. . . because much of the content relates both to Washington, D.C., and "outside the beltway" -- the heartland, specifically Iowa -- and because after going from Iowa to Washington via Texas and California I subsequently returned, From DC 2 Iowa.
Johnny Carson occasionally used a call and response with his audience. If he were announcing the recent report of Congress' approval ratings, it might have gone like this:
Carson: "Congress' approval rating is really bad."
Audience (shouting in chorus): "How bad is it?"
Carson: "It is so bad that . . .."
So how bad is Congress' approval rating these days?
U.S. Senator Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) has pulled together some comparisons for us. (There's no direct link to his charts; so go to his Web site, http://bennet.senate.gov, and put "Congressional approval" into his Search box. The pdf will be the top choice on the list.) Others' selections from his list are going around the media and Internet, but his chart is the only place I've found with citations to the sources of this otherwise unbelievable data.
Let's start with his report that from 1997 to 2001 the percentage of Americans who approved of Congress ranged between 40 and 65%. OK?
Today it's 9%.
How does that compare with recent polls of our approval of other individuals and institutions?
The IRS that some Republican presidential candidates disapprove of so strongly that they advocate its abolition? It gets a 40% approval rating.
Lawyers get 29% approval.
President Richard Nixon, at the depth of the charges of his Watergate criminality and pending impeachment, was still approved by 24% of us.
The Wall Street and other banks that profited from bringing on the global recession headed to depression, contributed to massive unemployment and foreclosure of homes, and have engendered the anger of both Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, still get a 23% approval rating.
How about BP during the time its negligence resulted in the deaths of its offshore drilling rig employees and an uncontrolled spill of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico? There were still 16% of us who approved of BP.
And finally (among my selections from Senator Bennet's list), how many Americans approve of the "U.S. going communist"? It's more than the percentage who approve of their democratically, and campaign contributor, elected members of Congress -- a stunning 11%.
I'm reminded of an exchange with a well-educated Kazakh friend when I was visiting her country a few years ago. I'd asked what America could do to help, what do the people of Kazakhstan want and need? She replied, "What we need is another Stalin."
Here was a country, a people, who had just come out from under Russian domination as a part of the Soviet Union, and she was not the only Kazakhi who yearned for some leadership, working electric and water systems, and security on the streets.
Tom Friedman picks up that theme in his column this morning.
At a time when, from India to America, democracies have never had more big decisions to make, if they want to deliver better living standards for their people, this epidemic of not deciding is a troubling trend. It means that we are abdicating more and more leadership to technocrats or supercommittees — or just letting the market and Mother Nature impose on us decisions that we cannot make ourselves. The latter rarely yields optimal outcomes. . . .
[I]n the age of Facebook and Twitter, the people are more empowered and a lot more innovation and ideas will come from the bottom up, not just the top down. That’s a good thing — in theory. But at the end of the day — whether you are a president, senator, mayor or on the steering committee of your local Occupy Wall Street — someone needs to meld those ideas into a vision of how to move forward, sculpt them into policies that can make a difference in peoples’ lives and then build a majority to deliver on them. Those are called leaders. Leaders shape polls. They don’t just read polls.
We may not want a dictator like Communist Joseph Stalin -- although as many Americans approve of Hugo Chávez as approve of our Congress (9%). But benevolent "leaders" alone aren't the answer either. When 91% of Americans disapprove of their premier democratic institution, "the people's house," the U.S. House of Representatives, America itself, as well as its democracy, are in very serious trouble.
"The Story of Stuff," the Alternative, Government by Campaign Contribution, and Population Control (brought to you by FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com*)
Note: Since writing this, a reader posted a comment (see below) taking issue with the accuracy of "The Story of Stuff" video (embedded below). Indeed, "taking issue" is an understatement. He is "appalled" that I am "enthralled" by a video that is "beyond belief" and "so full of patent falsehoods" as to be little more than a "load of neo-Marxist garbage."
The comment was posted here on May 14. By coincidence, the very next evening Bill Moyers led one of his "Journal" segments with an excerpt from that very same "Story of Stuff" video, prior to his interview with the New York Times former science reporter, Daniel Goleman. The Web site for this segment, which contains a link to the entire "Story of Stuff," explains,
"Goleman's latest book is ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE: HOW KNOWING THE HIDDEN IMPACTS OF WHAT WE BUY CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING. The book argues that new information technologies will create 'radical transparency,' allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made — changing everything for the better."
The comment on this blog entry does not cite any specific "patent falsehood," nor would I research and respond with any confirming sources of data if it had. I'll leave that to those who, like Goleman, write books rather than blog entries, or research and produce nationally-distributed television programs, like Moyers.
Of course, everyone should make an effort to be as accurate as possible in what they put into a video, such as "The Story of Stuff" -- or the videos they embed in a blog entry, as I have done.
But there is a concept in defamation law that I think is applicable by analogy in this instance. It is referred to as "the sting of the charges." It goes to the question of the "truth" defense. For example, if the plaintiff alleges that he was defamed by the defendant's charge that the plaintiff embezzled "over $100,000 from the bank," because in fact he only embezzled $87,000, the plaintiff can still use the "truth" defense because the inaccuracy did not diminish the fact that "the sting of the charges" (embezzlement of a significant amount) was true.
What "The Story of Stuff" and Goleman and Moyers and perhaps hundreds of others with and without scientific credentials seem to be suggesting is that there are economic, ecological, and epidemiological externalities that flow from our consumer consumption. They take into account the extraction process that obtains the basic natural resources, the manufacturing process, transportation to our stores, and the ultimate disposal of the product and the packaging in which it comes. As the story of these consequences gets around, governmental and personal decisions can better take them into account -- for the benefit of ourselves and future generations.
Debates about details aside, it seems to me "the sting of the charges" is something to which we need pay attention.
-- N.J., May 16, 2009
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A week or so ago I posted a blog entry called, "Don't Buy Stuff," March 6, 2009. It addressed the values of paying cash, my experience doing so with automobiles, and it included the "Saturday Night Live" 2:28-minute sketch entitled "Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford" ["Don't Buy Stuff: The sure-fire way to get out of debt," NBC Saturday Night Live, Season 31, Episode 12, aired February 4, 2006].
If you missed that blog entry you might want to go back and check it out, along with that "Saturday Night Live" sketch.
Meanwhile, today I'd like to continue the theme with a little more in-depth look at "The Story of Stuff."
The Story of Stuff
A week ago Tom Friedman asked, "What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: 'No more.'” Thomas L. Friedman, "The Inflection is Near?"New York Times, March 7, 2009 [hard copy version, March 8, 2009, p. WK12, New York edition]. The entire column is very much worth reading.
His is a profound and fundamental question being asked, and discussed, around the world today as the friends and beneficiaries of bankers and financiers, who are now running Washington, blindly continue on with their multi-trillion-dollar giveaway of our grandchildren's money in a failing effort to reconstruct the capitalist, consumer economy that enabled greed to fuel a drive off the cliff -- and will undoubtedly succeed in doing so again if we merely rebuild what we had before.
"The Story of Stuff" is a video narrated by Annie Leonard and made possible by the Tides Foundation, Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption, and Free Range Studios; see also http://www.storyofstuff.com/. My thanks to Trina L.C. Sonnenberg, TLC Promotions, Internet Marketing Maven, for bringing it to my attention.
The video is suitable for all ages -- and if you're a teacher of a subject as to which it would be relevant (whether K-12 or college) you might want to think about it as a discussion-starter for your class. Although it runs 21:19 I think you'll find it very much worth your time (as a summary of what would otherwise have taken you an entire semester in a classroom!) -- entertaining in its own way as well as educational. It contains occasional observations some might consider ideological -- causing you either to cheer or sneer depending on your orientation -- but they are few and far between and seemed to me mostly just factual.
India: The Alternative
NPR's "Morning Edition" had a segment this morning that provides one illustration of how another country is faring, and why, during this global economic collapse. "Why India's Economy Fares Better Than Others," NPR, Morning Edition, March 16, 2009 ("Steve Inskeep talks with Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics about how India [is] . . . significantly less affected than the U.S. and Europe").
It's as if the country's billion people had watched "The Story of Stuff" video and decided to begin practicing its clear implications.
India hasn't had a banking problem because it decided "government is the solution, not the problem," and nationalized all its banks long before our bankers became "thieves in suits."
It hasn't bought into the idea that global trade is good for everybody, and let its companies outsource, go offshore, and otherwise destroy jobs, as we have with NAFTA in the name of increased corporate profit. It only exports about 20% of its production -- comparied to some 40-50% in China -- so it doesn't feel as much hurt when global trade declines.
And why haven't its farmers been hurt economically? Because, for whatever reason, India has bought into the idea ecologists have long been urging upon us: eat locally grown foods. Not only is it a way of supporting the agricultural sector, it also radically cuts back on the economic, energy, and ecological consequences of transporting foods -- often into other agricultural areas, as we do in Iowa.
The result? While the U.S. economy is now going into "negative growth" India's economy, while declining, was 9% growth annually, is now 7%, and has 5% predicted for the future.
None of this is to say that all is wonderful in India -- I presume you've seen the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" -- but it does provide a specific example of what we, too, could do if we would really take the lessons of "The Story of Stuff" to heart.
Government by Campaign Contribution
There are some feigned expressions of outrage from Washington, that those who created the problems through personal enrichment are now enriching themselves further with taxpayer-funded multi-million-dollar bonuses, but little in the way of prosecutions, or efforts to get our money back. There are expressions that "we must re-examine and improve our regulatory model so that this never happens again." But we have had this conversation before; this is the happening that is "again;" and the problem is not entirely the model, it is also the people running it -- and few to none of them seem to be being prosecuted either.
Congress has a lot of explaining to do -- after we clean out the lot of them. I've documented before how those who make campaign contributions in the $100,000 to $1,000,000 range generally get something like a 1000-to-2000-to-one return on their "investment" -- for an investment it is, and one that pays much better returns than any on Wall Street. Nicholas Johnson, "Campaigns: You Pay $4 or $4000,"Des Moines Register, July 21, 1996, p. C2.
So it comes as no surprise to me to find out that the financial community has contributed some $5 billion to Congress over the past 10 years in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses. After all, members of Congress and senators are honorable people; they don't take $5 billion from someone and then give them a poke in the eye with a sharp stick -- not if they want another $5 billion over the next 10 years. They behave as they've been behaving; they give Wall Street its $5-to-10 trillion return on its $5 billion investment. See the report, Robert Weissman and James Donahue, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," Essential Information/Consumer Education Foundation, March 2009, linked from "$5 Billion in Political Contributions Bought Wall Street Freedom from Regulation, Restraint, Report Finds," March 4, 2009, Wall Street Watch.
And Population Control?
Of course, as my son, Sherman, is constantly reminding everyone -- most recently me, by email, this morning, "It's gotten to the point where I have a hard time listening to the environmentalists and smart growth advocates. Of course I agree with most of their ideas, but I just don't see how a person/group can rant and rave about the many ways in which humans are destroying the Earth yet not even mention population control as a primary part of any solution."
I'd say what he's pointing out is "the elephant in the living room" but for the pathos: one of the many consequences of largely uncontrolled population growth is its impact on endangered species, all wildlife in general, and elephants in particular.
More on "Stuff"
As far back as 1972 I was writing about this stuff, and my stuff, in a book that still enjoys a bit of a cult following, called Test Pattern for Living. It's available as a free download from my Web site, if you're interested.
My son, Gregory, has a more current version of the theme in his new book, Put Your Life on a Diet.
And let us never forget George Carlin, 1937-2008, and his insights about our "stuff." "George Carlin Talks About 'Stuff,'" George Carlin's classic standup routine about the importance in our lives of "stuff" from his appearance at Comic Relief in 1986, from YouTube:
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* Why do I put this blog ID at the top of the entry, when you know full well what blog you're reading? Because there are a number of Internet sites that, for whatever reason, simply take the blog entries of others and reproduce them as their own without crediting the source. I don't mind the flattering attention, but would appreciate acknowledgment as the source -- even if I have to embed it myself. -- Nicholas Johnson
Madoff and Bernanke: Bad Apples or Poster Ponzis? (Brought to you by FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com)
The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday night that it had missed repeated opportunities to discover what may be the largest financial fraud in history, a Ponzi scheme whose losses could run as high as $50 billion. . . . Mr. [Bernard L.] Madoff was arrested at his Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan last Thursday by F.B.I. agents, after his two sons — both of whom work for the company — reported that he had confessed to them that his money-management business was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme” and “a big lie.”
There are not a lot of people coming to Madoff's defense this week. There seems to be relatively widespread agreement that defrauding one's friends of $50 billion is not nice.
But how much difference is there between what Madoff did and what the investment and commercial banking industries have been doing to 305 million Americans over the last decade?
Not much, says Tom Friedman:
I have no sympathy for Madoff. But the fact is, his alleged Ponzi scheme was only slightly more outrageous than the “legal” scheme that Wall Street was running, fueled by cheap credit, low standards and high greed. What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that mortgage with 100 others into bonds — which Moody’s or Standard & Poors rate AAA — and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over? That is what our financial industry was doing. If that isn’t a pyramid scheme, what is?
Two days later the comparison was being spelled out in even greater detail: Paul Krugman, "The Madoff Economy,"New York Times, December 19, 2008.
So, meanwhile, what has Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke been up to?
We all know about the $25, or $34, or $15, or $5 billion the auto industry says it needs. We're all appalled at the $700 billion Congress authorized for Wall Street with little more attention to detail than it gave to authorizing our "preemptive war" in Iraq.
But do you have any idea what the total is at this point?
It's not $700 billion, it's 11 times that: $7.7 trillion. That's right, $7.7 trillion.
Here's an excerpt from Bloomberg's report:
The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system . . ..
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, . . . [dwarfing] the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis. . . .
The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $23 trillion, or 38 percent, of the value of the world’s companies and brought down three of the biggest Wall Street firms. . . .
The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.
Having grabbed 10 times what we thought he'd taken from the taxpayers, Bernanke now refuses to tell Congress or the media or us who he gave our money to, or what he got for it on our behalf, or how much what he got is worth on the present market.
Don't believe it? Read on. Bloomberg's suing him.
The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression. . . .
The Fed stepped into a rescue role that was the original purpose of the Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The central bank loans don’t have the oversight safeguards that Congress imposed upon the TARP. . . .
Congress is demanding more transparency from the Fed and Treasury on bailout, most recently during Dec. 10 hearings by the House Financial Services committee when Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat, said Americans had “been bamboozled.”
Bloomberg News, a unit of New York-based Bloomberg LP, on May 21 asked the Fed to provide data on collateral posted from April 4 to May 20. The central bank said on June 19 that it needed until July 3 to search documents and determine whether it would make them public. Bloomberg didn’t receive a formal response that would let it file an appeal within the legal time limit. . . .
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would meet congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system.
The Freedom of Information Act obliges federal agencies to make government documents available to the press and public. . . .
“There has to be something they can tell the public because we have a right to know what they are doing,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
“It would really be a shame if we have to find this out 10 years from now after some really nasty class-action suit and our financial system has completely collapsed,” she said. . . .
The Fed lent cash and government bonds to banks that handed over collateral including stocks and subprime and structured securities such as collateralized debt obligations, according to the Fed Web site.
Borrowers include the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Citigroup and New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co., the country’s biggest bank by assets. . . .
“Americans don’t want to get blindsided anymore,” Mendez said in an interview. “They don’t want it sugarcoated or whitewashed. They want the complete truth. The truth is we can’t take all the pain right now.”
The Bloomberg lawsuit said the collateral lists “are central to understanding and assessing the government’s response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression.” . . .
“I understand where they are coming from bureaucratically, but that means it’s all the more necessary for taxpayers to know what exactly is going on because of all the money that is being hurled at the banking system,” [Bruce Johnson, a lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Seattle] said.
The Bloomberg lawsuit is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
A couple of "distance education" stories in this morning's Press-Citizen reminded me of some ideas I've been playing around with for nearly a half-century.
Is it possible to envision a day when Big "E" Education might be provided, and recognized (credentialed), without the participation of institutions like high schools and universities (and law schools) or the necessity for all of the buildings we go on constructing at a cost of millions if not billions of dollars nationally?
A half-century is a long time to be "playing" with ideas like that without ever formulating them into a (pardon the expression) "concrete proposal." But this stuff is outside my normal line of work, far from my highest priority, I've never done the solid research necessary to bring the ideas home, and they're not within my areas of expertise -- not that lack of knowledge or credentials have ever held me back before, especially in this blog.
So let's start with this morning's stories, add some others, and then step back and decide whether we're looking at a trend or merely individual, disconnected, possibly interesting, anecdotes.
"Online" courses and degrees.
A local Horace Mann Elementary teacher, Emily Dvorak, is pictured on p. A1 at her laptop with a caption explaining that she is about to get a masters in education from her efforts online. Brian Morelli, "Giving It the (Online) College Try; More Students Turning to Classes on the Web," Iowa City Press-Citizen, October 31, 2007, p. A1.
The story goes on to note that the number of UI students taking online courses has increased from 280 in 2003 to 2,578 this year. The University offers a number of courses online, as well as a number of undergraduate and graduate degree programs: Nursing, Liberal Studies, and Applied Studies; Educational Administration; and certificate programs in Public Health, Entrepreneurship, and Nonprofit Management.
(For reasons not fully explained, given this trend, and his recognition of the full-bore efforts of Penn State and the University of Illinois, Associate Provost Chet Rzonca "said . . . UI's roots are in being a residential university. 'I don't think we will go into the online business.'"
Although I would have to say that his position is consistent with what I found 10 or 15 years ago when I came back from southeast Asia with a multi-billion-dollar distance education proposal for the University, or returned from Washington with an offer of a multi-million-dollar grant for a telemedicine program, and could find no local interest, let alone support, for either. A proposal for aiding Iowa's economy with "Information Age" industries got a comparable reaction from the Governor's office in the early 1980s -- following which the businesses I had in mind settled in states where they were understood and welcomed, although with no more advantages than Iowa could have provided.)
And of course there are probably thousands of examples of training and certification that are currently being done online, from the required training of IRB members and researchers in the standards for human subjects research, to Microsoft's certification programs, to the online tutorials, help screens and FAQ resources provided for most software packages.
In fact, there is now enough computer-based instructional material available that one can imagine the actual creation of something once suggested by one of my sons for a K-16 software package -- something that could be used by students both in school, and accessed from home. As a kid goes through various "When I grow up I want to be a . . ." phases, by entering "fire fighter," "astronaut," or "rock musician" the program could lay out what he or she would need to learn, year by year, through four years of college, in order to be well prepared for that career.
Although online instruction was a very small part of it, the recommendations of the National Commission on the High School Senior Year including a lot of out-of-building activity -- indeed, enough that, had the school board members been willing to read and discuss the document we could have saved much of the $40 million bond issue focused on putting more high school students in the present buildings, as well as much of the current discussion about who gets to go to which high school.
Finally, there is the related, and growing, "home schooling" movement for K-12 education.
Online and computer-based teaching and research materials.
The headline on the second story is a little misleading, Brian Morelli, "Student Group Spreads Internet; Developing Nations Receive Web Support," Iowa City Press-Citizen, October 31, 2007, p. A3. For some years now, UI School of Library and Information Science Associate Director Clifford Missen (who is not mentioned in the article) has been short-circuiting the Internet. The technological and economic costs of providing Internet connections to educational institutions in many third world countries are often prohibitive. Rather than abandon the effort, Cliff developed a work-around: put content from the Internet on a really big hard drive and provide the drive, or computers with such a drive, to the schools. This gives students access to the content as fast, or faster, than we can get it with our broadband connections.
What else is going on that I think somehow relevant to this overall story?
For those who can more easily get reasonable access to the Internet, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world's top institutions of higher education, has created an "open courseware" Web site. It explains, "OCW shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1700 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum." Why are they doing this? As MIT President Susan Hockfield explains, "OCW expresses in an immediate and far-reaching way MIT's goal of advancing education around the world." MITOpenCourseware.
Increasingly, professors everywhere are doing something similar. For example, I not only post a syllabus for my classes to the Web, I "publish" student seminar papers there as well (the response to which sometimes helps in their job search). And while I still assign conventional textbooks, to the extent possible I use original source, up-to-date, Web-published material as assigned reading that saves the students money, the hassle of carrying more weight in their backpacks -- and a goodly number of trees over the years.
Online "national universities."
That research and scholarship are global is not a new phenomenon. It has often been the case that an academic's best friends and colleagues don't live down the street or work down the hall. They may be individuals who live and work in Tokyo, Moscow, or London, who only get together once a year, if that, at international conferences.
Email, listservs, Web sites and blogs have only accelerated the interactions among such colleagues.
I offer a seminar called the "Cyberspace Law Seminar." Others around the country and the world who are teaching similar or related courses regularly interact with one another by means of a "cyberprof" listserv. Of course, it's not the same as having all of us in a single building on one university's campus -- anymore than talking to someone on the phone "is the same as" talking face-to-face over coffee. But clearly the cyberprof listserv creates some of the qualities of a geographically based faculty, a kind of preliminary phase of what could grow into a "national university."
A related contribution of the Internet is something called the Social Science Research Network, and within it the "Legal Scholarship Network" which offers, among many other subject matter areas, an online publication called "LSN Cyberspace Law" -- which contains abstracts of the articles being published by, among others, the "cyberprofs."
Online publications.
Increasingly, publication of all kinds is done on the Internet. This has had a variety of impacts, not the least of which is economic, on publishers of everything from newspapers to academic journals.
This is not to say that all persons, for all purposes, no longer need access to any hard-copy printed material.
But for our purposes at the moment, the point is that from commercial services such as Westlaw and Lexis (and hundreds of others) to the literally billions of Web sites, such as MIT's, where very valuable material is made available for free, for most persons, most purposes, most of the time, whether teaching (or self-study), researching, or writing, the Internet can provide the bulk of what is needed -- and can often do it better than the available hard-copy materials.
Friedman's Flat World and Tapscott's Wiki-Everything.
One of Tom Friedman's catchy titles is The World is Flat. Among other things, his point is that the Internet radically reduces, by orders of magnitude, what economists call "barriers to entry." The costs of creating and displaying a Web page to the world are as nothing compared with building industrial plants or even retail stores. With a Web site, and an ability to outsource many business functions, it's possible for many individuals to create a profitable business. It costs no more to send an email from Iowa to India than from Iowa City to Independence. (Moreover, both are essentially "incremental cost free.")
We've all had the experience of making a call for technical support, or customer relations, that ended up producing a conversation with someone in Manila or Bangalore. Friedman tells of a person in India who is preparing roughly a half-million IRS tax returns for Americans each year.
The education connection? MIT's teaching materials are instantaneously accessible around the world -- as are mine. And The Gazette recently highlighted the extent to which this is really coming home. Kristina Andino, "My Tutor Lives Overseas; Outsourcing Gives Many U.S. Students the Boost They Need," The Gazette, October 22, 2007, p. A1.
The story's lead tells of a 17-year-old woman in Sioux City North High School who was able to go from Algebra II to Calculus without first earning credit for Trigonometry, who went directly to Advanced Physics without taking Introductory Physics. How does she do it? She has a tutor.
The tutor, however, lives in India. "The two connect in cyberspace through a California-based company called Growing Stars," reports Andino.
There are a number of lessons here for our purposes.
1. Just as you can get high quality surgery in Thailand for a fraction of what it would cost in the U.S., similarly a student in Iowa can also get high quality tutoring from India for a fraction of what it would cost in Sioux City -- and, unlike the operation in Bangkok, she doesn't even have to go to India. The schoolhouse, like the world, is flat.
2. Of even greater significance for our purposes, note that she received no "credit" for her efforts, in the conventional sense, either from this "school she was attending in India" nor the one in Sioux City. And yet she received a meaningful benefit from this education in the sense that matters most: she knows the material, moreover she knows how to use it, to apply it. That's the substantive benefit. But she also gets the somewhat more superficial, administrative benefit that she is able to advance to subsequent subjects the same as if she had earned the academic credit at her Iowa school.
Another consequence of a flat world is what Don Tapscott calls, by way of the title of his book, Wikinomics -- "wiki" as in "Wikipedia," the online, collaborative encyclopedia. Tapscott provides dozens of examples that go well beyond online encylopedias, including but not limited to business applications, all the product of online collaborative efforts made possible by the Internet.
There are numerous opportunities for collaborative efforts in education -- among teachers, students and professionals. There have long been tiny steps in this direction, of course, but we are only on the threshold, limited only by our own lack of imagination, with regard to what this could become.
I see all of the examples and trends set forth above as in some ways related. Where they might lead is in part up to us and in part the consequence of technological innovations over which we have little or no control -- or even the ability to imagine.
This is much bigger than "laptops in the classroom" -- as significant a first step as that might be.
I see the possibility of getting more education to more of the world's 6 or 7 billion people than is now possible -- especially women and young girls.
I see the possibility of a testing and credentialing process, or institution -- not unlike the NAEP testing program (National Assessment of Educational Progress; "The Nation's Report Card") -- that could take the place of, and come to be recognized by employers as the equivalent of, a high school diploma or B.A. degree from a reputable institution.
Because I believe that something in the nature of K-12 teachers and college professors are somewhere between useful and essential, I can imagine their providing home visits (as is now done by some school districts for home schooled K-12 students), or their availability to college students on campus for, say, a once-a-month visit, or seminar session.
Change comes slowly in Education. As someone has observed, it took us 30 years to get the overhead projector out of the bowling alley and into the classroom. I have been frustrated with my own efforts here at the UI over the past quarter century.
But, like IBM's rejection of the desktop computer, it may well be that it's not going to make a lot of difference what the UI chooses to do, or fails to do. Those businesses I wanted to bring to Iowa simply went elsewhere, as did the proposals for university-provided distance education. (The UI, years later, did finally accept money for telemedicine.) The UI's "market," its competition, is no longer just its "peer institutions," the Big Ten, or even all of American higher education. The campuses, like the schoolhouses, like the world itself, are flat. Alternatives to skyrocketing student tuition are already here, and more are coming, fast, right behind them.
My earlier objection to the approach to the "naming controversy" being debated by the Board of Regents today (as spelled out at length in earlier blog entries) was that we needed to look well beyond the naming of colleges and buildings and other things at the University to the much broader question of our conception of our mission in an increasingly corporatized society. Are we to be an oasis of learning in a sea of commerce, or are we a ship sailing upon that sea -- like all the other for-profit merchants? Until we address that question, I said, we have little to guide us with regard to the corporate naming of buildings and colleges.
Now I see that earlier suggestion as much too narrow.
It's not what we are going to name the buildings into which we proudly pour millions of federal and state taxpayers' dollars, and the contributions of corporate and private donors. What the Regents ought to be researching, thinking and talking about is where buildings, regardless of name, will continue to fit in their vision of the future of something formerly tethered to Iowa City and called "The University of Iowa."
U.S. Senator Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) has pulled together some comparisons for us. (There's no direct link to his charts; so go to his Web site, http://bennet.senate.gov, and put "Congressional approval" into his Search box. The pdf will be the top choice on the list.) Others' selections from his list are going around the media and Internet, but his chart is the only place I've found with citations to the sources of this otherwise unbelievable data.
