Conventional wisdom views language as a device through which thought is actualized into spoken or written word, as a tool that simply assists in the representation of something that precedes it. To paraphrase a science mentor and dear friend of mine, “We do not create the world through language. Language and explicit knowledge are the poor symbolic systems we use to try and communicate about the real creator of the world: implicit rules and knowledge that are metasymbolic.”

Acronyms are introduced regularly in many contexts, not only to facilitate repeated reference to certain terms but also to imply wide acceptance of and add an air of importance to proposed ideas, processes, or methodologies. Instructional design loves acronyms. The buzz-cronyms of the hour include BD, PBL, TBL, and LCI (or LCT) (clues below).

Contributing to this long list, and in many ways consolidating it, I propose ADCL or Assessment-Driven Collaborative Learning. Details will be published in one of the 2009 volumes of Symposium, the journal of the College Music Society. In the meantime, here is a teaser:

Along with the general increase in the number and availability of online resources, educational or otherwise, the last decade has seen a growing trend towards developing complete post-secondary-education courses that can be made available online for free. In contrast to the widely varying quality and the general absence of systematic and educational-research-backed course-design standards that characterize online courses offered at a premium from a growing number of traditional or exclusively online higher-education institutions, the quality and standards of these free courses is consistently high—probably a reflection of the kinds of faculty and institutions willing to devote time and expertise to free education.

I am truly at a loss as to why we are still arguing about this, but we somehow still are! (See “Retailers Giving Vinyl Records Another Spin.”) Here is the quick answer: digital-audio techniques and media can capture and reproduce sonic events far more faithfully than any analogue technique and medium. Note that the focus of the above statement is fidelity not preference, a distinction that most “LPs versus CDs” debates wrongly blur.

Old news

Don’t get me wrong! I own three iPods, which I use extensively and absolutely adore for their portability and other obvious advantages. I, of course, use them differently than most listeners. (If you are lazy or impatient, feel free to jump to the bottom of the page and read how.) Most listeners use mp3 players and mp3 files in ways that severely degrade sound quality and eventually deteriorate the listener’s ability to even tell the difference between good and bad sound quality. But more on this a little later.

Back in September, I wrote a post addressing some drawbacks of applying the business model to education. In the meantime, and thanks to Don Casey, Dean at DePaul’s School of Music, I came across Jim Collins’s Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer. This is a monograph accompanying Collins’s book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. I found this monograph extremely useful in the way it articulates and organizes both the problems involved in applying the business model to education and the numerous concrete suggestions on how to proceed.

Both the low marketability of arts degrees and the low salaries of arts educators in our society, when compared to the marketability of degrees and salaries of educators in science or technology topics, reflect an attitude towards the arts that sees them as accessories to our lives, good mainly for entertainment, pleasure, or escape. This attitude frequently undermines arts education funding and is, for some, due to the admitted difficulty non-artists and artists alike face when trying to assess success in arts education and production with measures that make sense to and can be appreciated by “non believers.”

In recent years, there has been a growing trend to view educational institutions as businesses, assessing them in terms of business models and measures. Consistent with such models, institutions are required to justify their existence based not on criteria such as quality of faculty or resources, but on whether they:

1. satisfy a current demand,
2. anticipate a future one,
3. keep their clients happy,
4. continuously increase product offerings (courses/programs) and sales (enrollment), and
5. positively balance their books.