iCollege?
I don’t think so.
That’s the online reaction to Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s rant against traditional higher education this week on The Daily Show. In case you missed it, the Minnesota Republican suggested students would stop hauling their “keisters” to class and start paying $199 to download “iCollege.”
A few minutes of late-night chatter has touched off some fierce online blowback, ranging from earnest critiques of Mr. Pawlenty’s “pedagogical dystopia” to numerous variations of “Pawlenty is an idiot.”
• A student’s letter to the Star Tribune: “As a junior at the U, I am not only happy to ‘haul my keister across campus’ on a daily basis, I consider it a privilege.”
• A science professor’s blog: “… Perhaps businesses and other organizations seeking to hire graduates of our great institutions of higher education will prefer that their new employees are willing and able to haul their keisters into work at a specified time and place.”
• A state political blog: “Our public universities, led by the world-class University of Minnesota, have played an enormous role in building our state’s competitive advantage. Tim Pawlenty, though, has treated public universities with contempt, and now we know why — he doesn’t believe in their continued existence.”
• A local news Web site: “Some of the points he made in the nationally televised interview with Jon Stewart don’t square with statements he and his higher-education appointees have made in Minnesota.”
• A progressive think tank’s blog: “Personally, as a student of a private liberal-arts college in Minnesota, I’m shocked to hear the classroom spoken of as something to be removed from the education process rather than something to be enhanced.”
• A community college faculty-member’s blog: “The deregulation Gov. Pawlenty is proposing is the reason we have catastrophes like the BP Deepwater Horizon spill; oversight of the industry was long ago delegated to the equivalent of an “iOversight” app. We don’t need more of that–and we certainly don’t need more of it in higher education.”
20 Responses to ‘iCollege’ Idea Gets Chuckle on ‘Daily Show,’ but Online Viewers Aren’t Laughing
billso - June 16, 2010 at 6:36 pm
iYiYi!
marcyrw55 - June 16, 2010 at 6:51 pm
I saw Mr. Pawlenty on Jon Stewart and my immediate reaction was that he is onto something. Not that we need to get rid of college or students hauling keisters to class, etc., but we have to address the fact that the Internet is a smorgasbord of information at our students’ fingertips. And each generation is becoming more independent in learning and discovering because of the Internet. I know that while I’m lecturing, if I mention a case, a person, or a fact, my students immediately google the subject matter and, in an instant, there lies before them more information about that person, case or fact than I can possibly relay in 1.5 hrs. (complete with relevant links that allow them to dig even deeper). So, perhaps we should be asking these questions: How can we harness the “teaching power” of the Internet for our students’ benefit? Should our lectures, in some cases, become instead guided research projects, where the students actively learn how to critically analyze, research facts (and separate fact from fiction) instead of passively taking notes, answering a few questions, reading a few, old and tired paragraphs in the 7th edition of a (sort of) updated textbook and taking some multiple choice exam at the end? Is Mr. Pawlenty off-base? Not completely, in my opinion.
athlwulf - June 16, 2010 at 7:13 pm
I agree with @marcyrw55. Though Governor Pawlenty could have phrased his remarks better, there is something wrong with a system that is putting students into debt at levels that is far out pacing their capacity to earn wages after school. The efficiencies granted by technology have failed to reduce the costs of traditional education because many private universities are in a race to provide full-service education and many for-profits, well, profit. There are not enough schools to give everyone an education. Even if there were, there are more non-traditional students out there that can make use of new technologies in order to get an education. Even if face-to-face education is the best way to go (and there is mounting evidence that it may not be unless it is enhanced http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf) it will not reach everyone. The tools for online education have far surpassed the days where it was simply a website to distribute course information. With social media, online education has become more about the social construction of knowledge and collaboration. The tools of production that students have available to them, many of them free, would have required millions of dollars of investment a few years ago.
dmalouf - June 16, 2010 at 7:18 pm
There are so many things wrong w/ the Gov’s take on college education but here were my immediate reactions:* Universities are not just educational institutions. They are academic research institutions where knowledge is born/crafted due to centuries of crafting (through multiple technological revolutions).* Cognition and how people learn has not changed just b/c we have new technologies.* The reduction of education to vocational training will be the end of us all (us being humanity; not us being educators).* Yes, there has been severe corruption at the gates of the monastery, but the secluded environment of a non-commuter campus affords life changes (no guarantees) and changes in thinking processes that are lost on students who are forced to compete with their holistic lives. This is a luxury for sure, but 1 that will be gained only by the privileged (like so many other things) if we remove the public option of major state universities.I’m sure there are more issues, but I’ll stop there. I will add though that there was a major theme around lower-education on the twittershpere yesterday which went something like this: How dare we not give education (I’ll add at all levels) the same level of urgency and tax burden as our military (i’ll also add our healthcare system to the same statement). Our priorities have been squandered and we have taken on the defense of the planet allowing our allies to do w/ education and health for the last 60 years, what we have done with military alone.
lib_j09 - June 16, 2010 at 7:28 pm
God bless the U of M. Mr. Pawlenty is talking through his own keister just like the other Repulican carpetbaggers who have taken over Minnesota politics. Minnesota is my home state, and I graduated from the U of M. I have worked in education for 30 years overseas and now back in the States again. The U of M has been a world class tier one institution for many years, and has always been a step ahead in their offerings in adult and distance education when it was something very new. Has he ever looked at their website to find out all the offerings it has INCLUDING Online, Distance, and Evening Courses – a whole page of links and information??? What university classroom did he sit his keister in I wonder? Does he think that the online classroom doesn’t cost any money? Do you think that first class online instructors don’t get paid, or that their overhead is of no consequence, they have no library, no research to worry over? They use the University libraries and publications, and yes even their classrooms, etc. I’m all for online learning AND my university. Currently the U of M like most other higher education institutions incorporate not only ONLINE DISTANCE LEARNING as a separate entity but also online instruction alongside their classroom instruction via tools like Blackboard and their own websites – whatever it takes. Teaching is everywhere, but the university is the structure that holds it together. Working within an accredited University framework gives credibility and authority to those courses being offered. Give me a degree which states that I graduated from The University of Minnesota any day. When is the next election?
mariemrafa - June 16, 2010 at 8:14 pm
I think what most educators and politicans are forgetting is that every student is different, with different needs, with different backgrounds, with different advantages and disadvantages. As a future Student Affairs Professional mainly focusing on Orientation Services, I cannot ignore the rapid increase in First Generation Students as well as other minority groups based on SES or ethnicity. These students would suffer any radical change in education which caters to a more elite type of student who can afford the luxuries of an iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, etc. We cannot assume that this is the direction of the entire generation attending college. I’m not against online or distance learning experiences, but I do not want to see that replacing the traditional world of higher education. Mr. Pawlenty’s comments are unrealistic for the near future with the population of these special interests groups increasing. We need to focus on making the transitions and education gaps smaller between P-12 and higher education (including vocational/technical schools and community colleges as well as the four-year institutions). We need to give every student the opportunity to educate himself/herself in ways that will not make it more difficult such as the ridiculous idea of going to school on you Mac products. That cannot replace the human interactions each student needs to grow in other ways outside of the breadth of knowledge of a particular profession.
mkcovey - June 16, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Before you embrace this candidate for President, examine what he has accomplished as Governor of Minnesota; he has taken a state that ranked 1 or 2 in most quality of life indicators and dragged it to middling levels- 23-27th; in health, environment, and especially, education, all so he can run on a “no new taxes platform.” His inflexibility has brought my beloved state down. I quake in fear what he could do to our country.
paulderb - June 16, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Like it or not, the model the governor loosely described is on the way. The erosion of a college education’s ROI, as the I goes up and the R goes down, is being sped up by costs that accrue from people whose opinions defend their salaries. One can hardly expect them to escape the natural inclination to protect their source of livelihood. As a teacher, I love the classroom as a priest loves a temple, but who cant see that lots of time in that temple is wasted on profane indulgences? Quality of instruction does not get assessed, output of the class is not controlled for quality, and a huge number of students graduate with degrees that do not equip them for livelihoods that last.So make way for adaptive, agile schooling. Not iCollege, but discrete, short-sprint learning bursts that access rich, dynamic information sources, post the most able teacher to the head of the class, and result in clearly articulated demand for the next sprint.
mdhitchcock - June 17, 2010 at 12:02 am
I use the Moodle system to provide online materials and try to use a lot of independent investigation using the web. My take on this is that students’ abilities to obtain and use information from the internet are declining. Facebook and other similar sites allow people to spend a lot of time online without actually learning internet skills–there is more to information than Google and Wikipedia. iCollege would be to education what McDonalds is to cooking.
paievoli - June 17, 2010 at 6:18 am
Online is appropriate and fast becoming the accepted method in some cases. Just the other day I checked in with a grad student via simply using iChat. We shared screens and he brought me up to date with his work. He is in Taipei for the summer. I have been using it for years. We have “brought” in guest speakers from around the world by simply iChatting – no cost- no fuss. We project on large screen and have students pose questions. We record the session – with their approval – and get it ready to post to blog. It’s time has come and is here now, we need to embrace it and move forward. Please check my blog for more info. http://lnkd.in/A65hc_
bikegrrr - June 17, 2010 at 7:57 am
If you’re taking flak, you’re not over the target.
wordwright - June 17, 2010 at 9:03 am
mdhitchcock: “iCollege would be to education what McDonalds is to cooking.” Well said, and I agree totally. While I love the Internet and have taken correspondence and online classes myself, I do not believe we should replace our education system with online classes. The discussion of ideas in a chat room is very different from the face-to-face discussions in a classroom or study-group setting.Rather as a good source of facts, the Internet should enhance the classroom experience. However, facts can be found anywhere, but the importance of facts is what is done with them, as Albert Einstein so elegantly said: “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books [or today, the Internet]. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”Our democracy needs leaders who are more than fact regurgitators, which our schools are producing (with all the multiple-choice assessments) rather than critical thinkers with problem-solving creativity. We need leaders who have the ability to analyze the facts, review the history of similar occurances in the past, and make informed, ethical decisions for the future–something I have not seen in quite a while. The lack of good ol’ American ingenuity is evident from Afghanistan to Hollywood. Historically, no country has ever “won” in Afghanistan (What would a “win” in Afghanistan look like?), and Hollywood is no longer capable of an original thought, hence the remakes of old movies and the comic book movies so prevalent now.
lizhud - June 17, 2010 at 9:52 am
I think as educators, we have seen some of the downside of students as consumers. As a consumer, shouldn’t they be able to say what courses their major should consist of? Shouldn’t they be able to reach their professor whenever it’s convenient for them? Shouldn’t they be able to decide what an “A” is? The awareness by institutions that they need to be flexible and understand that today’s student is often working, has multiple obligations, and expects information to be delivered in multi-modal ways; to say that the institution has to become totally responsive to the consumer is undermining the integrity of the institution and the entire purpose for higher education’s existence. Many students understand and want what we offer: those are the students who tell me that while an online course is convenient and they may take one occasionally, that can’t substitute for the interaction they get in class, the immediate guidance, and even the motivation that is often necessary for anyone, let alone 19-year-olds to continue a path that is difficult, as it should be. No matter how wired our students are, they are also social creatures; how many of us would want to do all our work in front of a computer and never interact with those with whom we want to share information? To offer choices within the greater framework that still achieves the goals higher education has traditionally offered is one thing; to suggest that iCollege = more traditional classrooms is shortsighted and just plain wrong.
lauraeweber - June 17, 2010 at 10:28 am
For the record, Tim Pawlenty is from a working class family and is the first person in his family to attend college, something he highlighed in his initial run for office. He is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota, both undergraduate and law school. Talk about biting the hand that fed you.
john_d_foubert_phd - June 17, 2010 at 12:11 pm
People who look at their IPod at a talking head instead of engaging in classroom learning get what they pay for. Not much. Surely the Republican Party has a more thoughtful leader than this to run in 2012.
kmurphy724 - June 17, 2010 at 1:30 pm
To (11) bikegrrr -I believe the quote is: “If you’re NOT taking flac, you’re not over the target.”Or maybe you were being ironic?
dmaratto - June 17, 2010 at 6:26 pm
“Surely the Republican Party has a more thoughtful leader than this to run in 2012.”Watch as Pawlenty/Palin becomes reality.The issue is not really “traditional classroom education good, technology bad” or vice versa, but rather, HOW can the two coexist?
joeythibault - June 18, 2010 at 9:11 am
I think Pawlenty was referring more to the costs. A lot of schools do provide education to be consumed simply (as you would music or books). I paid good money for a course, on campus when I was a student and it was run completely through multimedia CDs which I “consumed” on my own time. Yet, it cost the same as a normal course at the school. I may be wrong, but I’m thinking that’s the type of course model Pawlenty was referring to being replaced with a lower cost, more accessible alternative (which I would have gladly taken to receive the same credit for less $). Just a thought.
angieclinton - June 23, 2010 at 1:55 am
online education will have a bright future. But before you decide to take an online program, consider seriously first. Here is my suggestion http://www.onlinedegreenavigator.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3775
jill_diedrich - July 8, 2010 at 8:49 pm
A recent study shows that in 70 percent of the cases, students taking distance learning courses outperformed their counterparts who took courses in a traditional environment. This study analyzed the past 20 years and was conducted by Dr. Mickey Shachar and Dr. Yoram Neumann, an internationally known scholar and leader in higher education who is the President and CEO of United States University. The meta-analysis based research shows that distance education courses outweigh the academic performance of traditional instruction. To learn more about the study visit http://significantfederation.com/eblast/2010.06.21/landing/.