Oklahoma State University submitted to the Recording Industry Association of America on Tuesday the names of 11 students accused by the group of swapping music files online in violation of copyright law, a university spokesman said.
In an order on Tuesday, a federal judge, David L. Russell, said the university had failed to respond to a subpoena seeking the identities of the students, and he asked why he should not hold the university in contempt.
According to a university spokesman, Gary Shutt, Oklahoma State had already e-mailed the names to the recording-industry group, but the group never received them. —Andrea L. Foster
9 Responses to Oklahoma State U. Fowards Names of Students to Recording Studios
11182967 - September 27, 2011 at 4:42 pm
Of course education is a complex adaptive system. This is true of every human system, particularly as it increases in size and develops over time. We all know that an organizational chart, eg, has very limited utility in explaining how such a system actually works–much of the most important work in higher education takes place across organizational lines rather than within them (who routinely sends messages to someone else by asking one’s boss to talk to that someone else’s boss?) Who doesn’t get a lot of work done through workarounds? Who doesn’t read Dilbert? The organizational chart is as anchronistic as those semester-by-semester “Suggested Course Sequences” which the majority of students–working, part-time, stopping out–find useless after a semester or two. But how do we turn this intutiive understanding of how things work into a dynamic model which is sufficiently explanatory to guide us toward improvement? And how do we overcome the vested interests in the traditional, static model? Maybe these guys are on to something.
keithsawyer - September 27, 2011 at 4:53 pm
The first scholar to analyze educational institutions using these concepts (emergence etc.) was Margaret Archer, a sociologist at University of Warwick, in her 1979 book _The social origins of educational systems_. An under-rated classic, especially the first chapter.
dnewton137 - September 27, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Sounds to me like Stephens and Richey are on to something. I look forward to reading their article.
Engineers deal with a real world in which complex adaptive systems are the norm. (So do biologists, I suspect.) Many of the rest of us so-called experts and intellectuals (not to mention politicians) deal with that world by over-simplifying it beyond rationality. Which is right? Category A or B? Who’s to blame, the faculty or the administration? Which party is right, and should control our government, the Democrats or the Republicans? Which religion is the only true religion?
It’s time we all recognized the complexity of reality and dealt with it intelligently!
gasstationwithoutpumps - September 27, 2011 at 9:54 pm
Looks like standard consultant double-speak to me. Is there any content at all behind their barrage of buzzwords?
dwestbrook - September 27, 2011 at 10:40 pm
This sounds an awful lot like the learning ecology folks. I look forward to this article. I believe it will have some utility.
Robert Talbert - September 28, 2011 at 6:28 am
I would encourage you to read the journal article – the full text is available at the link. It’s buzz-wordy — probably more a result of its coming from industry than its being in an educational journal — but there are glimpses of specific efforts Boeing makes in education that are pretty eye-opening. It’s an editorial, not a research article, but there is a good bibliography that points to supporting research.
22086364 - September 28, 2011 at 7:07 am
Thanks for the reference! I’m tracking it down.
Drclaw99 - September 28, 2011 at 4:09 pm
wow. I came on to this, and was very excited. After reading it, I was very disappointed, for two reasons.
1) The statements that the industrial market place offers innovative solutions to education is, quite frankly, both insulting and the product of ignorance. Peer-to-peer learning, Just in time content delivery, etc all are being applied right now to both science and education.There are 100s of articles on these techniques in educational journals and many authoritative books, some going back a decade or so (e.g. Duch et al 2001; Topping 2005 etc) . There are several NSF centers of educational excellence that apply these techniques to various disciplines. There are organizations, like PECASE (an organization of archiects, cognitive scientists, etc) that make design recommendations for scalable classrooms that utilize these techniques. Either Boeing has gone to a lot of trouble to reinvent the wheel, or they are not giving credit where credit is due.
2) There is not a shred of acknowledgment of basic cognitive science observations and principles to inform either the techniques or the assessment. The one nod to this a ms in review. Any assessment has to be based on learning theory, and there is little apparent attempt to either ground things in this way, or provide valid evidence or even, methodology.
Basically, I have little evidence that this is a solid, well grounded effort. It certainly is not as innovative as claimed. The most interesting aspect-modeling as a complex community, is the least well described, and there are certainly some potentially novel elements there, at least as applied to educational theory. On the other hand, what these two propose is largely similar to the theory of adaptive management articulated by a number of folks in the environmental science community (such as the resilience alliance), and there is plenty of research on topics such as the effect of multiple stake holders in this area (e.g by B. Norton).
Jay Lemke - October 2, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Good to see that people are interested in this approach. I’m a consultant to the project mentioned and some of the basic ideas and assumptions come from:
Lemke, J.L. and N. Sabelli.
“Complex Systems and Educational Change: Towards a New Research Agenda.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 40 (1), January, 2008.
While the current initiative started with Boeing’s concern that our educational system is pushing people out of science and engineering careers (they might say that more gently), the plan is to try to model the many interacting factors that lead to a particular outcome: a much smaller percentage of students going into these fields than in Germany, say, or China. And especially few women, Latinos, African-Americans: a large and growing majority of the US population and workforce.
We’re not interested in better methods of teaching as such, but in institutional, policy, and cultural factors that lock innovation and alternative pathways out of our formal educational system. We have shelves full of research on how to promote learning, but we know almost nothing about how to change educational systems. Or how they naturally change, or don’t change, on their own.
There’s no particular “business philosophy” behind all this. In fact the key Boeing leaders recognize that you can’t aim for efficiency in education in the same terms you do in a business (standardization of processes and outcomes), which have been the basis of the failing reforms of the last 20-30 years.
Maybe this new approach will come to nothing, but I think it makes a lot more sense intellectually and scientifically than what we’re doing and not doing in our schools and colleges today.