Today’s Friday Focus isn’t on an education blog though it is written by– based on all accounts– a fine teacher. Parking Lot is an example of what I was calling a lifeblog long before the term became co-opted to mean almost the opposite of my intention: a blog that is living, about becoming better as a person, as a member of many communities, and as an educator. He writes about his work as an Open Space facilitator, bringing groups of passionate people together to better themselves and their communities. In his blog I discovered. It was in Parking Lot that I first noted a direct conversation on the network and learning. In 2003! With Chris’s interpretation of the Tao Te Ching through the lens of Open Space ideas, I’ve figured out that "facilitation" was not just for facilitators and the principles of facilitation are incredibly important and useful for teachers, not to mention mercurial, moody bastards like me.

Like the best of the old-school lifebloggers, Corrigan’s blog is reflective of a whole, learning, evolving person. It’s not just the best of highlights or a list of lessons, but thoughts– often meditative– on practice and openness and politics and pretty pictures and the myriad fruit of trying to lead an engaged life.

I have aroused the ire, curiosity and pity in some of my friends with my Twittered assessment of last night’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin: pretty much a wash, with a slight edge to Palin. I stand by my assessment.

My reasoning is this: both candidates went into the debate needing to make a significant change in style. Biden, who could use the entire 90 minutes of the debate just to clear his throat, knew he had to be uncharacteristically concise. Palin, with expectations low after recent well-publicized bombs in the media needed to exhibit the qualities for which she was chosen and come across as a folksy, down-to-earth, just-like-you, female beltway outsider. I didn’t think either was a stretch. I had no doubt that Palin would come across more like the Palin we in Alaska know (needless to say, if she and McCain lose the election, she will probably be elected Governor for Life here) and I didn’t doubt Biden could get to the point when he needed to… though I was worried he’d still find time to lodge his foot in his mouth at some point (which he didn’t).

So, in terms of the effect of the debate and how it will "play," I thought it was a toss-up. Biden’s a known quantity and long-time politician, this debate was unlikely to sway too many one way or another unless he hit a long home run. There are many more who know little of Palin except what they’ve seen since the convention and who had rightly become worried over the last two weeks. That audience is more open to changing (or making up their as yet unmade) minds. So Palin just needed a base hit, which she got… maybe even a double. So slight edge to Palin.

My personal, biased, way-left liberal opinion was that Biden won. If I were grading them I’d give Biden a B- and Palin a D:

• Both had their talking points down, as they should, but Biden at chose one that was in the general area of an answer to the question given if not an actual answer. Palin chose to divert to her energy ‘expertise’ three times in more or less unrelated questions and then offered that she wasn’t necessarily going to answer any questions but instead speak directly to the American people. Even when that isn’t a way of evading the question, I find that approach intolerable. We only have one VP debate to begin with, and Palin can "speak to the people" anytime she wants just by opening her mouth right now.
• A significant problem with our political climate is that learning, which necessarily entails change, is demonized. If someone has never changed a position or rethought a decision after learning more about their job, they don’t deserve to aspire to the highest positions in their field. Being "for something before you are against it" is a description laced with derision… but what thinking person can’t be accused of this? We’ve seen great evolution in this country of our social context in ways which almost everyone agrees are good: women can vote, slavery is illegal, white and blacks can marry each other. None of these happen without people (not all, but a lot) learning and changing their mind. And if they can do so with issues of that magnitude, they certainly can do so when it comes to what kind of health care system makes sense or under what conditions foreign intervention makes sense, or whether a decision they made 1 or 5 or 20 years ago was the right one. I prefer someone who is willing to admit that they learn and change and– Buddha bow!– have made mistakes. Which leads to the problem that goes hand-in-hand with this one:
• Nuance is forbidden. Sometimes subtlety is discarded through accusations of changing positions; most often nuance is ignored when selectively choosing facts about another. Yes, Biden voted against more troop funding. So did McCain. Each voted that way when some part of the bill was in question… in this case when timelines were or were not attached. Contexts change, bills have riders and conditions and earmarks. What might have seemed– or was!– a good decision in 1998 or 2003 might not be so in 2008.
• Claims that Biden was "playing the blame game" and "looking backward" are naive and destructive. I admired Biden’s wholly uncharacteristic pithiness in saying "past is prologue." How right he is. I generally hate it when any part or political side makes this kind of statement. I also find it hard to reconcile that position with Palin’s claim that they’ll learn from the past mistakes in this administration and other administrations."
• When Palin did directly approach questions, her answers scared me: the role of the VP, applying the principles of the Iraqi surge to Afghanistan, the realities of meeting with the United States’ adversaries, lack of any specificity of how McCain’s policy toward Iraq (or Iran, or Pakistan) would differ from the Bush administration’s current one… those non-answers coupled with her pandering to Israel that included invoking the specter of Iran having nuclear capabilities was outright scary.
• Enough with the "maverick" stuff. None of the candidates are mavericks. It just sounds silly to keep choosing that label the way it is ridiculous when a kid tries to choose his own nickname. No real maverick would go around calling himself one even if everyone else believed it!
• Palin’s folksiness is extremely annoying. I believe most of that folksy charm to be a disingenuous put-on that sounds forced. And why does her Wasilla-in-Minnesota accent get stronger every week?

For the record, Palin’s getting General McKiernan’s name wrong and making the occasional grammatical error don’t bother me a bit, I could care less if she calls Obama by his first name (Biden said "John" so many times that it has to be the most frequently used word of the night) and I believe that Biden’s tears talking about his wife and daughter were genuine.

• Taking Back Teaching: A Forgotten History | Beyond School — more on the history of education and grading…

• Building a Virtual Museum on the History of EdTech — An interesting idea…

• Borderland » Blog Archive » NY Times Meets the Edublog — “…they were amazed at how a bunch of adults who don’t even know them could waste so much energy arguing about what we’re doing in our classroom”

"Open Education" is a vast area with many different territories. "Open Learning" encompasses a diverse group with some strikingly dissimilar needs. An "Open Course" might refer to a list of readings, a "complete" course without instructor, or a guided course. And then at some point a course becomes large enough or guided enough or at least some kind of schedule is suggested and it becomes a "Massively Online Open Course".

Then there are those labels and titles of initiatives that seem to cut various slices of the open education pie: OCW, OER, OpenEd…

It’s a bewildering array of options that makes discussion about accreditation (amongst other topics) difficult because I, at least, am unsure what kind of open education is being discussed at any given time. If "Open Accreditation" is referring to ways in which to confer some kind of material value to the learner who has succeeded in an "Open Teaching" environment, the road to accreditation hacking Shangri-La is a bit less hazy– a slightly smaller step– than providing the same service to the independent learner. The biggest problem is that of assessment. In an open teaching class, there is at least someone who could conceivably perform, facilitate, or coordinate assessment activities… in the independent learning scenario there is no one in that role.

• It Isn’t Easy Being a Genius - New York Times — Within days, I began to receive requests from family, friends and strangers to evaluate various pet theories, some well founded, some half-baked, ranging from the therapeutic benefits of magnets to the location of the missing dark matter in the universe.

• Personal Learning Environments ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes — A recent presentation by Stephen

• Joe Biden can beat Sarah Palin by pretending she’s a man. And that he’s not Joe Biden. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine — Agree wholeheartedly with Lithwick. There are many ways Biden (what a crap VP pick, by the way) can lose the debate to Palin *despite everything*.

• Deliberate practice in the working world

• Hotel Wikipedia - Meta — “Welcome to the Hotel Wikipedia / Such a lovely place / So much empty space”

• Sharing Nicely (at Pecha Kucha Cape Town) — Nice. Literally and figuratively.

I couldn’t find the thread George mentions, but questions about our grading system and the invocation of William Farish are interesting to consider. The history of grading as we know it, as laid in the article that George links to, can use some expansion. In that article, we learn that Farish instituted his grading system in 1792 or later. But there is an interesting parallel (?) development outlined in a 1993 Educational Forum article:

The history of grading in American colleges was eloquently detailed by Mary Lovett Smallwood (1935). She related that marking, or grading, to differentiate students was first used at Yale. The scale was made up of descriptive adjectives and was included as a footnote to Stiles’s 1785 diary.

President Stiles wrote that 58 students were present at an examination, and they were graded as follows: “Twenty Optimi, sixteen second Optimi, 12 Inferiores (Boni), ten Pejores” (Stiles, 1901, vol. 3). In all probability, these may have been the very first collegiate “grades” given in the United States.

Yale took the initiative in formulating a scale. Smallwood quoted the following from the Book of Averages — Yale College: “Record of Examinations,” 1813 — 1839: Rules respecting this Book and its records, 1. This book shall be kept with the Senior Tutor of the College, whose duty it shall (be) to see that the following rules are carried into effect. 2. The average result of the examination of every student in each class shall be recorded in this book by the Senior Tutor of the class.

Also this very same book from Yale gives a reference to marking on a scale of 4. In all probability, this was the origin of the 4.0 system used by so many colleges and universities today. There was, however, still no connection to letter grades. .or example, an A was not a 4.0, for at this point in time, there was no A.

The gap of 28 years between President Stiles’s remarks of 1785 and Yale’s in 1813 is also interesting. It is hard to imagine there were not any records or statements concerning grading written during this time, but apparently none have been found.

The article goes on to outline dates of implementation of various numeric systems at Harvard, Mount Holyoke, etc.

Regardless, the point being made by George and the CCK08 participants is well-taken– grading systems of the kind we are familiar with are relatively new to education. If you could go back in time, you would look in vain for grading scales in the Platonic academies, letter grades in the Lyceum, or calculators (literally) feverishly working out GPAs in the monasteries.

But before we get all medieval (figuratively and literally) on the system, let’s remember that the previous system wasn’t without its flaws. Then, as now, there were charges of favoritism and corruption, cults of personality and pressures to push learners through for reasons other than merit. Frankly, I find the quote George highlights:

"When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with a prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them."

terrifying. Because the truth is that while some students in the past became famous themselves because of the names and thoroughness of the teachers, others became famous because of the names of their teachers end stop. Great names are not necessarily great teachers; studying with a great name doesn’t mean one has learned anything; great names– knowing that the system that their students tend to thrive in are not meritocracies– are under the same kinds of pressure with or without grades to assign.

I’m the last person to defend contemporary grading systems. I much prefer performance- and apprentice- based systems of evaluation and promotion. But in our struggle to fight the man we shouldn’t lose sight of the reality that when it comes to the conferring of value and the measure of learning that grading is meant to stand for, there are many ways to go wrong and a wealth of subjectivity that ultimately will work to a significant degree to undermine itself by virtue of being accepted enough to become a "system" in the first place.

• Gene Expression: Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic fads — Despite the spirited defense by an apparently embittered ex-cultural studies student “gone science” and not meaning what they are purported to mean, the numbers here are interesting…

• Informed Comment: A Social History of the Surge — If the surge is working, I’d hate to see how “broken” has been redefined.

• Is This a ‘Victory’? - The New York Review of Books — it is a strange victory. Shiite religious parties that are Iran’s closest allies in the Middle East control Iraq’s central government and the country’s oil-rich south. A Sunni militia, known as the Awakening, dominates Iraq’s Sunni center. It is led by Baathists, the very people we invaded Iraq in 2003 to remove from power.

• Remember Iraq? | Salon — Glad someone is battling the “we are winning in Iraq” and “the surge worked” BS. How do the R’s get away with it?

• Muxtape — The story of the demise of Muxtape– at least in the incarnation we knew and loved

• The Museum of Conspiracies — Who’s behind it?

• The Hot and the New • Dwigger: Social Voting and Discussions for Twitter — Twitter conversation threads and voting

I didn’t see a clear winner in tonight’s presidential debate (except C-SPAN, which has created a great resource with their “Debatehub”, useful as the debates happen and afterward). Had things turned out as they did in a foreign policy debate that actually focused on foreign policy, I’d give the tie to Obama based on the various predictions that of the three planned debates, this was the one McCain was most likely to dominate. But neither candidate really rose to the occasion. Both were dispassionate– Obama didn’t turn on the jets as I hoped he would, McCain didn’t fall prey to his temper. It felt like McCain dominated the clock with long-winded answers, but Obama did nothing to assert himself either (of course, neither did Jim Lehrer, invisible moderator man). Still, I thought Obama delivered the only memorable lines of the night, beginning one response to McCain’s discussion of the Iraq war:

“John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007.”

the only moment I thought one of them might break out and show some emotion was when Obama incredulously questioned McCain’s dubious claims to being a “maverick”:

“John, it’s been your president who you said you agreed with 90 percent of the time who presided over this increase in spending. This orgy of spending and enormous deficits you voted for almost all of his budgets. So to stand here and after eight years and say that you’re going to lead on controlling spending and, you know, balancing our tax cuts so that they help middle class families when over the last eight years that hasn’t happened I think just is, you know, kind of hard to swallow.”

But it didn’t happen and the bus turned right back toward snoozeville.

In the end, Obama was more thorough and precise with details that effectively countered McCain’s claims. The transcripts read well for him, putting him in relatively sharp definition compared to the vague stump-speech platitudes from McCain. But McCain sounded more sincere– or at least more personally engaged– and ultimately showed a bit of the calculated simplicity and direct personal address that I believe won Bush a wholly undeserved second term.

As a skeptical Obama supporter feeling more and more disappointed since he won the primary, this was not the kind of performance I hoped for.

[I left a longish comment on Jen's "Network Persuasion" post, but putting more there seems rude, so I add a bit more here]

I suppose every discipline is like this, but educational technology (to adopt a very broad rubric, but intending it in the most inclusive sense of the term) seems particularly prone to the problem of not looking outside of its own (necessarily) narrow literature when considering phenomenon that cross many disciplinary boundaries. Beyond the normal problems of inter-disciplinary knowledge– there’s so much out there to be known in the many fields that "education" covers–  I think it speaks to a subtle, but deep-seated sense of technological determinism. Jen considers "the network" in the Connectivist and contemporary educational pedagogy sense and makes the accurate observation that "our own biases and prejudice lead us to build networks of people who share our beliefs and culture." If you remove that statement out of the context of social networks mediated by digital technology and consider it instead in the context of social groups and networks as they would have been considered 20 years ago, it seems dead obvious. Who doesn’t know the saying "birds of a feather flock together?" It’s a proverb so old it was already old when Plato used it in 360 B.C. And it wasn’t only in the simplistic sense of people performing an action together, but in the complex social sense– a few hundred years later Seneca will be advising Lucilius on the danger of operating solely within like groups– not just those who say yes to anything you say, but even the diverse but relatively like-minded.

That this idea feels new isn’t a matter of ignorance, but of a deep assumption that the technology used to facilitate and sustain groups has some kind of  bearing on the nature and quality of that group. We talk and talk and talk about the network (and I mean we, because I do so as much as anyone) and how it works and what it does. But most of that’s really a shorthand or a convenience for referring to (or eliding) the much more complicated question of what is actually new in these networks and what that potentially means. What characteristics distinguish these networks from the ones educators (to choose one example) had before there was an Internet and a world wide web? Because in figuring that out– and only in figuring that out– can we make sense of what is happening now and have a productive effect on what happens next. There’s a wealth of research going back hundreds of years into the dynamics of group formation and decision making in fields as wide-ranging as sociology, statistics, business and advertising, psychology, sociology and political science that wasn’t suddenly invalidated when the method of transmission changes from the telephone and letters to twittering and blogging (and telephones and letters) or when the network nodes grew to include electronic sources of information, analysis and decision-making.

I think there are some important differences that characterize current "networks" including relative diversity (perhaps our networks aren’t as global as we might like or think, but they are generally far more global and diverse than they would or or could have been in 1998 or 1988), speed (of transmission, formation, deformation, reformation), resilience, the strength and proportions of directionality. But I don’t think those differences dictate any particular result or determine the nature of the groups formed in and of them. The characteristics we can decipher are merely the outward manifestations of a great, underlying current of potential that may or may not come to pass. The future is determined not by the technology, but our understanding of and use of it, and part of that understanding has to come from integrating and accounting for the knowledge generated from a diverse set of domains and, ultimately, paying close attention to the human inhabiting the machines…

I don’t know who Artichoke is exactly– an educator in New Zealand sums up my biographical knowledge… but anyone who can as easily allude to Dr. Zoidberg as T. S. Eliot or Matthew Arnold while writing thoughtful, incisive and often complex posts on education, educational technology, information technology is sure to get my attention. New Zealand’s particular politics and educational institutions are different than those I labor within, but the themes found in Artichoke are universal: a passion for inquiry, enthusiasm tempered by skepticism, the constant struggle to make some sense, an affection for classical literature, Latin and stationery, paper, pens… OK, so the last few might not be universal, but I particularly enjoy them. I can’t claim to understand everything Artichoke says– every other post of his (?) I read adds a new title to a "to read" list that already far outstrips my most optimistic mortal span– but Artichoke remains constantly rewarding.