An Essay on Technology in the Classroom:  
Are You Willing to Be Blissfully Out of Date?

Bob Jensen at Trinity University

The Essay Request

My Essay

Resources

1998 New Faculty Consortium Slides by W. Steve Albrecht

A Message from Tom Omer About Helping Colleagues

My March 17, 2000 Letter to The Wall Street Journal

Onsite versus Online Universities in the 21st Century

 

 

Essay Request

Message from Professor Griffin on March 14, 2000

Bob
 I am the chair of the new faculty handbook committee (T&C section, AAA) and am following up on a suggestion made by Kathy Sinning, one of the committee members. She indicated you might be willing to provide an essay on using technology in the classroom. Is this something you might consider? If it would be helpful to you, I could provide you with copies of the material we have to date for the handout or simply a copy of the table of contents. I look forward to hearing from you. If you have questions, let me know. Lynn

Lynn Griffin Department of Accounting School of Business North Carolina A&T State University Greensboro, NC 27411 336-334-7581 ext. 6008


Bob Jensen's Essay for the American Accounting Association's New Faculty Handbook

Important Questions With Frustrating Answers 

 

Educational Technologies That Will Not Be Focused On in This Essay

It is assumed that virtually all accounting educators make use of presentation software (often PowerPoint), email, and spreadsheet software (usually Excel).  These are outside the focus of this essay except to recommend that presentation software, as well as lecturing in general,  be used sparingly in class.  If students have five courses in a day and all five instructors flash repeated PowerPoint screens in front of them, the students are brain dead by the end of the day.  Classtime should keep students active as much as possible with case discussions, student presentations, team tasks, etc.  Use of e-mail with students is recommended unless the demands on the instructor's time become onerous.

This essay will not focus upon courses that never meet synchronously (at regular class times) or only meet a few times a semester.  Courses that are virtually asynchronous require education technologies.  My discussion of asynchronous education can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm.

 

Examples of Educational Technologies That Will  Be Focused On in This Essay

Although I will not address each of the topics below in any kind of detail, it may be useful to note that I am referring in this paper to the following types of technologies:

Examples of what accounting professors can and are doing with educational technologies can be found in the Accounting Coursepage Exchange (ACE) program sponsored by the American Accounting Association.  See http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/teach.htm 

The American Accounting Association has some great Faculty Development helpers at http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/facdev.htm.  For example, you can read about both submissions and winners of the prestigious Innovation in Accounting Education awards.

 

Will educational technologies improve the performance of students and make them better prepared to be life long learners?

I don't think that there is any doubt that accounting students must learn more than ever about information technologies and the web.  Business reporting is going to change dramatically with web reporting.  It is vital that all accounting faculty and students become familiar with the IASC research report on this topic at http://www.iasc.org.uk/frame/cen3_26.htm 

In the short run, we will see rapid changes in university curricula to adjust to powerful student demands for e-Commerce. This complicated aspect of commerce is a high priority in business education.  There are new e-Business and e-Commerce sections being formed at the AACSB --- see http://www.aacsb.edu/e-business/index.html

My bottom line prediction is that education of the future will focus on development and use of knowledge bases. My analogy here is a comparison of a Model T Ford with an F-17 airplane. At age 14, my father could tear apart every component of a Model T, jerry-rig some of the parts in a barn, and have the car up an running in no time. Educators of the past prided themselves on being integrative scholars who could recite the major knowledge of many disciplines and produce a graduate who knew an amazing amount about a lot of things such as history, economics, psychology, literature, music, mathematics, statistics, etc.

When confronted with an F-17, however, an expert mechanic hardly knows where to begin. It takes a huge team of very highly skilled specialists to tackle an F-17, and that team may not be able to fix all of the 50 computers aboard a single aircraft. The knowledge base of virtually every discipline is becoming so immense that the way in which scholars approached issues in the 20th Century will change radically in the 21st Century. Future scholars will not necessarily be narrowly-focused specialists, but they will be adept at using technologies to integrate stored knowledge bases and attempt to creatively add to both the specialized components of knowledge and the integration of knowledge. The goal of education does not change dramatically over time, but the process will change radically. Learned teams will replace learned individuals. Learning will take place in real time at any place rather than in discrete time periods in classrooms.

Finally on the wild side we have a book entitled the "Brave New World: the Evolution of Mind in the Twenty-first Century," by Ray Kurzweil --- http://www.kurzweiltech.com/WIRED/. He forecasts that before Year 2050, we will be able to inject nanobots in our blood stream that will contain knowledge bases that attached to parts of our brain. How wonderful it would be if we could inject "FAS 133 Tutorial" with a needle and then know all about this standard without having to read or sweat. I will leave it up to you as to how futuristic you want to take this investigation of knowledge in a needle. 

There is that nagging issue of what the accounting profession will become.  Issues of auditor independence are enormous.  But the profession must not follow the way of the railroads who never looked beyond transporting across iron rails.  The railroads viewed  themselves as "rail roads" rather than transportation companies.  They missed their opportunities to expand into airline and communication ventures.  The accounting profession is at a similar juncture.  If public accounting moves backwards from its new ventures, it stands the risk of being a system of regulated "rail roads" rather than a relevant and viable profession in the 21st Century.  My latest website on this issue is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/cpaaway.htm.

Be that as it may, there is still the question of what technologies you use in your classes and how much you and your students rely upon such technologies.  It is possible to conclude with a sigh that adapting to newer technologies is just not for you and your courses.  Familiar reasons or excuses include the following:

In spite of the numerous excuses and reasons why instructors may resist using technologies other than PowerPoint and e-mail, my advice to you is think of what is best for your students.  Wouldn't it be awful if the only writing students did in college was in English composition courses?  It would be terrible if the only time they made an oral presentation was in a speech class.  The best universities have students writing and speaking in virtually all courses.  The same should be true of computing and networking technologies.  These skills and resources should be used in virtually all courses.

Resources

Fist give Bob Jensen's Threads a try at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 
Helpers for Educators --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ 
Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

Alternatives for creating MP3 audio files are given at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q4.htm#MP3 

Try the AskEric Toolbox at http://ericir.syr.edu/Qa/Toolbox/#education 

From the Learning Edge
Tools4Teachers --- http://www.thelearningedge.com/t4t/index.htm 
A directory of recommended educational Web sites for educators, parents and their students.

eCollege has a very helpful resource website at http://resources.blackboard.com/scholar/general/main.jsp 

A great place to start in the general topic of education is the Education links page of Yahoo at http://dir.yahoo.com/Education/ 

Network Social Science Tools and Resources http://www.nesstar.org/ 

Electronic Commerce Resource Center (e-Commerce, e-Business)  http://www.becrc.org/index.html 

Research Haven is a student research helper site that may also be of help to faculty --- http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6199/ 

For MP3 compression of WAV files, I use an old (free) version of Blade described at

http://bladeenc.mp3.no/skeleton/intro.html

http://showcase.netins.net/web/phdss/mp3/encoders/blade.htm

"Teachers' Tools for the 21st Century: A Report on Teachers' Use of Technology" is available online at 
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000/2000102.pdf 

I might give you some advice following my first try at using BladeEnc to covert WAV audio files into MP3 audio files.

I downloaded BladeEnc from ZDnet at http://www.zdnet.com/ (simply type BladeEnc into the search box).

Either turn off your screen saver or turn it temporarily up to a high enough number so that your screen saver does not kick in during the process of creating MP3 files. The screen saver does not stop the process, but you may get a blank screen that makes you think the program has crashed when it has not really crashed.

I found it easier to copy my WAV files into the same folder as the BladeEnc.exe program.

Recall how in may cases you can either run a program or drag files over a program (e.g., in Windows Explorer). For example, you can run Notepad.exe and then click on (File, Open) to load a txt file. Or you can use Windows Explorer and simply drag the txt file over Notepad.exe without opening Notepad.exe ahead of time.

With BladeEnc you cannot run BladeEnc.exe and then load your WAV file into the open window. Instead you simply drag the WAV file over the BladeEnc.exe file and it automatically commences to covert that file into an MP3 file. When it is finished, you have both the original WAV file and a new MP3 file.

In Windows Explorer you can hold down the Shift Key and multiple select files to drag over the BladeEnc.exe file. This will record the selected files automatically. However, I could not get this feature to work for a large selection of more than 12 files. Hence, I converted about 10-12 files at a crack.

Research Links

* Book Store  
Looking for cheap books, CD's, software.  Chapters.Ca offers everything you need, and best of all, at Canadian prices, stretch your US dollar as far as possible..
* Get Your Free EMAIL account here. 
Partnering with everyone.net, we are please to provide you with you very own e-mail address.  Forget about Hotmail and give us a try.
* Start Earning Money Today  
Looking at making a little profit on the internet?  Check out some of these amazing new business opportunities.  Within minutes you could be making money at no cost to you.
* Participate in Surveys and Focus Groups
Green Field Online offers you an opportunity to participate in live surveys and discussion groups.
* Building a Web Site
All the tools and sites you need to build or upgrade your web site.
* On-line Dictionaries Thesaurus and Famous Quotes.
Our on-line dictionaries and thesaurus as well as a list of famous quotes are perfect companion to any research paper.
* On-line Resources
Don't have time to run to the library. Check our extensive listing or on-line journals, magazines and newspapers for past and current issues.
* On-line Libraries
Trying to save yourself a trip to the library. Check these on line libraries which include most Universities and Government organizations in North America.
* Tutorials
Having trouble where to begin or are you just looking for some assistance in your research paper. Check these sites on steps to writing papers, formatting, and basic study tips and much more.
* Free Research Papers and Writing Services
Lost for a place to start. Check this extensive list of pre-written essays and research-writing services.
* Fun Places to Visit

For a listing of Yahoo's top distance education websites, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245progs.htm#Yahoo 

One of Yahoo's winners is The Journal of Library Services for Distance Education at http://www.westga.edu/~library/jlsde/ 

Another Yahoo pick is the University of Idaho's Engineering Outreach program at http://www.uidaho.edu/evo/distglan.html 
This is a very important website for links to resources and advice to faculty and students.  For more on resources, go go my Helpers for new faculty at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm 

Another one of the leading top Yahoo picks is UNext (see below).


UNext is best known for its prestige partnerings with Stanford University, Columbia University, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics.  The first major product of UNext is Cardean University.

The UNext website is at http://www.unext.com/ 

The Cardean University website is at http://www.cardean.com/cgi-bin/cardean1/view/public_home.jsp 

Pensare is another corporation partnering with such prestige universities as Duke, Harvard, Penn (Wharton), and USC.  See http://www.pensare.com/frame_expert.htm 

Penn's Wharton School of Business has partnered with IBM --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245prest.htm#Wharton01 

You can read more about these and other prestige partnerings at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245prest.htm 

 

Should I give students what they want or what they need?

Generally, good students will master the material under most any pedagogy as long as they are clear about what they have to learn. They may, however, not learn at the same rates under different pedagogies. Technologies generally increase the rate of learning, but they do not necessarily improve long-term recall of what has been learned.

Pedagogy may have more dramatic impacts on long-term memory than on short term performance across a given semester. These issues are taken up in Working Paper 265 at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htmOne of the real problems is that what students want versus what they need differs dramatically.  Students want us to make complex material fun, easy, and crystal clear. They want us to teach as if we can pour knowledge into their brains like a stop at a full-service gas pump! But for their own good, they are better off struggling on their own with lots of sweat, stress, ambiguity, competition, and even fear. It's a pity that our brains tend to work better when things learned were not learned easily! Thus we have a conflict between what students want and what they really need. There are no easy shortcuts with or without technology.  One problem with technology is the urge to make learning unambiguous and crystal clear in hypertext and hypermedia routings.  But preparing students for ambiguities they will encounter  in their careers should entail learning to cope with ambiguities that do not have routing lights.  Students think learning should be on a lighted path, when, in fact, the best learning entails groping in the dark.  Unfortunately students do not usually appreciate this until they graduate and discover that most roads in life are not lighted.

Formal studies of technology versus traditional courses are almost useless. One problem is that technologies keep changing, and therefore anything discovered a year ago may not apply under new software, new learning materials, new uses of chat rooms, etc. Another problem is the Hawthorne effect problem that tends to bias outcomes in favor of technology applications. Still another problem is that both instructors who use technology and instructors who do not use technology tend to revise, adapt, add to, and otherwise change courses every time the course is taught. Comparing performance over time is very risky even when comparing two or more semesters of traditional courses.  In addition, each class tends to take on a life of its own.  For example, a case that worked wonderfully in one course may fall flat in another course.

There is little doubt that technology probably improves both the effectiveness and efficiency of training (military experiments repeatedly bear this out). This may carry over into education, but with education there are many more variables and much more complex goals in learning and motivation. Results are less clear cut in the education arena. Hence, any published study comparing educational outcomes should always be viewed with skepticism.  

Other advantages and disadvantages are dealt with much more extensively in Chapter 2 entitled "Why? The Paradigm Shift in Computer-Aided Teaching/Instruction and Network Learning" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245ch02.htm 

 

How can I author my web materials?

If you must use your school's web servers, chances are that you will have to use whatever systems are already in place.  I do not recommend that you operate from your own web server.  It is too costly and troublesome to maintain your own server, invest in backup servers, and have around-the-clock technician service for a web server in your office.  If your students are depending on a web server, you just do not want to have the server be unreliable.  In fact, some universities have such unreliable servers that faculty have chosen to install courses on some of the "External System Web Authoring Shell Alternatives That Do Provide External Servers" --- see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm.

Alternative web authoring and delivery systems are critically analyzed at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245soft1.htm 

Alternatives for creating MP3 audio files are given at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q4.htm#MP3 

Should I Publish My Research and Teaching Materials on the Web?

This is a complex issue for which there is no easy answer.  The spirit of education and research is to freely share your intellectual property.  I tend to do this more than many professors, and the messages of gratitude from literally all parts of the world sometimes bring tears to my eyes.  But for younger faculty, such a spirit of sharing must be constrained by individual circumstances.  Universities have an interest in both your course materials and your research.  You must be aware of what restraints are imposed by your employer.  

In the 21st Century, the rights of professors versus the rights of universities are being pitted against one another.  These issues, including the lawsuit of Harvard University against one of its own professors, is reviewed at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245prest.htm.  

There is no crime in putting a price on your intellectual property.  The Harvard Business School charges $10,000 just to have breakfast with selected faculty members.  If there were no monetary rewards for development of both hard copy and hypermedia learning materials, the world will be deprived of great works that would just not be developed without rewards for effort and risk taking.

For tenure, promotion, performance rewards, self respect, and reputation, professors must conduct research and publish research findings in refereed outlets (usually hard copy and/or online research journals).  When an article is published isn such outlets, it is common for the author to lose control over distribution rights.  The journal that accepts your paper may not allow you to make that paper available for free at a website.  In some ways that is unfortunate because this freezes your paper in time.  I prefer to publish "living documents" that sometimes change almost daily.  For example, the document you are reading now will be frozen in the American Accounting Association's New Faculty Handbook.  However, I am assuming that the AAA will also let me keep this document posted at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm.  I will probably update and modify the online living document from time to time.  That is what makes web publishing so great.  It does, however, create refereeing problems if the author can freely change the content of a document that was refereed and an earlier point in time.

The following appears under "Promotions, Tenure, & Risk-Taking by Daring Educators" at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm

From: [Name Deleted]
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 1998 12:40 PM
To: rjensen@trinity.edu
Subject: Web projects

Dear Bob,

Thanks for sending along your web assignment and its rationale. I’m interested in doing a book-length project that has web links to my own set of materials and exercises. Or even doing the whole book in this way.

Question is, does one receive academic credit for producing work on the internet? Have you ever discussed this with the Administration?

Thanks,

[Name of the Trinity University Faculty Member Deleted]

========================================================================

Reply from Bob Jensen

Hi ______

One problem with web publishing is that if you submit your stuff to a top journal, the editor wants you to hide your research from the world until the journal gets around to publishing your work (which in a recent case took five years "in press" for an accepted Jensen and Sandlin article to finally get published). I recently had another paper accepted for publication. Then I had a long ‘fight" with the editor over whether I can keep a "live" and ever-changing version of the essence of that paper at my web site.

I have discussed web publishing with administrators in many universities. They have not and cannot take much of an official position without action by the faculty. Matters of promotion and tenure are pretty well decided all along the way (departmental faculty, Chair, Dean, and P&T comittee) with rare administrative reversals of recommendations. Faculty bring individual biases into peer evaluation, and ,at the moment, web publishing is a new thing to most of them. Until the peer evaluation culture is changed, web publishing will not count heavily toward promotion, tenure, or take home pay.

The main issue is that web publishing is not refereed with the same rigor as refereeing in leading journals, or, in most cases, is not refereed at all. This is a concern because it is pretty easy to disguise garbage as treasure at a web site. Leading journals will one day offer refereeing services for web publishing and may, in fact, do away with their hard copy editions. Until then what do we do? Most certainly we do not put up a web counter and brag about the number of hits --- Playboy probably gets more hits per day than all professors combined.

Somewhat of a substitute for hard core refereeing is a record of correspondence that is received from scholars and students who use your web documents. This lacks the anonymity of the refereeing process. Also, there are opportunities to cheat (I’ll lavishly praise your work if you will adore mine in a succession of email messages), but most scholars have more integrity than to organize that sort of conspiracy. If you have a file of correspondence from people that your peers know and respect, chances are that your peers will take notice. You can include copies of this correspondence in your performance reports, but this process is more anecdotal than the genuine blind refereeing process.

Until a rigorous web refereeing process is established, those who must evaluate a web publisher must do more work. They must study your web materials and make their own judgments regarding quality and relevance. It is much easier to simply tick off the refereed hits (for when the binary scorer comes to write against your name, he writes only ones or zeros; to him the unread articles are all the same). It is easy to become too cynical about the refereeing process. We have all had frustrations with what we considered to be bad referees, including acceptances of our weaker output and rejections of our best work. At my web site, I have a section for my "big ones that got away" (see http://WWW.Trinity.edu/rjensen/#BigOnes).   Refereeing is a little like democracy --- it ain’t perfect, but until a better system comes along it beats the alternatives over the long haul.

My trouble, and I suspect that others have the same problem, is that web publishing is addictive. The responses that you get from around the world set "your tail wagging." I have published many papers and several books (a sign of my advanced age), but I have never had the "action" following hard copy publication that I get from web publication. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that more people than you can imagine stumble upon your web documents while using a search engine on the web. Not all of them send you nice messages, but a typical message received by me is reproduced be low:

==================================================================

Dr. Jensen,
Wanted to say thanks for maintaining your Technological Glossary page. I
am currently studying for my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer exams. Your page has been a god-send.

Pacificare,Network Associate II
Al Janetsky
Microsoft Certified Professional

==================================================================

Messages like that shown above "keep my tail wagging." I even like the messages that signal items to be corrected --- at least those users found my stuff worth correcting. If you have audio on your computer, you can listen to Mike Kearl (a Trinity Psychology professor) discuss what makes his "tail wag." Mike also discusses the issue that you raised in your message to me. The web address for Mike’s audio on this is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm . That particular article is entitled "Daring Professors" and contains audio and email messages from other faculty members who were willing to take some chances with their careers.

I can offer you a wagging tail and small pay raises if you rely entirely on web publishing as evidence of scholarship. Old hounds like me can opt for more tail wagging, but young pups need more nourishment shoved into the other end. (Actually I still publish hard copy to maintain respectability, but I personally am far more proud of my "living" web research documents than of my annual refereed "dead" hits over the past few years).

Until the evaluation culture is changed in peers who hold you on a leash, try to do web publishing alongside your refereed journal publishing. But don’t let the tail wag the dog or you will wind up in the dog house. If your book or journal editor objects to having your working documents published at your web site, remember who your master is at all times. His title is Editor in Chief!

An interesting paper by William H. Geoghegan at IBM Academic Consulting is entitled "WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY?".  It discusses some of the issues as to why the faculty are not yet adapting to education technologies. Estimates are that as much as 95% of higher education faculty are not using these technologies. Geoghegan analyses social and diffusion barriers in particular. His paper is at http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/links/library/geoghegan/wpi.html

Bob Jensen
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134

 

How much help should I give my colleagues?

After reading my essay, Tom Omer added the following advice for new faculty.

Hi Bob,
For those with some tech skills learn how to politely say "No" or "I don't know" when asked by older non-tech faculty or non-tech faculty in general the following question(s).   Insert the following words as needed:

Dial-up Networking
FTP
Word
Excel
FrontPage
WebPage
Laptop
Desktop
Audio
Video
Courseware
Classpage

Will you help me with__________

My ________ won't________(failure supplied by questioner), do you know why?

For new faculty with low tech skills (probably few relative to older faculty).

Learn to ask

Insert words listed above as needed

What University office provides instruction and support for___________.

While this may sound rather harsh and anti-older faculty (maybe nontech faculty), new faculty need to devote their time to things that will have the best chance of getting them tenure. Being polite keeps you from making people mad, learning to say no keeps you from being the support person at the expense of your own career and learning where the University support office is keeps you from spending time learning something inefficiently by the seat of your pants along with your colleagues. Not something I would put in your essay but a hard learned lesson that that might make a difference to a few.

Tom

Professor Thomas Omer [tcomer@uic.edu]  
Accounting Department 
College of Business Administration University of Illinois at Chicago 
Voice 312-996-4438 FAX 312-996-4520


A March 17, 2000 Letter to The Wall Street Journal

A free university that intends to be "Top Class" --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,34988,00.html 

Billionaire to Fund Free Net U Reuters 12:20 p.m. 15.Mar.2000 PST WASHINGTON -- 
Internet software billionaire Michael Saylor plans to donate $100 million to launch a free online university that could reach hundreds of millions of people worldwide, his company said on Wednesday.

MicroStrategy spokesman Michael Quint said Saylor would announce his cyber university plans at a philanthropy conference in Washington on Thursday. America Online chairman and chief executive officer Steve Case will also be at the meeting.

"The idea is to create a higher learning center online for hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, which will be classified as top class," Quint said. "It's fairly hazy at the moment as to how this will work and the university is in its infancy stage."

In an interview with The Washington Post published on Wednesday, Saylor said he anticipated online courses that would include lectures from the world's "geniuses and leaders." The interviews would be videotaped at a studio to be built in the Washington area in the coming months.

Jim Borden led me to the March 16 editorial in The Wall Street Journal written by Mr. Saylor himself.  A portion of his sincere editorial reads as follows (note the reference to "knowledge base"):

It's time to create a universal knowledge database on video -- a cyber-library made available to everybody. It could feature not just calculus courses taught by leading mathematicians, but Warren Buffett on investing, Scott Turow on writing, Steven Spielberg on how to direct, John Williams on how to compose, Issac Stern on how to play the violin, and Michael Jordan on how to play basketball. All Nobel laureates on the subject that won them recognition; all Pulitzer Prize winners on their books.

This online library could be a resource not only for those living in the U.S. but in Calcutta and Beijing. For some it might replace a traditional university; for others, it would be a supplement, allowing them to take a course or two in a subject that interests them. There would still be plenty of reason to attend traditional colleges, but this would fill nooks and crannies not served by existing institutions.

A letter from Bob Jensen to The Wall Street Journal

Robert L. Bartley,  Editor
The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281

Dear Bob: 

I don’t know if you recall me or not, but in 1957 and 1958 I was one of your fraternity brothers at Iowa State University.  In any case, would you please forward this as a Letter to the Editor.  Thanks!

In academe, we are always grateful to our benefactors.  I would like to point out that, for Mr. Saylor's lofty goals, not even a $100 billion gift could make a very big dent given such very big dreams.  I hope that his gift will help to seed a knowledge base that will serve academe in carrying out his vision.

In a recent essay ( http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm  ), I asked the following question:
What is the most frustrating aspect of modern technology? 
 

My Answer:  The pace of change in scholarship that we should be teaching.  In the past, scholarly publications came out at discrete points in time such as every three months.  If we put learning materials on library reserve at the beginning of the semester, the materials probably were relevant for the entire semester.  Now thousands upon thousands of scholarly publications are put on the web every day.  There are search engines to help us and electronic media to signal what appears where, but each morning we awaken to a whirling blizzard of new happenings in our discipline.  All academic documents should be subject to change at any time.  What was posted yesterday to the web may be changed if and when you assign it for your students to read.  Unless we accept being stamped "blissfully out of date," we will perpetually live at a pace that ruins our fingernails, harms our families, impairs our diets with fast foods, reduces friendships to email messages, creates encounters as fleeting as passing trains, and bewilders our students because what we taught last week is out of date this week.  For example, this semester I spent a goodly part of the summer preparing web documents on FAS 133 (hedge accounting) only to awaken in mid-semester to the  Financial Accounting Standards Board  Exposure Draft of proposed FAS 133 amendments.  The standard is "possibly" being amended prior to when FAS 133 is slated to go into effect.  On top of that there are almost daily happenings that affect FAS 133, notably the pronouncements of the FASB's Derivatives Implementation Group.  And FAS 133 is but a grain of sand in the world of knowledge.

Mr. Saylor mentions that his vision of a knowledge base is video-centric.  In the present world of technology, this is the wrong place to begin when constructing a knowledge base.  The most important ingredients in a knowledge base are text and links to text files on other servers.  Text is cheap to store, is efficient to transmit across the Internet, is somewhat easily translated into other languages, can be searched very efficiently, and can be sliced, diced, quoted, and reassembled for a particular contextual purpose.  The second most important ingredient is a file of graphics to accompany text.  Graphics allow students to efficiently visualize some aspects of knowledge that are ineffectively demonstrated in text.  Graphics can also be animated for greater understanding.  The third most important ingredient is audio.  Audio is a learning tool when hands and eyes are occupied as, say, in driving a vehicle.  Audio can aid memory and attracts attention more than text.  The fourth and least important ingredient to date on the Internet is video.  Video streaming in at about 30 images per second along with accompanying audio is extremely expensive to store and transmit across clogged network lines.  Both audio and video are extremely inefficient to search electronically and are difficult to slice, dice, and reassemble for teaching in a particular class on a particular day.  The main drawback, however, is the cost and difficulty of editing and updating old audio and video files in a knowledge world that keeps changing in real time.  

And even if Mr. Saylor's generous gift serves to unite other institutions to cooperate in building a multimedia knowledge base for educational purposes, that knowledge base is only a small part of the educational process.  Think of our primary duties in academe other than to create knowledge bases.  Some of these other duties are as follows:

To accomplish the above duties on the global scale envisioned by Mr. Saylor requires trillions of dollars.  This can only be accomplished in the combined efforts of government and industry with educational foundations and educational institutions the comprise what we refer to as academe or the higher education "academy."  With the help of Mr. Saylor and the other major players in this effort, the academy can and will adapt to newer technologies to deliver quality education to all parts of the earth.

In closing, I once again want to stress that the generous gift of Mr. Saylor can help the academy do its job if the money is spent at a more basic level of knowledge base.  Shooting thousands of hours of video of experts frozen in time is not the place to begin.  Instead, Mr. Saylor's gift would better serve us at a grass roots level of knowledge where we will soon be attempting to build knowledge bases of text and graphics in a multiple language Resource Descriptor Format (RDF).  This is not the place to delve into RDF, but RDF will be to knowledge what HTML was to the world wide web.  Readers can learn more about RDF and the efforts underway to create a world RDF standard at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/xmlrdf.htm.  Readers interested in academe and the efforts of academe to adapt to changing technologies are encouraged to explore some of the links at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm .  My homepage devoted to helping academe is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/.

In any case, let me once again thank Mr. Saylor for his lofty goals for education and his generous gift.

Sincerely,
Bob Jensen

Acknowledgement:  I want to thank my colleague Petrea Sandlin for making some editorial revisions and suggestions for this document.


Onsite versus Online Universities in the 21st Century

Is the University of Phoenix really better positioned for the 21st Century than "many non-elite, especially private, traditional academic institutions?"

"Remaking the Academy", by Jorge Klor de Alva, Educause Review, March/April 2000, pp. 21-40.
 http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0023.pdf  

As education moves toward the certification of competence with a focus on demonstrated skills and knowledge— that is, on “what you know” rather than on “what you have taken” in school—more associations and organizations that can prove themselves worthy to the U.S. Education Department will likely be able to gain accreditation. This increased competition worldwide—from, for instance, corporate universities, training companies, course content aggregators, and publisher media conglomerates—will put a premium on the ability of institutions not only to provide quality education but to do so on a continuous and highly distributed basis and with convenient access for those seeking information, testing, and certification. In short, as education becomes a continuous process of certification—that is, a lifelong process of earning certificates attesting to the accumulation of new skills and competencies—institutional success for any higher education enterprise will depend more on successful marketing, solid quality assurance and control systems, and effective use of the new media than on production and communication of knowledge. This is a shift that I believe University of Phoenix is well positioned to undertake, but I am less confident that many non-elite, especially private, traditional academic institutions will manage to survive successfully.

That glum conclusion leads me to a final observation: societies everywhere expect from higher education institutions the provision of an education that can permit them to flourish in the changing global economic landscape. Those institutions that can continually change, keeping up with the needs of the transforming economy they serve, will survive. Those that cannot or will not change will become irrelevant, will condemn misled masses to second class economic status or poverty, and will ultimately die, probably at the hands of those they chose to delude by serving up an education for a nonexistent world. Policy Issues for the New Millennium March 30–31, 2000 Washington, D.C., Renaissance Hotel Networking 2000 is the premier conference on federal policy affecting networking and information technology for higher education. The conference engages higher education and government policy leaders in constructive dialogue on the latest policy issues posed by information technology and network development. Detailed information and an online registration form for Networking 2000 are available at Deadline for early registration: www.educause.edu/netatedu/contents/events/mar2000/

I don't think Jeoge Klor de Alva and I agree on the roles of what I called Type 2 (onsite) versus Type 1 (online) universities in the 21st Century.  I wrote the following in the April 4, 2000 edition of New Bookmarks at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book00q2.htm#EducationIntangibles

Education Intangibles:  
Will accountants "rule the world" of the future of educational institutions?

I was challenged by the recent TigerTalk exchanges on the emerging dominance of economics and accounting in higher education.  Although I still have hundreds of unopened email messages, I did encounter messages from Dr. Spinks (English) and Dr. Meyer (Director of Trinity University's Library)

Unfortunately, I agree that accountants should never "rule the world."  Actually business firms and educational institutions have much more in common than non-accountants tend to realize.  The race of Ivy League institutions to capitalize on their logos by partnering with corporations like UNext and Pensare is only the tip of the iceberg in this age of technology.  But the value of their logos and other assets cannot be realistically accounted for due to the many intangibles that defy accounting. 

If you aggregate all the prices of all the shares of companies traded in the world markets, the tangible assets that accountants account for on balance sheets tally up to only 17% of business "value."  The other 83% is comprised of intangible assets (largely a business firm's human resources, intellectual capital, organizational synergy, name recognition, goodwill, leadership, and R&D) that we do a miserable job of accounting for in business firms. In not-for-profit organizations, and especially educational institutions, accountants perform  even worse, because the proportion of intangible assets is even higher in those institutions.  Anyone interested in problems of accounting for intangibles should take a look at http://www.fastcompany.com/online/31/lev.html 

The problem with curriculum design is that it tries to turn intangibles into tangibles.   For instance, the term "Western Culture" is intangible and ambiguous. Adding specific courses with specific content to the "Western Culture Curriculum" is in some sense an attempt to "account for" what qualifies as tangible learning of an intangible topic.  In spite of our efforts to declare these "tangible" curriculum requirements, intangibles in the curriculum and other areas of living and learning dominate as much or more as intangibles dominate in business firm valuation.  In this context, curriculum design is a form of accounting for intangibles that becomes more and more hopeless as we attempt to turn intangibles into tangibles.

I think we give Trinity University students the full measure of what they bargained for even if they don't realize all they bargained for when they first appear on campus. The curriculum is only a part, albeit vital part, of living and learning while they are here. It is generally the most stressful aspect of college life, because satisfying the curriculum is where students discover that there is so much to be learned, and so little time in which to learn, from faculty with integrity and standards for demonstrating that learning takes place at equal or higher levels relative to our own peer competitors. To do anything less would be the real "bait and switch," because if the curriculum becomes too easy or irrelevant in changing times, then respect for a Trinity degree plunges.

The point here is that if you base predictions on 17% or less of the "total" data, then you hardly stand on sound footing for making predictions. One of the main problems accountants have in dealing with intangibles is that, relative to tangible assets, intangible assets are very fragile. Today you have them, but tomorrow they may disappear without even being stolen in a legal sense. For example, I suspect that Bill Gates is far less concerned about the anti-trust lawsuit than he is about emerging signs of inability of Microsoft's "intangibles" to prosper in a networked world of e-Commerce, ubiquitous computing, and wireless technologies.  Virtually all universities have been shocked by the paradigm shift in distance learning and are now worried about whether their "intangibles" can prosper in the new "McLearn" paradigm.

Having said this, I think that there will be two types of higher education institutions in the future.  Type 1 will be run like a business whether it is a corporation or a traditional university with web training and education programs.  This is what I will call a McLearn online university.  Type 2 is a traditional onsite university brimming with more intangibles.

McLearn online universities (or traditional universities operating like businesses) will provide certificate and degree programs from anywhere in the world. They will be very efficient and reasonably effective for topical coverage. The world will flock to them just as the world flocks to fast food restaurants for convenience, price, efficiency, and sometimes a craving for the food itself (e.g. a taco salad or a milk shake) that just seems right for the time. They may also have nutritious items on the menu. See Maitre d'Igital's cafe at http://www.technos.net/.  In the same context, McLearn's online knowledge bases will proliferate and become spectacular due to the billions of dollars that will be available for building such knowledge bases.

Business is not an evil thing per se.  Outstanding research takes place in the private sector as well as the public sector. Outstanding performances (music, theatre, film, etc.) take place in the private sector as well as the public sector. Even though we view Hollywood as blatantly commercial, some of our finest works of art have appeared in commercial films. The power of films and television to impact upon culture is both magnificent and scary.  On the magnificent side, do you think there ever has been anything more powerful than Hollywood in fighting bigotry in the hearts and minds of succeeding generations following the Civil War?  The same will be said, ultimately, for global and life-long learning in McLearn online universities.  In fact, for certain types of learning there is little doubt that corporations can and are doing a better job than the public sector (e.g., the success of Motorola University in delivering technical engineering training and education to the Far East.  See http://mu.motorola.com/.)

Be that as it may, McLearn online universities will have a difficult time putting together a cost-effective total education menu that competes with Type 2 onsite universities like Trinity University. This is largely due to intangibles that lie outside the grasp of McLearn online curriculum.  It happens that some of our best Type 2 onsite students are also varsity athletes, musicians, actors, etc. Athletic competition and artistic performances are part and parcel to living and learning for many students.  McLearn universities may have online debates and chess competitions, but these will never take the place of the roar of the fans, slapping your buddy on the butt with a wet towel, getting chewed out by a tempered coach, having your boyfriend or girlfriend in the audience even if you only have a bit part in a performance, etc.  McLearn online university will probably never find a way of making a bottom-line profit on building and running a chapel, having faculty that students consider friends as well as teachers, and having students learn about what real life is all about with loves gained and lost, living in rumor mills, enduring insults, helping someone who has lost the way, and learning to deal with greater diversities in life styles, and cultures.

Accountants will not rule the world at large. And curriculum designers will not rule the university at large. We are only bit players in immense productions in Type 2 onsite universities.  And we may need some of those cursed marketing metaphors that indicate how living and learning universities differ from learning universities.  Providing a student with a chapel, a theatre, a concert hall, a playing field, a dormitory, and a geology professor named Glenn Kroeger can all be described as a "service" in a broad sense.  Students are our "clients" in a very broad sense.  But neither our "service" nor our "clients" constitute very good business in an accounting sense, because more than 83% of the value of our service to clients is intangible and subject to circumstances outside our control.  Serendipity rules supreme in a Type 2 onsite education.   There's no accounting for serendipity.  What we do best is to create an environment where serendipity has more opportunity.  Perhaps this is one of the main distinctions between training and education.  In this context, curriculum design is necessary to a point but should never become too structured or too specific as a "tangible" asset in either the online or the onsite universities.

Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen 

-----Original Message----- From: c. w. spinks [mailto:cspinks@Trinity.edu]  
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 12:44 PM 
To: rmeyer@Trinity.edu; tigertalk@Trinity.edu Subject: 
RE: Windmill #3: Blade 3 (marketing metaphors)

Nah, Rich, I'm not caught . If a University is an economic enterprise like a corporation, then it may be true, but that was my whole point, the university ain't that kinda beast.

Beside economic theorists don't really have a outstanding track record on predictions, definitions, or stipulations. What else would you expect of folk who have expropriated an energy quotient into economic theory? Efficiency (other than in a physical sense as an energy quotient) is still metaphoric and as hard to define as "service" and equally in need of clarification of its hidden assumptions.

If accountants rule the world, I am sure "bottom-line" is a primary value, and if these economic theorists (not all are efficiency readers), then I am sure efficiency is the primary value, but neither set of rules is privileged to the point of disallowing discussion of the consequences of the rules.

I surely will be caught in one of these verbal spins as my own gaminess collapses, but I don't think so yet.

bill

-----Original Message----- 
From: owner-tigertalk@Trinity.Edu [mailto:owner-tigertalk@Trinity.Edu
On Behalf Of Richard Meyer 
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 12:03 PM 
To: tigertalk@TRINITY.EDU  Subject: RE: Windmill #3: Blade 3 (marketing metaphors)

-- snip--

Alas, Bill, you may be stuck. Economic theory predicts that institutions that emerge do so as the result of their provision of greater efficiency. The consumer metaphor may be the most efficient one to communicate the concept of a university. -- Rich