Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Professor Chen Zhiwu, a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, organized a conference on China which I attended over the last few days. There were a number of interesting participants and keynote speakers. I met Jeffrey Williams who served for a period as CEO of Shenzhen Development Bank after Newbridge capital gained a controlling stake in it. He must be the first foreigner to have headed a PRC bank since 1949.

There were panels on China’s stock markets, bond market, banking industry, film industry, real estate and other sectors. The conference included a good mixture of academics and “practitioners.”

One panel was about the development of the legal profession in China. I was a discussant for that session, commenting on a paper by Nicholas Howson, now a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and formerly the partner in charge of the Beijing office of Paul, Weiss (when I was there as an associate, in fact).

PRC President Hu Jintao went to Yale to give a speech during his American visit. I happened to be on campus that day (coincidentally for a conference on China).

Chinese leaders travelling abroad routinely encounter protests, which of course is quite different than their experience inside the PRC (despite ostensible guarantees to freedom of speech and assembly in the PRC constitution).

I took a few pictures of the motley assembly of New Haven protesters (and counter-protesters).

On the critical side, there were Falungong adherents, human rights activists, Tibetans and general anti-communists. The counter-protesters included, oddly, what appeared to be a uniformed PRC military band, plus lots of organized civilian flag wavers (and a few people who seemed to have randomly turned out to welcome Hu).

Pro-CCP forces were using huge speakers connected to a generator to blare patriotic songs, trying to drown out protesters who were screaming their complaints and chants into loud speakers.

I overheard people arguing in Chinese, accusing each other of being unpatriotic (to China), and there was some jostling for positions along the sidewalks that lined what was perceived to be Hu’s motorcade route. There were lots of leafletters, and scattered groups of FLG people sat meditating. Overall it was a relatively small and vigorous but certainly peaceful assemblage.

I understand Hu’s speech was nothing scintillating (predictably) but that he answered a couple of pre-determined questions with aplomb (perhaps surprising given that he doesn’t get a lot of Q&A practice).

“The logic of education systems should be reversed so that the system conforms to the learner, rather than the learner to the system.” link

Later this month I’ll be teaching a course on business ethics to a group of executive MBA students in China. Then next month I’ll be teaching a course on doing business in China to a group of U.S.-based MBA students.

I’ve been working on the content of these courses for a long time and am looking forward to each class. But now, as the time for these courses nears, I am thinking about how I might best use web-based tools in each course.

One reason I’m thinking about how to use (or “leverage” as business people love to say) the web for these courses is that the face-to-face component of each course is quite compressed.

Neither is an “online” course in any conventional sense; each involves a substantial “synchronous” component (meaning the students and and I will be together in “real time” for many hours). However, neither class is delivered in a traditional 15-week semester (or even a more compressed quarter format). The ethics course meets over three long days, and the course on doing business in China involves two long pre-departure meetings in the US then a week of company visits and cultural experiences in Shanghai.

Each course requires students to do a substantial amount of work before our formal, synchronous times together and after we disperse. I’d like to use web tools to maximize everyone’s learning (including my own), extracting as much value as possible from our time together and from the work done before and after the formal class meetings.

I don’t mean I’d merely like to use the web in a simple, “Web 1.0″ sense.

Is any college course nowadays taught without a substantial online component?

1. Every course in the business school where I teach has a BlackBoard site (before adopting BlackBoard we used WebCT). At the very least, faculty use those sites to publish their syllabi and post grades.
2. In nearly all courses it is also now inevitable that a good deal of student-instructor interaction (and no doubt student-student interaction) occurs through email.
3. Both students and instructors now Google a topic to begin their research—the net has become most everyone’s portal into the world’s knowledge, at least initially.

Going beyond these now-routine uses of the net in education, beginning two years ago I started requiring the students in my doing business in China courses (both honors undergraduates and MBA students) to produce a blog as one of the formal “deliverables” that I graded. I’ve had, frankly, mixed results from that initiative. The undergraduates—who are closer to being “digital natives” took to it better than the MBA students who, alas, think in PowerPoint, not Web 2.0.

I’m thinking I’d like to try something more now, try to shift the direction of online interaction form:

student–>instructor (or student group–>instructor)

to something like:

student–>student, and
student–>world.

Reading people’s notions about the Web 2.0 and social computing has prompted some of this thinking. So has my daily experience. I find that my own patterns of information “consumption” and production are moving, subtly but inexorably, online. (This fellow explains in detail).

Currently I’m investigating Elgg, Drupal, and Moodle.

I have no time for a steep learning curve, and my busy MBA students certainly do not have time to learn software in addition to the substantive content of the courses (nearly all of them have jobs and families besides being students), but if I can find, install and set-up an easy-to-use web 2.0 course site quickly using one of these packages–something that would allow individual blogs for publishing assignments, at least to the class, rather than a single group blog like I’ve been using with WordPress–I may try to do something new in my upcoming classes.

Of course, I’ve been learning online about these new tools (new to me at least). Some things I’ve found helpful include this, this and this Guardian story on Elgg, and this posting on integrating all three of the tools I’m evaluating.

The Guardian has the best technology coverage and use of any “paper” in the world. This speech by its editor is a great overview of what the new world of net-based interaction means for old, dead tree media companies.

Much of what he says about how new technologies challenge old media will also be played out in education. Already some major universities are putting content on Apple’s iTunes, and companies like Audible and The Teaching Company are storming ahead even as most educators slog behind. People are talking a lot about creating personal learning environments, so that a student’s portfolio of learning experiences is portable (and perhaps even publicly accessible) beyond the construct of a particular class or even particular educational institution.

I now think this is scintillating stuff, but when I first began to read about most of it my initial reactions were not immediately positive. Although I tend to be a bit ahead of many of my colleagues in adopting new technologies, I consider myself a second wave adopter. By nature I am quite conservative.

My first reaction to the idea of podcasting my lectures, for instance, was almost instantaneous resistance. “I teach by the Socratic method! I won’t allow people to create an embarrassing permanent, globally accessible record of some poor student’s floundering . . . that will chill discussion. It’s anti-educational!”

Upon greater reflection, however, I have realized students could use digital versions of portions of my lectures (the comparatively few moments when I “lecture” as opposed to ask questions) the way I use NPR—as a way to multi-task, so that they can absorb information while doing other things (commuting, doing housework, yes even surfing). What’s wrong with that? I want them to learn, not be in front of me but be mentally elsewhere.

Indeed, I recall that in law school I used recorded lectures about black-letter law (purchased from the substantial legal study aids industry—an industry so pervasive in law schools that in truth it substantially augments (if not often replaces) the Socratic method that is, ostensibly, the way law is taught in US law schools). Back then I found it extremely helpful to be able to 1) time shift 2) place shift and 3) listen repeatedly to this content (though in those days I didn’t have the vocabulary for time shifting and place shifting—I just thought I was listening to tapes to cram for exams!).

So I know from my own experience that listening to asynchronous instruction works for substantive content just as it works for language learning (foreign language training has long relied on multi-media experiences “outside” class to achieve learning objectives, and it’s been interesting to watch how ChinesePod has caught the attention of Mandarin learners around the world).

Now I realize putting most of my lectures into iTunes (or some other distribution channel) won’t eliminate my job—rather, it could allow me to

1. spend more time on the higher-end research and publishing parts of my job,
2. spend more time listening to my students rather than lecturing them during our precious synchronous time (so that they get more of the the educational benefit from recital (teaching), rather than me the teacher hording that benefit)
3. provide students with a way to learn and review at their pace, in places of their choosing, with as many repetitions (or fast forwarding) as they desire.

It seems the role of professors (and institutions) has long been, really, to provide a forum for interaction (concentrate talented people and resources), assemble experiences (teacher as DJ) and to certify the result—to signal through the prestige of the institution and the degrees conferred that person X is duly capable and skilled—not merely that he or she has sat through N-credit hours with a living professor. With those essential roles clarified, new technologies suddenly seem inviting, not threatening.

In other words, I think the future will look more like these classes I’m about to teach–where students and professors interact asynchronously a great deal, with some compressed but high-value time spent in real time, synchronous interaction, the whole experience of being in a “class” knit together as much by technology as by physical co-presence. I suspect the results will be better–or at least as good–as much of what we now call education.