Create â Curate- Communicate

Create – CurateCommunicate Handcrafted Liberal Arts Education for the 21st Century David Eubanks and David Gliem Eckerd College Higher education is changing rapidly, and traditional small colleges need to figure out how to adapt to the world of MOOCs and negative discourse about the value of degrees. The argument below contrasts the traditional process-‐‑driven model of education with a product-‐‑ driven model, the create-‐‑curate-‐‑communicate pedagogy, which is a way to use technology to reinvent education.

Create – Curate-‐‑ Communicate • • •

Create – CurateCommunicate Handcrafted Liberal Arts Education for the 21st Century

Empowerment • • • In 2012, nine-‐‑year old Martha Payne, a middle-‐‑schooler in Scotland, began a blog

Executive Summary

about her school

The Internet allows a fundamental change in the philosophy and practice of higher education, one that has not been fully developed yet. We propose to do so, with the goals of improving engagement

lunches that featured photos and her assessment of the food.

and learning, creating ongoing proof of the value of education by demonstrating the products, better preparing students for whatever comes after graduation, and serving as a positive example to other

liberal arts institutions. We can change the product of college coursework and co-‐‑curricular activities from mostly inward-‐‑looking to more meaningful interactions with the real world, documenting and communicating those experiences in such a way as to build continuously a portfolio of real accomplishment. This has long been the tradition in the visual and performing arts. The Internet makes it possible for

Her efforts quickly attracted attention, and led to policy changes in the school cafeteria. The administration tried unsuccessfully to shut down her journalism,

everyone (see the sidebar for an example of this empowerment).

but instead the blog has

John Dewey succinctly stated this philosophy of real engagement

become an inspiration

as:

to students worldwide. She has had millions of

Education is not preparation for life; education is life

visitors to her site, and

itself.

raises money to support

The project we propose centers on faculty development, taking advantage of the many high-‐‑impact practices already being used at the College, in order to create publically available, digital records of student contributions to the world. This also becomes the College’s own digital record, for use in recruiting and motivating students, and for generally making the case for 21st-‐‑century liberal arts. Executive Summary  1

schools around the world. Her story is told in Neverseconds: the incredible story of Martha Payne. The Internet made this possible.


Education as Process Education has become a factory-‐‑like process. Bemoaning the state of education as a “data driven” assembly line, Gerald J. Conti, a teacher of 40 years, insightfully opined in his open letter of resignation for the Washington Times in April 2013 that:

We have become increasingly evaluation and not knowledge driven. Process has become our most important product. By this he means that education today is increasingly motivated by a misguided trust in a one-‐‑size-‐‑fits-‐‑ all approach that only dilutes its purpose by equating success with test scores, and stifling the individuality and creativity of teachers and students. This dehumanization of education is being compounded by an accelerated incursion of technology that is making the education-‐‑as-‐‑process model more efficient and pervasive and, sadly, more attractive to bureaucrats and legislators. By eerie coincidence, the public announcement of free, automated essay grading from MIT and Harvard arrived about the same time as Conti’s resignation. In his April 4, 2013 article, John Markoff of the New York Times wrote about this new technology:

Imagine taking a college exam, and […] receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program. Add Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to the mix of technological threats to traditional education along with public skepticism about the value of degrees and the reliability of grades and diplomas as evidence of actual skill and knowledge, and one has to wonder: So what’s next for traditional colleges, especially liberal arts colleges that specialize in individualized, student-‐‑centered, handcrafted education? Recently, Thomas Friedman weighed in on this very issue in an op-‐‑ed for the New York Times. Though positive about higher education, Friedman believes colleges and universities need to keep pace with the times and demonstrate their worth:

There is still huge value in the residential college experience […] but standing still is not an option. Friedman’s suggestion, quoting historian Walter Russell Mead, is that:

Institutions of higher learning must move from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” One can infer from this that the technical challenge of measuring “stuff learned” is the problem to be solved, representative of the recent public discourse on higher education that goes back at least to the Spellings Commission’s attempt to create a standardized testing stampede. This way of thinking has

Education as Process  2

Create – Curate-‐‑ Communicate • • • led to more onerous (and some would say arbitrary) accreditation requirements and the double-‐‑speak of Academically Adrift. We accept the challenge as given, but have a different solution. Instead of trying to measure the learning imparted by marginal improvements in processes, we would like to focus on the purpose of learning, and argue that the best evidence of learning is actual accomplishment, not tests, timed writings, or other artificial assessments, but actual intellectual, creative, or service contribution to the real world. Put crudely, it’s the difference between assessing the quality of a process versus the quality of the product. We argue that the latter is the only real way to do the former. We now are able to assess directly real student contributions to the world because of the individual empowerment and social changes brought by the Internet. Process assessments like tests and grades are still useful pedagogical instruments, but they aren’t the ultimate measures of success. Traditionally, a college’s job is to pack students’ minds full of new information and teach them the skills and values to use that information effectively and responsibly. In the traditional learning model, faculty check to see if any of this knowledge persists by using tests and papers and other kinds of assessments. These assessments are often standardized and encoded into bureaucratic language, and we say things like "ʺ73% of students met the writing benchmark"ʺ in accreditation reports. This is an internal measure of process quality. After surviving the whole educational process, students are awarded with a degree. With their diploma neatly framed, transcript in hand, and letters of recommendation, they are released into the real world to seek their fortune, to make their mark, or to just get a job that pays the bills. Unfortunately for our new job seekers, few of the process-‐‑monitoring assessments used in college courses mean much to the outside world. An employer might look at course grades, but not the tests and papers from which the grades were derived. Indeed, students may not have a visible product to show other than a diploma and transcript, which are process certifications. Before the Internet, employers had to rely on these certifications because often it was the only way they could determine a job candidate’s suitability. Now employers have other means to determine whether or not a job candidate is worthy. They are turning to the Internet to find evidence of a college graduate’s skills and knowledge. More often than not what turns up in such searches is not helpful to the job-‐‑seeking student. However, with guidance from faculty, using technology as a pedagogical tool in the way we prescribe it, students can learn how to use the Internet to their advantage and to build an online presence that is attractive to employers.

Education as Process  3


The Internet-Empowered Model Because of the Internet, educators can now ask students to work on real problems, not just practice drills in a textbook, and connect them with the outside world in more meaningful ways than before.

Transparency • • •

With the Internet, students are empowered to create new knowledge and give it back to the world. Not only can students reference information on the Internet, but they can also improve it, and the whole world gets smarter. Although schools have the opportunity to cultivate this production of new knowledge and assess it, the discourse on higher education is still almost entirely about process improvement, not what students are returning to the world as new knowledge. Even discussions of “outcomes” are process outcomes, not actual contributions.

We can cultivate student work that engages the outside world, represented as red arrows in the schematic below that span the boundary of the college (green).

If schools can make students into content providers instead of just content consumers, the contributions they make to the outside world are accomplishments that they take with them after they graduate and be accessible to employers or anyone else. The more significant a student’s contributions, the more competitive he or she will be.

We call this approach to education: create-curatecommunicate. Some disciplines operate this way already. The visual and performing arts have always used this form of authentic assessment by helping

Graduates now have direct evidence of accomplishment, and it connects back to the college too, as pictured below.

students create portfolios of work of the sort expected of them in the real world. Students of the arts have an outward-‐‑facing attitude toward this work, showing it in galleries and on the stage. Now, because of technology, every field of academic endeavor can make this happen: the Internet is the gallery, and with billions of potential viewers, there are ways to connect to others in order to refine ideas and make them accessible.

There are already services that evaluate and publish this

connectivity. We have some fascinating research on that.

The Internet-‐‑Empowered Model  4


What has changed? We focus on three specific changes brought about by the Internet.

Empowerment The barriers to an individual making a significant impact on the world are almost non-‐‑existent, and the level of impact scales from making the world smarter by improving a Wiki page to programming Facebook from a dorm room. Individuals can harness the power of like-‐‑minded groups through crowdsourcing, crowd-‐‑funding, and connections through all manner of social networks. We have access to unbelievable stores of information, can add value to it and put the new result in the proper context.

Transparency Much of what we do is recorded in some way, and our lives are constantly being computed and indexed by parties interested in selling us stuff, ascertaining our loyalty, checking our past for embarrassing episodes, and looking for skills that might be useful in the workplace. Sites like Kred.com automate the latter, and though crude now, advances in artificial intelligence will make them better. The accumulation of information about an individual comprises an online footprint that records accomplishments and failures in many dimensions. It is to the great advantage to an individual to cultivate this digital record. Educational processes currently ignore this, and measure internals instead, like the quality of a timed writing that few, if any, will ever read outside of class.

Authenticity As a result of empowerment and transparency, we don'ʹt have to depend on secondary sources to tell us what to think -‐‑ we can almost always go right to the source. Authenticity has always been more valuable than commentary and certifications, and now we have equal access to both. A company searching for a computer programmer won'ʹt want to see just grades and certificates, but evidence of a reputation on Stackoverflow.com, contributions to open source projects, or other indications of real engagement and accomplishment.

What has changed?  5

Create – Curate-‐‑ Communicate • • • Authentic student contributions to the world will often be unique, and a

Authenticity

perfect match for the mentorship model of a good liberal arts college. All

• • •

that'ʹs required is a change of viewpoint—outward instead of inward—and leadership.

One Eckerd College freshman is working on

Megan Poore'ʹs paper "ʺDigital Literacy: Human Flourishing and Collective

a project that uses real-‐‑

Intelligence in a Knowledge Society"ʺ references Paula Friere’s "ʺontological

world data: real-‐‑time

vocation"ʺ to encapsulate this sense of intellectual activity:

information on the movements of great

Man’s ontological vocation is to be a Subject who acts upon

white sharks that have

and transforms his world, and in so doing moves toward ever

been tagged with

new possibilities of fuller and richer life individually and

transponders. Most

collectively1.

sharks stay close to shore, but there are some interesting

Imagine if we habituated students to interact meaningfully with the world

exceptions where they

as the purpose of learning, instead of just "ʺpreparing"ʺ them. The barriers to participation in real events using the Internet are very low.

head off into the open water for long distances.

In the worst case, a student can say I tried to do something meaningful and failed. But they won'ʹt always fail—and a handcrafted liberal arts education is the perfect way to cultivate success.

Show, Don’t Tell

This is the standard advice to aspiring writers of fiction. Higher education

Figure 1 Recent locations of "ʺMarcella,"ʺ a young female Carcharodon carcharias

traditionally "ʺtells"ʺ about student success with certificates and diplomas. In recent years the public discourse on the process of education questions the value of this process, including the charge that students aren'ʹt actually learning anything. The certificates aren’t convincing, the grades are inflated and meaningless, so the argument goes. Ironically, the direction higher education seem to be heading is more process, more tests, more certifications of having survived some preparatory experience. There’s even a 2012 article in The Chronicle of

Unlike inward-‐‑facing course work, this project engages with real-‐‑world data, and is open-‐‑ended, offering connections to researchers and findings through professional social networks.

Richard Shaull describing Friere’s idea in the Foreword to the 30th anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (with minor editing) 1

Show, Don’t Tell  6

Create – Curate-‐‑ Communicate • • • Higher Education advocating replacing grades with “badges,” as if swapping one kind of credential for another is the solution to the problem.2 There’s nothing inherently wrong with grades and test scores and badges and degrees, other than the usual limitations of secondary literature—it is one step removed from the actual work. This is why people go to the trouble to see art shows, plays, and movies instead of just reading reviews. The show-‐‑don’t-‐‑tell strategy is attractive for liberal arts colleges because of the inherent personal educational experience that already exists. Ideally, all educational experiences should lead to the production of some real contribution to society. Much of this is already happening at Eckerd College: •

•

• • •

• •

Students present papers at professional meetings, or give gallery shows or performances of their work. The Spanish program has students write reviews of Spanish-‐‑language movies and put them on the International Movie Database (IMDB.com) so that others can use them. They also had students making podcasts. The Environmental Literature course uses a public blog as a forum for discussion of readings. Some classes have students updating and checking the accuracy of Wiki pages. Math students are doing campus safety studies by measuring speeds of cars and pedestrians at troublesome intersections, to contribute to the ongoing discussions on speed bumps and skateboards. Study abroad courses often create public blogs or photo journals. The Science Symposium shows off student work to the public.

The first example reminds us that a good model for this apprenticeship is the visual and performing arts approach, which entails producing authentic work (e.g. actual art) and showing the best work publically. The Internet allows this model to be applied to all disciplines. We summarize the components of this approach as create-‐‑curate-‐‑communicate.

2 http://chronicle.com/article/Grades-‐Out-‐Badges-‐In/135056/ Show, Don’t Tell  7


Create-Curate-Communicate Mentorship and small classes lead to continuous creation of authentic student work, either as by-‐‑products of knowledge and skills training, or from special projects. To qualify as authentic, the effort has to be valuable

The Three Cs • • •

Create

to an external audience (a kind of service, which corresponds well to the

Original contributions

college mission). These are scalable in both effort and payoff.

can take many forms; the criterion is does this

The raw material that students have to work with is incomprehensibly

usefully contribute to

vast, and they have the option to either use that or create more of it, e.g. in

society? This

the laboratory.

encompasses works of art, service to others,

The payoff for the student is ideally four years’ history of real-‐‑world contributions, with the best of these curated for public display and linked

and many other types of

to a professional online presentation, for example on LinkedIn. The benefit

contributions.

to the College is that we have access to these too (they are public), and can

use them as examples of the product of the college—we can show instead of tell.

Curate Content needs to be

This create-‐‑curate-‐‑communicate model is inherently entrepreneurial, and ideally leads to a life-‐‑long cultivation of work that can contribute value to the world. It’s the actualization of an ontological vocation.

organized and professionally presented in a context that maximizes its impact.

Online Portfolios Authentic work that is shared with others becomes new content on the

Communicate

Internet, which can be drawn from to form a portfolio of work either for a

Engaging the right

student or for the whole college. A LinkedIn.com account serves as a generic home for a portfolio of work. It is currently a popular, flexible, and growing platform for professionals to network.

audience for content goes hand-‐‑in-‐‑hand with its production.

A stub of a portfolio is shown below, for Eckerd student Nika Ostby (her work is used here by permission). The LinkedIn profile is nearly bare, but it does connect her to Eckerd College, which is an important first step.

The same content might be presented differently to different audiences.

Create-‐‑Curate-‐‑Communicate  8

Create – Curate-‐‑ Communicate • • • As it turns out, Nika actually has lots of original content on several social media sites including a photography site Lensblr.com (shown below).

This particular photo has been referenced 113 times on the site, a crude measure of connectivity and value. She also has an official Facebook group (not a personal page) that presents her work in a professional way. It’s been ‘liked’ 522 times. There are hundreds of results for an Internet search that links Nika to Eckerd College.

Figure 2 Figure 2 A student'ʹs online photography portfolio

Online Portfolios  9

Create – Curate-‐‑ Communicate • • • As a more mature example, the CUNY mathematician Joel David Hamkins has a public portfolio that includes a profile on MathOverflow.net, a social network for professional mathematicians.

Figure 3 Professional social network activity example

The graph shows his reputation score on the site, mapping his contributions. His profile has been viewed over 26,000 times. There is also a link to his professional blog, shown at left.

Online Portfolios  10


Implementation One of the advantages of the create-‐‑curate-‐‑communicate pedagogy is that it doesn’t require deconstruction of the curriculum, an immediate infusion of new technology, or hiring a new division of administrators. It comes down to developing practices that align with a new philosophy of the intent of education. The transition need not be mandated, but can proceed through faculty and staff who are naturally disposed to the idea. Initial implementation includes these elements: 1. Create a faculty development program. The speed of change depends on the conversion of traditional instruction into the “three-‐‑C” pedagogy. 2. Establish a formal research and implementation presence at the College in order to have an interface for fundraising and public relations: a virtual center for innovation in learning, or something similar. There is some minor cost associated. 3. Establish metrics to survey Eckerd College visibility on the Internet due to student and graduate work. Preliminary work on this is underway. 4. Apply the philosophy being espoused at the college level. Document and share the ideas and practices that develop in order to enhance the college’s own digital record. This is already underway through a conference workshop and a book on the subject. We can create an online social network for the project and eventually seek to set up a summer institute for other higher education professionals who want to do this. 5. Educate students early about building their digital footprints and portfolios. This is already planned for Fall 2013, headed by Career Services. 6. Involve students. Find student leaders who can help communicate the philosophy and plans, for example by creating a public video that sells the idea and the college. 7. Integrate the authentic work idea into the assessment parts of existing and future grants. 8. Seek external funding for the project for faculty and staff professional development. 9. Investigate integration with PEL, e.g. into the introductory LLV course, to use as a ‘hothouse’ for establishing good practices. 10. As the project shows signs of success, we can inventory good student work being produced and use it for marketing, and consider how to maximize the advantages of “show don’t tell.”

Implementation  11

Create â Curate- Communicate

Create â Curate- Communicate

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