First, an important aspect of this case that I discovered while writing this post. I was surprised and disappointed to learn that peerScholar is a Pearson product. I expected the software, if shared, to be available to other professors and universities under an open-source license. Naïve on my part, I guess. I'm assuming that after Joordens developed the product for his course, Pearson acquired rights to the software and is now looking to sell it into all universities who are dealing with the problem of large classes. No pricing is available on the web site, but my guess is that since you have to contact a sales rep for that information, it isn't free and it isn't cheap. That parties stand to benefit financially from the use of this software should have been made clear from the start, since it changes the context of the discussion, giving both parties a fair amount of self-interest in the outcome. Anyway, on to the opinion pieces...

The first opinion piece is by the professor involved, Steve Joordens, titled Placating unions versus educating students. While I agree with Joordens that the unions should not be allowed to prevent him from using peer-assessment in his course, I didn't find his editorial did much to support his position. Placing this discussion in the context of formal vs informal education doesn't help, especially when the issue has to do with assessment, specifically peer-assessment. The learning the students do though peer-assessment still formal, certainly more formal then when they learn from their friends how to add an application to their iPhone.

(FWIW, kids don't have a "complex and deep knowledge of iPhones, Facebook and computers in general". That is a myth. They were introduced to these applications at a time when the user interfaces were much more advanced and usable then when we started using them. As a result, their conceptual models of these devices are much different. And while they do have a great facility with the technologies, there are very, very few of them who have any idea how they work at all.)

Joordens is entirely correct that the unions will not succeeded in stopping him, they'll just force him to work around the union rules to achieve his goals.

The union's op-ed piece is titled Fast and cheap student grading isn't the answer at first glance provides a good justification for their position against the use of PeerScholar. For example, they calculate that the course generates approx $1.8 million in revenue for the university, with only $30,000 going to pay for the salaries of the teacher and existing TA. They argue that more could money could be spent on TA. However, this argument assumes a simplistic model of university economics.

Putting aside overhead costs for the course, the reality is that while you do have a few large 1500 seat classes like this one, you have many courses and programs that do not pull in enough revenue to cover their costs. Courses are not restricted by the revenue they generate, nor do they have access to all the revenue they generate. This allows the university to fund a wide range of activities that do not generate enough revenue on their own, but which nevertheless contribute to the student experience and the university as a whole. It is misleading, therefore, to suggest that there is over $1.7 million sitting in an account somewhere waiting to be spent on the course.

I agree that the formula for TA budgets are too small, and that 1500 people in a class is too many. However, I don't accept the union's position that they are making a stand on behalf of the students, nor do I accept Joordens' position that this is entirely about student learning.

If there is anything positive to be drawn from all this, it is that universities should be taking a look at the issues around large classes, as well as the availability and use of teaching assistants.

This morning, that particular process isn't working. I can post via gtalk, and what I do post to identica isn't flowing to facebook or twitter (but friendfeed is ok...). The whole mess has left me somewhat frustrated and thinking that this system of tenuous links is a Bad Idea, and that I should prob rip the whole thing out and start over...

Anderson is not only an author, but the editor of Wired magazine. He knows better, and this is not a mistake someone with his experience can easily make. His excuse that footnotes were removed at the last minute is lame, since in many cases the text is pulled directly from Wikipedia, requiring quotations and footnotes. I encourage you to click through to the article linked to above and review the examples yourself.

I think that Anderson may have taken the notion of 'free' that he is pushing in his book a bit to seriously. I can see him on his book tour, "Let me give you an example of free. Parts of this book you paid for, the book I just signed for you, were written by someone else, and I used them in my book, for free!"

A radical notion indeed. We used to call this dishonesty. Anderson and his publishers, Hyperion Books, appear to want to brush it all away with an apology. They apologize, you get less then what you paid for (since I'm assuming you didn't pay $30 for repurposed wikipedia entries), they keep your money.

I think in addition to apologizing, Anderson should donate his income from the book and the publisher their profits from the book to the Wikimedia Foundation. Then I might just believe he is sorry about the mistake, and not just sorry that he got caught.

William Kennedy, Microsoft's VP of Office responds to a recent campaign to being attention to the fact that Outlook 2010 will use MS Word as its HTML authoring and rendering engine. The short version is that they think MS Word's handling of HTML/CSS is pretty good, there is no standard for how to handle HTML email, and the Email Standards Project is not a standards body anyway, so they have no intention of listening to them.

Unfortunately for Microsoft this excuse falls flat with developers, mostly because there are standards for HTML and CSS that MS could follow and create a viable subset from. The problem is MS Word which is used to edit all Outlook email messages (plain text, RTF, or HTML). It is MS Word's inability to render HTML/CSS that is the problem here, or more specially, MS's refusal to recode MS Word so that it can handle HTML/CSS layouts. I think this is doable, but more complicated then suggested by the folks at the Email Standards Project.

It should be noted, however, that the Email Standards Project is an initiative of a company that sells email marketing software, and the developers who want to use HTML and CSS layout in email are for the most part email marketing folks who want to deliver heavily branded email messages to our inboxes, something IMHO we can do without. This is why I have Outlook set to render all email as plain text (Thank you Microsoft, btw, for that bit of functionality!) regardless of the format it is sent in.

Despite the fact that Microsoft's reasoning is a bit weak, I'm glad that they are not being distracted by the ESP's campaign.

We are heeding the research results as well as the call from our members that our name no longer represents who we are and the value we add for our employers.

The research they are alluding to is the SLA Alignment Project , although I can't find much specifically on the topic of renaming. Judging from the blog post linked to above, the motivation is the perceived need to come up with a name that means something to companies, executives, or anyone else who relies on the services of specialized libraries.

I'm not sold that a name change is what is needed at this point, or rather, is where the SLA should be investing its energies. As a professional organization, the SLA does represent the profession and is responsible for promoting the profession. However, the language in the announcement suggests that the SLA executive has confused the SLA the organization with being the profession (i.e. "our name no longer represents who we are and the value we add for our employers" (emphasis mine)).

The problem with this is that is makes the exercise of renaming the organization that much harder, since it challenges the professional identities of people, asking them to give a name to what they do. And whatever is decided, a line will be drawn with some people included and others feeling less so.

What I'd like to see is what specifically is wrong with Special Libraries Association? I've never liked 'special' as a descriptor, since the links to its origins (specialized libraries) are not clear. 'Association' can't be a problem, so I would guess that it again comes down to 'libraries' being a bad word.

In any case, some folks have started a forum to discuss potential name changes.

Coming up with a better name is going to be a long process, one that will consume a lot of time and resources, and on that is likely to generate a fair amount of heat (as opposed to light) between those involved. It is a costly undertaking, and one that is unlikely to generate any real benefits for its members. Does anyone think that a name change of the professional association is going to create job opportunities for its members?

In the end, I think the SLA would have been better to just stick with SLA, but have it mean nothing. "It used to stand for Special Libraries Association, but now it doesn't mean anything."

There. Done. Now, on to more important things...

Interesting the ways in which Google Suggest tries to complete the phrase "libraries are...".

The suggestions are based on analysis of search queries submitted by users, so they reflect on what people are looking for, not necessarily what people are saying about libraries.

Thanks for Seb Paquet for the idea.

I wonder: is Elsevier the only publisher carrying out these dishonest business practices, or are they merely the only ones with the misfortune of being caught. And what are librarians doing, if anything, to make sure their trust in publishers is not misplaced?

Steve Joordens, the professor involved in this case, teaches an intro psychology course with 1400 students. That is problem number one, and one that is faced by almost every university. That number of students would overwhelms any conventional teaching scenario. Even setting an acceptable class size at 50 students would require 28 sections, with 28 professors teaching. While that may appear at first to be a solution to the PhD employment problem, the resources and logistics for putting on 28 separate sections (vs. one or a few mega-auditorium classes) is hard. And you would need to pay those 28 professors, who even at typical sessional rates would cost around $140,000 per semester.

That's only about 100$/student, though, so it wouldn't be impossible to do this. If tuition rates could be increased to cover the additional costs of teaching, facilities, and operations. Which they can't, at least not at most universities. So we're stuck with the basic parameters of the problem: one professor teaching a class of 1400 students.

The typical solution involves trying to get 1400 to view the lectures, then using machine-readable assessment methods. Pulling even that off is a lot of work, but it still leaves a lot of be desired as far as student learning goes.

What complicates the matter somewhat is Joordens' motivation for introducing the PeerScholar software. In this blog comment in 2006, he states that his motivation behind the PeerScholar system was pedagogical:

While I did indeed – perhaps stupidly it now seems – point out some of the economic value of the peer-to-peer approach, it was not instituted for economic value at all. It was instituted because it provides a method of teaching thinking and communication skills that is generally regarded as superior, yup superior, to TA grading. That is, by applying critical analysis skills (call that marking if you like) to written pieces that vary from poorly to well written, students gain extremely valuable skills that they can then apply to their own work. Thus, the grading component of the assignments may be where the true learning is occurring.

The "stupid" comment he refers to is the one cited in the courts' judgment, apparently taken from Joordens' web site:

I will be completely honest. The original reason for seriously considering a peer-to-peer evaluation process was financial. We cannot afford to pay a large team of TAs to mark written answers for large classes. Moreover, it would take them so long to do the marking that it also just wouldn't be practical. Peer-to-peer evaluation, when combined with great internet programming, is fast and cheap.

In other words, Joordens wanted to improve the student learning by introducing assessment that was not based on multiple-choice answers. However, the financial restrictions of the situation prevent him from hiring TAs to correct written assignments, so he implements a peer-review solution which provides the same or better student outcomes.

The union, predictably, is concerned only with the impact this has on their members: the loss of jobs of teaching assistants. Note that in this specific case there is no loss of jobs because there was no budget anyway to hire teaching assistants to handle this marking. Joordens wasn't using the peer review system to cut costs, he was trying to improve student outcomes without incurring additional costs.

Still, the union has to fight this on principle: they cannot allow this kind of solution to take root on campus because it has the potential to reduce the need for teaching assistants. This is a real risk, especially with universities looking for ways to reduce costs, and especially if it can be positioned as improving student outcomes.

It doesn't have to be that way, of course. Educational technologies and teaching assistants can co-exist in ways that lead to improved student experiences and outcomes. Students can become more engaged in their learning, teaching assistants, freed of some of the burden of correcting, can focus on interacting with students and teaching.

Now that the union and the Ontario courts have established a precedent that attempts to reduce dependencies on TAs will challenged and most likely prevented, instructors will be wary of making changes to how they deliver and manage their courses. But I hope that people will still try to innovate, to find ways to improve student learning in more efficient and effective ways. The system as it is not sustainable, and we are going to need creative solutions in the coming years if we are to continue in our role as establishments of higher learning. Peer-review assessment methods are not the biggest threat faced by teaching assistants, and it is time that they and their unions faced that fact.

I'm not sure how the professor argued his case, but I would have positioned the student assessment as part of the learning process, which it is. As such, I cannot see the union being allowed to intervene in the classroom and dictate what teaching methods the professor can and cannot use.

I'm hoping that this news gets some more traction in academic news circles so that hopefully more details and reaction will emerge.

Update 1: I came across this related editorial at the NP: CUPE, proudly stopping progress:

PeerScholar was a research project worth pursuing for its own sake, but the Ontario Superior Court's support for CUPE's grievance means that the Joordens/Pare research will be very difficult to reproduce scientifically, under real-world conditions, inside Ontario. It also means that PeerScholar, as a made-in-Ontario software application, will be hard to sell to colleges and universities where teaching assistants are unionized. And the potential for Peer-Scholar to improve the quality of large first-year survey classes may never be realized. How often does a labour union, with one single action, harm science, education and business all at once? What an astonishing hat trick of ignorance and greed; doff your lids, readers.

Update 2: Here is a 2006 post from Rochelle Mazar that documents the beginning of this brouhahah.

(Original link via George Siemens)

Long story short: To run the Active Directory management tools on Windows Vista, you need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools for Vista.

Next, you need to go into the Control Panel to 'unhide' the Active Directory tools that Windows hides from you, presumably for your own protection.

Derek Melber covers the entire process in detail over on WindowsSecurity.com.

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The next problem I ran into was that I needed to run the AD tools using my AD admin account, which is different from my regular user account. In Windows XP/etc, you could shift+right click to get a Run As option on the context menu. With Vista, you only get Run As Administrator option, which is useless for me.

To run the AD tools as another user, I first downloaded MS's ShellRunas utility. I downloaded this utility to a (manually-created) folder c:\program files\shellrunas, then opened a command-line (cmd.exe), navigated to that folder, and ran the utility with the 'reg' switch (i.e. shellrunas /reg) to add it to the context-menu.

This worked as advertized, although I had to enter the alternate credentials twice: once for the AD tools and another time for mmc.exe. Weird, but I do this so infrequently that I can't be bothered to get rid of the annoyance.