According to a recent article in Forbes, more congestion may be a sign the economy is on the move. Bruce Upbin cites data from the Inrix Gridlock Index, which shows American road congestion jumped 9.4 percent in April, marking the second largest yearly increase since January 2010, when Inrix began recording these numbers.

That spike in congestion stands out, according to Upbin, because Inrix’s numbers have shown much lower congestion levels in previous years:

“Traffic congestion data is supposed to indicate that more businesses are buying, workers are commuting and shoppers are shopping, but one might also think too much traffic would be counterproductive to a metro area’s economy. Turns out not to be the case. A couple of years ago economist Eric Dumbaugh of Florida Atlantic University found that congestion, is nicely correlated to per-capita GDP growth in that area.”

Upbin notes that it’s not a perfect measurement—questions remain as to why the congestion index is still half of what it was in January 2010, in the midst of the decade’s economic turmoil. Still, relationships between traffic and cities remain relevant to planners, government officials and businesses, who often rely on traffic data to make decisions.

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 At the same time, incomplete traffic models can yield the wrong results in some cases, according to a post from Angie Schmitt at DC Streetsblog, putting a direct damper on walkability.

Schmitt cites the Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion that the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ traffic generation model consistently overestimates motor vehicle traffic produced by mixed-use development:

“Research has consistently shown that neighborhoods that mix land uses, make walking safe and convenient, and are near other development allow residents and workers to drive significantly less if they choose.” — EPA Office of Policy.

However, this, also from the EPA:

“The technical methods to estimate how much traffic a new development will create, known as trip generation analysis… are generally based on data collected from single-use, automobile-dependent, suburban sites.”

In essence: transportation planners are overestimating just how many cars will crop up from a new mixed use project.

“This often increases the cost of building mixed-use projects, because the developers are asked to take steps to compensate for the added traffic,” wrote Schmitt.

The EPA worked with researchers, including Reid Ewing, University of Utah professor of Transportation Engineering, to develop a new model to better forecast traffic generated by walkable development. Ewing notes the state of Virginia has adopted the new method, as has the Utah Transit authority.

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 Over at Slate, Matthew Yglesias wrote a post on a subject similar to walkable neighborhoods and traffic counts. Citing Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz’s criticism that New York CIty’s new bike share program amounts to “transportation authoritarianism,” Yglesias countered that the allocation of public space to private automobiles is, in fact, the real boondoggle.

Yglesias points to 13th Street in Washington, D.C., outside his home:

“You can see that roughly twice as much space is dedicated to the movement (traffic lanes) and storage (parking lanes) of private automobiles as is dedicated to pedestrian pursuits on the sidewalk. And that’s not a particularly large street. One block over, 14th Street, offers a 50 percent increase in car lane traffic offset by a tiny increase in sidewalk width and the addition of desultory bicycle lanes.”

A majority of the public thoroughfare is dedicated to car lane traffic, Yglesias writes, offset by relatively small sidewalks and bike lanes.

“Why would a city like Washington (or New York), most of whose residents don’t [emphasis his] commute to work in a car on a daily basis, want to allocate its space in that manner?” wrote Yglesias.

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Over at NPR’s special series on cities, Morning Edition’s Lauren Frayer looks at how thousands of high-tech sensors embedded all over Santander, Spain, may mark the future of “smart cities.”

“The sensors measure everything from air pollution to where there are free parking spaces. They can even tell garbage collectors which dumpsters are full, and automatically dim street lights when no one is around.”

The SmartSantander concept is designed to create a “city-scale experimental research facility” which can be leveraged to test a wide variety of applications, according to researchers. Data from Santander could help future “smart cities” save millions on utility bills, and improve services for their citizens.

Rich data visualizations are also targeting transit in Boston, pulled from GPS location data from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and mapped by the cartography-minded bloggers at Bostonography.com.

Mapper Andy Woodruff compiled time-stamped, georeferenced data to reveal the locations of MBTA’s buses at any given time, providing a color-coded map of bus speeds across the city. Intuitively, red streaks denote speeds less than 10 miles per hour, yellow 10-25 mph, and green reveals speeds more than 25 mph.

“The cool thing about the existence of such a map in the first place is that the data behind it are live and constantly published. It’s the same data that has helped you catch the bus on time thanks to apps built around it. Every minute it’s something new, so why limit mapping to a single snapshot in time?  I’ve learned better ways to automate this mapping since making that first map, so with a bit of code we can sit back and let the maps draw themselves as time goes on.” wrote Woodruff.

With his new methodology, Woodruff plans to update and publish new maps daily, while maintaining a live map with more recent data.

The post City Links: Gridlock and Recovery Edition appeared first on The Blue Review.

Rewind to the Depression years and the issues weren’t much different. To sell New Deal programs, President Roosevelt sent photographers from the Federal Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the status of the nation. In Idaho, photographers visited twice—in 1936 and 1942. The first time they came they documented depressed conditions. The second visit documented improvements ostensibly linked to New Deal spending. The collection of photographs that follows highlights issues with water, women and the economy, and Idahoans’ mixed feelings about the more activist role of the Federal Government. Issues then, issues today.

Gallery: Pre- and Post-New Deal Idaho

Photos from the FSA-Office of War Information Photograph Collection

The post Selling the New Deal appeared first on The Blue Review.

The North’s first subdivisions bordered the cavalry fort. In 1891, when President Benjamin Harrison visited to celebrate Idaho’s statehood, Boiseans landscaped 18th Street and renamed it Harrison Boulevard. Electric streetcars reached Hyde Park in 1892. West State Street became a Boise-to-Caldwell railroad. Boardwalks and service alleys paralleled streetcars.

Gridded but uneven, the North End emerged as a mix of gingerbread Victorians and kit-made catalog homes. In 1905, on Harrison at Eastman, Tourtellotte designed his firm’s last corner turret. The California Mission Revival reached Boise in the redroofed George Washington Bond House, completed in 1911. English cottages and the Tudor Revival gained popularity in the 1920s and 1930s. Homebuyers with modest resources came to prefer a space-efficient, functional, low-roofed style of working-class housing called the California Craftsman Bungalow.

Gallery: Quintessential North

Photos from Quintessential Boise: An Architectural Journey

About Quintessential Boise: An Architectural Journey, a 2010 book by Charles Hummel and Tim Woodward

Quintessential Boise is dedicated to the proposition that streets and their buildings are keys to the life of a city and that good architecture, like good books, should engage the public in readable and provocative ways. The book emerged from coffee-house conversations among an architect, a newspaper columnist, a newspaper reporter and a history professor. Charles Hummel, the architect, is the son, grandson and nephew of men who designed some of Boise’s most iconic landmarks. A legendary designer himself, Hummel, age 85, thinks deeply about how people use and appreciate buildings. Tim Woodward, the columnist, has been a champion of authentic places since his early reporting on Boise’s urban renewal in 1972. Reporter Jeanne Huff worked closely with Hummel and Woodward to identify object lessons. Todd Shallat, the historian, is a student of the physical layout of streets. Together, the team set out to devise a rating system for understanding the social impact of architecture.

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The heated debates—when they do rise to the level of actual debates—frequently ignore larger public policy questions regarding the politics of mental illness. Idaho’s suicide rate went from 11^th to 6^th in the nation between 2009 and 2010, the latest date for which data is available.Idaho is a case in point. While Idaho Code denies a concealed weapons permit to people defined as mentally ill, the state’s last attempt at a comprehensive definition of “biologically based mental illness” is now 15 years old. The definition includes “schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, bipolar disorders, major depressive disorders, pervasive developmental disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders or panic disorders.” Mental conditions due to “chronic alcoholism or drug abuse” or geriatric dementia are specifically excluded, “unless these are associated with the other disorders” (18-41-1843). Also missing are the so-called personality disorders, binge alcohol or substance use, identity disorders, eating disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders and sexual dysfunction disorders. And stress-related or situational conditions ranging from PTSD to temporary depression to surviving rape, incest or domestic violence remain unmentioned as well. People in these higher risk categories are allowed to own firearms.

Several other states define mental illness for purposes of firearms restriction in terms of histories of treatment by inpatient psychiatric facilities. Idaho instead relies quite specifically on the diagnostic nomenclature and criteria of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), currently in its fourth and revised edition, and scheduled to be updated this month. Aside from access to guns, DSM definitions shape all statutes governing involuntary mental holds, insurance reimbursement, Workman’s Compensation settlements and licensure requirements for mental health practitioners.

PSYCHIATRY’S INFLUENCE ON POLICY

While it appears premature to enter into the controversies surrounding the final edition of the DSM-5, it’s useful to briefly trace the intersection between psychiatric theory and other public policy decisions. Some of the major intellectual spadework in this area was suggested by the work of Michel Foucault. In his Madness and Civilization (1961), Foucault traced the positioning of mental illness within the philosophical framework of the Age of Reason, as fundamentally deviant and therefore in need of correction and rehabilitation. As Foucault pointed out, government-sponsored asylums were filled with criminals, prostitutes and the insane, all housed together on the basis of the shared inability to engage in economic productivity.

Such strong distinctions between sanity and its opposites were clearly challenged by the Romantic Movement, of which Freud was the most scientifically ambitious spokesman. The concept of universal intra-psychic conflicts and the infantile roots of unconscious adult behavior had already been articulated by Nietzsche, Wagner, Schelling, Wordsworth and the Symbolists, all leading to a reframing of mental illness as a matter of degree, rather than kind, from so-called “normal” social behavior. In terms of treatment modalities, psychoanalysis was the first that moved treatment sites out of the large institutions and into small scale private practice. Psychotherapy was now a humanistic endeavor, one that emphasized self-knowledge, interpretative insights and a studied stoicism in the face of the irrationality that client and therapist share with the rest of humanity. Its major enclaves now included academic departments of fine art, art history, religious studies, English, film studies and comparative literature.

But the exercise of empiricism and the application of the medical model continued apace here in America, especially given the increasingly large number of mental conditions that appeared to disqualify enlistees from service in the two world wars and the Korean conflict. Insulin shock, electroshock, prefrontal lobotomy and other intrusive brain surgeries, and the use of psychotropic medications were all highly specialized technologies that could best be applied within centralized institutional settings. These were conceived of as sites for advanced research as well as protective asylums that could secure both patient and public safety. Idaho established its first state-run mental facility in Blackfoot in 1886, followed by State Hospital North in Orifino in 1905; both facilities are still in active operation.

POLITICS AND MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT

Criticisms of the “warehousing” of mental patients began to swell in the post-World War II period, energized by the 1962 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with a graphic scene of electroconvulsive shock therapy as its centerpiece. During the year prior to this film’s release, a federal Joint Commission on Mental Illness had issued its recommendations in the “Action for Mental Health” report, which called for deinstitutionalization and community integration of mental patients via local community mental health centers. The centers were to offer medications, a range of psychological and occupational therapies, social contacts and case management. While legislated into existence in 1963, a large number of these failed by the end of the decade due to underfunding. Mental patients continued to be discharged from hospitals but, lacking transitional facilities, most became homeless or wound up being arrested for petty crimes such as vagrancy and shoplifting. President Jimmy Carter attempted to restructure and re-fund the centers under his Mental Health Systems Act of 1980. One of Ronald Reagan’s first acts in office was to rescind this legislation.

Reagan’s actions, while driven by an ideology of fiscal conservatism and “The New Federalism,” coincided with the development of a biopsychosocial or ecological model of mental functioning promoted by patient advocacy groups such as the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI), founded in 1979. This agenda also decried psychiatric abuses and favored individual autonomy and choice in treatment. The appeal of community psychiatry and outpatient clinics, along with sheltered housing and workplaces, seemed a good fit with demands for economic efficiency in the mental health care system. Many NAMI members felt that states would prove far more sympathetic and responsive to patient needs than the federal government. The creation of state mental health councils—Idaho’s wasn’t established until 1990—brought along the hope that recipients (now “consumers”) of public mental health services would finally enjoy a place at the table in terms of formulating local policies. This optimism was underscored by the development of so-called “second generation” or “atypical” antipsychotics and antidepressants including less expensive, time-release and injectable formats. Funding was to be guaranteed by the federal transfer payments to state Medicaid programs under Lyndon Johnson’s plans for “The Great Society.” These had been set up in 1967 and ratified by Idaho in 1969.

Medicaid also opened the door to the lucrative privatization of mental health and substance abuse treatment programs. For example Intermountain Hospital, Boise’s only private mental health facility, has changed ownership at least four times since the 1970s. Ironically, its last three owners have been large corporations that recreate, in their own way, the type of centralized financial decision-making that Reagan-era policy makers and mental health advocates found so objectionable. The state health care insurance exchange appears headed in an identical direction.

The current care structure has clearly demonstrated its vulnerability to constrained economic conditions and state government funding priorities. NAMI Idaho’s 2012 legislative report noted that Idaho led the nation in overall and per capita cuts to funding for mental health services. While Health and Welfare regional offices do offer diagnostic, assessment and pharmaceutical services for the most indigent suffering from severe and persistent mental illnesses, counseling supports remain a low priority. State clinicians devote more of their energies to emergency competence examinations and involuntary commitment court proceedings. And with Medicaid reimbursement rates in steep decline, many private practitioners now refuse to admit these sorts of clients. Increasingly discouraged by the inaccessibility of services, mental health clients become overrepresented among those who “never come in but always show up” through homelessness, arrest and incarceration.

Idaho Governor C.L. Butch Otter’s 2013 State of the State speech called for a $70 million bond issue to build “a 579-bed secure mental facility at the prison complex south of Boise.” The announcement came as no surprise. Otter chose to frame mental health issues in terms of incarceration rather than treatment and recovery. As Otter, a fierce defender of gun ownership rights, put it to the Legislature, “We all saw just a few weeks ago the terrible impact on a community and a nation when mental illness leads to tragedy.” Yet the $70 million, to be spent under the auspices of the Department of Corrections rather than Health and Welfare, dwarfs the $41.1 million that Idaho spent on mental health services in 2011.

The 2013 Legislature killed the facility proposal for financial reasons, along with efforts to establish permanent school counselor funding based on student population densities. But Otter and other politicians may find it difficult to avoid increasing pressures to reframe a public health system into a public safety surveillance apparatus. The major legacy of the rampage shootings in Idaho is the plus ca change framing of mental illness issues in terms of criminality and control, rather than treatment, recovery and hope.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Boise State University or the College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs.

In the meantime, it’s still far easier for someone to purchase an assault rifle in Idaho than to access a psychiatrist, psychiatric nurse or mental health counselor.

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Selections from In Reference To: Mexican Women of Idaho & Oregon

Photos by Alejandra Regalado

In Reference To: Mexican Women of Idaho & Oregon explores how a group of 100 Mexican women who immigrated to the U.S. at different points in their lives, went through the process of choosing which personal objects, among all of their belongings, were important enough to take with them on their journey. These precious objects are literally references to their past lives, backgrounds, cultures and femininity.

The influence behind the format and composition of the women’s portraits and the photographs of the objects come from two very different sources. The women were photographed in a square format against a white background as a reference to the American passport photo, which is a 2 x 2” square. By way of comparison, the Mexican passport photo is 3.5 x 4.5 cm. The influence to feature the objects isolated against a white background comes from the way pre-Columbian archeological artifacts are cataloged and celebrated throughout Mexico.

The women featured in this project live in Idaho & Oregon and span a wide range of ages and socio-economic backgrounds. The youngest girl in the project is 8 years old and the oldest is 76. They come from 22 states in Mexico including: Aguascalientes, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Colima, Distrito Federal, Estado de México, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Michoacan, Nayarit, Nuevo Leon, Querétaro, San Luis Potosi, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tabasco, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Yucatan y Zacatecas. These women work in a wide variety of professions including: business executives, students, artists, house keepers, project managers, nannies, teachers, personal assistants, sales representatives, sorters, lawyers, farm laborers and restaurateurs, just to name a few.

The objects of this series are also references to the connection of these women and their beloved ones: family portraits, a sweater knitted by her mother, wedding bands, religious images that have been in the family for generations, mortar and pestle (molcajete y tejolote), hot chocolate frother (molinillo) and tortilla presses to cook Mexican food for family and friends.

These precious objects are treasured not only because they represent their lives back in Mexico, but also because they are the only real piece of the past that can be held onto as reminders by their future generations. Each woman and her object tell a unique story; taken together, they form a visual narrative that has a life of its own.

The post Gallery: Mexican Women and The Things They Carry appeared first on The Blue Review.

I’m not opposed to disruption; rather, I’m skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise: “paradigm-shifting” technology that improves university teaching and learning. The truth is, many of these start-ups clearly have no idea what actually works in higher ed and know little about the direction university teaching and learning have moved in the last 10 years, because they’re trying to take us backward, not forward. Start-up and commercial tech are certainly proving disruptive—just in all the wrong ways.

But this is a not (merely) a post complaining about bad technology. Instead I want to highlight the ways university faculty and staff are driving thoughtful technological innovation. These are people who intimately understand students’ needs and the faculty’s interests, tech skills and psychology. And although there are some acclaimed universities launching projects with the aim of spawning start-ups or transferring commercial technology to industry, I want to showcase a few projects that take the opposite track: they’re innovative, but they tend to rely on open source technologies, and their focus is on individual and collective empowerment of students and communities, rather than commercialization.

Those who have been paying attention only to partnerships among Silicon Valley companies and the Ivies may be surprised that the beating heart of a tremendous amount of academic technology innovation is a small state university in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At the University of Mary Washington, the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology has launched at least four amazing initiatives that should be replicated widely because it’s clear to even casual observers that they advance teaching and learning in myriad ways. For one, evidence of student learning appears on the open web, and I encourage you to check out the current blogs developed for courses. Faculty, too—and I know this from first-hand experience—benefit from knowing what students are thinking (as expressed in blog posts and comments) before they convene for class.

Several years ago, UMW’s DTLT premiered UMW Blogs, termed “the Bluehost experiment” by the DTLT staff because in its first iteration, it was little more than a WordPress Multi-User installation on an inexpensive ($6.95 per month) shared server at Bluehost. Today, any UMW student, faculty, or staff can set up a blog for class or personal use on UMW Blogs—and 500 courses have been brought onto the platform since fall 2008.  Anyone can browse the courses using UMW Blogs or discover all kinds of non-course blogs by exploring the latest posts featured on the home page. The UMW archives, for example, recently put online a series of lectures by the late civil rights leader James Farmer, and Jess Rigelhaupt’s Oral History class has created Rosie the Riveter, an excellent resource that includes “firsthand accounts of what people experienced on the American home front during World War II.”

Next to emerge from this innovation engine was DS 106, an open course on digital storytelling, originally taught by Jim Groom, but since taught by several different instructors, including noted ed tech thought leaders and innovators Martha Burtis and Alan Levine, and recently by instructors at other universities as well. Because of the strong networks of the instructors and students, DS 106 took on a life of its own, with students—both those enrolled at UMW and those following the course from elsewhere—providing daily fun assignments (“the Daily Create”) that stimulate participants’ creativity and stretch their technological savvy. DS 106 spawned ds106 radio, a free-form, streaming broadcast for which anyone could volunteer to provide content.  How popular is DS 106 and its apparently endless stream of creative multimedia content? In spring 2012, Groom launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a better web server for DS 106, and the campaign raised 600% of its goal in just a few days, providing funding for all kinds of course improvements and expansions.  While Kickstarter provided private funds for this project, I’m excited about this kind of crowdsourced funding—although I’d be even more enthusiastic about greater public funding—because it allows project creators greater future freedom than would, say, funding from investors whose motive is more likely to be profit than pedagogical revolution.

Springing next from the mind of the DTLT geniuses was Domain of One’s Own, in which each first-year student at UMW receives a domain name and space on a web server. The project encourages each student  to “reclaim the web” by “taking control of your digital identity,” gathering its artifacts “in a central place that you own and control.” And it’s offered in collaboration with the university’s Office of Information Technology Services:

The pilot gave 400 students and faculty their own domain name and web space to install a portfolio of work or map onto existing systems. In Fall of 2013 every incoming student at UMW will have the opportunity to choose their own domain and receive a web hosting account with the freedom to create subdomains, install any LAMP-compatible software, setup databases, email addresses and carve out their own space on the web that they own and control.

Then, as if granting students this creative freedom and technical autonomy wasn’t enough, this spring UMW launched Thinklab, a makerspace. According to its About page:

ThinkLab is the exciting new makerspace located in the Simpson Library at the University of Mary Washington. As a collaboration between the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, the College of Education, and the Library, ThinkLab hosts a variety of emerging technologies and tools for students and faculty across all disciplines. 3D printing, robotics, and electronics work using Arduinos and simple breadboard kits are just some of the many exciting things happening at ThinkLab.

The innovations and—yes, I’ll say it—disruptions, emerging from UMW exemplify some of the best practices in developing communities of learners, fostering collaboration, encouraging writing and reflection and developing curiosity about the world. Channeling George Kuh, Randall Bass emphasizes that such “high-impact practices” lead to “meaningful learning gains” as well as “high retention and persistence rates” because they encourage these specific behaviors:

• Investing time and effort
• Interacting with faculty and peers about substantive matters
• Experiencing diversity
• Responding to more frequent feedback
• Reflecting and integrating learning
• Discovering relevance of learning through real-world application

In an age when universities are pushing faculty ever harder to develop monetizable intellectual property, it’s refreshing to see faculty doubling down on using relatively inexpensive technologies to improve student learning. UMW is a case in point: it’s a modestly funded, small state university that, thanks to all the active minds (and periodic strategic hires) at DTLT and on the faculty, has become a major hub of innovation in higher education. It joins other cutting-edge departments and programs launched by other Virginia institutions, including the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab and the Virginia Center for Digital History, as well as George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, whose staff and fellows have created not only a lot of terrific curricular resources, but also Zotero, Omeka, ScholarPress, PressForward, and the globally popular THATCamp. It’s amazing how much scholars, programmers and others have accomplished in such a short time—and all without spinning off start-ups as seems to be so fashionable in higher education today.

This is the kind of disruption I’d like to see at more universities, especially out here in the Intermountain West, Pacific Northwest and Great Basin. That’s going to be difficult because, in Idaho at least, we aren’t developing or attracting people with the programming training to do this kind of work. Still, we can go a long way using inexpensive but high-quality, open-source tools.  And in fact, in my teaching, I have relied on a number of open-source tools, including WordPress and LocalWiki, and (to a lesser extent) Sakai, an increasingly robust alternative to the unwieldy course management system Blackboard. I require my students to create digital products and imagine new digital services they might provide, and I teach them about Creative Commons and the public domain.

I admit I feel a good deal of pride that this movement toward open source, open access learning founded on creative uses of inexpensive technologies is driven by digital humanists, faculty, librarians and academic technologists—including some people who manage to occupy all of those fields simultaneously. If you follow any of these innovators on Twitter or read their blogs, you can see their conversations and collaborations unfold, illustrating, as Scott Leslie points out, that disruption emerges from networks that enable open learning. Their collaborations and projects are excellent case studies of why Jon Boeckenstedt’s term “punctuated equilibrium” makes more sense than “disruption” when discussing changes in the digital landscape of higher ed.

I’m no detractor of entrepreneurship; I encourage my public history graduate students to make their own way in the world, and if I wasn’t so busy with my faculty responsibilities, I’d dabble in it myself. But what if, instead of investing so much time, effort and money in start-ups, MOOCs, lecture capture, unwieldy learning management systems, overzealous intellectual property protections and the like, we redoubled our efforts in open access, open learning and open source? These are the efforts that would prove truly disruptive of business-as-usual at the university.

Of course, I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. Aaron Bady muses on what makes a good MOOC (hint: it’s open and free), and then points out that what most folks are talking about when they invoke “disruption” is a further corporatization of the university:

So I want to shift the debate a bit. [Clay] Shirky thinks in terms of “disruption” and what can come of it, in theory. I think in terms of what the “disruption” of the University of California system looks like in practice, as a complex of politicians, financiers, and career administrators move in lock-step to transform it into a self-sufficient corporate entity, and to enrich private industry in the bargain. I see a group of decision-makers who quite manifestly do not know what they are talking about and who barely try to disguise it, for whom “online” is code word for privatization. If I am against MOOC’s, I am against the way “MOOC” is being experienced in California, in practice: as an excuse to cheapen education and free the state budget from its responsibility to educate its citizenry.

There’s little need to hire Udacity or Coursera or any other ed tech company to disrupt higher education because faculty and staff representing key nodes in the network are already evolving the theory and practice of teaching, learning, research and outreach in ways that are incredibly productive, if not always recognized. Take a moment to explore some of the projects and networks I’ve discussed here and then ask yourself: who exactly is so invested in interrupting this productive disruption, and why? Why are universities considering spending $2 million to affiliate with a MOOC provider, when tremendous faculty creativity and the $6.95 Bluehost experiment are at hand?

The post Beyond “Disruption” appeared first on The Blue Review.

There is no evidence that Bergoglio ever had a conversation with Chávez, but one imagines if they had conversed, it would have been lively. At first glance, the personas of these two men have little in common: one is soft spoken and self-effacing, the other defiant and provocative. Yet, both sought leadership roles, weathered election by their respective constituencies and stand in for the uneasy pattern of how power plays out in the region.

One of these men, born to dirt-floor poverty, ascended to power and once there elevated the plight of the poor. He vocally championed the disenfranchised majority long exploited by a system of corruption and patronage that squandered resource wealth and upheld inequality. And he put this theory into action by reorganizing and redistributing not just resource wealth but access to social and political rights. Sound like the Hugo Chávez you know?

The other man, by contrast, submitted to the rule of hierarchy, watched from afar as fierce struggles over social justice inflamed his natal land. He offered calm words to soothe the populace and derail attempts to collectively organize resistance to a system of oppression that was literally killing dissenters. So, why are Americans eager to embrace Pope Francis and equally enthusiastic to dismiss Chávez?

News of these men in the US media has been ubiquitous but also frivolous. Focus on footwear, ceremony and perception dominate larger connections and observations that could provide complex factors to weigh and consider. Both men have led complicated lives and understanding that complexity means considering the past context of faraway places. In synthesizing some of the debates on both men, I hope to make clear that opinion is no substitute for knowledge and punditry must not replace compassion for other nations and cultures.

THE NEW POPE

The selection of the first pope from outside of Europe and from the region of the world with the highest concentration of Catholics is certainly worthy of attention and ripe for contextualizing. Argentina is the most European of Latin America’s republics, having absorbed over four million European immigrants (mostly from Italy and Spain) in the critical late-nineteenth century years. At times, almost a third of the population was foreign born. Pope Francis is the product of such immigration (as his Italian surname suggests), born to a recent immigrant father and a mother born of northern Italian parents. A pope born and raised in Latin America is a distinction for the church. Yet, it’s hardly a radical break in the sense that his heritage remains expansively European in the most neo-European society of South America. Just when does an immigrant become “from” somewhere new?

The European sensibilities that accompanied the immigrants infused Argentine society, suggesting it was different from Brazil, with its large population of African peoples due to the slave trade, or Mexico’s heavily indigenous and mestizo citizenry.Scholars differ on the exact dates of the Dirty War. While 1976 was the most brutal year, repression began earlier. Paul Lewis traces the origins of the Dirty War to the 1930s and ’40s. Until the 1970s, many political theorists believed that Argentina was on a trajectory toward modern, democratic and capitalist ascension. Instead, the government veered off toward the most brutal right-wing military dictatorship in the region and engaged in the Dirty War (1973-1983), which turned ordinary citizens into enemies of the state. This dictatorship and war involved a calculated attempt to reform society from the top down. To make these reforms in the name of re-establishing “order,” more than 30,000 people were kidnapped, tortured and killed including students, activists, opposition politicians and even Jesuit priests. Associated most notoriously with the authoritarian General Jorge Videla, the so-called “process” maintained explicit support from the U.S., made clear about a decade ago with the release of documents confirming that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger supported the junta’s tactics.

There are striking parallels between the ascension of Bergoglio to ecclesiastical power and the rise of General Videla and the dictatorship. Since many reports have claimed Pope Francis is a man of the people (who rides the subway!) or a defender of the poor, one might think that he was on the side of the priests objecting to the kidnapping and murder of citizens protesting brutal military repression. Instead, as investigative journalist Horacio Verbitsky has demonstrated both in print and in court since 2005, there are serious questions about Jesuit leader Bergoglio’s human rights record (although Verbitsky’s own role in the military regime is also suspicious). In fact, Bergoglio’s actions during the dictatorship have been seriously questioned (and in rarer cases defended) on three fronts:

1. Bergoglio’s knowledge of and possible complicity in the removal of babies from political prisoners,
2. the disappearance of Bergoglio’s colleague and friend, Esther Balestrino de Careaga and
3. Bergoglio’s role in the 1976 detention and torture of two Jesuit priests in training—Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics—for their work among the poor (see the Counterpunch link for expansive discussion of these incidents complete with translated transcripts of testimony).

The last issue is central to understanding Bergoglio’s leadership since it highlights the contradiction of a Pope who has painstakingly angled for a reputation as a man of the poor yet turned away from the tradition of social justice forged in the contested social space of Latin America, namely Liberation Theology. The unwillingness of Bergoglio (or others) to seek justice and truth for the victims after the dictatorship casts a troubling shadow over arguments he stands for and with the poor and repressed. Indeed, the Church in Argentina generally aligned itself more strategically with the “order” brought by repression than with “liberation” promised by those speaking out against human rights violations.

Pope Francis is only the latest example of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions in a Church that simultaneously claims the mantle of defending the poor and standing for hierarchy. Centuries ago, missions protected indigenous peoples from slave traders or defended natives from harsh treatment by the Spanish while simultaneously amassing great wealth. In the 1950s and 1960s, a set of ideas largely formulated by young priests working in marginalized and impoverished communities sought to reformulate the Church’s approach to the poor. These priests did not just condemn oppression and injustice; they called on their flocks and the Church itself to act to liberate suffering in the world by ending oppression and injustice. This became known as Liberation Theology.

Liberation Theology’s main challenge came through the notion of systemic sin. Individual sin is a well-known component of Catholic doctrine but Liberation Theology introduced the notion that sometimes individuals are so inextricably mired in structures of oppression that the only just course is to work against the systemic sins that cause poverty and oppression. Such a “preferential option for the poor” called for a new path toward building more equitable, inclusive and humane societies that followed the teachings of Jesus. Given the revolutionary context of the 1960s in the region, such ideas became immediately (and often inaccurately) linked to similar ideas about inequality and oppression articulated by Marxist revolutionaries. Yet, this notion of working within the Church to change structures of oppression sparked not only a revival in faith, but a burst of activity in the Church.

Given the popular focus on Pope Francis as a defender of the poor, you might suspect he comes from this tradition. That is not the case.

Another important first for Pope Francis is that he is a Jesuit and the Jesuits have a long and complicated history within the Church and also within Latin American history. Few recognize that the Jesuits were widely regarded for settling the most remote outposts of the Spanish, Portuguese and French empires largely through frontier missions (including Tucson and Detroit). They also extended into southern frontiers in the Argentine steppes, or Patagonia. Jesuits were, on the one hand, associated with education and intellectual pursuits and on the other with growing economic power centered in many mission territories. But, due to changing church politics and fears of the wealth and power the Jesuits were developing, a papal decree 1767 suppressed the order.

At its heart, the suppression of the Jesuits was a political move over trade disputes and economic power. It resulted in near-complete eviction—all Jesuits were forcibly recalled and removed from the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and took refuge in non-Catholic locations. This resulted in not only removing Jesuits from their flocks, but also auctioning off their possessions—from mission buildings to violins. It also seared a deep wound—a fissure perhaps only beginning to heal with the selection of the first Jesuit pope.

THE DEAD PRESIDENT

Unlike Bergoglio, Chávez’s personality kept him in the news and created a character in the U.S. media—one overwhelmingly negative. Chávez lacked the intellectual polish or the pedigreed mannerisms of most world leaders. This uncouth style—really a manifestation of his humble beginnings and hard-fought ascension as much as a political persona—never failed to get him attention. Whether calling George W. Bush the devil in front of the U.N. General Assembly or blaming the CIA for causing the cancers suffered by six recent presidents of the region, Chávez knew how to make headlines. His longstanding affiliation with Fidel Castro and more recent flirtations with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alone were enough to get many Americans to dismiss him outright. But his friendship with notorious bullies belied the fact he felt (and perhaps was) bullied himself by not just the Venezuelan oligarchy but also the CIA. Dismissal of Chavez without contextualizing his achievements reveals the opinions of, as one reporter put it, “critics that haven’t even seen the movie.”

Despite several actual movies about Chavez, the significant plots of his presidency remain mysterious to most people in the U.S. In particular, Chavez governed for the poor and was continually elected by the majority. He came into power through elections and stayed there through elections (despite claims otherwise by the New Yorker), ones Jimmy Carter called the best he had monitored. Chávez certainly gave notoriously long speeches on state-owned media channels, but 70 percent of the media field is private in Venezuela. His social base was broad and heterodox—trade unions, peasant organizations, feminists, environmental coalitions, neighborhood councils. The flourishing of these coalitions in the decades under Chávez speaks to the power he gave to ordinary citizens to participate in democracy, both on the ground and in the polling booth. In fact, several scholars have found that the rise of these social movements and their room to flourish points to Venezuela as the most democratic country in the hemisphere with peaceful methods of conflict resolution and mutual support between citizen alliances and federal bureaucracy. At a time when representatives in Washington seem deeply disconnected from citizen desires, such a system of participatory action points to a redefinition of liberty, freedom and social power.

Acceptance by the Venezuelan electorate isn’t all Chávez accomplished. He made strategic—and radical, in a progressive sense—choices about how a government should distribute and redistribute its resources. The results were vast improvements in the social landscape and economic equality, unlike those that occurred elsewhere. During his time in office, a lengthy 14 years, he cut the poverty rate in half. This is not an internal metric. The U.N. regularly measures inequality by the Gini coefficient, a measure of the distribution of wealth. In this measure, 0 refers to complete equality, 1 is complete inequality: Venezuela’s Gini fell from .498 to .397 between 1999 and 2011.The Gini for the US is .49, but rather than get more equal, it has trended the opposite direction, increasing from .45 under Reagan. His government also stalled inflation and kept salaries rising while increasing real per capita GDP. He had oil reserves and skyrocketing oil prices to help him, but the critical piece is that Chávez and his government made it a governmental priority to use that oil wealth to reduce poverty, to fund education and to provide healthcare.

Chávez’s governance certainly had flaws, but it is clear that what preceded him had more. There was no international outcry in the mid-1990s about an entrenched oligarchy enriching itself with natural resources that could have been used as public goods. Perhaps the timing of his failed coup attempt in 1992 forever falsely labeled him as a remnant of a crumbling Cold War. Perhaps his challenges to power and oil wealth speak too closely to debates in the U.S. over taxation and spending. All that Chávez has been accused of (corruption, dominating unions, stacking the judiciary, etc.) existed well before he came to power. Competition for power took place in a narrow contest between two elite political parties (sound familiar?) and these interests were reluctant to give up their privileges. It took Chávez nearly five years to gain control of oil revenues, but notably, once he did, he refused to extinguish his opposition. Instead, he allowed chaos and competition for the oil money, a luxury most other nations in the region could scarcely afford.

Chávez’s bravado also masked another important change for the region, largely unreported outside of it. He stitched together a collaborative and cooperative set of agreements, meetings and politicians in the Latin American region, invoking the wistful dreams of the charismatic independence revolutionary, Simón Bolívar. His international agenda included a strong relationship with Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a much more sympathetic figure in the U.S. press. In contrast to Chávez, Lula looked calm and rational but together they succeeded in making hemispheric relations more, well, hemispheric. Together, they derailed a 2005 trade agreement that sought to lock in a deeply unfair trade advantage for the U.S. and pushed for debt relief among the poorest countries in the region.

MEN OF THE 99 PERCENT?

Many reference Pope Francis as the “Pope of the 99 percent” but his past tells a somewhat different story. His association with hierarchy and ambivalence to the movements of the poor make fewer headlines than his symbolic gestures elevating humility. Missing are similar eulogies calling Chávez the “President of the 99 percent,” despite his abolition of an entrenched oligarchy and use of oil wealth to build human capital through education and social services, all the while arguing that Latin American nations should seek natural alliances and integration. Both men provide contradictions in leadership and visions of hope for a more thorough engagement with the rights and the plights of the poor. They offer differing versions of moral authority to the world in a time of increasing austerity and vulnerability.

The post The New Pope and the Dead President appeared first on The Blue Review.

Seeds of the “locavore” moment take root in a valley that once led the nation in irrigated agriculture. Locavores—like the carnivore natives who hunted big game during Boise’s Ice Age, like the omnivore Shoshone who once roamed southwestern Idaho, spearing salmon and digging roots—follow the seasons and forage within 100 miles of home. Coined by a chef in San Francisco, locavore was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s “word of the year” for 2007. In Boise it has come to describe a way of life. Local food tastes better, its proponents argue. It preserves biodiversity. Supports regenerative agriculture. Cuts greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels. “Food miles” has become the Idaho locavore’s measure of globalization’s impact. In Boise, locavores say, the average distance from farm to table is 1,500 miles.

Paul BudgeCapital City Public Market, founded in 1994, crowds 150 vendors into six blocks of Boise’s downtown. Sixteen of the original vendors have since split off to a nearby farmers market exclusively focused on local food.

At once nostalgia and economics, and strong enough to override suburban land-use zoning codes, the locavore movement pines for the barns and rail fences lost to suburbia’s blight. “Agriculture is our heritage,” said the Urban Land Institute in its 2012 “Sustainable Farming” report on the Treasure Valley. Yet agrarianism retreats before the advance of asphalt rooftops. USDA census figures show a 14 percent loss of farmland in Ada County, 2002 to 2007. Canyon County lost 4 percent. Population, meanwhile, boomed. “If we have no land for agriculture,” the land institute continued, “we have no food. If we have no food, we have no long-term sustainability. For flat and irrigated land, agriculture may well be the highest and best use.”

In Boise the movement prescribes a transformative diet of communitarian values. A school for Boise Urban Gardens offers a seven-week summer program on food “literacy” and “a deeper understanding of nature.” An organic farm called Peaceful Belly credits “community” for its commercial success. The Treasure Valley Food Coalition, meanwhile, campaigns to end the tyranny of tasteless tomatoes. Stressing food security through food independence, the coalition promotes its “modest” ambition to double farming acreage. Its goal is to increase the valley’s consumption of local food from 2 percent to 20 by the end of the decade. Posters advertise a 12-part local meal of food in healthy abundance, of milk, wheat flour, beef, dry beans, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, leafy greens, apples, strawberries and grapes. Twenty percent local consumption would add, says the coalition, 8,800 local jobs.

Not everyone accepts those numbers. Economist Steve Sexton of UC-Berkeley has argued that local food, being seasonal and small-scale, is inherently inefficient. Nationwide, says Sexton, if America’s top 40 crops were consumed within 100 miles, farmers would need to plow 60 million more acres of cropland. It would require 2.7 million tons more fertilizer and 50 million more pounds of chemicals. Nutrient-rich produce would be more expensive.

“Large operations are more efficient,” writes Sexton in the book Freakonomics. “Implicit in the argument that local farming is better is an assumption that a ‘relocalized’ food system can be just as efficient as today’s modern farming. That assumption is simply wrong.” The Idaho Potato Commission points out that some soils are better than others. Alabama, for example, yields 170 hundredweight of potatoes per acre. An acre in Idaho yields more than twice as much. To forsake that comparative advantage would be to destroy more habitats, use more chemicals and pollute more water and air. Economists wince at the locavore claim that food mileage is an obvious way to measure environmental impact. Trucking lettuce from California may require less fuel that heating an Ohio greenhouse. Potatoes travel by rail and sea in fuel-efficient containers. Small-scale farming relies more heavily on gas-burning vans and trucks.

Locavores brush back those free-market claims with the arguments that local food, being fresher, provides more nutrition; that free-range valley farmers treat their animals better; that growth hormones and preservatives poison the food chain; that organic farming cultivates tastes for unique products; and that conscientious consumption promotes citizenship. Evaluating those claims and assessing those expectations are the research questions that guide a new collection of student essays from the Boise State University College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs. Topics in the volume include farm subsidies, farm ethics, breweries, vineyards, public markets, refugee gardens, potato promotions, land-use patterns and locavore entrepreneurs.

The book is available at Rediscovered Books on Boise’s North Eighth Street or via Boise State’s online catalog at http://sspa.boisestate.edu/publications. Below are selected images from the latest volume in the Investigate Boise Student Research Series.

The post Gallery: Local, Simple, Fresh appeared first on The Blue Review.

Peter Kageyama, producer of the Creative Cities Summit.

Kageyama earned an undergraduate degree in political science and a law degree, and like other crusaders before him (one thinks of Michael Shuman of Going Local) found the law tedious, perhaps because, well, it follows the letter of the law. Born again as a community developer in south Florida, he fell under Florida’s wing, and hasn’t looked back. After producing some large events for Florida’s Creative Class Group, Kageyama found his own voice with his first book For the Love of Cities.

The book boasts a simple premise: get people to love their cities and good things follow. As Kageyama explains, city leaders have a basic obligation to ensure that their cities are safe and functional. Using the filling of potholes as an example, he shows that those basic services don’t add up to a citizenry that’s more invested in place. Kageyama’s presentation clip art shows that cities that feel comfortable, generate conviviality (a term reserved for European urbanists meaning “hospitality”), and FUN are the ingredients that matter most.What would Tiebout say?

So how does that translate? In New York, the remaking of Times Square into a pedestrian-oriented corridor allowed people to stop and enjoy the sites (and the free wi-fi!) without fear of being run down by busy New Yorkers and coffee-fueled cab drivers. Lynne Sagalyn’s award-winning book Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon, detailed the complicated partnership between powerful and well-placed city leaders, some of the world’s largest financial institutions that funded redevelopment, and the passion of the historic preservationists and arts community members who inhabited the theaters so long a part of Broadway’s “Great White Way.”

Chicago city leaders generated some love with the construction of Millennium Park. Timothy Gilfoyle in Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark wrote how Chicago’s one-stop-shop city government paved the way for redevelopment, while wealthy and influential corporate CEO’s called in favors (and funding) from friends and allies.

Not all places have those things in spades—Boise, ID being one of them. Here, the flight of local capital—Morrison-Knudsen, Albertsons, Trus-Joist, Ore-Ida and Boise Cascade among the notables—left behind only a shell of the human and financial capital necessary for the Herculean efforts seen in the big cities.

No matter. As Kageyama noted in his talk “sometimes it’s the garden hose solution that allows you to start solving a problem.” While visiting a town in rural Connecticut, he noticed children playing in the stream of a garden hose mounted on a stake. That’s in stark contrast to the multi-million dollar fountains in Millennium Park whose computer generated faces spew water from their mouths to revitalize Chicagoans run down by the Midwest summer heat. But the result is still the same: “surprise and delight,” smiling faces on children and adults alike. A happy child makes a happy parent. Kageyama urges city leaders—and even meeting organizers—to stop and ask the simple question, “where’s the fun.” Simple tool, powerful revelations.

Sometimes governments aren’t the entities to direct these garden hose strategies. Instead, they well up from a group Kageyama calls “high-touch entrepreneurs.” This sets off a couple of predictable challenges. In Raleigh, North Carolina one of these HTE’s (I just coined that acronym, by the way, look for it as a research variable in a journal near you) took it upon himself to remedy the city’s non-existent wayfinding program. In urban planning, wayfinding generally describes the process of informing people of key locations and how to navigate to them. Naturally it involves signage. So naturally, our high-touch entrepreneur in Raleigh hung wayfinding signs pointing to parks and other attractions. The city promptly removed the signs. Citizens promptly complained. Now the city has commissioned a way finding plan. Sigh.

Boise had its in-and-out-of-love moment with High Touch eEntrepreneur Mark Rivers. Rivers, the BoDo mastermind, threw his considerable creative energy into Curb Cup, a circus-like event of street performers vying for audience distributed tokens. Winning the most tokens won the event. Curb Cup was a smash success. But somewhere along the way city leaders couldn’t find a way forward with Rivers and alas, Curb Cup is no more. But the city has had other successes. High Touch Entrepreneur Wyatt Werner breathed life into the Egyptian Theater with his showing of classic films there under the mantra of Boise Classic Movies. Under Werner’s method, Boiseans suggest movies they’d like to see on the big screen. They vote on the list of suggested films. The top vote getter gets shown—as long as enough people pledge to buy tickets and “tip” the movie. It’s turned into a great business for Werner and a love affair for the city. Werner even showed An Affair to Remember just a few months back.

The founders of Ignite Boise once received a proclamation from the Mayor declaring it “Ignite Boise Day” (disclosure: I am an Ignite Co-Founder). Even Kageyama himself took advantage of city-based social capital honing his presentation at TEDx talks across the country. What did Kageyama find to like in Boise? Freak Alley, utility box wraps downtown and Farmers Markets —the three, respectively the products of gritty spontaneity, the City’s graffiti reduction policy, and personality conflicts.

Economic development theories come and go. Some endure. All are a product of the historic context from which they emerge. The policy options Kageyama advocates fall into what Blakely and Bradshaw refer to as “third wave” economic development policies, or what Clark and Gaile refer to as “fourth wave” policies. These policies differ from strategies of the past, which many scholars decry as “smokestack chasing”—luring firms with the promise of tax abatements, subsidized loans, and bond funding. More recent economic development policies favor tactics that enhance soft infrastructure, and networks that leverage human capital. And they are not without challenges.

First, they don’t allow for easy “credit claiming.” For Kageyama, the end goal of all this love is getting people more invested in their city. But that might not be enough for the political class, who often direct the flow of economic development dollars. Politicians, slaves to the electorate, need votes to survive. In the words of a group of researchers from Skidmore, they need to able to claim credit. Thus, the softer side of economic development often gives way to naked industrial recruitment policies:Turner, Robert, Ben Kaufman, and Petria Fleming. “The Political Economy of Trophy Industrial Recruitment Projects.” Philadelphia, PA, 2005. 

What is significant about this explanation (credit-claiming) of industrial recruitment policies is that it provides an explanation for why governors ignore their analysts and academics and engage in industrial recruitment. Governors can plausibly claim credit about their commitment to growing the economy as well as improved economic conditions by recruiting a firm to a county. By contrast, a governor would be unable to claim that a growing software company is the product of his or her decision to open a technology center at the state university where the founder of the software company was later a graduate student.

There’s also the matter of how you define “growth” and “development.” Emil Malizia and Edward Feser find at least nine different ways of defining the two:

1. No definition: growth and development are reduced to concepts such as urbanization and industrialization.
2. Growth and development are the same.
3. Growth occurs in rich countries, development in poor countries.
4. Internal sources cause development, external forces cause growth.
5. Growth and development are complements; one makes the other possible.
6. Growth and development are alternating processes that occur in sequential time periods.
7. Growth is an increase in output; development is structural change—technical, behavioral, attitudinal or legal.
8. Growth expands the economy; development must lead to more equal distributions of income and wealth.
9. Growth or development leads to a wider range of economic choices.

With the nation still emerging from a prolonged economic downturn, the watchword of the day is JOBS. So it can be tough to translate exactly how loving your city translates to jobs.

Finally, some economic development theorists tend to see cities as having some sort of a fixed end—that they are essentially path dependent. The pioneering work of John Logan and Harvey Molotch argued that municipalities have only so many potential outcomes, regardless of the actions of political and economic elites. A few “primate,” or supersized, cities in the world will emerge as headquarters cities—New York, Atlanta, London. Other cities will emerge as innovation centers —American examples include Boston’s Route 128, Silicon Valley in California’s Bay Area, and the Research Triangle in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Some locales will become module production and processing centers, or what Ann Markusen called “satellite industrial complexes.” For some, like Salt Lake, this will be a boon. For others it means an influx of foreign capital that locals cannot control and jobs they cannot access. Some cities will grow as third-world entrepots—gateway cities for immigrants looking for better economic opportunities. In the U.S., southern border cities like El Paso spring immediately to mind. Finally, other areas with nice weather, good health care systems and a low cost of living will find themselves willingly or not, transforming into retirement towns.

But Kageyama was not in Boise to bore the downtown elites with economic development theory. He was here to inspire, and that he did. Summoning the unexpected, toward the end of his presentation, Kageyama quickly exited the stage without saying goodbye, but not before queuing Bizet’s Carmen, the sounds of which streamed from the Centre’s PA. Up popped Opera Idaho’s Michele Detwiler, and husband Jason to regale pleasantly stunned onlookers with song. The music closed and Kageyama offered his thanks. Grasshopper had snatched the pebble from Florida’s hand. We looked about at our neighbors wondering who could repeat such a performance in the city we love.

The post Take This Town and Love It appeared first on The Blue Review.

Let’s begin with a round-up of what badges are and do.

As expressed by badge enthusiasts, there are multiple ways to approach digital badges:

• Badges as alternative assessment: perhaps a way of thinking beyond one-size-fits-all, industrial models of student learning
• Badges as a way of engaging students in ways that are more interesting to them through game-based learning
• Badges as an alternative way of scaffolding learning, particularly to make visible to students how their educational experiences build on their prior learning
• Badges to encourage and recognize learning beyond the academy
• Badges as a way of increasing the development of skills championed by the field of digital media and learning, particularly making to learn
• Badges as a force to democratize learning by giving learners greater autonomy over their own experiences, including through peer teaching, assessment, and recognition

Badges, of course, have their skeptics. Among the most-cited reasons for skepticism is that, as Henry Jenkins points out, badges emphasize extrinsic motivation over intrinsic and may impose hierarchy, structure and system in informal learning environments where system is not a desirable feature. Badges are the wrong way to motivate students because students might, in Mitchel Resnick’s words:

focus on accumulating badges rather than making connections with the ideas and material associated with the badges— the same way that students too often focus on grades in a class rather than the material in the class, or the points in an educational game rather than the ideas in the game.

Another criticism arises from the “wild west” nature of badging, and represents an anxiety about credentialing free-choice, informal learning experiences. Anyone can award badges. Jackie Gerstein writes:

Another possible flaw in and potential downfall of this system revolve[s around] the difficulties and dilemmas of deciding what the badges represent, how one earns the badges, and how badges will be standardized for recognition of “institutions” of learning and of employment. This lack of consensus about the meaning of badges will create further problems once the learner leaves that learning platform. What value will the badges have in unrelated institutions?

When I bring up the topic with my colleagues, their response is skepticism—and almost inevitably a rendition of “Badges? We don’t need no steeenkin’ badges!” But maybe we do need badges—just not in the form they have thus far been presented to us. “Badges” is a useful term, I think, for describing interdisciplinary learning experiences that form a more-or-less coherent cluster of related knowledge and skills—much the way a major or minor traditionally has within disciplines and departments. And unlike the interdisciplinary concentrations that have sprung up at both undergraduate and graduate levels—I myself earned a “designated emphasis” in Feminist Theory and Research—badges might allow us to indicate that learning transgresses the boundaries of formal and informal learning.

ALTERNATIVE SCHEMES

Badges aren’t, of course, the first alternative scheme for acknowledging student learning and skill acquisition, but they are a part of a cultural moment where skill development is being emphasized even within intellectual environments. (Witness the exhortation that everyone should learn to code, including humanities scholars like myself.) Eric Landrum writes:

we need an enhanced emphasis on pedagogical practices to help students acquire skills. We need to devote expertise and resources to develop multiple measures of skill competency to assess and document both student achievement and institutional performance.

Landrum points out that students don’t retain knowledge long after they finish their courses (or even long after each class meeting, I might add), and thus, he argues, it doesn’t make sense to keep knowledge development and retention at the core of the undergraduate curriculum. I’m not entirely persuaded by Landrum’s argument—I don’t see the knowledge/skills dichotomy being as clear-cut as his article suggests—but I think we as faculty might trust students (at least some students) to map their own archipelago of courses and learning experiences.

Does this mean I think universities should adopt the model proposed for the New University of California, a “university” offering no instruction but conferring degrees if students demonstrate proficiency through tests? Not at all. Nor does it mean I’m ready to embrace Landrum’s every-skill-is-measurable approach to assessing students’ readiness for graduation.

When I say I want faculty to grant more autonomy to students in designing their degrees, I’m drawing on my own experience as an undergraduate. Classes like landscape architecture, detective fiction, the history of photojournalism, museum literacy, French poetry, collaborative video art, a cultural studies methods course on television studies and others may look like a random assemblage of whatever-was-offered-that-quarter, but taken collectively they constitute a meaningful constellation of knowledge and skills.

At the same time, I was doing a lot of work that wasn’t formally recognized on my transcript, but which accelerated both my knowledge development and skill acquisition. I worked at a science center, first as a classroom outreach specialist, then exhibition developer, then program evaluator. I started a couple of blogs, one personal, one on museums. I attended museums conferences and met all kinds of interesting people. This work helped me cinch my first post-Ph.D. job, in academic technology—again, a subject in which I had no formal training. That job flowed into one in higher ed pedagogy—again, something I had not studied formally. Those two jobs, along with a notion that I could write a dissertation based on archival material—for which, surprise!, I had no formal training–helped land me my current position teaching public and digital history in a history department.

My experience may look atypical (at least for an academic), but increasingly it is—or will become—the norm. It’s hard to capture all these experiences, however, on a traditional one- or even two-page résumé. Might there be a way for institutions of higher ed to formally recognize this cluster of skills that I developed half in the classroom, half out of it?

A MORE RIGOROUS APPROACH TO BADGING

I think what most disappoints me about badges is that too often their implementation is facile; it smacks of the every-kid-gets-a-trophy soccer tournament. Attend a conference plenary session? You get a badge. Get a D- or better on an exam at the end of an online course? You get a badge. Complete one week of a MOOC? You get a badge.

I suspect I’m not alone among faculty in seeing badges as little more than a not particularly meaningful gamification of learning. That doesn’t mean, however, that the concept of the badge is completely useless. In fact, we might take advantage of the current trendiness of badges to sell university leaders on investing in a true restructuring of the curriculum that benefits both students and faculty.

What if, instead, we thought of badges as a variation of the minor or even the major? Many colleges and universities offer programs where students can design their own majors or create custom interdisciplinary concentrations that serve much the same function as minors. Traditionally, these paths required intensive faculty advising and mentoring of students. In a digital age, however, it’s possible to assign keywords, tags, or categories to courses. Students could propose a course of study from the offered classes, with the database suggesting courses that might be compatible based on these tags and a recommendation engine that recognizes patterns of student enrollment; students also might be limited from taking too many courses in the same category. As part of this system, faculty could designate a cluster of courses across disciplines that could function as an alternative to a major or minor. These clusters become badges, and students could be both creative and strategic about which combination of badges they pursue.

Let’s consider some possibilities in a field like history.

A traditional course sequence for history majors includes several foundational survey courses based on geography and/or era, followed by more in-depth seminars on particular regions (e.g. North Africa), time periods (the Reformation), or themes (war and genocide). Students also might take one or two courses that teach the conventions of writing in the discipline. If faculty structure their courses thoughtfully and students actually do the (often volumnious) reading and participate fully in class, the history major will graduate with the ability to conduct research across multiple media, analyze primary and secondary sources, synthesize ideas and evidence into an argument and communicate effectively in writing. That’s the ideal, however. In an era of growing class sizes, adjunctification (in which faculty teach ever-greater numbers of students as they piece together full-time work across several colleges and universities) and MOOCs, students aren’t held to the same levels of accountability as they might have been in the past. If courses focus on retention of knowledge—as demonstrated, for example, on multiple-choice or short-answer exams—rather than student research and writing, students’ critical thinking and communication skills might be underdeveloped at graduation. Furthermore, students may lose interest in engaging intellectually with history if they are subjected to too many required courses that just aren’t interesting to them.

Instead, students interested in history might pursue a series of badges that emphasize complementary knowledge and skills. These may or may not be related to employment. Say a student wanted to pursue a career in history outside the classroom—a field typically termed “public history,” with jobs traditionally in museums, archives, and government agencies, but also increasingly encompassing game design, film consulting and other digital content development. In lieu of a traditional history degree, she might pursue badges in Original Research (Humanities), Communicating Knowledge to the Public and Digital Media Production. The cluster of courses for the Original Research badge, for example, might include several history or literature seminars that emphasize research and writing, a statistics course, an internship in the state archives and a capstone course in which the student produces a significant work of original research—perhaps a traditional essay, a mini documentary, or a carefully curated and interpreted repository of digitized primary-source documents and artifacts.

A student who would have traditionally majored in English or a foreign language might pursue badges in Cross-Cultural Literacy, Digital Publishing and Translation. A gender studies major might opt instead to pursue badges in Original Research (Social Science), Advocacy and Activism and Cross-Cultural Literacy. A studio art major might seek badges in Visual Literacy, Digital Media Production and Theory and Practice of Creativity. The last of these might include courses representing traditional studio practice but also philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and arts and humanities pedagogy, as well as observation of K-12 students in music, art, lab science and creative writing classes. A student who wants to start up her own fashion design studio might pursue courses in drawing, graphic design, accounting, marketing and textiles to earn a badge in Arts Entrepreneurship.

Badges might thus comprise knowledge and skill development appropriate for employment, yes, but also emphasize the kinds of broad liberal-arts-and-sciences training and cultural literacy essential for contributing fully to civic life. Students with traditional majors and general ed courses on their transcripts have difficulty articulating to employers and others why their particular degrees are useful. Because a student can’t explain how her knowledge and academic experiences transfer to the workplace, a nonprofit’s director might not see the immediate benefit in hiring a history or anthropology or philosophy major. Rethinking traditional majors as badges like those I describe above might help students, employers and other stakeholders better understand a student’s areas of experience and expertise.

IN PRACTICE

All of this is, of course, merely a rough sketch, but it draws on and takes advantage of several cultural, economic, and technological trends:

• a decline, especially in regions like Idaho, in middle-class jobs, due to automation and overseas outsourcing
• the availability online of all kinds of more or less formalized learning, including MOOCs, language-acquisition software, digital community-development, entrepreneurial opportunities, and more
• low graduation rates at many universities, and an insistence from parents, students, and state legislators that these rates improve
• an increasing interest in competencies instead of credit hours
• “big data” computing capacity on campus that might be used to recognize patterns of student course-taking; track the placement of graduates, the courses they pursued, the skills they use in their new jobs, and their satisfaction in their lives and careers, and match these to current students’ (as yet unrecognized) interdisciplinary curricular clusters; and the development of recommendation engines that could identify course clusters that students might find useful in good careers

Does this mean a ton of extra work for faculty?  It shouldn’t. Many of us already help students figure out which courses will most help them in securing jobs in their chosen fields, as well as determine which courses from other colleges students have attended might transfer for credit. Student advising staff, the registrar’s office, departments and deans might all work together to draft guidelines for what constitutes sufficient quantity and quality of work for a badge.

Perhaps the meaning of “digital badges” has already been too diluted by being issued in so many varying contexts. Still, I foresee a paradigm shift in which universities will increasingly need to recognize different forms of learning.  Students, who more and more perceive themselves as consumers, will choose universities that are less constraining about general education and major requirements and offer a more flexible path to graduation.

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