Comments for Knowledge Rules

Comment on Global university rankings - the best of all possible worlds? by Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:34:13 +0000

Kenny is right to spot the key problem with university rankings metrics (that they eliminate contextual data that enable us to interpret the numbers) but, I think, less convincing in advocating reputational surveys as the preferred alternative. All the evidence we have on reputational surveys suggest that most people who fill them in do not know the field of institutions well enough to make deep judgements. They only know institutions where they have worked or studied and this small group (possibily as small as one institution) is not enough. So if consumers are to be guided by rankings as Vicky suggests, it would be a case of ‘the blind leading the blind’. I would be much more confident if rankings judgements were based on a study by an expert group which studied the ‘outputs’ of insttiutions in context, conducted case visits and drew on all available evidence. It would be an expensive process, perhaps too expensive to conduct annually, but it would produce universally valuable data and would develop a much stronger culture of scrutiny and product improvement. This in turn would lead to better judgements and decisions by consumers in the marketplace and that too would ‘lift the bar’.

Comment on Global university rankings - the best of all possible worlds? by Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:21:30 +0000

You bring up some important criticisms of reputational rankings (that they can be confounded by “brand” recognition, that they often have very low response rates, that they are self-reinforcing, and that they have no necessary connection to “fundamental capacity or performance”) but it seems that in some cases, they are still better than the “quantitative” rankings that are often preferred. For instance, looking at citation numbers privileges achievement in some disciplines more than others. Graduation rates don’t indicate whether students are very talented or whether the program is very easy to complete. And so on. In many ways, reputational rankings, when done very carefully (first of all, don’t ask students to rank law schools!) may be much more relevant for many purposes. The people who are solicited for reputational rankings are hopefully the ones who know the most about different systems and can understand what features of the difference are relevant or not, while explicit quantitative rankings often fail to recognize these differences.

Of course, the points about making specialist rankings, having many different ranking organizations, and making these organizations as disinterested as possible are very important points.

Comment on Global university rankings - the best of all possible worlds? by Vicky Phillips

Vicky Phillips — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:51:27 +0000

The concept of “college rankings” looks very different depending on one’s primary viewpoint. You’ve written an excellent piece when the issue is looked at from the perspective of an “inside academic.”

But what if this issue is viewed from the perspective of the student: especially a student in the USA who faces the daunting task of trying to locate that relatively new creature: the online degree.

Potential learners, unlike academicians, love rankings, ratings and lists. This is because in the USA the choice of university porgrams, even online, is staggering: the cost likewise. Our firm, GetEducated.com, just completed our national (USA) rankings of online MBAs which are AACSB accredited. There exist 168 accredited MBA options in the USA: 62 of these AACSB accredited (which many consider the gold standard). Of these, the very same degree, the MBA, can cost from $8,000 to well over $100,000.

Shocking, isn’t it?

What is the average potential learner to think of this wide a spread in cost? Is a $100,000 degree more credible than a $10,000 one? We all know there is no strong and fast relationship between cost and quality in higher ed (or a very shaky one at best in the USA!).

Consumers deserve more transparency and explanation of why higher education presents at such wide price and prestige points. They turn to various ratings and ranking systems to determine what they might be buying (other than an early shot at bankruptcy) for such wide price points.

There should be *more* ratings and rankings and such systems should use all types of reference viewpoints, especially those that matter to the learners themselves.

Vicky Phillips ~ Chief Education Analyst - GetEducated.com

Comment on Reading Google’s Monetized Page by Marc Aronson

Marc Aronson — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:39:20 +0000

A second thought on Peter’s piece: I think it suffers from the apples and oranges problem. For argument’s sake we can say that from Erasmus to, what, the Federalist Papers there was some form of Republic of Letters in which men read works on law, on government, on natural philosophy…with — as they say on PBS — limited commercial interruption. And we can say that that Republic was, in a sense, more open than then modern academy in that any educated reader felt he could or should join in — in other words in its widest range, say the readership for Common Sense, it ranged from the academy, past NPR, to the modern talk show.

But throughout that time there was always a Grub Street that would have been just as thrilled as the RH editorial team had they gotten news of a sudden bump in sales of anything. You can’t compare a reading community interested in Novangelis with the mood of a publishing team. They are simply two different beasts. And, as students of publishing in the Republic of Letters have shown, those publishers were savvy in exactly the way Peter must be today — networking, making connections, promoting younger scholars to older more famous mentors. In other words, within their world, they were skilled at monetizing their pages.

All this said, I think when Peter said his goal is to publish books that matter and not lose money, I think that is tragic. The negative aim — that pit of doom University Presses circle around — really does not in any significant way fit with the first aim. And that is worth discussing.

Comment on Reading Google’s Monetized Page by Marc Aronson

Marc Aronson — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:16:33 +0000

I always enjoy Peter’s thoughtful articulations of the ideal of reading as potentially offering a kind of individual emancipation. I think he is on to something. But the obvious historical point is that in the days of coffee house culture, the newspapers read by Addison and Steele were full of ads, and in the days of Melville the ads were in the books themselves (his novel Pierre has great fun with the publishers of his day) — not to speak of the ads that surrounded, say, Edith Wharton’s or Fitzgerald’s pieces when they were serialized in popular magazines (where surely they found the most readers). So while I think he is pointing us to a meaningful moment in the present, it is based on a many times abstracted and idealized past.

Comment on Reading Google’s Monetized Page by Jonathan VanAntwerpen

Jonathan VanAntwerpen — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:03:00 +0000

Thanks to Peter Dimock for this fine first post, and for helping to launch what promises to be a very interesting blog. I particularly appreciated Dimock’s first person perspective—and I think that all three of his “publishing moments” are worthy of further consideration. At this moment, though, I’m wondering specifically about his second, “quieter” anecdote, and thinking about the lack of “contemplative time” necessary to read, let alone seriously engage, major new books. “What does it mean,” Dimock asks, “that scholars may increasingly be writing very good books for audiences who, though possessed of interpretive competence, simply cannot meet their interpretive demands?” Anyone who has lived through the transformation of daily life wrought by the likes of email is bound to understand, at least in part, what Dimock is getting at. In little more than a decade, we’ve gone from the heady heyday of extensive and frequently lengthy email exchanges (both personally and on substantively defined listservs) to the age of the BlackBerry and the T1, in which many of us exchange hundreds of emails a day, most of them furiously pounded out in the clipped, short clauses of e-speak. Life is busy, as the Sprint multi-taskers ad would have it, but some people—ie, those with a good handheld (and “Sprint speed”), though probably not a whole lot of “contemplative time”—seem to get more done than others. Among scholars and their fellow travelers, responses to this reality have varied. On one end of the spectrum are those who have completely embraced the new technology and its omnipresent place in their lives. Count among these the colleague who recently assured me that while he was busy traveling and would be touching down in Helsinki before arriving in New York for an SSRC meeting, he would nonetheless be readily available along the way, since “BlkBerry sleeps by my side.” On the other end of the spectrum are those colleagues who are very nearly impossible to reach by email—because, for instance, they check it once a week during their “office hours,” wedging their hurriedly drafted responses in between meetings with students and dealing with that mail still kind enough to come in an envelope capable of being torn open. Most of us probably tend more towards the former pole, but at least some of those who lean towards the latter are nonetheless to be commended (even if they do annoy us by not responding immediately to our variously worded, and repeated, email entreaties). They are, after all, holding out for one version of the scholar’s dream, the situation of skholè, that unfettered free time in which we (and our time) are freed, as Pierre Bourdieu once put it, “from the urgencies of the world.” Most of these hold outs, however, appear in my admittedly non-random sample to be tenured faculty members, well ensconced in one elite institution or another, with the freedom to not even know the meaning of an email bankruptcy, much less be forced to contend with the consequences of having to declare one. So what about the rest of us? We’re the somewhat guilty would-be readers that Peter mentions in his post, whose Amazon wish lists—if all of our book-buying dreams were suddenly to come true—would have us surrounded by stacks and stacks of carefully crafted and laboriously researched books, their pristinely preserved or merely half-turned pages serving only to reinforce our sense of despair at all that we might have known. Our best hope might be the convulsive gift visited upon the protagonist in Coppola’s (and before that Eliade’s) Youth Without Youth, Dominic Matei, who having been struck by lightning was subjected to a change in ontological status that enabled him to completely assimilate all the knowledge lodged in books simply by passing his hand over them (whether he was also thereby able to make use of their “emancipative potential” is, I suppose, another matter). While we wait around for our own bolt of lightning to strike, we might comfort ourselves by remembering that there are good reasons to be engaged with and by “the urgencies of the world”—and yes, this means that some books will go unread. Whether some books ought to go unread, or even unwritten, is yet another important question, and one that I hope contributors to this blog will eventually take up. We certainly might begin by acknowledging—scandalous as it may seem to say in a world in which everyone is (and indeed must be) a published author—that not all books are created equal. Yet what about very good books, like the one Peter Dimock mentions, books that deserve to be read? Well, we’ll just have to blog about them, of course!

Comment on Reading Google’s Monetized Page by James Zwier

James Zwier — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:26:08 +0000

One possible benefit of technologies such as Google’s Book Search is the linking potential between various different sources of knowledge. In other words, a re-mix enabled by emerging communication technologies (aka Web 2.0) may emancipate not only the reader but the words themselves.

That said, I will continue to follow the conversations on this blog to learn more. Thank you!