On Choosing to Learn

In my Learning Sciences and Technology Design seminar we recently read a draft of an upcoming book by Dan Schwartz, a Professor here at Stanford. He argues that we need to reconsider our assumptions about assessment in order to better capture the things we actually care about as educators. Instead of evaluating student knowledge, understanding, or even skills, he argues, we should try to assess student choices. That is, what a information or skills a student knows, and even her ability to learn further information or skills is not as important as the decision to learn.

That choices are central to how we move through the world is perhaps obvious, but it is striking how infrequently choice is a core part of any assessment framework (multiple-choice tests certainly do not count as "choice" in the sense that Dr. Schwartz means it). Even forward-thinking educators tend to focus more on acquisition of skills or overly-ambiguous notions of "metacognition" or "critical thinking" than on the specifics of decision making.  And specifics are the keys.  "Making good choices" is as bad a curricular goal as "being able to organize the following events chronologically."  A better option is a synthesis of the two, perhaps something to the effect of: "Given the task of explaining a historical event, choosing to organize parts of that event chronologically."

It seems to me that little education - indeed, even little of my own education, excellent though it has been - is organized around this kind of formulation. I believe that the most successful students end up adopting good strategies and making good choices, but Denise Pope's Doing School (about which I've written previously) suggests that a great many of our most successful students (if grades are our standard for success) in fact make terrible choices, ethically, academically, and even physically.

For my own part, I am struck by how often the schools I've attended - even Stanford - have not only tacitly accepted but in fact actively encouraged poor choices and unhealthy habits.  And I don't just mean ambiguous moral choices, but concrete habits of mind and academic practice. For example, in spite of Stanford's ostensible lack of concern over grades, their various administrative policy practically forces students to waste hours of time engaged in a gamey calculus over which courses to take credit/no-credit, and which to take for a grade. If I choose not to engage in this practice, I put myself at a disadvantage in terms of various small-scale political interactions that are inevitable in a graduate school.   On the other hand, the process itself, besides consuming intellectual energy better spend elsewhere, has undesirable effects on the way students engage with the particular courses they are not taking for a grade and the way professors engage with those students.

In other words, by separating this seemingly administrative cultural artifact from the curriculum, we've set up a situation where knowledge and skills are within the purview of the course, but where the most important actual decision making is made at an institutional level.  In graduate school - which is at least theoretically preparation for a life in the academy - this is perhaps not overly troubling, but as we shift our gaze to undergraduate or k-12 education, it's easy to see that students are often well-taught to make bad learning choices by the broader curricula and institutions in which they find themselves.  My rule of thumb for this kind of supposition is simple: if Stanford's graduate programs have a fundamental pedagogical or curricular problem, odds are that same problem can be found - and, indeed, is probably worse - at earlier stages of the education system.

So what is there to do? Unfortunately, it seems to me that this problem is virtually intractable in our current education system because it is endemic not merely to our curricula and pedagogy, but to our very culture, our policies, our institutions, and even our economics.  That is, there is a good reason we teach bad choices in schools: because our political, economic, and social systems are built upon the majority of people making bad choices.

Backwards Design and Higher Education

A note about the title: it's actually a joke.  There really isn't any meaningful backwards design in higher education.  But I'm not here to complain.  No, there's actually very little backwards design at every level of education, and for the most part I've managed to enjoy being a student throughout my life.  Even without backwards design, schools are wonderful places to establish networks, to have conversations, to try out ideas, and, if you put yourself in the right mental space, to learn by failing.*

* That could be its own post, but we'll save it for now.

Before I can say anything about higher education, I need to talk about backwards design, briefly.  Back in 1998, Grant Wiggins - who happened to go to a very good Great Books college - and Jay McTighe wrote a book called "Understanding by Design."  It's essentially a handbook for curriculum writers, advocating an approach that starts at the end and works its way backwards.  This idea was hardly new to educational theory by 1998 - indeed, in one of my courses this week we've been reading a piece from 1949 that advocates the same idea - but for whatever reason the formulation by Wiggins and McTighe grabbed ahold of the world of educational practice.

The essence of the concept is this.  First, you figure out what core idea or ability you want students to finish a class with, then you figure out how you're going to know whether they have it.  And voila, you're curriculum is done!

That's not entirely true, but it's pretty close.  Sure, you can import a handful of secondary and tertiary ideas or abilities with which students should gain familiarity, if not mastery.  And sure, there's still the work of actually writing the curriculum after that.  But figuring out the end goal and the assessment really is more than half the battle.  I would say that, in writing my creative writing curriculum this summer, for example, I spent a good two or three weeks decided on an end goal and an assessment, and maybe a day or two on writing the actual curriculum from there.  That is, once you know what you're trying to do, it's not so hard to figure out whether any particular activity or lesson plan fits into that bigger frame.

The funny thing is, in higher education this doesn't seem to happen at all.  I could speak to my current classes - though a couple are better than others on this front - but rather I want to point out a deeper and less personal issue.  It should seem obvious to anyone who has been to college or graduate school that the vast majority of Professors do not use anything resembling backwards design in their curricula (heck, most of them just stand up and lecture every week, and then have their TAs administer and grade a content-knowledge test at the end).  The question is, why?

At the heart of the problem, it seems to me, is a dichotomous conflict between research and pedagogy.  The difference between a Professor and a researcher at a think tank or consulting firm is, primarily, this: the Professor, in addition to doing research, teaches.  Perhaps it is easier to find Professor jobs than pure research jobs, or perhaps Professors like the idea of and prestige associated with University positions.  Regardless, once in the Academy, Professors do not, actually, get to choose one or the other.  Or, rather, they are not assessed, themselves, on both fronts.

For the most part, academic survival depends upon research and publishing.  While a great many people will defend the "publish or perish" mentality of the academic market as a necessary part of a meritocracy, it has an unintended side effect.  Professors, because they are evaluated almost entirely on research, do not spend time or energy designing or executing their pedagogical functions.  They are, in short, bad teachers.  And they are not necessarily bad teacher by choice, but rather by necessity.  A Lecturer (not a full Professor) at Stanford I spoke with this week related a story of a colleague whose Dean told him not to spend so much time teaching.  "If you ever want to get tenure," he (more or less) said, "You have to cut back on your teaching and get to work doing research and publishing."

It's important to note that "cut back on your teaching" does not mean teach fewer courses.  No, the admonition is to take your teaching less seriously, to spend less time and effort on designing a good curriculum, on employing effective pedagogy, on evaluating whether your students are understanding the material.  The result, for students, is long, boring lectures and even longer, even more boring reading assignments that float aimlessly in an ethereal mist, never to be connected to their studies except in their own minds.  In short, none of the habits of mind - design, making informed connections, creative generation of questions, and so on - that make for good research are modeled for students in the classroom.

So what does that have to do with backwards design?  While Wiggins and McTighe talk mostly about courses, I think there's an argument to be made that educational structures as a whole can be subjected to a similar analysis.  In the case of higher education - and especially graduate studies - the analysis leads to disturbing revelations.

- At the level of the individual course, there is no clear sense of what a student ought to be getting out of the course, nor how anyone (except maybe the student) will know whether the course succeeded.

- Institutionally, there is little coherence to the student experience except what the student is capable of bringing to it herself.

- It is not clear that the assessment procedures we have in place - that is, the dissertation - are effective measures of whether students are adequately prepared to do meaningful research.

I've hit on the first of these above, but the second two deserve quick explication.

Institutional incoherence is a big problem in the humanities in particular, where students routinely take ten years or more before they finish their studies.  While there are many factors that cause this problem, one of the most important is the lack of clear objective for graduate students at an institutional level.  That is, Universities do a very poor job of saying "what we want out of our PhDs in English is _____."  Of course, they do generally have something to fill in that blank with, but it's rarely something that makes sense, or that would be agreeable across the department (let alone amongst students).  Now, that may not be a problem, per se, except it leads to our other issue.

How do you assess outcomes (or processes, even) when you do not know what outcomes (or processes) you desire?  In the case of the University, the dissertation has long been the be-all-end-all.  Why? Because of tradition.  Oh, sure, there's more to it than that, but not much more.

In the modern world, I think it's fair to ask whether the dissertation is an adequate reflection of whatever kind of learning students are meant to do.  That is, the dissertation exists, primarily, as a kind of pre-monograph, a preface to a first book.  But is our goal to turn all PhD students into writers of books, anymore?  How many graduate school programs define their success based on whether or not graduates go on to publish books?  While that may have been the model in the past, that publishing itself is undergoing rapid transformation in the modern age demonstrates that its probably not the best model for the future.

What's more, the dissertation is written, published, and defended individually.  It is, perhaps, in some ancillary sense a collaborative experience, but it is still held up as an indication of individual achievement.  The problem is, Professorial research is decreasingly individual.  Collaboration has taken hold in much of the academy, and, indeed, part of the goal of graduate studies probably ought to be habituating students - many of whom have been stuck in highly uncollaborative environments through the whole of their academic lives - to working in teams.  And yet, our final assessment is monolithic, and, what's more, it's almost unimaginable that it be anything but the work of a single person.

All of which shows not only a disconnect between purpose and assessment in higher education,* but a total lack of consideration of that disconnect.  What is the purpose of a graduate education? How do we know that we've achieved that purpose?

* We haven't even touched undergraduate, which is its own messy can of worms.

A great many institutions obviously do a fine job creating future scholars, and so the system is working fine on a certain level.  The question is not, however, if it has worked or if it is working, but rather how does it work and will it continue to work?  Despite missing the kind of clear curricular structure I've mentioned above, the Academy has always has a resilience, thanks largely to its clever, self-motivated members.  It is not clear, however, that survival alone means that the system actually works.

When Doing Poorly on an Assignment is a Crisis

I knew, when I decided to come to Stanford, that there would be days I would wish I had gone to UCSD instead (just as the reverse would have been true).  I did not expect that one of those days would come so early.

Those that know me know that I care little for grades.  I am perfectly capable of assessing my own learning.  What I desire, instead, is feedback, constructive criticism, helpful advice.  Harsh doesn't hurt.  On the contrary, the more direct the feedback, the more specific the criticism, the better.  I want to be a better writer, a better thinker, a more skilled lover of wisdom.

In one (or two) of my courses this quarter, however, I'm feeling something of a crisis of purpose.  The course is a core requirement for all Stanford PhD students, a course that, in principle anyway, is at the heart of what we're doing and learning as future researchers.  The course is a methods course, an introduction to research methodology and thinking.

It is in this course that we recently read a piece by Jerome Kagan.  The piece was the first chapter of his "The Three Cultures," and, frankly, it's one of the worst pieces of writing I've read in a long time.  Its point - that different research methodologies* have different cultures - was blindingly obvious, but its construction was totally inane, ranging from disorganized to grossly oversimplified to needlessly complex.  Phrases like "the critical point is" appeared over and over, often referring to disparate ideas, while the phrase "to put it simply" appeared in front of one of the most complex formulations in the text.  A single paragraph mentioned algae, bees, and ferrets in an effort to make a point about language, but the point got lost in the bestiary. 

* That is, the hard sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

All of this was prefaced by two inexcusable writing decisions.  The first was a table that shouldn't have been a table. The table charted "dimensions of research cultures" against those cultures, with the horrifying result that some cells contained whole sentences formatted like bad poems.  Note to self: anytime you put a 20 word sentence in a table, try to make the cells wide enough so that you do not to have one word per line.

The other decision - perhaps graver - was an invocation of Ludwig Wittgenstein near the opening of the text.  Wittgenstein, if you don't know, is famous for destabilizing theories of language and meaning with his not-always-clear, fragmentary texts.  He challenged the assumption that words meant the same thing all the time, and ultimately convinced everyone from philosophers to linguists to social scientists that context is really important - perhaps the only thing that is important - to meaning.

Kagan uses Wittgenstein, then, to begin his treatise on the three cultures.  His citation of the philosopher is made to preface his own observation that, within different research paradigms, different words have different meanings.  Fear, for example, means a different thing to an English professor than to a Behavioral Psychologist.

Which is all well and good, of course, if blindingly obvious.  No, the offense here was pointing to Wittgenstein as the divider of the disciplines.  It perhaps did not strike Kagan as supremely ironic that Wittgenstein himself probably would not have been all that excited by the theoretical division of the "three cultures" of modern academic research, that Wittgenstein's ways of thinking were in equal part scientific, social, and humanistic, that his methodology was not easy to categorize by the very system that Kagan found Wittgenstein to be the father of.

Behind my disgust at reading page after page (after page) of the drivel in "The Three Cultures"* was a lurking fear.  You see, this was not something I was reading on my own.  No, this was one of the first pieces that I was meant to read as a PhD student at Stanford University.  In some sense, this was canonical, brilliant, an important work for me to contemplate and consider.

* I prefer to be a generous reader, but in this case I cannot think of a single redeeming quality of the piece.

With even greater horror I turned to my assignment: I must summarize this monster and, what's more, apply its reasoning to my own potential research interests.  The written summary is, I think, a poor piece of pedagogy and assessment as is, but it's doubly hard when the work in question is of such poor quality.

Being the contrarian that I am (nicht diese tone, after all), I decided to write a poem.  I suspected this might get me in trouble, to a degree, but I have always tested academic limits (often to my benefit) throughout my time as a student.  This was not, for example, the first poem I've turned in on a non-poetry assignment, and historically my assessors have appreciated the change of pace, as well as the effort at creative insight.  Some have leveled a warranted "don't do that again" at me, as well, but at least there was respect for the process.

In this case, I borrowed some of Kagan's language, inserted a one-sentence statement of the simple fact - that different research cultures are different, basically - and ended with the observation that "somebody misappropriated the Wittgenstein."  It was, in my opinion, a funny but not inaccurate piece of analytical and synthetic work considering the quite dull material with which I was presented.  It was not a good poem, but it was not meant to be.  Good poems (and perhaps good writing of any kind) need subject matter worth writing about.  Of course I could have, in less time and probably with better results - at least from the Professorial point of view - done a traditional summary, but if I'm going to spend hours reading a piece of drivel, I intend not to bore myself by writing the same kind of drivel in response.*

* It is worth noting that the Kagan piece was poor writing by academic standards as well.  It was flowery and full of needless metaphors.  It was organized so that multiple and unclear ideas populated each sentence.  It was a mess.

In response to my poem (and, for the other reading, an interpolation of the reading into Plato's Meno; another, I thought, interesting and synthetic attempt to summarize the work without driving myself totally mad at the grade-school-book-reportiness of it all), I received a "check-minus" with a note that I did not summarize Kagan, and that I should look at my classmate's example passages for help.

Hence my crisis.  I know how to summarize a piece of writing.  I can write a clear and concise sentence when it is worth writing.  But I am not here to learn how to regurgitate simple information poorly presented.  And yet, increasingly, that is how I feel my classes are designed.  Classes taught ostensibly by critical pedagogues - who believe in student-run classrooms and dialogue and activity - are two-hour lectures.*  Courses in research methodology involve no training in research or methodology, but rather middle-school level assignments that ask primarily that I demonstrate not that I understand the ideas of a text or am striving to make them my own, but rather that I have done the reading, and am able to copy and paste important ideas into equally vapid academic jargon.**

* A fact that would amuse me were it not so sad.  It is a shocking revelation that the people who teach teachers to teach (and teach education researchers to assess good teaching) - that is, School of Education Professors - are such poor teachers.

** Perhaps that is "methodology" to the modern researcher?  If so, academia is in worse trouble than I thought.

Perhaps I was mistaken in thinking that Education research was open to people who value ideas as much as research, people who value creativity, process, and inspiration as much as method and practice.  It is not that I discount research, method, or practice, it is rather that I see so little of the other stuff that I'm beginning to wonder, well, whether wonder is a part of the equation at all.

Again, I don't really care about grades.  I could get a check-double-minus or a D or whatever and that wouldn't bother me.  No, what bothers me is that the feedback I received misses the point entirely.  It bothers me that the conversation is one way.  That the pedagogy is so deeply flawed.  That the underlying philosophy is so undemocratic.  That the value system is so blindly accepted that it cannot see that, maybe, a whimsical, irreverent, and sarcastic spark might have merit beyond "not being a summary."  Of course it wasn't a summary; it was a condemnation.

If a summary had been worth writing, I would have written one.  Give me an assignment worth doing, an article worth reading, a conversation to have (instead of a lecture to attend to), and I will produce high quality work.*  Give me a class worth taking - do not waste my time for three hours at a time with your pontificating and your holier-than-thou elitism (tenure alone does not make you interesting).  I, too, am an intellectual.  I, too, love ideas, perhaps more than you would believe.  I, too, can speak and listen.  I, in my own way, am well-read.  I have stood in front of students and shut myself up so that they might speak, and it was wondrous.  Yet, if no such thing can happen even here, at Stanford University, in a PhD program, in Education, can we hope for it to happen anywhere else?

* I might as well say the same for any and every student, and yet this lesson learned so well in research has not been learned in practice even by the very researchers who teach it.

It is not my assignment that makes me wonder about all of this.  That is but a small and ultimately meaningless symptom of a much deeper problem.  Nevertheless, it is an indicative example of the bigger picture: a case in which, it now seems obvious to me, the result was destined both because of how I was inevitably to respond to the assignment, and how the assignment, so to speak, was going to respond back to me.  And so the deeper culture becomes the question, and leaves me with an exhortation.

Instead of demanding that I fit into your narrow boxes, academia, you would do well to invite and celebrate your radicals, your creative thinkers, your irreverent teachers, your trouble-makers.  I know that UCSD does, and yet I chose Stanford, in part, because I believed that it did as well.  Now I'm not so sure.

Why I Chose Stanford

It's official, I've accepted Stanford's offer to attend their Learning Sciences and Technology Design PhD program starting next fall.  Initially I'll be studying under Roy Pea and Hilda Borko, both - since we're talking about, you know, Stanford - renowned researchers and well-respected in their field.  I know Roy from my time as a Master's student, during which my friend and co-conspirator Coram and I consulted Professor Pea as often as we felt we could get away with while working on our project.  As a result, I'm certain I'll be able to work with him and learn from him.

Ultimately, this decision was not an easy one, even though Stanford is an "obvious choice."  To the common layperson, the name Stanford alone is worth so much that, when I have posed my conundrum to certain people the response has been a resounding, "you mean there's actually a question?"  My answer is, yes, there is (or was) a question.  You see, PhD work is less about prestige and more about fit.  My decision, then, was not about trying to find the "best" program, but to find the program that most matched my own learning style, research interests, pedagogical biases, and general outlook on the world in general.

The Communications department at the University of California, San Diego matches me very well in almost all of those areas.  Their pedagogical model is highly discussion driven, the amount of reading and writing that students do their lines up well with the amount of reading and writing I do of my own volition, their conversations are lofty and philosophical, and the people are quirky, critical, and equal parts cynical and optimistic.  In short, a lot like me.  Indeed, had I chosen to attend UCSD I'm sure I'd be having a number of conversations with a variety of people right now in which I would be pointing out exactly that: I definitely fit at UCSD, and that's the most important thing.

So why not UCSD?  Well, I also fit at Stanford.  In fact, I think I fit better at Stanford.

While the people at UCSD are a perfect match for me, and while I would have the freedom to pursue my research interests, I'm actually not convinced that the general outlook of the department matches my own and that, even more importantly, the pedagogical bent of the program would suit me.  I don't mean to say I think there's anything wrong with the outlook or pedagogy at UCSD, I just think they wouldn't work for me.

As a graduate of St. John's College, I come from a strange academic tradition.  I'm a student of the so-called "Western Canon" at a time when a lot of the academic world - and places like UCSD in particular - seriously doubt whether there really ought to be such a thing as a canon.  The questions at the heart of this objection are valid, and look like this: How can you determine which books are Great, or even if there is such a thing as Greatness?  Isn't that a hegemonic, colonial tool to marginalize the values and cultures of all of those people who are not white male Europeans?

By themselves, these are important questions that, frankly, St. John's probably doesn't do a good enough job answering.*  The problem, to me, is the double-reversal jiu-jitsu that comes next.  Because those are good questions, the answers are assumed to be, basically, that there is no such thing as Greatness, that the Great Books are a total sham, and that any curriculum that reads them and takes them seriously on their own merits (instead of through alternative cultural and contextual lenses) is itself an instrument of intellectual and cultural tyranny.  The result, of course, is the laissez-faire, anything goes attitude towards ideas that pervades the post-modern world.  That attitude says, "your ideas and my ideas are equally valid, because they each come from our own perspectives.  Right and wrong are relative, and meaning is personally constructed, and if we all just agree to disagree and get along the world will be all right."  To me, that's a shameful intellectual surrender.  Maybe this is a hegemonic idea, but I like to think that there's more value in consensus - and, even more so, the effort to get there - than there is in tolerance.**

* Of course, any graduate of the college who continues in academia will inevitably have to confront these questions anyway, and will be - I think St. John's would argue - equipped to do so because of the critical thinking skills they've gained as Johnnies.  I suspect a great many St. John's graduates end up being heavily critical of the curricular content of the Great Books program precisely because it is so Anglo-European centric.  So it's hard to criticize the college for picking a narrower curricular goal that it can achieve in four years, instead of trying to bite off more than it can chew when it knows students will get there after-the-fact anyway.  That's just good curriculum design.

** That the position of tolerance for differing ideas is also held be many self-proclaimed radicals - many of whom are only actually tolerant up to a point - only serves to remind me of this Eva Brann (St. John's Dean, not wife of Hitler) quotation: "To the radicals we might say: you don't begin to know what radical is; we are the ones who go to the roots."

Now that's not to say that I know anything like enough about UCSD to say where the institution as a whole stands relative to this issue.  In reality, I'm sure there are a range of opinions.  I did, however, get the sense from the brief time I spent there and the one class I visited that I would likely end up very frustrated by the "make connections" instead of "find meaning" model that goes with their post-modernist academic culture.  That each week's reading on the syllabi I saw included multiple and intentionally disparate authors in order to build background and force cross-cutting interpretations rubs against my Johnnie sensibilities, in which those things are not exactly bad, but nevertheless can undercut the effort to actually understand a given text's content, instead of just its context or impact.

Again, I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with the way UCSD is doing things, I just don't think it's right for me.

Now you might be thinking that Stanford is vastly different.  It isn't.  If anything, it's less discussion and dialogue oriented than UCSD, and it is just as much concerned with post-modernist questions and processes.  The difference, then, is that Stanford is not just talking and reading and dancing around the theories and philosophies of these issues, but is, in fact, actually out in the world doing.  My experience as an LDT student was one of project-based classes and practice-oriented learning, which lines up well with modern learning theory.  While not every professor I had was a brilliant teacher using the more cutting edge pedagogy and technology, many - including Roy, incidentally* - were just that.  For all of its stuffy, privileged, businessy, ivory tower reputation, Stanford really does strive to practice what it preaches.

*Or not incidentally at all.

Being political (in the root, Greek sense of dealing with society) has its drawbacks.  It can be frustrating to try to make a difference.  But as much as I'm sure I'll have days and nights when I feel like I'm just a small, insignificant part of a broken system, and I can't do much to improve the situation, I think that Stanford will encourage and support (and, really, actively enlist) me in fighting the good fight.  The potential for myopia at UCSD, on the other hand - the ability to remove myself from the world and just do whatever I want - frightens me much more than the frustrations I'm sure I'll feel at Stanford sometimes do.  I am, despite myself, equal parts idealism and practicality, and I feel like Stanford understands that dichotomy (and supports both sides of it) better than UCSD does, at least in my case.

There are, I suspect, a great many other things I could say about what draws me to Stanford (including my previous experience there compared to the relative unknown of UCSD), but they would be variations on the theme from above.  The truth of the matter is, both programs were the "right decision," but in different ways, and I was fortunate to have an opportunity to pick between the two, even if it meant the decision was a difficult one.

The List

For the past few weeks - since my resignation at NALU - I've been mired in a search for an appropriate PhD program.  If you know anything about academia, you know that my timing is particularly awkward, because most programs put their deadlines smack dab in the middle of December, which is, you know, very soon.  So I've been exploring research angles, having conversations, browsing websites, sending emails, and doing all the legwork I need to do as quickly as possible.

The result is that, as of today, I've made my decision as to where I'm applying, and for what.  I don't think it's a perfect list, but it's a list, it's actionable, and I know - or at least strongly suspect - I would be happy in any of the programs I've narrowed my search down to.  So, without further ado, here are the five programs.

Stanford University, Learning Sciences and Technology Design

I'll be applying to LSTD for the third time, and from a third completely different angle.  When I was accepted to LDT I applied at both the Master's and PhD levels, but my application was broad and vague to a degree that made me an undesirable PhD candidate.  Last year, I wrote a more specific statement of purpose, but unfortunately my specific interests didn't align with anyone at the University.  This time, and now that I know the Professors better (and they know me better), I feel I can write an even better statement of purpose, and potentially latch on with a suitable advisor.

In short, the question I'm pushing will be this: what is the most effective design in terms of providing students access to secondary, tertiary, and contextual sources?  There are more than a few angles here, including whether it's better to simply let students surf the Internet for contextual information about the books they're reading or the history they're learning, or whether there are ways to specifically limit that vast set of information.  Likewise, one might focus on the difference between learning from primary source materials alone versus learning from primary source material supplemented by secondary sources, interpretations, and contextual information.  Regardless, it is vital to consider pedagogy here, as well, and what kind of teaching goes best with what kind of information.

So yeah, that's jargony, I know.  But it's also the kind of focused question that not only might help me get into a school that I do love, but also would set me up to be a successful doctoral student there, with a sufficiently nuanced, but also sufficiently broad research question.

University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought

Now I haven't really chosen a specific research focus here yet, but the program is fascinating to me.  Perhaps the most appealing part of this program is its breadth, and its inherent similarity to the St. John's education I received as an undergraduate.  Indeed, the program shares common roots with St. John's and the "Great Books" curriculum - as well as the dialogic pedagogy - they use.

The Committee on Social Thought website states that students are encouraged to come without a specific dissertation topic already in mind, but rather a broader area.  The purpose of the first two years, then, is to study a variety of works in that area, to select a dozen-ish of them, and then to begin laying the groundwork for doing a dissertation on the confluence of themes and ideas in those dozen books.  So, really, it's like a Johnny's dream.

The broader area, however, is something I still need to think about.  The application asks me to check a box: philosophy, literature, history, classics, or art history.  I'm inclined towards literature and/or art history, and perhaps even the combination of the two.  Peter Quince at the Clavier is, of course, an example of that intersection, and something I felt compelled to write about for fun.  I'm leaning, however, towards an explicit study of art history in the form of music.  That would be in line with my undergraduate thesis, on the one hand, but would allow me to reach far beyond the narrow scope that I began to explore in my paper about Beethoven's 3rd and 9th Symphonies.

Needless to say, this won't be as specific and jargony an application as my Stanford one will be, but I dare say it's not supposed to be.  Rather, this program would signal a return to my educational roots, but at a much higher level of sophistication.  And, armed with some knowledge of education and technology design, who knows what fun ways I'll come up with to synthesize my learning.

University of California Santa Clara, History of Consciousness

Besides having an awesome name, this program fulfills the requirement of being sufficiently cross-disciplinary and creative for my liking.  The website notes that the program is "in transition," and that the next cohort will be a smaller-than-usual one, which doesn't necessarily bode well.  But, on the other hand, that means that if I am not a good fit, it's extremely unlikely I'd get in.

I'm applying, however, because my intuition says that I am a good fit.  Unlike Chicago, UCSC asks for applicants to have a fairly specific project in mind, and of the faculty research interests they list perhaps the most interesting to me is "global capitalism and cultural process."  Now, I have almost no economics background, but culture and I spend a fair amount of time with each other, and the relationship between the two is the kind of question that I could easily get lost in for a few years.

That said I'm also intrigued by the possibility of formulating some of my own questions about culture and learning.  More than any non-education program, it strikes me that I might be able to formulate the intersection of my questions about culture, learning, and technology into a single actionable research path.  The question, of course, is if anyone at UCSC is interested in that kind of thing.  If not, well, that's why I'm applying to five schools.  If so, then maybe this is the place.

University of California San Diego, Communications

Yes, that is half of a green telephone at the top of their website.

The program here was described by someone I trust very much as "the only good communications program in the country."  So I figure it's worth an application.  Back before I enrolled in the LDT program, I looked long and hard at communications as a field that I might want to do graduate work in.  I think that education ended up being the right choice in the short term, but now that I have at least some education background, branching out into a cross-disciplinary communications program makes sense.

One of UCSD's Communications listed sub-genres is, in fact, "mediational theories of mind and of learning."  UCSD might be, for that reason, the perfect place to pursue something along the lines of a study of how people learn music, and in what role "communication" plays in that learning.  That would be an outgrowth, in some ways, of my undergraduate studies combined with my graduate work at Stanford.  In short, it would be wonderfully synthetic of what I have already done, meaning I can write a compelling application, and I would enjoy the hell out of studying it because I could go so much deeper into the issues at hand than I had an opportunity to as an undergraduate (or Master's student).

University of Hawaii, Educational Foundations

Perhaps the least "ambitious" of my applications, I nevertheless feel as though there are significant benefits to potentially staying in Hawaii and receiving a PhD from the School of Education at UH.  For one thing, if Jericha and I want to live and work in Hawaii in the long term, I could do worse than getting a degree from UH.  It's hard to explain, but I honestly believe that a PhD at UH will get you further in Hawaii than a degree from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or any other school.  That's just the way it is here.

Beyond the practical, however, I'm happy to note that UH has a very interesting School of Education.  Like all of UH's programs, the Educational Foundations program is cross-cultural.  And, moreover, it strikes me as fairly interdisciplinary as well.  That is, the goal is to understand what is at the heart of education, and how to build meaningful thought and learning processes that serve as a foundation for further learning.  The question "How do we learn?" may be too broad for PhD work, but it's a good entry point, especially coupled with the cultural question: "In what ways do different people's learning differ, and what do various cultures and peoples have in common?"

In summary, I am legitimately excited about the possibilities in all five of these programs.  What's more, the geography is agreeable as well.  The three California schools are, of course, in the good parts of the state (two in the Bay Area, one in San Diego), the Hawaii school is, well, yeah.  And the University of Chicago may be in Chicago, which would test my anti-Cubs patience, but is also the location of the Baha'i National Assembly for the United States, which would make Jericha very happy.  Plus, a lot of people do swear by Chicago, and it does have a good reputation as big cities go.

Unfortunately, deadlines loom, and so I'll be holed up working for the next couple of weeks.  Then, once I'm done, I'll be waiting for a few months.  Ah, academia.

Exploring Research Questions

Having effectively joined the ranks of the unemployed following my resignation as Director of NALU Studies, I have begun not only looking at other jobs - which is lots of fun in the current market - but also looking at PhD programs.  In the case of the former, my range is fairly narrow.  I'm looking, basically, for work with schools that want to do technology integration in their curricula because, after all, that's what I got my Master's in.  In the latter case, the angle is much more obtuse.

Pursuing a PhD is something that makes sense to me, as an avid writer, reader, and thinker.  While the politics of the University world are somewhat abhorrent, the intellectual community is appealing nonetheless, and a doctoral degree hardly means that I'd have to stay in academia if I found it too distasteful.  On the other hand, the real challenge here is not navigating politics or soft money, but rather defining an area of interest sufficiently narrow to ensure finding a fitting advisor and, ultimately, a fruitful dissertation.

For a generalist, however, that is a difficulty that cannot and should not be overlooked.  Part of the appeal, indeed, of the specialized job of instructional technology and curriculum support is that it is, in reality, a generalists job.  I would be the expert on what tools are available for classroom use, and good implementation practices, but I would (at least in theory) have the opportunity to work with teachers of English, history, science, math, music, foreign language, and anything else a given school offers.  In short, I'd be a specialist who nevertheless gets to work across fields, who gets to talk to people who know, between them, know a lot about almost any subject you'd want to know about.  Contrast that with most Universities, where the world is more insular, where conversations don't frequently happen across departments, and you'll see the appeal to a generalist and a learner of being able to span multiple disciplines.

So the challenge, given the fast approaching deadlines of many PhD programs, is defining not only a question, but even an area of study.  Hence this post, which is more for me than my readers, as I try to explore the implications of a few ideas and, hopefully, get some ideas back in return.

Music

One of my first thoughts in my current exploration of graduate programs was, "Why not return to music?"  I do love music, as the title of the blog suggests.  The biggest challenge is that, though I am a marginally competent pianist, I am no expert, certainly not at the level that PhD programs expect.  In the last two years, especially, my practice has been limited, and while I have more or less maintained my skills, I am no better at the piano now than I was as an undergraduate.

Nevertheless, my Senior Thesis at St. John's was a musicology paper, I was an assistant in music courses for three years, and I conducted a chamber orchestra.  I don't think selling a program on my background would be easy, but it would be far from impossible.  Which leaves the bigger issue of what part of music I'd like to study.

Regardless of the field of study I pursue, integrating some of my Stanford LDT knowledge is a no-brainer.  And, ultimately, I'm still passionate about education.  So the angle from which studying music is most appealing is the musical-cognition angle.  That is, how do people learn to understand music?  Perhaps there's a cultural and anthropological bent to that question: how does culture and language effect the learning of music?  How, for example, does classical music differ from jazz harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically, and how would a classical musician describe those differences relative to a jazz musician?  Beneath all of that, how does learning the music from one or the other perspective (and we could throw in many others, from pop music to modern rock to Hindu chants) influence the comprehension of the others?

It seems to me that there are two chief ways to explore those questions.  The first involves neuroscience, studying cognition using brain waves and such.  But that science is still in its infancy, and the more interesting angle (though probably the less fund-able one) is the anthropological one.  The ethnography necessary to do research into any of those questions would be fascinating and enjoyable.

Another angle, here, is strict musicology, but that seems a little bland and self-serving.  At least the above has implications for education, assuming schools ever teach music again, anyway.  On the other hand, musicology could also be a curricular focus.  Is there a way to teach music to students that combines theory, history, and appreciation.  As it is, those are all usually separate classes (as the college level, of course).  Why not make a single class that incorporates all of those?  The question, I guess, is does that effort even belong in a PhD program, or is it more of a professional deal?

Fellow Johnnies will point out that St. John's does indeed combine those three points, which leads to a possible research project: how do students of St. John's music program compare to students who take music classes at other colleges?  But that's a can of worms that leads to a different area of study, as well.

Education

Working towards a PhD in education makes some sense given my Master's in education, and I certainly feel I can ask a more sophisticated and specialized research question in this area than in any other.  Of course, the question I'm most fascinated by brings with it certain challenges: St. John's and research are not always friends.

What I mean is, I'd love to study the differences between a St. John's education, a different liberal arts education, and normal University education, and a parochial education.  I of course know that the curricula and pedagogy are wildly different, and I more or less know in what way and why.  But the question is deeper than that: how do students in those various settings differ?  What is the culture of St. John's compared to Williams College, compared to the University of Michigan, compared to a Community College?  How much of that owes to geography, how much to pedagogy, how much to some other factor?  Of course, the outcome piece is important, too: which graduates are more "successful," and in what ways?

I'm not convinced, however, that St. John's buys the kinds of processes that go into that kind of research project.  I'm not sure I do, either.  Try as they might, even the most objective education researchers usually have an axe to grind, and have biases built mostly (or even exclusively) on their own educational experiences.  "Best practice," in that cynical world view, is "what worked for me."  And, without a doubt, that's the challenge I would face.  St. John's is, to me, one of the best colleges in the country, if not the best.  Could I really overcome that bias and look at it objectively?  Would St. John's even want me to?  Do they care if they are "effective" in any modern, researchable sense?

Which leads me to narrower questions that might be more researchable, and still fit under education.  For example, do students do better working from original source material alone, or do they do better working with secondary sources and interpretations?  This question comes from a conversation I had at Stanford with a Professor there, and it still is fascinating to me.  It captures a piece of St. John's, without a doubt (since Johnnies are discouraged from using secondary sources and interpretations, so much so that we're often asked not even to consider context).  But it also captures high school English, where Hamlet is usually read without any accompanying documents.

The linchpin here is "better."  What exactly constitutes "better?"  Do secondary sources improve comprehension, interpretation, analysis?  Do they improve creativity?  Do they improve the level of conversation in the classroom?  What's more, is there even a good way, pedagogically, to introduce them without being boring?

There are other rich angles here, as well, such as the differences between high school and college level students (which benefits more from secondary source material).  Moreover, we might ask about the cultures of the schools and classrooms involved.  Perhaps a lecture class is much better with secondary sources, but a discussion one is not.  Or maybe it's the other way around?  Who knows?

Needless to say, I could probably generate a good dozen questions that fit under the heading of education, but the underlying theme to all of them is the same: I want to know about the components of a St. John's education, and what makes it work (assuming it does).  Discussion versus lecture is the key here, and that's a cultural question, which leads to a whole other kind of thought.

Anthropology

I have never taken a single anthropology class in my life, though the Alienation and Deprivation in Fiction and Education course at Stanford was close.  I don't know the language, I don't know the research, and I don't know the questions.  Nevertheless, the concepts keep hitting me again and again.  Cultural anthropology is the kind of research I keep coming up with, even if it's in music, or education, or literature, or anything else.

Now there's no question that I am a math person, and I don't know what place math has in anthropological research.  I'm wary of numbers, because too often we let them stand in for real meanings and real people.  That said, mere anecdote does not knowledge make, and so the best bet is to combine the two.  I'm sure that anthropology does this, but I simply don't know enough about it.

So what questions do I even have?  Well, I don't have archaeological questions.  That's not totally true, but I don't want to get a PhD in them.  My questions are more about modern cultures, and especially the Internet.  Ironically, though I do not use Facebook or Twitter, I'm fascinated by the cultural implications of both.  A study of how social networking is effecting people's understanding of self and culture would be extremely interesting to me.  And I'm sure it's already happening.

Anyway, that's just one of many questions in the anthropology world that appeals to me.  Some of the questions from my music and education sections could probably fall under this heading as well.  And that's the rub.  How and where can I bring subjects together?  What school is cross-disciplinary enough, what advisor enough of a generalist to help lead me through not only doing research, but narrowing my focus enough to be effective without gimping my generalist tendencies overmuch?

The truth is, I'm leaving off disciplines, even here.  I've explored Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program, which runs out of their English department.  I've considered Linguistics.  I won't rule out Neuroscience, even if I'd have a lot of catching up to do.  I'd even consider Statistics!

The trick, to me, is not finding the right field, it's finding the right school and the right advisor, and then breaking the rules.  My academic success has always been built upon stretching the limits of what is acceptable, whether that means turning in a poem instead of an essay (but a poem that is still an essay), or taking courses that don't fit into a degree but using them to inform projects, or purposefully trying to break rubrics.

Which is all well and good once I'm in a structured, academic environment, but I'm smart enough to realize that I need that structured environment, too.  The rebel has to rebel against something.  The innovator is only innovative relative to his surroundings.  Finding a good environment, then, is the real key, and the truth of the matter is, I don't know what I'm looking for.  Or, rather, I know exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't have the slightest clue how to find it.

But maybe that, more than anything else, suggests to me that I'm ready to work towards a doctorate.

The Specialist and the Generalist

A recent Pitchers and Poets podcast spoke to an issue about which I have a strong opinion.  I suppose I have a great many strong opinions - or at least I present them strongly - but I would argue that the vast majority of those remain conditional.  It is important, I think, to be open-minded enough to be persuaded by a contrary, or more likely, an entirely new perspective on an issue.

For my own part, my political convictions - which were (and are) quite strong - have undergone quite a few radical shifts since I first was granted the right to vote.  The outcome of that was, in the 2008 election, a ballot which included at least one vote for a member of each of the following parties: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, and Independent.  Why? Because I felt, in each of those races, that the party in question was irrelevant, and that the person most capable of doing the job was worthy of my vote.  Anyway, the point here is not to discuss politics, but to point out that even what seems a fervent position on my part is liable to change if I am confronted with a valid alternative that seems compelling enough.  At the very least, I am easily persuaded by nuance, especially nuance that takes on accepted cultural narratives.

There is, however, one duality which I reluctantly accept, and about which I firmly and probably irrevocably believe in one position.  That duality is specialization versus generalization, or the competing ideas that a person should focus on learning a small number of things exceedingly well, on the one hand, or a large number of things in less depth.  Of course, as Ted and Eric point out in their podcast, we live in a time where being a generalist is almost impossible.  Specialization has so much won the day that it's practically a sin to have too many interests.

Of course, I think it's difficult to draw an exact line between the specialist and the generalist.  How many fields must one study to be a generalist?  How advanced must a person's knowledge of a particular field be in order to qualify as a specialist?  What about people who are somewhere in between?  And, moreover, isn't the true generalist also a specialist in some sense?

All of those are valid questions, and I think the duality here is - like most dualities - not totally fair.  I believe there are a great many people who are, in fact, both generalists and specialists, and there's no reason those things have to be mutually exclusive.  I think there is, however, a marked difference in mentality between the two.  It is especially rare to find someone who will advocate specialization whilst also celebrating the "Renaissance Man," as we like to call generalists (implying their anachronism).

It seems to me, however, that this is a horrible mistake, and particularly important in education.  A lot of what people say is "wrong" with education amounts to this: it's not specialized enough.  Certainly it's not fair to look at students and to say that they all need the exact same, incredibly broad education, but it's also not fair to say that we should tailor everything we teach to some appropriate and predetermined career pathway for each student.  Specialization, at its extreme, suggests that students should not learn anything that isn't directly relevant to what they're going to do in their lives.  Of course, the extreme generalist learns anything completely regardless of its value, which is equally silly, but that's the point.  Going to an extreme here is bad, and these days, as we cut arts programs, recess time, and gym class, we're much closer to the extreme of specialization.

The reason this debate is important in education, however, reaches far beyond the classroom.  It is in our adult lives where we, generally speaking, are forced to specialize most.  Indeed, the older we get and the further along we go in our career paths, the more and more narrow our focus becomes.  Professors at most Universities don't just study a field (like Sociology) or even a sub-field (like the Sociology of Business), but a specific aspect of that sub-field (like gender relations in rural small businesses, or some such).  At a certain point, the robust thought processes that shaped the original study become so fine that, I would argue, they are no longer useful.

The same could be said in the business world.  One of the reasons we have such a strongly established hierarchical structure in business - besides being a vestige of feudalism - is the fact that all of the specialists that make multi-national corporations go can't speak to each other without an interpreter.  The fact of being able to talk to the IT guy, the operations guy, the finances guy, and the engineer, and the ability to translate between those branches is, as far as I'm concerned, the primary function of most executives at major companies.  Making decisions and selling the company are of minor importance by comparison.

Unlike in academia, however, in business there is an established method for getting specialists to interact, and it mostly works.  Indeed, if specialization didn't work, we wouldn't use it.  It's almost impossible to argue with specialization, in fact, from within our existing social and economic system, because of how effective it is.  The point, however, is that if we step outside of the specialized world and look at the other consequences of a society built around the extreme specialist, it's not quite as pretty as it seems from the inside.

Bertrand Russell was fond of pointing out that things like useless knowledge and idle inquiry are vital to a person's happiness.  A child does not ask questions because he wants to master his world, but merely because he is curious.  Over time, curiosity tends to diminish and ambition increase, and as a result people become more successful and less happy.  Education, from my perspective, works best not when it forwards a person's professional goals, but when it reminds him or her that there are other important goals as well.  What good is money if you are so specialized that you don't know where and when to spend it?  What good is success if you are so specialized that you can't have a conversation with anyone?

From the individual point of view, specialization, I think, can be somewhat soul-crushing.  A professor I had at Stanford told me that the day he got tenure was one of the best and saddest of his life.  Best because he was secure and successful, saddest because it meant he was locked in, all of the potential paths he might take had been narrowed to one that he had taken and would take from then on.  Why must we do that to people?  Does our society benefit so much that taking away the wonder of exploration and inquiry into ideas unknown and unconsidered is necessary?

The answer, I think, is clearly no.  Our society may benefit from specialization in that we are able to produce more goods, more "knowledge" (which so few people can use, because it's highly specialized), and more advertising.  But isn't one of the biggest problems we face as a world that we produce too much?  There are too many people on the world, eating too much food, using too much plastic, guzzling too much gas, and wasting too much electricity.  It's all well and good to address those problems by creating legions of conservation specialists, I suppose, but wouldn't it be better to just ease up off the ever-racing production line?  Indeed, it seems to me a self-perpetuating cycle.  Less specialized work means more generalization, more "Renaissance Men" who can step back and see that, hey, the world is a better place when we communicate more and produce less.

Again, I don't advocate the extreme, here, else nothing at all would get done and we'd all starve, but it seems to me that we've ventured too far in the direction of specialization.  What's more, my other fervently held opinions - that process is more important than outcome, and that cooperation is generally a better model than competition - seem to me to be complementary here.  Specialization encourages competition, which in turn is concerned with outcomes.  Generalization encourages cooperation, which is much more about processes (stuff like how people work together and whether they're doing the right thing) than outcomes.

All told, it's unlikely that we'll see a world of generalists anytime soon.  But it is the case, in my experience, that we "Renaissance Men" have serious advantages, even in this society, over extreme specialists.  Generalists learn to say "both... and..." while specialists are stuck with "either... or..."  As a teacher, there's no bigger selling point: generalists get to be leaders and visionaries, while specialists have to do what they're told.    As a human being, I believe my breadth of interests may make it harder for me to define myself to other people, but it makes it easier for me to move around joyfully and inquisitively.  And, really, what else is there?

Intellectual Property

How can you own an idea?

I know, that's a prompt for a middle school discussion of copyright, but that doesn't mean it's not an important question. Indeed, we have a whole cultural and legal mechanism that allows us to "own" ideas, but the very concept of intellectual property has a far from clear history. Even today, there is a large ideological rift between open intellectual and artistic resources on the one hand and proprietary resources on the other (and, as is common in such debates, the more "practical" side of the argument has co-opted the language of the more idealistic, so that things like Facebook, Twitter, and Google get called "open" when they decidedly are not).

Long before any modern debate, however, Plato confronted the very issue, matter-of-factly stating that, when it comes down to it, owning an idea is essentially impossible. As soon as you hear someone else's idea, understand it, and express it to yourself, it becomes yours. And thank goodness, because the number of original ideas floating around is very small (and those few truly original ideas that do exist are likely insane). There's a particular myopia in believing that any of our ideas have never been thought of before or elsewhere, or even that seemingly new ideas don't come from a huge, continuous background set of repeated ideas. The world is, after all, very old, and people have been on it - and have spoken and written - for a great many generations. There are, at present, well over 6 billion people on the Earth. So show me a completely original idea. And, what's more, show me an idea that is owned.

Of course, we have a cultural and economic model - as I mentioned - for "owning" ideas, but it has nothing to do with where ideas come from. Intellectual property, like the first forays into physical property, is the domain of the socially and culturally adept. Indeed, one might look at the University (or the Record Label, for that matter) not as a way of generating new thoughts, but as a way of ensuring that you publish your thoughts, protecting your intellectual property. It doesn't matter that most researchers in every field are heavily dependent upon each other and upon the mass of research and theory that predates them, because they have a system of intellectual property built around them to keep all but the most determined students out. Participating in the free flow of ideas in academia, in other words, comes at great cost (all of the journals and reviews and books that academics are forced to produce so that, ironically, their employers can afford to pay for all of the journals and reviews and books they need to provide their faculty). Some academics fight this commercialized view of ideas, but it's a tough fight. After all, their own survival depends, to large degree, on their intellectual property.

Owning ideas, however, contributes to social injustice. When access to the best and brightest is limited to the most able to pay, it's no wonder that rich begets rich and poor begets poor. Meritocracy is maintained, perhaps, in the sense that it is much easier to become a meritorious leader when starting off able to afford and willing to pursue an education. The "American Dream" notwithstanding, there is a strong sense of caste in the United States that rests, in most part, upon our inability to provide free access to the one resource most at the heart of learning: ideas (we might also say wisdom, but that's a more complicated word).

From an individualistic perspective, there seems little point in coming up with ideas if other people have already had them (unless, of course, other people didn't publish them), but that seems to me a mistake. A society with open access to ideas will perhaps produce more redundancy, but will also therefore produce a citizenry ready and able to adapt their thinking to particular situations. New ideas may be few, but the peculiarities of any one problem may require a precise combination of ideas (and skills) heretofore untried. At the very least, the processes (and there are many) of problem solving are ideas that no one should "own," and yet problem solving is so rarely taught.

Ultimately, we are all constrained by the culture of intellectual property, but I believe it is worth it to ask questions of the system sometimes. Indeed, if there was more critical reflection going around, we might find that much of what we do "because we have to," we don't actually have to do.

Brief Thoughts on Citation

Citations, citations, everywhere. If you read the studies that show all the things that "studies show," you'll find that they are full of citations. A single paragraph may spend as many characters chronicling all the people who were sources for the words in that paragraph as it does actually, you know, making a point. I have serious reservations about this practice, not because it violates Plato's "once you put it in your own words, it's your idea" concept (though that certainly makes sense to me), but more because it ruins the flow of the writing, and makes every piece about law more than about ideas.

Like with many social, academic, or cultural ills, the reason this happens is money. How can we make sure people get paid for their ideas? By making those ideas intellectual property, of course!* But the process of getting published makes intellectual property more of a political competition than an actual representation of the way ideas are generated. Though not an expert, a high school student may conceive of an idea that a Senior Researcher would not, and yet the high schooler cannot publish that idea - cannot be granted ownership of it - unless he can play the game of writing a proper paper, finding a proper journal, and including proper background and citations and so on.

*Think about how much blogging - and electronic publication in general - complicates the issue.

The reality is, there's no way to trace all of our ideas. We can debate whether a priori knowledge is possible - allowing for the possibility of "original" ideas - but even if it is, the fact remains that almost everything we think and say is amalgamation and permutation of things we have seen, heard, read, felt, or done elsewhere. There may be original means of expression, and original ideas in some formal sense, and perhaps original connections between experiences, but it is exceedingly difficult to have a truly original idea. How far does citation go, then? Exact, word-for-word recreations of thoughts published elsewhere makes some sense, but what about paraphrasing, or re-wording? Should I cite my classmate for a witty saying, or my Uncle for a joke he told me when I was twelve?

'Common knowledge,' we tell students, need not be cited. We all know that there are 12 months in a year. But what is common knowledge in academic writing? In education research? In a physics journal? What glaring assumptions go without citation, while others are backed by fifteen papers over the last fifty years? And which of those papers do you cite?

I would be shocked if there are not people who research the use of citations in research (who must, themselves, also include endless citations), but there seems little to do about the actual practice. Yet, so many people seem to think it's either useless, or silly. At the very least, we could move citations out of the body of the text, right? Regardless, it's a game that academics have to play, but it's a game that I find indicative of a troubled culture.