The Curmudgeon Speaks

Have you encountered the book “Freakonomics” (or the sequel Super Freakonomics)? In the book (I have read only the first), as the subtitle claims, “a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything”. The book explores unusual topics from the perspective of an economist and comes to interesting and sometimes counter-intuitive conclusions. I don’t have the book in front of me, but I seem to remember one of the examples involved the question of the benefits and costs of “going for it” when you are fourth and short. If I remember the analysis, the answer is it is better to go for it (tell that to the Vikings after last week). Part of the analysis is to understand that factors other than the probabilities of a given outcome can play a role in decision making. For example, it can be better to take the safe route if that is socially acceptable or “approved” – kind of the “you never get fired for buying IBM” approach. So coaches may kick even though the stats say you are better off attempting to make a first down and thus increase the probability of a touchdown. If this is not an example from the book, I apologize to the author. For anyone else reading this, it is still a good example.

Anyway, I was walking back from lunch today and I noticed something. If one were to look at the roof of campus buildings, some interesting differences can be observed. Some roofs provided a perch for lots of stuff and other roofs did not. There also seemed to be some relationship (correlation is not always causal) between the amount of stuff on the roof and the budgets of the departments housed within. For example, the three roofs appearing below cover the med school, the chemistry department, and the psychology department. Take a guess. Which department has less stuff?

It is my job to make the case for my department. Stuff probably comes with money. In the academic tradition, money comes with grants and rich alumni. Even viewed from an economic perspective, this is not actually how it works. Some departments contribute real money by generating student tuition dollars. So, if you generate 21,000 credit hours at approx. 250 per credit, that comes out to somewhere over 5 million. What was that expression – a million here, a million there, pretty soon it amounts to real money.

The stuff on the roofs sometimes has to do with learning experiences; i.e., labs. You need fancy labs with ventilation hoods to teach chemistry. I think you need labs to teach other things too. This is where the “you never get fired for buying IBM” thing comes in. You are always safe putting money into experiences in the “hard sciences” because there is a common assumption that those studying such subject matter need such experiences. Actually, for those taking lower division courses only, this is difficult to actually demonstrate, but such a position would begin sounding like science and real data and I won’t go there.

Hmm – Dr. Curmudgeon, “you seem a little upset. This was kind of funny, but a little edgy.”

Well, it is some of those other gadgets that have me annoyed. Some of that stuff involves air conditioning and I am still trying to figure out why real scientists require more cooling.

Late last Thursday evening I noticed that my Learning Aloud site was not responding. I moved most of my content to a BlueHost site a couple of years ago so I could quit worrying about such things. Commercial sites have the same problems my own servers have but they do a better job of backing up content and they have more experience fixing things.

I assumed the problem was unique to my site. I tried the chat to connect to customer service. The chat service kept claiming I had chosen to cancel the chat. I tried the phone number for support, but it was busy. This was a clue that the problem might be a general one.

I did a Twitter search and it became clear that my problems were not unique.

Twitter turned out to be an interesting source for information, but also the comments of many frustrated customers. Some customers were frustrated that Bluehost was not forthcoming with information about what was happening. Why were there no email notifications or tweets from Bluehost. Some had somehow learned what the company was dealing with, but doubted it. One explanation pointed to a concern with widespread viruses on Bluehost servers. Many claimed they were moving their accounts elsewhere and others jumped in with suggestions.

I received an email several hours later indicating the city of Provo had experienced a major power issue and Rocky Mountain Power had requested Bluehost to shut down all electical systems. My sites were up the next morning.

This was an interesting experience with the power of the social Internet. A group of strangers immediately shared what information they had. Evidently, the crowd does not necessarily generate much wisdom when the participants are frustrated and probably concerned about their content. I do think BlueHost made some critical mistakes in not keeping customers informed as the situation unfolded. Lesson – take a deep breath and see how things look in the morning.

I have been a blogger since 2003. Since that time I have written several thousand posts scattered across three different blogs. My original blog and the one I use to share my more serious thoughts on technology and education I call Learning Aloud – cute don’t you think.

I track access to Learning Aloud using Google Analytics. Using my well honed scientific mind I have carefully scrutinized that data and concluded that no one really much cares what I think. I have opinions like most popular educational bloggers but the posts in which I speculate about educational topics do not appear to draw much attention. I seem not to be among the crowd of popular education bloggers who are picked up on rss feeds allowing people to connect to just see what I have to say.

Most of my “hits” seem to come from searches for my descriptions of how something works. My most popular post during the past 30 days was something I wrote in 2008 about the similarities between cloud computing and the concept of thin clients. Somehow, my comments on using the iPad to write on Google docs has made the first page when you do a Google search on this topic. How about that text to speech feature of Snow Leopard – now that topic should appeal to the masses. I guess at least some attention is better than nothing. It seems I explain some things people want to understand (top posts from the past 30 days), but my opinions are not that interesting. If I can make topics like thin client computing interesting, surely what I think about educational reform should be spell binding. Perhaps there is just too much competition in the “opinion space”.

I pay attention when the general public is told something about higher ed. I am an educational psychologist so the topics are sometimes relevant to my teaching or research. I also am interested in how the area in which I work is presented to the public.

In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty- four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week.

In mid-summer, the results of a research study by Babcock & Marks (prepublication PDF) received general attention. This does not happen often. The lead sentence from the abstract appears above. The amount of time college students spend studying has declined dramatically. (BTW – the authors use the word “curmudgeon” in the first paragraph of their article. How often does that happen?). The authors examine and reject some possible explanations. For example, technology does not appear to have made students more efficient learners. Only a fraction of the decline can be attributed to a higher proportion of college students who work.

So even though we lack the data to observe directly whether college has been “dumbed down,” we are able to draw from the data a solid conclusion about university practices: standards for effort have plummeted—in practice, if not in word.

I think their conclusion translates as – whatever has changed on the instructional side, college profs have lowered standards resulting in less student effort.

Now, this could have been the end of this story (and my post) – BUT NO!

UND, my institution, topped one of the lists generated by the Princeton Review. We are #1. We are #1. We study the least. Wait, this may not be a good thing. Just so those in the area do not scoff. We are also the only ND school Princeton Review considers for any ranking.

So, studying is declining. This decline may indicate a lowering of standards. UND students study the least. I am not sure I like where this logic exercise is going.
This topic (the general finding, not the UND data point) has generated a good deal of discussion and analysis.

Boston Globe
Atlantic Wire
Mother Jones

I do think this should be treated as a serious topic (generally and locally). I am not a big fan of survey data – participants can exaggerate or give answers to create an impression. Is indicating you don’t study much at your school fall within the same category as bragging that you school is a great party school?

Here is my take (no data here) as a prof. I think profs are pressured from two directions. First, there is the “I don’t want to buy and then read that expensive and large book” complaint. This is student pressure. Then there is the colleague pressure (with support from some students) that condemns lecturing as boring and passive. We should expect students to read and then discuss and explore in class. The combination may be deadly. If there is a resistance to reading and there is a resistance to presenting what you have left is discussion of personal opinions. We used to call this shooting the bull (not sure why – I did attend a land grant college) and it was what you did after studying when you walked to the campus town bar for a nightcap. I tend to think of a heavy emphasis on class discussion as “studying with your students”. This is not necessarily a bad thing if students come to class with something to study. Perhaps out of class and in class studying should be combined as a single variable. But, just what would be the focus of such effort?

I really hope this topic receives more attention. … enough of this writing stuff, back to reading the student’s book for the semester. …bah

Cindy and I have been married 40 years and we have arrived at several arrangements. These arrangements differ in importance. At some point we arrived at a significant agreement regarding shopping. I don’t. I buy. I do not care what Cindy spends as long as there is something left at the end of the month. I refuse to follow her around and watch what she looks at.

Now, it appears our arrangement is in some jeopardy. In North Dakota, going shopping may mean something a little different than you might imagine. We like to shop in Fargo because Fargo has a bagel shop and a Barnes and Noble. Fargo is about 75 miles away. This is not an unusual shopping trip in North Dakota.

I don’t mind going. It is not the time. It is what I have to do when I get there. Ever see that grumpy guy sitting in one of the stuffed chairs while the wife tries on clothes or looks for special finds for the grand kids. That could be me. EXCEPT – malls have wifi. Coffee shops have wifi. I can exist for possibly a week if I have wifi and coffee.

However, it appears today that our arrangement has encountered a problem. Is it possible that the mall is concerned that people are taking advantage of the free wifi.

This is the time of year when people take off for vacations. Many email services offer the opportunity to leave a “vacation message”. It does sound like the polite thing to do – let others know you will be away and may not respond promptly too their emails. However, think carefully before you take this step. Do you subscribe to any listservs?

Here is what can happen (see below). An email is sent to you from the listserv and your email system follows your request and sends your vacation message back. The server may interpret this vacation message as a submission and send the message out to all members of the list which would of course include you. Which results in an email arriving in your inbox which results in a vacation message being sent back to the server, etc. etc.

Back when I learned to program I had to learn to essentially hit the “kill switch” for those times in which I put my computer into an infinite loop. If you are the culprit in this listserv problem you do not have access to the kill switch, but trust me every member of the list will soon recognize your name.

The Curmudgeon is always on the lookout for business opportunities. For anyone willing to invest, I have already revealed my number 1 suggestion – bring a bagel shop to Grand Forks.

Keep your eyes open and new opportunities may run you over. We just returned from Minneapolis and this was nearly the case. The image below shows the “pedal pub“. A pedal your own bar – complete with driver and bar keep. You do have to provide your own beer which will be chilled and then distributed back to you on demand. Wow – the wonders of the big city.

Once we escaped from the path of this “vehicle” we quickly circled the block so I could capture a picture. These guys acted like no one had ever taken their picture before. Perhaps they had never heard of the curmedgeon.

People who are serious about photography sometimes create challenges for themselves in order to develop their “eye”. For example, professional photographer Jim Brandenberg decided for 90 days to take only picture per day. The result was an amazing collection I have on my coffee table – Chased by the Light.

I have embarked on an adventure of my own. For 2010, I am taking at least one picture a day – a 365 project. Finding something interesting to photograph, often late on an ordinary day is a challenge. Today was no exception. It was late in the day and I had not taken a picture. I was driving home after working out and then I saw something that was interesting, actually kind of amusing to a college professor. Perhaps what I saw was a comment on today’s generation of learners. I wonder if anyone else saw this and found the combination amusing.

The connection between online and social is difficult to figure out. We are clearly familiar with the value of face to face. Many of us just spent a substantial amount of money to meet with like-minded ISTE folks in Denver. There are unique opportunities in face to face encounters – more cues, greater efficiency. I can also understand the opportunities in online connections. Sometimes face to face is not practical and sometimes online offers a more controlled setting that encourages the shy to speak.

Then there are some strange combinations I really can’t figure out. The image below offers a perspective on Second Lifers. They appear to find some unique value in gathering together to watch each other in Second Life.

No, this post is NOT about me. I am told writing about me does not attract readers. This post shares philosophical wisdom and one small consequence of my contemplation of the big picture.

The summer break is underway and we, with friends from Hinkley, MN, have rented a lake cabin in western Wisconsin. We are now here for our first visit of the summer. It is a beautiful lake and a beautiful cabin. We have been assured that we are to be carefree and to treat the place like our own home. I have decided people may not really mean it when they make such statements.

The picture above says it all. Who lives in a home with a cupboard like this? I am afraid to use a coffee cup. The cups are all the same and look fancy. What if I drop one of these cups on the beautiful tile floor and it breaks. It would be obvious what I have done. I would have ruined perfection.

Next time I come I am bringing my own coffee cups. I have a great Apple cup Cindy brought me from Cupertino. I have a hand-made, blue glazed cup I brought home from Alaska. This was a special blueberry festival purchase. I like small cups rather than large cups – cups I can hold in one hand and need to refill frequently. I may even bring a cup or two with chips. My collection will not match. My version of perfection will be created.