About

11 August 2010

My name is Gary Lewis. I started this blog after retiring in 2007 with 60+ years of living and working on college and university campuses. To me education always seemed one of life’s true callings. Reluctantly I now believe that higher education in the United States is increasingly befuddled, lost in its chase of chimeras like institutional prestige, and actively betraying its commitment to serve as hope for the future.

Harsh words, I know, but the situation is not unique to higher education. The same malaise affects many other institutional forms once held in regard. These problems are all complexly interrelated; problems in higher education, for example, are not bounded within colleges and universities.

This may all sound bleak, but that’s not the way it feels to me. Indeed, how lucky we are to live at a time when a confluence of global issues make it possible and compelling to reinvent our institutions and the way we live.

The title of this blog is Educational Imaginations. In it I try to imagine and to help build a tomorrow constructed around the following principles.

• It’s learning that’s important, not education.
• Learning should be available to everyone everywhere as a right of birth.
• Opportunities to learn should be specific to an individual and available at each learner’s discretion
• Learning should be free throughout life.
• Learning opportunities cannot be imagined or created in isolation from many other facets of life today.

Possible? No, not any time soon. But these principles provide a good compass toward true north I think. Not only for reform of existing institutions but also as guides when cobbling together entirely new institutions.

My background is heavily technical; data warehouse design/development and various forms of analysis and research. For me it makes sense to use these as a core when imagining tomorrow.

Here’s one illustration of what I mean. I’m presently conducting and blogging about a project that asks one simple but very powerful question: Why does higher education cost so much these days?

Colleges and universities in the U.S. have priced themselves precariously close to being out-of-reach of students and families, exposing an open flank to for-profits and other lower cost competitors. With the digital networked age gnawing voraciously at some industries, higher education seems a prime target for unwelcome externally driven change.

In the project, I’m building a database of college and university financial data over the last 30 years. It’s based on a Department of Education survey called the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).

I consider it an experiment for tomorrow, one of thousands upon thousands that people everywhere are conducting. From this rich substrate of possibilities, I believe new institutions and new ways of living will evolve. I’d be surprised if this did not involve notions of the commons, networks, communities both local and virtual, peer-to-peer solutions, and social justice. Basically people exerting their influence by saying we need to heal this world.

Here’s how I see my current project in light of these comments.

1. It’s an opportunity for me to personally learn many new skills. Things like XQuery, Perl, R, HTML5, CSS3, SVG and the list continues.
2. I’m doing everything transparently in this blog without limitations on intellectual property rights. IPEDS is public domain data. The dataset I produce will be also be public domain. I invite people to extend it, revise it, improve it, build it out as their own, whatever. This is definitely an open data project in the most expansive definition of that term.
3. It’s also a project that tests the possibilities and limitations in government transparency programs like data.gov. What does it take for citizens to use government data in novel and useful ways? How much data curation is required to maintain the integrity of the data and promote trust in results?
4. Most importantly this is data-supported project-based learning. It’s intended for everyone interested in the rising cost of higher education, most particularly a general audience of concerned students and families. How do we make the project fun, accessible, and useful? Is the data-driven project-based form applicable more generally to other learning situations?
5. It’s also a project that reaches out to others. I can build the dataset, make it available as open data, and build a web application that highlights some possible uses of the data. But my hope is that other developers will build their own applications that use the dataset in creative and interesting ways that I never would have considered. My web application development skills are modest at best. Other developers are critically important. This project is definitely an experiment to see if a robust database focused on an important issue with wide appeal is sufficient to draw developers to the data and to build applications with it.

My regards to all; everywhere.