More Second Gilded Age Blogging

My world has been full of language labs, cat doors, hiking, assessment, fence building and course prep recently and I've neglected to blog about much. Meanwhile, we keep bailing out the upper 6%. The average income of this 6%? Over 30 million dollars per year. On a global scale, 300 or so individuals are worth more as a group than the bottom 2.5 billion (Harvey, A Brief history of neoliberalism). What irks me is that this is an absolutely radical transformation from 40 years ago, yet we act (see Forbes, Bush, Palin, McCain, Norquist, Newt, Armey, John Roberts, Scalia, Goldman Sachs, etc.) as if these folks are under some kind of burden, held back by meddlesome government and jealous commoners. Right.



Anyway, as always, Brad Delong gets it right, channeling Krugman quoting Saez...

More Second Gilded Age Blogging: "

Via Paul Krugman:

Even more gilded: With everything else going on, the latest inequality numbers from Emmanuel Saez, now updated to 2007, didn’t get much attention. But they’re truly amazing:

That means that the top 1-10,000 of the American income distribution receives 6% of pretax household income--meaning that their average income is 600 times that of the average.

Time for a more progressive income taz, is what I am saying...

The curious thing is that Emmanuel's office is only 7 doors north down the hall, yet I have to find out about this via a loop to New Jersey...

"

Lab renovation continues

I spent most of the morning in the lab today just staring at the new tables we got yesterday.  We're going from 14 fixed PC stations to 6 fixed stations and conference tables.  The tables will allow us to have seminars, better tutorings, and, with laptops, have even more people at a computer than before.

Of course, you might have noticed all the cables coming out of the floor.  Placing new outlets and running new cables is the next step.   Once that's done, we'll really be able to clean up and organize things.

You might also notice the couch and tv (running foreign language programming).

Anyway, I'm always excited about progress, and this should be a much more flexible space than before, and hopefully a little friendlier (in the spatial sense) too.

Learning Management

Educause's recent survey  shows a tremendous increase in LMS usage among campuses.  Whittier is certainly part of that group, having "chosen" Moodle.  In 2007 we had no LMS (unless you count Luminis' paltry, resource-poor system).  By 2009 we were noting thousands of logins per week--quite a feat for a school of 1400 students.

You can read the quote below, but mostly what I want to underline is the increasing reliance on an LMS to teach.  Portfolios, federated logins, social networking and modular  are already or will soon be a feature of the LMS (particularly open-source varieties). 

I can't stress enough the usefulness--even in a small-class-size liberal arts environment--of the LMS.   Here's a quote from the survey:

The learning management system (LMS) has become a mission-critical enterprise system for higher education institutions. According to the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service: Fiscal Year 2007 Summary Report, 93 percent of all campuses responding to the survey supported at least one LMS. In fact, only 0.5 percent of respondents did not deploy and had no plans to deploy such a system.⁶ In Campus Computing 2008, Kenneth C. Green reports that the percentage of college/university courses that use an LMS has risen from 14.7 percent in 2000 to 53.5 percent in 2008.⁷ Accordingly, the LMS faces challenges and concerns similar to all other enterprise systems: acquisition strategy, local needs, rising costs, data migration, system integrity, integration/interoperability with other campus resources, and expansion to purposes for which it was not initially intended.
Although the commercial LMS providers (e.g., Blackboard/Angel Learning and Desire2Learn) dominate higher education, the percentage of campuses using open-source applications (e.g., Moodle and Sakai) has nearly doubled in the last two years.⁸ Given the rising cost of the commercial LMS, the current economic climate, and the pattern of consolidations in the commercial LMS market, the open-source LMS may be a viable alternative for some institutions. For those institutions with an already established LMS, however, the human and technical resources needed to migrate to a new system may be a concern.
Over the years, the LMS has evolved from a content (course) management system (CMS)⁹ to a more all-encompassing system that includes groupware and social networking tools, as well as assessment and e-portfolios to track learning across courses and semesters. Although the LMS needs to continue serving as an enterprise CMS, it also needs to be a student-centered application that gives students greater control over content and learning. Hence, there is continual pressure for the LMS to utilize and integrate with many of the Web 2.0 tools that students already use freely on the Internet and that they expect to find in this kind of system. Some educators even argue that the next requirement is a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) that interoperates with an LMS.¹⁰
At the same time, the question remains: is the LMS being used effectively at the institution, by both faculty and students? Institutions need to ensure that there are quality guidelines for the LMS, that both faculty and staff receive training,¹¹ and that assessment is conducted regularly.
Critical questions for Learning Management Systems include the following:

• What factors at the institution favor buying a commercial LMS or supporting an open-source application?
• What systems need to be integrated with the LMS: portal? e-portfolio? ERP? library resources? Does the LMS support the integration of these systems?
• Does the institution have the development and support expertise either to support an open-source LMS or to integrate open-source components into a commercial LMS?
• Has the institution conducted, or is it planning to conduct, an assessment of how effectively the LMS is being used? What training/support resources are available to help faculty and students make better use of the LMS features?
• If a change will be made to a new system, what plan is in place to ensure the smooth migration of existing materials to the new system?

Lab Renovation Pictures

Progress!!!  After I spent Monday talking to concerned parties and disconnecting cables with Jeonathan, our summer worker, I walked in today and there was a big change.  Indeed, with only two days notice, maintenance came and removed most of the workstations, leaving the room to look like this:

Of course, we'll be adding tables back, but this time it will be conference and seminar tables to make the room more friendly.

Lab work is coming along

I don't know where the summer is going.  It seems that I've already been to any number of meetings and it's only mid-July.

What's up?  The lab.  We are in the midst of a major upgrade to turn 4 parallel rows of computer stations into a more user-friendly space with a conference table, round tables, and new technology.  The hope is to turn a common space into a community space.

More info and photos to come!

RFID cat door

Ok, it's been a while.  I apologize to all my dear fans.  Things have been going like gangbusters at work and I just didn't have time.  I mean, I've hardly been able to pick up my camera.

Anyway, I did take a break yesterday afternoon.  I had to, because I got an arduino, a parallax rfid antenna and some rfid tags in the mail.  You see, we need a better cat door and yesterday I got started on the KD2000 (Kitty Door 2000) by adapting the reader code from arduino.cc.  I've modified to make it work with my tags.

int  val = 0;
char code[12]; //The arduino.cc code shows a [10].  You may need to put [12] in here.  This solved a major frustration for me.
int bytesread = 0;
int ledPin = 3; //I wanted to prototype some interactivity, so I attached an led to digital pin 3.
/* In defining the variables for the tags, you'll want to list these as arrays separated by commas.  For example:
  char Biscuit[12] = "3600738183" didn't work for me.
I then revised that to do if(strcmp(code,Biscuit == 0)... That didn't work.  It was all in how I defined Biscuit as a string.  See below. */
char Biscuit[12] = {'3', '6', '0', '0', '7', '3', '8', '1', '8', '3'};       //These are obviously the tags.  With these arrays, the strcmp function worked.
char Marathon[12] = {'3', '6', '0', '0', '8', 'A', '9', '4', '4', '3'};
char Max[12] = {'3', '6', '0', '0', '5', 'C', '6', 'F', '3', '6'};
char Sage[12] = {'3', '6', '0', '0', '5', 'C', '2', 'F', 'B', '2'};
char Veeps[12] = {'3', '6', '0', '0', '5', 'B', '8', '6', 'C', '6'};


void setup() {

Serial.begin(2400); // RFID reader SOUT pin connected to Serial RX pin at 2400bps
pinMode(2,OUTPUT);   // Set digital pin 2 as OUTPUT to connect it to the RFID /ENABLE pin
digitalWrite(2, LOW);                  // Activate the RFID reader
pinMode(3,OUTPUT); // for the led on/off
}  


 void loop() {

  if(Serial.available() > 0) {          // if data available from reader
    if((val = Serial.read()) == 10) {   // check for header
      bytesread = 0;
      while(bytesread<10) {              // read 10 digit code
        if( Serial.available() > 0) {
          val = Serial.read();
          if((val == 10)||(val == 13)) { // if header or stop bytes before the 10 digit reading
            break;                       // stop reading
          }
          code[bytesread] = val;         // add the digit           
          bytesread++;                   // ready to read next digit  
        }
      }
 
      if(bytesread == 10) {              // if 10 digit read is complete
        Serial.print("TAG code is: ");   // possibly a good TAG
        Serial.println(code);     // print the TAG code        
        {
        if(strcmp(code,Biscuit) == 0) {        //This is my own code.  Not hard.  There's probably a way to do this all in one line by having the the if statement run through the list of tags.
          Serial.println("Biscuit, you're in");
        }
          if(strcmp(code,Marathon) == 0) {
            Serial.println("Marathon, you're in.");
          }
          if(strcmp(code,Max) == 0) {
            Serial.println("Max, you're in.");
          }
          if(strcmp(code,Sage) == 0) {
            Serial.println("Sagebrush, you're in.");
          }
          if(strcmp(code,Veeps) == 0) {
            Serial.println("Veeps, you're in.");
            digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);   // sets the LED on
            delay(250);                  // waits for a second
            digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);    // sets the LED off
          }
          if((strcmp(code,Biscuit) !=0) && (strcmp(code,Marathon) != 0) && (strcmp(code,Max) !=0) && (strcmp(code,Sage) !=0) && (strcmp(code,Veeps) !=0)) {
          Serial.println("Illegal attempted entry");  //Any cat that shows up with an rfid will be denied and it will go on record.
          Serial.println(code);
      {
   
      }}}}
    
     
      bytesread = 0;
           delay(1000);                       // wait for a second
    }
  }
}

// extra stuff
// digitalWrite(2, HIGH);             // deactivate RFID reader

It took me a while, but now everything is working.  I know my engineering and math friends will be able to cut this down to 25% of its current length.  Nonetheless, the "proof of concept" (the proof of the concept that I could do this) worked.  Of course, lots of tweaking remains for the servo, a clock, and the mandatory network interface for twittering.  Luckily I've got friends to help do this--I'm going to need them.

Here's a screenshot from the arduino serial window:

 

 A virtual cat just came in the house.

The biggest challenge will be getting a better name for this thing.

Pork Brains

http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/post/81700285/pork-brains-in-milk-gravy

Studying World Languages

In case you needed another reason to study languages,

Long Sequences of World Language Study Significantly Better
Research data bear out that in order to achieve equity for all students, increasingly longer sequences of study are essential to the acquisition of second language proficiency. As part of the 2002 AP French, AP German, and AP Spanish language exams, survey data support a strong connection between the length of study (in years) and students’ scores on the corresponding AP Examination. Students who had engaged in long sequences of language study (e.g., beginning in grades 4-6) performed significantly better on the corresponding AP Exams and positioned themselves to be granted advanced placement and/or receive academic credit when entering college. (Baum, Bischof, & Rabiteau, 2002)
World Language Study Translates to Higher SAT Scores
In the College Board’s report, 2004 College Bound Seniors: A Profile of SAT Test Takers, students whose profiles include long-sequences of world language study consistently demonstrate higher scores on both the math and verbal portions of the SAT than do their non-language studying counterparts.  The gains are incremental; the more years of world language study, the greater the gains on the SAT Test. These data continue to corroborate previous research confirming the correlation of world language study with higher SAT scores.

Disappointless

I thought it my be time to revive my neologism for when one feels particularly disappointed after trying really hard, being really thoughtful and considerate, and all for naught.  For example, "I can't believe that guy shot down our proposal in a faculty meeting, especially after we all worked so hard to make a balanced document!  That was totally disappointless."  Or: "Wow, we started off with that compromise of 300 billion in tax cuts that actually don't do that much for most Americans just to appease those people and those very people still went around whining like babies and making disengenuous arguments.  That was truly disappointless."

Cheerleader Journalist vs. Analysts: Inane vs. Sane

Here's the picture, via tpm, students: Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb had a 3-hour long line to get into their talk at Davos.  Who was waiting to get in?  Folks like Bill Gates.

Roubini is "famous" now, so CNBC invites him and Tasseb on to the channel.  The problem is that either these journalists are too isolated, stupid or brainwashed to understand what Roubbini and Taleb had to say, or they are selling a product (unlimited growth, DOW 50,000!) that just doesn't exist right now.  They seem to think there is some sector that will give their portfolios a miracle cure, which is silly.  Our problems are systemic.*  It's not just banking or insurance or production or demand.  It's all entangled and until the finance sector clears its bad assets and can clearly put value on real, physical production (as opposed to circulating mathematical-model hedge funds that relate to no real-world products) then the system will not work.  It's really fascinating to watch these clueless people who seem to think that a little cheerleading is going to get everybody through this.  (Oh, and they also think that all bankers are geniuses and deserve high salaries for crashing the system.)

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1027496846

Video link 

*Of course, there will always be some stock somewhere that makes money.  The point is, Roubini and Tasseb are not talking about isolated stocks, but about a whole (screwed up) system.

Back to the classroom...

Things I'm looking forward to this semester:

--Teaching
--Gardening
--Writing more
--Exericise
--Getting back to blogging
--More moodle

Things I'm not forward to:
--Grading
--Exercise
--Assessment
--California's budget
--The Republican Party' Budgetary Bad faith (in California and the U.S.)

Master Shine

Master Shine
Originally uploaded by andrethegiant

I lieu of my comments re: The South elsewhere on the internet, I thought I would post this picture I took back in 2006. It's a rather sad commentary, I think.

The Count of Monte Crisco

Student paper: "...Dantès was a character in and Alexandre Dumas story called the Count of Monte Crisco..."

Now that's a typo I can believe in.  It's tasty and has a long shelf life.

Why They Hate the Great Depression:

I know, I know.  I don't know a damn thing about economics.  Luckily I blog so it doesn't matter.  Here is why rich people hate the Great Depression: 1) The Business Class screwed up royally and wrecked the economy and a lot of rich people got less rich and even went broke; 2) Interventionist state policy actually worked to fix it:

 

Of the various sins committed by Roosevelt, Keynes et al, it is the fact that their policies worked that is the scaries to the "conservatives."  Note how a return to more "orthodox" (read: non-interventionist return to 20's-style) slows the recovery.  

If you don't believe me, ask Brad Delong, he's the guy I stole this chart from.

Politics in the Classroom: Not such a bad thing?

Students in most of my literature and cultural courses have probably noted that I do not hide my political identity.  Of course, like most of my colleagues, I think I strive for evenhandedness, fairness and bringing a multiplicity of voices to the classroom.  And, certainly, when grading, I attempt to be extremely sensitive to recognizing my own possible bias.  Indeed, it is quite possible that, in an attempt to be fair when I grade, I allow students certain leaps of logic that I would not in the classroom setting where realtime dialogue is possible.

Unsurprisingly to me, it turns out that American students lack many of the basic skills required to "talk politics."  Anne Colby, at the Carnegie Foundation, exposes the problem at length in a recent AAC&U article:

Although preparing young people for intelligent democratic participation is undeniably important for them and for the country, this goal is not addressed in a direct and systematic way in American higher education. To be sure, higher education does improve political understanding and engagement. Virtually every study of political knowledge, interest, and participation shows a positive relationship of these variables with educational attainment. But, despite this positive effect, many college graduates are not very politically knowledgeable, sophisticated, skilled, or engaged.
Even though the proportion of the U.S. population attending college has increased dramatically in the past fifty years, according to some indicators, political knowledge and engagement have actually decreased. Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996), for example, found that from the 1940s to the 1990s, overall levels of political knowledge did not go up, while the percentage of Americans attending college more than doubled. As they put it, “Today’s college graduates are roughly equivalent [in political knowledge] to the high school graduates of the 1940s.” Likewise, Bennett and Bennett (2003) report that the statistical strength of the relationship between higher education and political knowledge and participation has weakened in recent years. They found, for example, that exposure to higher education had a weaker differential effect on news consumption in 2000 than in 1972. Research my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that this trend could be reversed if higher education would address students’ political learning more directly.

 What is unsurprising too is that Colby underlines the importance of active learning and engaging pedagogies.  Powerpoints on government structure are really courses about politics, but rather organization.  Students need to learn to engage in personal ways that make politics (its structures, its discourses, its history, media, etc.) contextualized and pertinent.  It is about global learning, and tolerance.  It is more about opening minds than "teaching" them things:

In practice, it is not easy to sort out exactly what it means to align efforts to support political development with these core academic values. It does not mean giving equal time to ideas that are without merit, for example. But it does require a real commitment to open-mindedness on the part of faculty and administrative leaders.
In the courses and programs in our study, we saw that it is possible to combine passionate concern and commitment with openness to views different from one’s own. Many of the students reported that they gained a gut-level understanding that those with opposing views are real people, not demonic caricatures. They learned how to find common ground with people whose interests are quite different from their own and saw that both can benefit when they cooperate around shared goals. We were continually impressed by the ways these courses and programs were able to work toward political clarity and conviction combined with human understanding, tolerance, open-mindedness, and a sense of community that transcends ideological difference. [My emphasis]

I am always pleased to read that a good classroom is not necessarily a "neutral" environment but a place to weigh, balance and discard "bad" ideas--without throwing the people who hold them.

The Mind of the South

We were at a party last night and Adrian says "Look what I got: The Mind of the South," and say "Cool. Uh, what's that?" So he hands me the book and I flip immediately to page 53:

Such is the primary picture. But I must not leave the theme without calling your attention specifically to the stimulation of the tendency to violence... Nor must I leave it without pointing to two significant patterns which grew up in the closest association with this romanticism and hedonism and served it as channels of discharge.
The first of these is the Southern fondness for rhetoric. A gorgeous primitive art addressed to the autonomic system and not to the enchephalon, rhetoric is of course dear to the simple man everywhere...

Well, I read that and laughed and thought "What the hell is this?" and we all got a chuckle out of its ornate prose and "fondness for rhetoric."

I am no longer making fun of the book, though. I've been flipping through it and, while it is "primitive" in its approach to social sciences and says sweeping, generalizing things like "The Yankee" and "The Southerner" and "The Negro" all the time, W.J. Cash's book is truly interesting. Right now I'm reading p. 331 where he is listing a whole slew of incidents in which professors at various universities have been fired for saying things like "The North was generally in the right" or Booker T. Washington was a great man. Earlier, Cash goes into the whole idea of victimization in "The Southerner." I can only say that this foreshadows the current nativist trends in the Republican party, the militia movement and various right winger purveyors of hate. His writing is thus an ancestor to books I love like What's the Matter with Kansas?, Nixonland, and, obviously with Wendell Berry's stuff.

Cash's condemnation and deconstruction of lynching as a practice are great too. At one point he draws the obvious parallel that the KKK and the Nazi's are of a cloth: "In its essence the thing was an authentic folk movement--at least as fully such as the Nazi movement in Germany, to which it was not without kinship" (344). (Remember, this book appeared in 1941, so he doesn't need film reels of concentration camps to figure things out.) He goes on to relate the growth of the Klan in class terms: "Its body was made up of common whites, industrial and rural. But its blood, if I may continue the figure, came from the upper orders" (344). His point was, of course, that he saw through the upper class' self-interest. The KKK was being used in part to keep workers divided along racial lines.

Ok, I'm going to read now.

Thanks, Adrian. Much, much more interesting than I had thought.

No on Prop 8

Courage Campaign asks you to sign their petition. 180k have so far. Why not you?

http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/repealprop8

Ingrates

The Republican party is either full of ingrates, ashamed of its history, or some of both:

To understand Nixon’s pivotal role in American history, it is essential to see how he helped turn his personal anxieties into political arguments, remaking his own insecurities into right-wing populist messages. Rick Perlstein’s superb recent book Nixonland provides a fascinating account of Nixon’s rise that ties together his private story with the larger saga of American conservatism.

 Of course,  I teach at his alma mater, so it's a tribute to our college's long legacy of advocating for peace, social justice, and tenure that I say this.

Keynes, Our Economic Times and a Liberal Education

The world-traveling alum strikes again with this find in Asia Times.  The article begins with a quote by Keynes, which should be enough to lure you in...

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions ... [John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace], 1920

Keynes was a genius. Read the article and see what kind of shape we're in and what kind of thinking it's going to take to get us out.  GCS students, you'll be reading some of this.

When students graduate with an interest and some understanding of the world I feel a sense of pride and a renewed belief in the liberal eduation.

Fast cars, clean bodies...

Kristin Ross is a good writer:

"And women...as the primary victims and arbiters of social reproduction, as the subjects of everydayness and as those most subjected to it, as the class of people most responsible for consumption, and those responsible for the complex movement whereby the social existence of human beings is produced and reproduced, are the everyday: its managers, its embodiment." (Ross 77)