A Disney-related setback for e-learning?

October 25, 2009 by Brian Hughes

“If you’ve spent money on an e-learning course in the last five years, you’re entitled to a full refund. We now admit that our courses don’t make you any smarter.”

OK, no one has said that yet, but if you’ve seen the recent news, then you know that Walt Disney has taken the bold step of responding to the threat of a class action lawsuit by offering refunds for “educational” materials sold in recent years – Baby Einstein videos.

“The Walt Disney Company’s entire Baby Einstein marketing regime is based on express and implied claims that their videos are educational and beneficial for early childhood development,” a letter from the lawyers said, calling those claims “false because research shows that television viewing is potentially harmful for very young children.”

Of course the real danger isn’t the degradation of a young child’s vision from frequent and extended use of the television. The problem seems to be about “fostering parent-child interaction.”

Having seen Baby Einstein material, I am somewhat shocked that Disney has acquiesced to removing the label “educational” from these products… it seems to acknowledge that products so labeled would literally have to raise a child’s IQ. Doesn’t that seem like a pretty tough new standard for education? (One that, perhaps, most “educational” products would have difficulty achieving? At least it would prove to be a new, hard-to-prove evaluative standard…)

But even more interesting, I think, is the apparent agreement that the videos are more or less worthless as learning tools – that you might as well turn off the tv and talk with your child. Could it be that this same outcome will be demonstrated all the way up the educational food chain?

Publishers as purveyors of education

September 20, 2009 by Brian Hughes

In Post-Medium Publishing, Paul Graham makes the very elegant point that people have never paid for content. He explores this point from a few directions, pointing the way toward a future with low-cost distribution and high-quality “events.”

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it… In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?

If he’s right, it’s amazing how slow publishers of all kinds have come to appreciate this – even as they run their businesses into the ground. (Perhaps they are just being optimistic that they will survive long enough to retire!? Anyone under 60 should probably adopt a different strategy.) The same could be said of academic institutions.

While academic publishers are conveniently tied to institutions with event models, I suspect they will increasingly see “traditional” publishers move to compete in the academic marketplace… offering new and powerful educational experiences. Will they be able to compete head-on with colleges and universities? I suspect they will. After all, they’ve been distributors all along – it’s just a new kind of content.

A generic box is the college of the future

March 25, 2008 by Brian Hughes

Acording to this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, new campus is being built to spec in Chaska, Minnesota – that is, they are building it without knowing who the tenant will be, with the intention of leasing/renting space to a variety of schools. Is this what the college of the future looks like?

Perhaps. It’s a slick idea. As we’ve recently seen on Willoby & Himrod, U.S. colleges are exporting education around the world. So why not grow new campuses at home in the U.S.?

This could lead to competition for students, opening up whole new markets for undergraduates and professionals who would like to receive a degree from a distant college, but who prefer face-to-face instruction.

Will remote facilities be able to deliver the goods? Two possible developments, neither of which feels so good: 1) more traveling for star professors, and 2) more adjunct positions using a ready-made curriculum.

Gauguin’s artistic quest to achieve moral excellence

October 20, 2007 by Brian Hughes

The following excerpt is from an unpublished essay on Gauguin (the artist) and Genius (the concept). First explored in a chapter in my doctoral dissertation, my argument is that Gauguin was a highly moral person – in spite of his sometimes reckless and irresponsible actions. I think this is an important counterintuitive case, for it allows us to consider how different (and sometimes competing) aspects of personhood define not only our own conception of morality, but moral philosophy itself.

From the introduction:

Why did middle-aged Paul Gauguin abandon his family and social context to live as a poor, reclusive painter? Could a moral conception be said to have sealed his fate to live in Tahiti as an estranged and unhealthy expatriate until his untimely death? The answer may lie in his artistic oeuvre, which includes over forty self-portraits in several different mediums, including more than twenty oil paintings. Here I argue that his self-portraits, in conjunction with his self-reflection in many letters to his wife and friends, form evidence that a conception of artistic genius became a touchstone of his art and life — a comprehensive conception of “goodness” that shaped his reception of tradition and transformed his whole life into a mythic quest.

Further evidence comes in the form of philosophical context. Romanticism and religion, two influential social currents of the Parisian artworld, fed into Gauguin’s perception of himself as an artist — he was, after all, first persuaded to take his painting seriously by his contemporaries. Reflection on spirituality became a prominent feature of his “artistic consciousness,” and became a theme that ran through his work in self-portraiture. This reflection, against a backdrop of Romantic and religious imagery, led Gauguin to discover a concept of artistic genius — heightened by Romanticism’s obsession with aesthetic transcendence — that especially propelled his artistic and spiritual quests.

A humble bug-related knowledge tool

September 14, 2007 by Brian Hughes

Folks at EdLab often talk about tools that have knowledge “built into them.” I thought this was a cool example:

Cory Doctorow writes:

The Spark Talking Bug Identifier is a magnifying glass with a bug-identifying expert system built into the handle. Find a bug and answer a series of directed yes/no questions and the glass will tell you what bug you’re looking at (as far as it can tell, anyway).

Is it a cricket or a katydid? Help your budding entomologist identify more than 50 real live bugs – simply by answering a series of yes or no questions.

Cheating is the pedagogy of the internet

June 8, 2006 by Brian Hughes

I ran across this fun and informative lecture by Jon Ippolito discussing various tensions between cultural production (in general) and the current culture of intellectual property law – where he introduces his idea that “cheating is the pedagogy of the internet.” It’s the written version of a lecture he gave at Columbia University a few years, when I was lucky enough to hear him. His ideas and criticisms about pedagogy and the internet led to his project called The Pool.

Watch and be introduced to other goodies such as:

I’ve been trying to take some of the ideas he touches on here and push them forward a bit. The law stuff is great, but perhaps it’s not the most accessible inroad to thinking about academic honesty. In lieu of that, I’m interested in what kind of conceptualization of education we would need to make room for new technologies that accelerate cheating. (Maybe it would turn out to be an approach to education we’ve always needed?)