutions. This is even more interesting as some schools are switching to Gmail for their students to save server and IT costs, so using Wave will be a natural move for them. Got an invite? Check it out and see what you think?
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