Harvard Extended

Final thoughts about Harvard Extension

2008-09-07T07:50:00.084-05:00

(New: Updates to Q&A section, summer 2009. A long review of Dean Michael Shinagel's history of the Extension School, "The Gates Unbarred", Sept. 2009. Launched @HarvardExtended twitter feed, April 2010. Updated answers to professional ALM and résumé sections after degree requirements changed, summer 2010. Launched Ipso Facto on Harvard Law School blogging platform in September 2011, with the first post a criticism of the Harvard Extension School's reckless expansion into online education.)

After writing more than 400 entries, I've decided to bring the Harvard Extended blog to a close. This is the final post. It's a long one, filled with observations, praise, and criticism of the Harvard Extension School and its degree programs. There are also four "top ten" lists of popular, controversial, and interesting posts that I've written up over the years, grouped into topic areas (my thesis experience, views of the Extension School, research interests, and miscellaneous). After today, I won't be adding any new material to the blog, other than to reply to comments. I'd like to thank long-time readers for their curiosity, participation, and support over the years -- if you're interested in following me elsewhere online, or staying connected with the Harvard Extension School community, I have some links for you further down.

If you're a new reader and you've reached this page, it's probably because you searched online for information about the Harvard Extension School. Or, maybe someone told you about the obscure blog run by a graduate student there, and you wanted to read some first-hand insights into the school and its programs.

You've come to the right place. I was an Extension School student from 2003 to 2008, and, until recently, operated one of the few non-official sources of information about the Extension School -- the Harvard Extended blog, which you're looking at right now.

Over the years, many ~~tens~~ hundreds of thousands of people have visited Harvard Extended. I've received scores of emails from people all over the world, plus many blog comments, asking about the Extension School. I'd first like to get some of these questions out of the way, and then I'll talk about my own experience before highlighting the "top ten" posts:

Questions about the Harvard Extension School

Is the ALM/Master of Liberal Arts program challenging? Does it represent a quality degree? (Updated) For those students who take all or most of their classes in person on the Harvard campus and complete the degree requirements, the ALM/liberal arts degrees absolutely represent quality (I don't feel the same way about online classes, however. Scroll down to see why). Students who register for on-campus coursework study under Harvard professors and recognized experts in their fields, and truly engage with them in the classroom. Harvard faculty demand a lot from students, and often use the same reading materials and assignments for their Extension School and GSAS sections.

The course offerings in a few liberal arts fields are superb. Harvard has a large number of extremely talented faculty who are used to working with very bright colleagues and students, and the university has world-class libraries and other facilities. The rich Extension School course catalog reflects these factors. It is a wonderful feeling to browse through the course offerings before the semester starts, seeing what's available and who's teaching certain sections. Where else would you be able to study genetics with a Harvard Medical School professor; a class titled "American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac" that is taught by two Harvard faculty members with expertise in literature, history, and African-American studies; or classes on the history of Christianity, led by an expert from the Harvard Divinity School? Besides enrolling at the Extension School, the only way to have these types of educational experiences would be to attend Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard Medical School, or the Harvard Divinity School.

Quality is also manifested in the tough requirements for admission to the ALM/Liberal Arts program. Students have to prove they can handle the coursework and research requirements before they can matriculate. However, the element that really sets the ALM/Liberal Arts program apart is the thesis. It is a major research and writing project that is guided by a Harvard faculty member, and prepares students for advanced research elsewhere. It takes years to complete, and is probably the most difficult research project that most students will ever undertake, with the exception of those who go on to write a doctoral dissertation or book. Just a tiny percentage of the graduate students who come to the Extension School ever complete the ALM thesis. For all degree programs, including the undergraduate ALB and professional master's programs which don't require a thesis, the overall graduation rate relative to the number of people who register for courses is 3% (Source: Dean Michael Shinagel, 2009 address to degree recipients).

The quality and rigor of the ALM/Liberal Arts program attracts high achievers. In my graduating class, there were successful professionals as well as students who had completed their undergraduate and earlier graduate degrees at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Georgetown, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Those who are unprepared for serious study won't get very far. Some prospective degree candidates assume that the experience will be akin to a typical continuing education program. They quickly learn otherwise. While anyone can take a class at the Extension School, students who want to study for a degree have to prove they can walk the walk before they are admitted. Harvard instructors have extremely high expectations of HES degree candidates, and the workload can be absolutely brutal. Classes, homework, papers, exam preparation and thesis research will dominate students' evenings and weekends for years (four is typical).

The washout rate is high. People who sign up for classes and expect to float through the ALM program won't make it past the admissions requirements. Matriculated students who can't keep up with the academic demands will eventually be forced out by poor grades (a B- or higher is required for each course and students must have a 3.0 GPA to graduate) or their inability to complete the thesis. Nine out of ten people who enroll in Extension School classes will never receive an ALM or ALB degree, and even among matriculated students who have been admitted to one of the ALM/liberal arts programs, half won't make it to Commencement.

What about the ALM degrees in information technology and management? (Updated) I can't answer that question -- I never took any IT or management classes at the Extension school.

But I can talk about other aspects of the programs. Despite being called "master of liberal arts" degrees, they are actually professional degrees. And, unlike the Liberal Arts ALM degree, the professional ALMs no longer have any Harvard instructor requirements.

This is a shocking development. The Extension School has portrayed the end of the Harvard instructor requirement as a positive move, saying that it enables more flexibility in course selection. Unfortunately, it also takes away one of the primary reasons for attending the Extension School -- being able to study under real Harvard faculty.

A little history is necessary to explain why the Extension School administration decided to jettison one of its core competencies for its professional degree programs. When the professional degrees were grown from the much smaller professional certificate programs, the Extension School attempted to duplicate the "Harvard Instructor" requirement that governs the liberal arts-focused ALB and ALM degrees. In fact, the printed 2002-2003 Extension School catalogue actually used the term "Harvard Instructor" for both liberal arts and professional degree requirements.

The professional degree programs were a hit. However, the school had difficulty attracting Harvard faculty to teach the professional classes. Sometimes it was because Harvard's other schools didn't have faculty who taught those subjects -- for instance, there is no journalism or media studies department from which the Extension School could recruit instructors for its graduate journalism degree. In other cases, Harvard professors could not be enticed to teach at the Extension School. In his book The Gates Unbarred, Dean Michael Shinagel admitted this was a problem.

This situation caused the Extension School to loosen the criteria to include "Harvard-Affiliated Instructors", including working professionals and non-faculty researchers from Harvard's huge staff. The school also greatly ramped up its reliance upon pre-recorded distance education classes featuring Harvard faculty, which by their very nature limit direct interaction between faculty and students. This, in turn, greatly expanded the potential customer base outside eastern Massachusetts, increasing demand for more online course offerings.

As for the Extension School turning to affiliates to teach its professional classes, many of them bring huge amounts of experience and talent to their respective programs. However, they are not Harvard faculty members responsible for driving research and academic dialogues at the University. In addition, in many cases the affiliates' experience is specific to Harvard's own operations, which may not apply to the wider world.

According to a letter sent to me by an officer at the Extension School in July 2010, the professional programs' affiliate requirement is being replaced by "advisory board oversight," which the Extension School officer suggests will provide "better quality control". The letter further suggests that the change will allow the Extension School to recruit more talented faculty from other area schools as well as working professionals from outside Harvard.

While recruiting professors from Boston University, Bentley, Boston College and UMass will improve the quality of the instruction in these programs, it is a tacit acknowledgment that the professional degree programs have failed to fit the model established by the Extension School to offer a Harvard academic experience led by Harvard faculty members to students. It further sets a precedent for launching new professional degree programs that have no connection to the University's existing areas of study, and opens the door to criticism that Harvard Extension School degrees aren't "real" degrees because they no longer represent study under Harvard's top-notch faculty.

President Lowell, who established the Extension School more than 100 years ago, would have been disappointed. From the archives of The Crimson:

"President Lowell, in speaking of the relations of the University to the community, laid special stress on the importance of confining university extension to fields in which the existing resources of the university could be placed at the service of the community. It was much better, he said, to have substantial instruction of a high grade given by a few of the most eminent and stimulating teachers than to have superficial or merely entertaining courses of a popular nature."

There are a few additional things I would like to note about the ALM in Management program. Completing the ALMM degree requirements will not result in a Harvard MBA, which can only granted by the Harvard Business School. The Business School is a completely different campus entity that has no direct connection with the Extension School. The pedagogy at the two schools are different -- for instance, the Business School stresses the case method and team-building exercises based on class cohorts, and does not incorporate online instruction. For these and other reasons, the Business School's MBA program and the Extension School's ALMM program are not comparable. Further, it is impossible to study for a Harvard executive MBA or a Harvard online MBA -- neither school offers such a degree. (For insights into the student experience at the Harvard Business School, I recommend Philip Delves Broughton's Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School).

Nevertheless, the ALM/Management program is extremely popular. It has grown to hundreds of students since it was introduced in 2007. The Extension School recently decided to tighten up the ALMM requirements, by demanding a 3.33 GPA for admissions and requiring six out of twelve classes to be taken on campus. I believe the new rules are appropriate -- the program really was getting too large, and attracted some people who seemed to value online convenience over academics.

The Extension School's ALB program for undergraduates -- is it worth it? I received my undergraduate degree from Boston University, so it's hard for me to judge the ALB, which is a non-residential program tailored to the needs of working adults. However, many of my Extension School classes had undergraduate and graduate sections, so I can attest to the quality of in-class instruction (but not distance education classes, many of which have little or no interaction between faculty and Extension School students). I would also recommend some of the following posts (be sure to read the comments):

Do Extension School graduates go on to complete advanced degrees at Harvard's other professional schools? (Updated) Yes. There are a small number of ALB and ALM recipients who are admitted to masters and PhD programs at Harvard's other professional schools, including the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For instance, in 1996 10 HES grads received degrees from other Harvard schools, including a PhD in English and American Literature and Language from GSAS.

The Extension School no longer publishes the names and degrees of alumni who receive additional Harvard degrees, but the trend has continued into the 21st century, according to Post Harvard (the alumni website, which includes a directory of all Harvard graduates). I did a quick search for a single year's HES graduates in the 2000s, and for that year found about a half-dozen alumni who had received masters degrees from other Harvard schools, as well as one PhD.

Not only does this indicate that some Extension School graduates are being accepted to some of the world's most selective graduate programs, it also proves that the Extension School is giving its students the skills that are required for advanced research and study elsewhere.

However, note that an Extension School degree is *not* a guarantee of admission to another Harvard school. Admission to most masters and PhD programs depends on many factors, including the number of applicants, the specialties/needs of the academic program, applicants' research and work backgrounds, GPAs, adcoms standardized test scores, admissions essays, recommendations, etc.

Will an Extension School degree look good on my résumé? Will it help me get a good job?

I proudly list my Extension School degree on my C.V., and know that many others do, too. But if adding "Harvard" to your résumé is the sole purpose for attending, as opposed to learning, then you are going to the Extension School for the wrong reason and will probably end up wasting a lot of time.

The number one reason for attending the Harvard Extension School is to be exposed to some of the best teachers and researchers in the world and study topics that truly interest you (perhaps as a precursor to further graduate studies elsewhere). Some who manage to get through the degree requirements look back at their studies as a transformative learning experience. Getting a degree from Harvard is the icing on the cake.

That said, it must be acknowledged that an Extension School degree will not hold the same cachet as a Harvard College AB or an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Students at those schools are heavily recruited by multinational corporations, technology powerhouses, and well-known management consulting firms and boutique service providers. The Extension School programs are not as well known, and some employers may be skeptical of any degree that does not represent full-time study (this is an existing issue for some EMBA and part-time MBA programs).

I personally think the Extension School's ALM/Liberal Arts and ALB degrees will look good on résumés -- both are quality academic programs and represent serious study and research at one of the top educational institutions on the planet. However, I can't tell you whether it will lead to a good job. That depends on a host of factors, including work experience, work-related skills, job interviews, and the attitudes/requirements of employers. I've hired people before, and the number one requirement is relevant work experience, not where they attended college or graduate school.

I also feel that the expectations of employers regarding the Extension School's professional degrees (management, information technology, journalism, etc.) are going to become less aligned with what the Extension School delivers, owing to the administration's move in 2010 to end the last vestiges of the Harvard instructor requirement. If I were an employer, I would expect that someone putting "Harvard" on his or her résumé would have been exposed to the research and world-class faculty that the Harvard brand represents. Therefore, my advice to students interested in those programs would be to make every effort to take Harvard faculty-taught classes that match your interests (at least while they are still offered) and make an effort to attend symposia, special lectures, and other campus activities that allow Harvard students to get direct exposure to the intellectual and academic life of the University.

Surely the Extension School has other drawbacks. What are they? (Updated) It's true. Besides some of the issues described above, I have found several notable shortcomings with the Extension School's degree programs.

The biggest problem is the University's resistance to accepting the Harvard Extension School and Extension School students as equals. Yes, students get ID cards and Harvard email addresses. They can use libraries and other facilities on campus. But they are treated as inferiors in several other important areas.

For instance, ALB and ALM candidates who have completed their studies aren't granted degrees in history, biology, or other concentrations. Instead, they receive degrees in "Extension Studies." Dean Michael Shinagel has tried to fight this, but has been opposed by some FAS professors and members of the Harvard College community.

Another example of the Extension School's unequal status: It is the only school at Harvard whose graduate students are not allowed to cross-register. A student at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine could conceivably enroll in a class at the Kennedy School of Government, but a government concentrator in the Extension School's ALM program could not. It's unwarranted, unfair, and insulting. Elitism is one reason for this state of affairs, but a misunderstanding of the Extension School and its bifurcated student body is also partially responsible (see my comments regarding the name issue, below).

I have some specific complaints about the ALM/Liberal Arts program, starting with the limited opportunities for specialization. I was able to take lots of courses in my field (Chinese history) and locate a thesis director in the FAS Department of Government who had very specific insights and expertise relating to my research questions and methodology. Other fields are poorly represented in the Extension School course offerings and among Harvard faculty. For instance, I wouldn't have been able to take many classes related to African history, and I've heard of several ALM students who have had difficulty finding a thesis director who has expertise or an interest in the topic they want to research.

Another program-specific drawback was the lack of departmental affiliation. Outside of the classroom, academic support for matriculated graduate students at the Extension School consists of writing help, thesis research study groups, limited academic advising and guidance for the thesis proposal. It's also possible to serve as teaching and research assistants for instructors and FAS professors. Other than that, students are on their own. They can use Harvard's library facilities and attend open seminars elsewhere on campus, but the Extension School does not have full English, biology, or history departments that bring concentrators together on a regular basis or organizes guest speakers, special research projects, or other activities. I am not blaming the Extension School for this state of affairs -- I realize that it has limited resources and can't support full departments with dedicated faculty and staff. Still, it's disappointing to graduate students who are very serious about their studies and want to get the most out of their Harvard experience.

This brings up a related issue: The limited Extension School student community. There are a few clubs, and the Harvard Extension School Student Association (HESA) tries hard to organize social and academic activities, but the number of people who get involved is small relative to the total number of matriculated students. It's not surprising, considering most students live far from campus, have full-time jobs, and often juggle family responsibilities as well. The creation of an online community for Extension School students has helped, but it is also quite small -- even though more than 300 have registered, I estimate less than one-sixth are active participants in the discussions there.

Online education is a huge growth area for the Extension School, but the technologies used today are not a suitable replacement for in-class instruction and discussion. Unlike traditional face-to-face classes at the Extension School, contact with Harvard faculty in the online classes is limited. Even though many distance education students work extremely hard on assignments and tests, watching videos on the Extension School website and participating in limited online discussions does not represent a "Harvard-caliber" academic experience, as the Extension School claims. I strongly disagree with the Extension School's liberal online credit policies, which allow students in the undergraduate ALB and graduate ALM in IT programs to complete upwards of 90% of their coursework online, without ever sitting in the same room with their classmates or professors. Tellingly, neither Harvard College nor Harvard's professional schools offer online classes to their own students for degree credit.

You can see more of my thoughts about online education at the Extension School here, or read about the online math class I took for credit at the University of California at Berkeley Extension School in 2010. Bottom line: The convenience was addictive, but there was no sense of community or classroom discussion. I was basically "taught" by a textbook (the online element included some light reading, homework, and tests), and received university credit for it. To equate this form of online learning with a traditional, on-campus seminar or lecture is a major stretch.

Lastly, I must address issues relating to the Harvard Extension School's name. When President Lowell established the school nearly 100 years ago, "Extension School" made sense: It was a small program intended to give local residents a taste of the Harvard experience, and for a tiny number of people (for decades, just a couple of students per year), it offered a chance of earning an associate of arts degree. But the school has since outgrown its original mission, as I noted in June:

While the casual population remains (see "The Extension School's 88% dilemma") there is now a significant contingent of undergraduate and graduate students attempting to complete the requirements for the ALB and ALM (graduate) degrees. Forget the outdated student profiles promoted in this 1951 Crimson article -- nowadays, the ALB/ALM student body includes many high achievers and people from all over the world interested in taking advantage of the school's stellar academic offerings. Extension School undergraduates sometimes match or outperform their College counterparts, and among my own graduating class for the ALM/liberal arts degree were a Harvard Divinity School graduate, a Harvard Medical School instructor, and students who had already earned JDs from two of the top law schools in the country before coming to the Extension School.

The problem with the Extension School name -- and the even worse replacement that the administration is promoting, "The Harvard School of Continuing Studies" -- is they reflect the temporary experiences of the majority, as opposed to the dedicated, long-term academic commitments of the minority. "Continuing education" and "continuing studies" suggest casual, open programs of study. That matches the Extension School's original mission, and meets the needs of the many thousands of students who take a class or two because they're curious or want to sample the Harvard educational experience. However, it does not reflect what I and others in the ALM/Liberal Arts program had to go through, in terms of completing graduate coursework and a major research and writing project, or the many years of dedicated studies that are required to receive a degree or certificate through the Extension School.

This is not an attempt to slight continuing education or open enrollment at the Extension School. Continuing education helps individuals and benefits society. I've taken classes for personal enrichment and/or career advancement, such as the Mandarin courses I took at the Taipei Language Institute and my very first class through the Department of Continuing Education -- an introductory short story writing class that I took through the Summer School in 2002. But these experiences simply do not compare to my ALM journey.

It's quite clear that the Extension School's degree programs have outgrown Lowell's original mission and the Extension School name. Harvard could tolerate casual class takers and an associates degree program that graduated a handful of people every year, but it never anticipated the school would become a significant campus presence in its own right. The ALM program, which was launched in 1980, now has more graduates every year than the Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Divinity School, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. This is hardly what President Lowell envisioned when he established the Extension School. I also doubt most other people in the University community are even aware of what's going on at the Extension School -- at Commencement, I remember our gigantic procession passing the Kennedy School graduates outside of the Yard before the ceremonies started, and overhearing one remarking to her classmate, "the Extension School has degrees?"

Getting back to the name issue: I do not have any specific suggestions for a new school name, and frankly, I don't think it's possible to come up with a suitable name that reflects the school's greatly expanded mission and two disparate populations (casual class takers and serious degree candidates). But this leads me to think that it's not the name that is the root issue. Rather, it's the under-the-radar departure from the school's original mission and the resulting bifurcated student population.

As one might expect, these are sensitive topics among the Extension School student body. I am proud to list my ALM degree on my résumé, but I've found that many Extension School students and alumni play down their Extension School affiliations. The ALB and liberal arts ALM programs require a tremendous amount of work to complete and are quality degrees, yet many alumni would rather state they graduated from "Harvard University" (Harvard does not discourage this -- see the official Harvard Extension School résumé guidelines which say "Harvard University, Master of Liberal Arts, concentration in history" is acceptable).

There is also a high-profile minority of students and alumni who misrepresent themselves as being affiliated with Harvard College, the Harvard Business School, the GSAS, and other professional schools at Harvard. When their lies are inevitably exposed, they not only embarrass the people making the false claims, it also hurts the reputation of the Extension School. These incidents are sometimes reported in the press, further damaging the reputation of the school and its students.

However, these issues should not detract from the quality of the course offerings, the top-notch instruction, and incredible learning experiences available through various Extension School programs. I know three people who have received Extension School degrees and have decided to start again in another HES degree or certificate program. If I had the time and the inclination, I would probably do the same, despite the problems listed above.

My Extension School experience

Like many students, I was introduced to the Harvard Extension School through work at Harvard University. Staff are allowed to enroll in classes at Harvard's professional schools at a greatly reduced cost through the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP). Many of my colleagues at the Alumni Affairs and Development Office pursued degrees at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, or took classes casually or for credit at the Extension School and Summer School. I took a Summer School course in 2002 on a casual basis, liked it a lot, and decided to take advantage of Harvard's TAP benefit. I had no interest in the programs at the Ed School, but was impressed by the Extension School catalog, and intrigued by the possibility of earning a masters degree there. I decided to register.

It took me five years to complete the ALM requirements. My first graduate-level class, History E-1830 (The Emergence of Modern China) started in January 2003, and my final elective, Humanities E-105 (Survey of Publishing, from Text to Hypertext) ended in January 2008. I graduated in June of 2008. I wasn't taking classes or working on my thesis for five whole years -- I took off one semester in the fall of 2004 when our second child was born, and there were several months-long breaks in 2006 and 2007 after my thesis proposal and final draft of the thesis were approved. With the exception of one archaeology class, I took all of my classes in the evening, and spent thousands of additional hours at night or on weekends studying, writing papers, and carrying out a seemingly endless set of database queries for my thesis research. I completed all of my courses on campus (as opposed to online) so I had to deal with commutes and parking as well. During the five-year period, I practically gave up reading for pleasure. There just wasn't enough time.

I also had work-related pressures to deal with, especially after I left Harvard in early 2005 and returned to the world of technology journalism. The pay was better, but the hours were longer and my office was far from campus. In addition, I no longer had the TAP benefit, so tuition, books, and other costs rose from a few hundred dollars per class to nearly $2,000 per class, on average. It was expensive, but it was absolutely worth it.

I was a history concentrator. With the exception of two American history classes, most of my coursework related to ancient and modern Chinese history. I studied under Philip Kuhn, who has researched and taught Chinese history at Harvard for many decades. My thesis was completed under the guidance of Professor Alastair Iain Johnston, the Governor James Albert Noe and Linda Noe Laine Professor of China in World Affairs. The title: "Making a Case for Quantitative Research in the Study of Modern Chinese History: The New China News Agency and Chinese Policy Views of Vietnam, 1977-1993." Unlike most history theses that rely upon traditional qualitative methods, mine was quantitative in nature. I designed and carried out an extensive computer content analysis (also known as computer-assisted text analysis) to test a disputed issue relating to Post-Mao foreign policy using Xinhua, China's official news agency. You can read about my thesis here, and you can also read some of the other research papers I wrote when I was a student.

Besides studying Chinese history, I also used my time at the Extension School to explore two additional academic interests: Virtual worlds and the Chinese Internet. There were many opportunities to branch out in these areas. I wrote an op-ed piece for the South China Morning Post about how the Internet and consumer technologies were eroding the power of China's government. I was a guest author on Terra Nova, an academic blog focused on virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games, and was invited to take part in State of Play V, an international conference devoted to these emerging technologies. In my last year at the Extension School, I joined the Harvard Interactive Media Group, and for my final research paper for the survey class wrote an extensive analysis of the future of computer-generated 3D environments and the World Wide Web.

Best of the Harvard Extended blog

I launched Harvard Extended in mid-2005 to keep myself motivated as I started the most difficult stage of the ALM degree: The thesis. By reading the posts listed under "My ALM Thesis Experience: Top Ten Posts," you'll get an idea of the intellectual and practical challenges involved. Only a tiny percentage of the people who take graduate-level coursework at the Extension School ever complete the ALM degree requirements, thanks in large part to the thesis.

You'll also find many other posts about the Extension School, classes, and student life. I've come to the conclusion that the Harvard Extension School is one of the best educational deals in the country. I also believe the Harvard Extension School ALM program that I enrolled in was more academically challenging than many full-time graduate programs at Harvard and elsewhere. Nevertheless, I did not always blog about the good stuff and the high points. A range of opinions are covered in "Extension School Commentary: Top Ten Posts" section links further down the page.

I frequently used Harvard Extended as a platform for exploring other scholarly and professional interests, including virtual worlds, Chinese media, and the Internet. See "Research and Professional Interests: Top Ten Posts" for more information. Miscellany has a top ten list, too.

Harvard Extended has 414 entries, totaling well over 100,000 words, but the four lists below include what I consider to the most informative and interesting posts, essays, and asides. If you want more, you can read all 400+ posts by cycling through the monthly index on the right side of the Harvard Extended home page, starting with May 2005.

My ALM Thesis Experience: Top Ten Posts

Extension School Commentary: Top Ten Posts

Research and Professional Interests: Top Ten Posts

Miscellaneous: Top Ten Posts

Staying Connected

If you would like to follow blogs by other Extension School students, I highly recommend the following:

ClueHQ, written by an undergraduate (ALB) candidate

There are Facebook and Post.Harvard groups devoted to the Extension School as well, but as of this writing they are not nearly as active as ExtensionStudent.com.

As for me, the end of my Extension School studies does not mean the beginning of advanced studies somewhere else. Many ALM graduates leverage their research experience into graduate and doctoral programs at Harvard and elsewhere, but I am not interested in risking the interests of my family and my media career on an expensive PhD program in a crowded social sciences discipline. I have already spent enough nights and weekends over the past five years taking classes, conducting research, and writing. Now it's time for me to spend more time with my wife and kids. Additionally, the end of my last class in early 2008 coincided with the start of a new job as managing editor of The Industry Standard. This position is extremely demanding, but it's also quite exciting, and allows me to indulge my curiosity in a number of areas, including several that overlap with my research interests listed above. (In 2010, I left journalism and returned to graduate school full-time as an MIT Sloan Fellow.)

My own blogging will shift over to I, Lamont, and you can also keep up with my day-to-day experiences on Twitter, either from the feed on the right side of this page, or by visiting my personal Twitter page. I have also created a special @HarvardExtended twitter account, and update it with news and views that have connections with the Extension School or education.

It's been a good three-year run, but this is where Harvard Extended ends. Thanks for reading!

Ian Lamont
ALM '08

Distance education at Harvard: I'm not convinced

2008-09-03T07:48:00.015-05:00

This post was originally part of my epic last entry for the Harvard Extended blog, but I have decided to split it off and post it now.

It's a criticism of the Extension School's aggressive expansion into online/distance education. It's difficult for me to express, considering a good friend in the ALB program is completing his degree remotely. In addition, I have never taken an online class for credit at the Extension School -– all of my coursework was completed in person on Harvard's campus. Still, I have given this issue a great deal of thought, and I want to discuss it here.

I feel the Extension School's distance education push has gone too far. It's one thing for the Extension School to offer online lectures to people who want to sample Harvard's incredible faculty and course offerings. But permitting students in some programs to get most of their degree credit sitting in front of a computer terminal, often with few opportunities for direct interaction with faculty and classmates, is a mistake. Two of the Extension School's most popular degree programs -- the undergraduate ALB and the graduate ALM in IT -- allow students to complete 88% and 90% of their coursework online, respectively. Students can earn certificates in environmental management or applied sciences without ever stepping foot inside a Harvard classroom.
I don't doubt the drive or abilities of these students (after all, some ALB candidates get better grades than their Harvard College counterparts in shared classes) but I am questioning the degree to which the Extension School has embraced for-credit online classes as an alternate means of educating students and awarding degrees. At the same time, I accept that the Internet offers benefits that are impossible to realize in the Extension School's real-world campus. Do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? I am not convinced that they do – at least not yet.

The Internet and its role in education have been discussed for many years at Harvard. In May of 1996, in an address to the First Harvard University Conference on the Internet and Society, President Neil Rudenstine recognized that the Internet was not just another mass media or communications technology, like the telegraph, radio, or television. In the educational sphere, the Internet represented a "real transformation." It was a technology that broadened access to data and course materials, reinforced methods of study, and enabled the sharing of knowledge in new and exciting ways:

"We know that the constant exchange of ideas and opinions among students -- as well as faculty -- is one of the oldest and most important forms of education. … The Internet allows this process of dialogue -- of conversational learning -- to be transferred easily and flexibly into electronic form. Communication can be carried on at all hours, across distances, with people who are on-campus or off-campus."

(Source: Neil L. Rudenstine, Pointing Our Thoughts. Harvard University Press, 2001, 123.)

For students at the Extension School, the Internet has certainly provided a special link. None of us live on campus. Many of us don't even live in Boston or Cambridge. Email, instant messaging, and the Web have provided connections to the school and to each other. These technologies have brought us closer, and they have also empowered us. My own thesis would have been impossible out without the Web. I used it to access HOLLIS and the LexisNexis Academic service, download text analysis software, and pass drafts back and forth with my thesis director while he traveled between Cambridge, Washington, and China. This blog is a product of the Web revolution, as is ExtensionStudent.com, where students and alumni gather to discuss classes, share advice, and debate issues relating to the Extension School.

But I am skeptical that distance education based on asynchronous Internet technologies (i.e., prerecorded video, online forums, and email) is a substitute for live classroom discussion and other on-campus interaction. Distance education students can't raise their hands to ask instructors questions or participate in discussions, and it's difficult or impossible for them to take advantage of faculty office hours. Teaching assistants don't always respond to email, and online class discussion boards can be neglected by students and faculty alike. In this sense, the "process of dialogue" is actually limited by technology. The main benefits of distance education become issues of convenience and access – being able to watch lectures at any time from any location, replay important sections, and see lectures by professors who otherwise don't teach live classes at the Extension School.

President Rudenstine saw some of these limitations. "No one should believe that electronic communication can be –- or should be -– a substitute for direct human contact," he said in his 1996 address. He stated that some technologies "permit an extension of the scope, continuity, and even the quality of certain forms of interaction," but added "communication over the network lacks other absolutely essential aspects of ‘real' conversations in the presence of ‘real' people."

Since then, the University has treaded very cautiously with online education. There have been a few isolated initiatives, and online video lectures and downloadable course materials are offered to Harvard alumni. But only the Extension School has made a serious attempt to develop an online curriculum and allow some students who live in other states or other countries to complete the majority of their classes remotely. Every year I see an increase in the number of online options, and the HES website currently boasts more than 100 online classes, out of more than 600 total.

This leads me to ask: If Harvard's other professional schools -– not to mention practically every other institute of higher education in America -- fail to regard online education as an acceptable substitute for in-class instruction, then why does the Extension School put them on the same plane? In the absence of any official explanation, I will offer my own speculation:

The school really believes the convenience of online education and the chance to expose students to special Harvard faculty outweigh the disadvantages outlined above. If this is the case, the Extension School has failed to communicate or explain its reasoning, other than offering feel-good marketing copy ("Harvard Caliber, Course Credit") on the HES website. Also, if the DCE feels that distance education is an acceptable substitute for in-person instruction, then why do certain degree programs (such as my own, the ALM/Liberal Arts) insist on a much higher level of in-class experience than the ALB and ALM in IT?
Opening up the course catalogue to out-of-state and international students has greatly expanded the Extension School's customer base, and increased revenues. The interest in these programs is huge -- every week, my Web traffic stats for Harvard Extended show visitors from all over the world searching for terms like "Harvard online MBA" and "Harvard online degree." The Extension School does not offer an online MBA, and the undergraduate ALB requires 16 out of 128 credits to be taken on campus, but no matter: The course offerings, the Harvard brand, and the possibility of completing between 50% and 90% of certain degrees' class requirements online are attractive enough for thousands of people take HES distance education classes casually or for credit. This has generated many millions of dollars in revenue for the Extension School over the last 10 years. However, it's not clear whether annual revenue is enough to offset costs -- distance education classes require a great deal of coordination to prepare and teach, not to mention significant hardware and software investments (hosting, editing, cameras, etc.)
Distance education dovetails with the Harvard Extension School's mission to offer Harvard's educational resources to members of the community. Dean Shinagel references this in his welcome message on the HES website, noting that "we stand ready to serve the community, be it local or global."
Harvard recognizes that the Internet is going to fundamentally transform education, and it wants to be prepared for the inevitable revolution. The Extension School has become Harvard's laboratory of sustained innovation and experimentation for distance education technologies and best practices.

The last theory is a stretch, but it intrigues me the most. The Internet has already transformed many aspects of society and human communication, and it's not unreasonable to imagine a future in which people participate in "conversational learning" and the "process of dialogue" even if they are not physically sitting at desks in the same room as their professors and classmates.

In fact, I agree with this vision. I just don't think it can be realized with streaming video, email, and online discussion forums alone.

Virtual worlds offer some hope for making highly interactive distance education a reality, and in fact the Extension School is a pioneer in this field, thanks to a partnership with the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. But, as of mid-2008, the virtual world platforms and applications used for distance education are only halfway there. The interfaces are difficult to use, the environments are hard to build and prone to unexpected problems in terms of behavior and connectivity, and in-world meetings can't scale. This technology definitely is not ready for large-scale adoption (Disclosure: I am a board member of the non-profit Immersive Education initiative, which is trying to develop and promote virtual world technologies and best practices for education).

Where does that leave the Extension School? Certainly, it's in a great position to capitalize on powerful technology and social trends, and potentially become a model for Harvard's other schools. But in the meantime, the technology is just not there. While I believe distance education is a worthy experiment, it is not a substitute for real-world instruction and discussion, and mostly online degrees should not be a part of a part of the Extension School's offerings.

Later this month, I'll be taking my first online class, Michael Sandel's Justice. It won't be for credit, but will give me some more insights into distance education. Maybe it will even change my mind. I also welcome other Extension School students to post their own thoughts on distance education below. What are some of the benefits and drawbacks that I missed? Can anyone describe what the academic research says about distance education? Am I being unfair to the Extension School and students working remotely? To what degree should distance education for credit be allowed using current technologies? What is the future of online education?

Update: Richard at ClueHQ has posted a lengthy response: Is Distance Education a Problem at Harvard?. He is a distance ed student in the ALB program, and his insights are definitely worth reading.

2nd Update: I have responded to Richard's essay in a comment on ClueHQ. Here's the preamble:

I think one of the biggest differences in our respective arguments is you are defending online distance education from the point of understanding course materials. I am approaching this issue from the point of what a “Harvard education” means.

It’s not just about having the campus experience, mastering course materials, or getting better grades than students who attend class in person. I firmly believe that a Harvard education — indeed, a university education — entails spending time in the same room with other human beings, listening to what instructors and classmates have to say, and asking questions. This is the process of dialogue that President Rudenstine referred to in 1996 — the discussions and sharing of knowledge that takes place when people are talking with each other in a direct manner, in person. It’s old school, but it works.

I describe specific advantages of in-class dialogue vs. their online components in the comment as well. You can read the entire comment here.

3rd Update: I have written about my own experience with distance education after sampling a class through the Harvard Alumni Association. See "Follow-up: My online education experience" on the I, Lamont blog.

4th update: Since writing this post, I have taken an online math class for credit, and have this to say about the online education experience:

My online math class: Convenience gets an 'A,' but at what cost?

Some of my other writings about online education:

In the digital age, Widener is "almost a museum"

2008-08-30T20:31:00.003-05:00

Earlier this week, I was lamenting the state of research and the dissemination of knowledge in academia. Despite the incredible tools at the disposal of students, scholars, and professors, paper is still the medium of choice when it comes to publishing research and sharing knowledge.

I am not alone. This morning I was reading the September-October issue of Harvard Magazine, and spotted this quote from Venkatesh Narayanamurti, the outgoing dean of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences:

"I believe that the liberal-arts education of the twenty-first century has to be different," he says, noting that information is no longer centered in Widener Library. "The library made Harvard -- we have always had the rarest things, the best repository of knowledge, [but] information now is digital; it is on the Web. Widener Library is very valuable, but it is almost a museum."

When it comes to publishing, the Extension School is also very much oriented toward paper. Theses are bound in buckram and end up on shelves in Grossman Library. They may never be seen or read outside of the university community.

I really hope to see the Extension School and other academic units at Harvard embrace digital publishing and other Web-based ways of distributing knowledge in the next few years, so our collective efforts can be truly shared with the world, rather than being restricted to the museums of paper that dominate the campus.

Update: I just found out that in February of 2008, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences approved a plan that will "post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program." The source indicates that the policy applies to professors, but it's not clear whether student papers or research will be published online as well.

Taking Sandel's online "Justice" course

2008-08-29T08:33:00.003-05:00

I received an invitation through the Harvard Alumni Association to take "Justice" online. The class is taught by Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard's government department. I've heard about this class for years, and the preview looked fascinating. It's a great opportunity to take it online for free.

It looks like it will require a significant time commitment. There are 24 streamed sessions starting in September, plus opportunities to discuss the class with other alumni and even Professor Sandel. But it's a commitment I am willing to make. This is not just because the class looks interesting, but also because I have never taken online classes at Harvard, even though they were offered at the Extension School when I was a student there. I have some strong opinions about online education and its place at Harvard (which I will discuss in my final post for Post Harvard), but also realize that my viewpoints are limited by a lack of experience.

Thoughts on research, and saved by Scribd

2008-08-26T06:54:00.004-05:00

When scholars from the year 2058 look back on the current state of academic research and the dissemination of knowledge, they surely will marvel at the fact that so much of it remained oriented toward printed words on paper.

It is a surprising situation. Never mind that nearly all educated members of early 21st century society are already familiar with the World Wide Web, the most extensive and accessible publishing and communications tool ever invented. Despite this, many facets of the academic world remain firmly planted in the ways of the early 20th century. Whether it's writing a term paper or conducting a major research project, the fruits of students' and scholars' efforts usually end up as printed sheets of paper destined for a professor's mailbox, a filing cabinet or a university library. Even a doctoral dissertation that takes years to complete is probably going to exist as a paper hard copy in just one or two locations. The insights contained in it may never be read by more than a handful of people.

This is not to suggest that academics are Luddites. Far from it -- most students and educators are very familiar with email, search engines, online databases, and Microsoft Word. But even if students use software programs to make and distribute a term paper or thesis proposal, electronic copies hardly ever venture beyond the hard drives of the students who created them, or the inboxes of the professors who received and graded them. On occasion, high-level research will be deemed good enough for a wider audience, but all too often these works remain restricted to books or journal articles that can only be seen in university libraries or expensive, password-protected databases. Fifty years from now, the scholars of the future will marvel at all of the ideas, hypotheses, evidence, analysis that were expressed but were only shared with a limited slice of humanity, despite the ubiquity of the Web and the many software tools at our disposal to share them with a much wider audience. This system will not only be viewed as inefficient, it will be regarded as isolating researchers from potential sources of knowledge and preventing them from making discoveries and improving our understanding of the world around us.

But there is hope. I have mentioned initiatives at MIT, Berkeley, and elsewhere that are attempting to leverage the power of the Web to spread knowledge more widely (see Online education, sharing knowledge, and a proposal for Harvard and UC Berkeley's free lectures on YouTube). Harvard Extended itself represents my own personal effort to share my experiences, observations, and research findings with a wider audience, and has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations -- Google Analytics tells me that more than 3,000 visits to Harvard Extended have taken place in the past 30 days, and nearly 85,000 visits have occurred since I first started using the tool in May of 2006.

Still, I want to do more. My blogging on Harvard Extended will come to an end in the next week, and it bothers me that the class papers I worked so hard on over the years do not have a permanent online home. Collectively, they took many hundreds of hours to research and write, and were shaped by my interactions with Extension School instructors, including members of Harvard's faculty. What a waste if they were to be resigned to a box of old papers in my basement, or a file directory on my hard drive. When I was still a student at the Extension School, I posted some of them to a fas.harvard.edu Web server. Unfortunately, I lost my FAS computing privileges when I graduated earlier this year, but I think I've found an alternate solution: Scribd.

Scribd is kind of like the YouTube of electronic documents. Registered users can upload their PDF or Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and random .txt scribblings. Anyone with a Flash-enabled Web browser can view them, or even embed them on their own websites, just like you can do with YouTube videos. The database is searchable and indexed by Google, meaning that people anywhere can readily find specific documents, if they use the right search terms.

So, I've taken a half-dozen papers and uploaded them to Scribd. The idea is to share them with my readers on Harvard Extended, and anyone else who finds them interesting. I've linked them below, and embedded one of them in this post -- my final research paper for HUMA E-105 (Survey of Publishing, from Text to Hypertext). You can read them in your Web browser, or download a PDF copy, but I've disabled text and Word exports to discourage plagiarism. Here are the papers, starting with the research proposal I prepared as part of my proseminar back in the winter of 2003:

Defining a Territorial Sea: China's South China Sea Policy in the 1950s and its 1958 Declaration on the Territorial Sea (research proposal)

January 2004. Harvard DCE/SSCI E-100B (Graduate Research Methods and Scholarly Writing in Social Sciences), Joe and Doug Bond, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

Historical Nationalism: How Interpretation of China's Past is Used to Build Unity in the Present

August 2004. Harvard DCE/Archaeology S-171 (Archaeology of the Silk Road), Irene Good, Peabody Museum, Harvard University

China's Emerging Overseas Chinese Policy in the Late 1970s and Implications for Ethnic Chinese Communities in Vietnam and Kampuchea

May 2005. Hist E-1834 (Chinese Emigration in Modern Times), Professor Philip Kuhn, Harvard University

Evaluating Official Attitudes Toward Post-Mao Chinese Film Through a Quantitative Lens

August 2006. History S-1855 (Film and History in Postwar Japan and Post-Mao China), Prof. Charles Hayford, Visiting Scholar, History, Northwestern University

Proposal for a Thesis in the Field of History in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Liberal Arts Degree

February 2006. Prof. Donald Ostrowski and Prof. Alastair Iain Johnston, Harvard University

The Rise of the Press in Late Imperial China

November 2007. HUMA E-105 (Survey of Publishing, from Text to Hypertext), Matthew Battles, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I am also embedding the last paper I ever completed for the Extension School in January of this year, which was also for Battles' excellent survey class. It's quite fitting that it should end up here, as the class discussed the history of the written language from the time of the Sumerians through Gutenberg's printing revolution and finally the beginning of the current publishing revolution taking place on the Web. I took things a step further, and looked at emerging Web-based software technologies and photorealistic 3D environments. It's entitled Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web:

Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web - Upload a Document to Scribd

One thing that's missing from this small collection of papers is the most important paper of my Extension School career: my thesis (title: Making a Case for Quantitative Research in the Study of Modern Chinese History: The New China News Agency and Chinese Policy Views of Vietnam, 1977-1993). There's are several reasons I have not included it here. While Scribd is a very easy way to host documents, one thing that Scribd does not have is a vetting process or a reputation for reliability. The contents of an academic journal will have been vetted by experts and editors, and quality will be high. On Scribd, anybody can publish anything without it being vetted by anyone, and quality is mixed. For academic papers published on Scribd, the good appears alongside the bad. You'll find astounding creative works and rigorously designed research projects, as well as limp efforts at scholarly writing and even deliberate misinformation. Users can flag offensive content and copyright violations, but the process is flawed and leaves a lot of bad content on Scribd's servers. Interesting or quality content can also be highlighted by readers and illuminated with comments, but this system is imprecise in that it does not differentiate the praise from a 15-year-old kid trying to finish his homework and a 60-year-old university professor who stumbles upon a great paper on Scribd through a search on Google.

You'll have to take my word that all of the above papers were submitted to Harvard faculty or Extension School instructors for review, and all received excellent grades. However, the weaknesses in the Scribd system have convinced me to hold off on reposting my thesis on scribd.com. I want it to have the largest possible impact on my field, and I don't believe it will have that impact if posted to Scribd. Instead, I am holding out hope for a Harvard-sponsored solution. Nearly two years ago, I petitioned the Extension School to archive masters theses in the same electronic database used for doctoral dissertations at Harvard, ProQuest UMI (Update: My thesis is now available through UMI/ProQuest). While this is a closed database that can only be accessed through university library systems, it is restricted to vetted, accepted research from university masters and doctoral programs. It is widely used in academic circles -- in fact, the literature review in my thesis referenced several dissertations that I had located in the ProQuest UMI database. I hope that someday my own thesis might also be useful to future scholars of modern Chinese history, Cold War history, and Chinese media studies, if Harvard decides to extend this resource to ALM theses from the Extension School.

Couldn't have said it better myself ...

2008-08-03T20:40:00.002-05:00

I just noticed this on the ALM/Biotechnology admissions page:

Because most of our students are experienced professionals, we believe an applicant’s ability to do honors-level work at Harvard is a more relevant predictor of academic success than standardized test scores or undergraduate grade point averages. Thus, a prerequisite of admission is the successful completion of three courses from the program curriculum.

What a great way to describe admissions at the Extension School. Note that "successful completion" means a B or better in each of the three classes, and in order to graduate, students have to maintain a 3.0 grade point average. In other words, it's a meritocracy, from matriculation to graduation. Students who can't cut the coursework won't be admitted, and those who can't complete the thesis and other requirements won't get a degree.

I wish the Extension School could use this text on the admissions page for the Liberal Arts ALM programs, but relatively few of us can be considered experienced professionals, and even those of us who are often study academic subjects outside of our career backgrounds.

Where I'm writing

2008-07-26T09:38:00.004-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting. There're a few essays in progress, and later this summer I will be wrapping up Harvard Extended (but keeping the blog online as an archive) with a long, final post.

In the meantime, you may want to check out some of the writing activity over at my other personal blog, I, Lamont, and on The Industry Standard (scroll down below the list of friends to see the headlines and links). I actually updated I, Lamont last night, with the following items:

I am also regularly updating my Twitter feed, which is kind of like a mini blog that features quick thoughts and interesting links. You can visit the page directly, or I have the five most recent "tweets" appearing on the right-hand side of Harvard Extended and I, Lamont (you may have to scroll down to see them).

Hope you are all having a nice summer ...

Random thesis notes

2008-07-06T19:31:00.002-05:00

I've updated a post from last year that described the completion of my thesis, and thanked various faculty and family who helped me during the long research and writing process.

Besides adding the final grade report from Prof. Johnston (my thesis director), I also removed the broken link to the archived PDF version of the thesis. It had been stored on my personal FAS Web account, but that expired in April and I have yet to find an alternate solution. I've considered Scribd, or hosting it my own, but would much prefer a database that's associated with the University, and can be used by other scholars studying Chinese media and foreign policy during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s.

Update 3/15/2009: My thesis is now available via UMI/ProQuest's widely used academic database. You can read it here. Information about how it came about can be read here.

The coming Video 2.0 storm

2008-07-02T17:41:00.002-05:00

This afternoon around lunchtime there was a severe hailstorm in my neck of the woods, about a quarter mile from the junction of I-90 and I-95 (about 10 miles west of Boston). Our family has a Flip video camera, so I grabbed it and took three quick clips, including this one:

Posting video on blogs is not a big deal nowadays, but as I went through the process, I was struck by how much things have changed in just a few short years. We really are entering the age of Video 2.0, and it's happening so fast.

Consider this: Five years ago, shooting and posting video was a very convoluted process. Most cameras did not record to disc, meaning that tape had to be played through cables to a PC and potentially converted to some Web-friendly format. Then you had to find server space, which basically limited homegrown video to techies who knew the ins and outs of FTP and had access to a server to host the file. At that point, you could send the link around or promote it via your blog, and maybe if you were lucky, someone bigger would also link to it or it would show up at the top of Google search results for people interested in the topic at hand.

A couple of developments have occurred since then which greatly change the way video is consumed and distributed online. First, there was a watershed event in world of news and user-generated video, the Indian Ocean Tsunami (I discuss this disaster at the bottom of this page). Second, the rise of free video-hosting sites such as YouTube not only took care of the hosting problem with easy-to-use interfaces, but also handled format conversion automatically and created search-enabled clearinghouses for millions of consumers. Third, cheap consumer gadgets such as the Flip (see my Flip review) and video-enabled phones made it easy for people to capture and send video to friends and hosting sites.

The hailstorm video above took 30 seconds to shoot, about a minute to get onto my computer (thanks to Flip's built-in USB connector) and about 10 minutes to upload to YouTube. Before I uploaded it, I used YouTube's interface to tag it, add a description, and even "geotag" it through the integrated Google Maps function. I then sent the link via IM to friends and even left it in a comment thread on a local newspaper blog. The editor at the blog then took the YouTube syndication code and published it under another blog entry, enabling more people to see the power of the storm ... and the power of Internet-enabled video.

This type of video will really change the way we understand the world in the coming years. For my final Extension School course (Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext, see a blog description here) I devoted my term paper to the discussion of video, 3D animation, and the Internet. The paper was called "Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Internet", and I'd like to share one of the sections here:

Members of the public not only happen to witness news, they often gain access to people and places that broadcast news professionals cannot or will not see. They are able to capture vivid, on-scene accounts of major and minor events. The Zapruder and Rodney King home movies were early examples of this movement. Then, the devices were relatively expensive and there was no way to distribute the video to a wide audience, except through traditional media outlets such as television news. Now, cheap webcams, video cameras and mobile phones with built in cameras make it possible for practically anyone to record news events. The Internet lets them distribute the footage to a huge audience, and lets them bypass traditional gatekeepers, their professional editing requirements, and ethical codes. The footage they shoot is raw and real. It can be brutally honest and compelling, but also provocative and biased. The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was a watershed moment in this respect. For the first time, global awareness of a major news event was shaped in large part by footage shot by amateurs and distributed via the Internet. The footage was disturbing, but captured the scope of the destruction far more effectively than broadcast news outlets, which had no reporters on scene when the waves first struck the beaches.

While my 38-second hailstorm clip is not as important as a riot video, it really is a sign of things to come. When hundreds of people are witnessing and videotaping storms, disasters, political meetings, crimes, and sporting events, and there are technologies to aggregate this content or highlight the best parts, local TV news created by a relatively small team of expensive anchors, reporters, videographers and editors will be unable to effectively compete using traditional newsgathering methods.

Another Harvard College AB/Extension School ALB comparison

2008-06-28T22:38:00.002-05:00

This week I received a comment on an older post, comparing the Harvard College AB degree with the Harvard Extension School's ALB degree. "Chris" says forget about the differences in the two undergraduate curriculums or the academic abilities of students -- he found that cost and the Extension School's original mission set it apart from the College:

Back in 2000 I worked as a student assistant at the Office of the Governing Boards, Loeb House. I had a very candid discussion with one of the Fellows regarding the Extension School and the school's status at Harvard. For the most part, the President & Fellows of Harvard College do feel that the degree programs at the Extension School are a strong component of Harvard's philosophical mission. Unlike most other Ivy League institutions, Harvard is the ONLY university to offer a true, world-class education to academically-enabled non-traditional, adult learners. While Columbia and Penn do have programs aimed at non-traditional students, the cost and slim evening course offerings are prohibitive to many working adults. According to this Fellow, the primary goal of the Corporation, as far as the Extension School is concerned, is to keep the programs affordable to adult students that may already be over-burdened with a variety of real-life expenses. The fundamental difference between Harvard College and the Harvard Extension School is NOT in the curriculum (as the ALB is heavily modeled after the traditional AB) but in the cost of attendance. If you compare the cost of attendance at Harvard College with the cost of attendance at the Harvard Extension School, you'll immediately notice a stark difference. That difference is of phenomenal benefit to the academically-enabled non-traditional student. We will earn a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, study with a world-class faculty, have access to a variety of resources (libraries, email accounts, facilities, many clubs/organizations etc.) and we will become alumni of Harvard University, just as anyone else graduating from the University.

I don't agree with Chris' statement about the curriculum -- the Extension School can't match the sheer number or breadth of offerings available to College undergrads, and the Extension School does not have the core curriculum or many opportunities for specialization -- but his comments about the attitude of the Harvard Corporation toward the Extension School is interesting. The Corporation is a small but powerful group that makes many important decisions about University affairs, including choosing Harvard's president. I don't think the Extension School figures prominently in the Corporation's meetings, but if the governing body truly is dedicated to the Extension School's original mission of providing affordable access to non-traditional students, that's a good thing. The Extension School is a fabulous deal, providing access to world-class faculty and facilities at a relatively low cost, and it should stay that way.

However, one thing that the Corporation and the rest of the University needs to realize is the Extension School has outgrown its limited community and academic mission. For decades it was populated by casual students from neighboring cities and towns as well as a minuscule population of students interested in getting an associate of arts degree. While the casual population remains (see "The Extension School's 88% dilemma") there is now a significant contingent of undergraduate and graduate students attempting to complete the requirements for the ALB and ALM (graduate) degrees. Forget the outdated student profiles promoted in this 1951 Crimson article -- nowadays, the ALB/ALM student body includes many high achievers and people from all over the world interested in taking advantage of the school's stellar academic offerings. Extension School undergraduates sometimes match or outperform their College counterparts, and among my own graduating class for the ALM/liberal arts degree were a Harvard Divinity School graduate, a Harvard Medical School instructor, and students who had already earned JDs from two of the top law schools in the country before coming to the Extension School.

Chris touches on a few other points, including work/life/school balance, and his experiences in the Harvard clubs of Boston and New York. You can read the entire comment here (warning: Long, and no paragraph breaks!)

See also:

Thoughts on the ALB program: "The best undergraduate education possible"

Chinese character stroke order

2008-06-18T19:13:00.001-05:00

Learning Chinese characters is perhaps the most difficult aspect of studying Mandarin. It's not just a matter of memorizing what a character looks like, the constituent parts (known as radicals), or the etymology. There is also a fairly precise "stroke order" that governs writing. It can be very frustrating for Western students.

I was reminded of this as my young daughter attempts to learn some traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and some overseas Chinese communities (China uses simplified characters, see my essay here for a quick history). Her inclination is to write the characters any way she pleases -- much like I did when I started studying Mandarin many years ago -- but my wife and I had to correct her. The general stroke order is top to bottom, left to right, but there are some exceptions. We weren't helped by a cheap Taiwanese children's character booklet which had the incorrect stroke order for several basic characters -- for instance, the instructions for xiao (小, small) had her starting with the left dian instead of the central stroke. I am hardly an expert on characters, but it still seemed strange to me. When my wife saw it, she was puzzled, too. "That's not the way we learned it," she frowned.

She was right. I found a great online resource, the YellowBridge Online Character Dictionary, which has a very useful lookup function and animated character tool which shows the proper stroke order. It backed up my wife in almost every case. Still, as she tried it out, she was reminded that there are some alternate writing methods for certain characters, such as guo (國, country), below, which places the top right dian second to last in the stroke order, instead of near the beginning, which is how many people in Taiwan write it in order to save time.

Harvard Extension School Commencement

2008-06-05T21:08:00.010-05:00

(Note: Videos and pictures of the June 5 ceremonies are available below) Commencement 2008 is finally over. It wasn't just today's exhausting slate of ceremonies -- it was a whole week of activities and get-togethers that brought students back to campus over several days this week.

For the Liberal Arts ALM recipients, there was a pleasant Faculty Club reception on Monday in which prizes were announced. On Tuesday, there was also an alumni reception and dinner at Quincy House (see photo, below, from the Quincy House courtyard), the first I've ever attended, in which I got to meet some older ALM and ALB graduates, as well as some members of the class of 2008. Last night, some of us got together at Daedalus after making plans on ExtensionStudent.com. At all of these events, it was a good chance to reflect, trade war stories, and talk about the future. The stories I heard were fascinating -- some people had to go through incredible struggles to complete their degrees, and others managed to complete their degrees despite years-long interruptions, travel and family obligations, and high-powered careers. Examples that spring to mind include the ALM/Women's Studies student who stopped her coursework to get a degree from the Harvard Divinity School, the Harvard Medical School doctor who managed to get her ALM in Literature and Creative Writing and write a prize-winning thesis, and an ALB student and honor's society member (I believe Phi Beta chapter of the Alpha Sigma Lambda society) who completed her final four courses online in one semester while working a full-time job in Korea and Japan.

But Commencement was the main event. I've never participated in anything like it, and probably never will again. There are so many memories, and it involves many traditions, ranging from the archaic to the raucous. And it was all quite splendid. Highlights included a bagpipe-led parade from 51 Brattle Street to the rear of Sever Hall for the morning exercises; the Middlesex County Sheriff bellowing for the tens of thousands of people in Tercentenary Theater to come to order; the spontaneous chants of "Vincimus!" (we conquer!) during the Latin Oration; the sobering yet encouraging Graduate English Address by Anthony Christopher Woods, an Iraq war veteran who just completed his studies at the Kennedy School; the playful waving of inflated globes, pills, gavels, bills, and lanterns as the various school populations received their pronouncements from President Faust; and the final, joyous diploma ceremony at the Loeb Theater, with family and friends watching.

And let's not forget the crowds, the drizzle, the confusion. And the waiting. Lots of waiting -- for parades to start, for the black- and crimson-clad graduates to get into Tercentenary and Loeb theaters, and finally, the wait for the speeches to end so we could receive our diplomas.

Here are some photos from the day ...

Our marker in the Sever Quad, around 8 am. I'd say around 300-350 of us gathered here after marching from 51 Brattle Street behind a piper. This figure includes ALB and ALM students, but not the certificate recipients, who don't participate in the Tercentenary Theater exercises.

ALB and ALM graduates, seated in the center of the throng between Widener and Memorial Church, where the addresses were made. The ALB (undergraduates) wear all black, while the ALM (masters) have red academic hoods draped over their shoulders (the same regalia as our counterparts from the College and the other schools). About eight of us in various ALM programs received the Class Marshal Award for Academic Distinction, which meant we also got to add a red tassel to our hats and carry a small baton.

Looking toward the steps of Memorial Church, where Faust, the deans, and the honorary degree recipients were seated. It drizzled lightly at times, and the trees above us also dropped twigs and little buds in the wind, but it did not rain. Divinity was in front of us, and the College houses off to the left.

人山人海

Widener steps, after the morning exercises.

Around 1:30 pm, ALM Liberal Arts grads gather in the back alley of Christ Church, for the short march to Loeb/ART on Brattle Street. In back of us were the ALM/IT graduates. The ceremony for the ALM Management (103 graduates, and the program is only two years old!), ALM/Museum Studies and one or two other concentrations took place in Loeb while we were waiting here -- even if there were a large enough hall to hold all of us and our families, the ceremony for such an event would last three or four hours, including the speeches and prize announcements.

I also wanted to include a video of part of the final ceremony, in which prizes were announced and our diplomas given to us. Dean Shinagel gave a short speech in which he described some of our accomplishments and some stats about the ALM program. He also named the winner of the "tortoise award," an amusing title for something that truly is awe-inspiring:

(There are about a half-dozen additional videos from Commencement 2008 posted on my YouTube account)

One final thing I'd like to mention about Commencement 2008: The morning exercises is the only event in which all of the diploma-earning students from the University -- College, Extension, Divinity, Education, Government, Public Health, etc. -- are brought together in a shared Harvard experience, one of the oldest and most important ceremonies at Harvard. As we watched the other 2008 cohorts parading into Tercentenary Theater, wearing similar regalia and sporting similar smiles, I was very conscious of the fact that we really were actually quite similar. Our respective schools may teach different things and have different requirements, but for years we all shared a dedication to study and a drive to succeed at one of the most special learning environments on the planet. This was the day when we finally all came together, after which we all will go our separate ways, forever.

A return to books, and thoughts on translations

2008-06-03T23:33:00.005-05:00

I've been reading a lot lately, following the completion of my last class and a change of jobs. After being hired as managing editor of The Industry Standard at the beginning of the year, I decided I needed to brush up on the history of Silicon Valley and the first Web bubble, so I tackled The New New Thing, The Nudist On The Late Shift, and a history of The Industry Standard itself, Starving To Death on $200 Million. I also read The Search, by Industry Standard and Wired founder John Battelle, and the first half of a dry tome on UIs and GUIs entitled The Human Interface.

I read fiction, as well. Since I was a teenager I have been a fan of fantasy and science fiction, and re-read The Hobbit as well as a newer book by an old favorite -- The Knight, by Gene Wolfe. Historical fiction is another genre that I love to explore, and one that I sorely missed when I was deep into my thesis and had no time to read for pleasure. The Piano Tuner has been sitting on my shelf for at least two years, and I was pleased to finally pull it down and finish it in a few days. Last month when we were on vacation, I finished Thomas Harris' Imperium, which is a depiction of several episodes in the life of Cicero. It was interesting, yet disappointing. I had greatly enjoyed Harris' earlier book about ancient Rome, Pompeii, and loved watching the first season of Rome on DVD with my wife, but Imperium came across as too disjointed, and too focused on Cicero's Machiavellian conspiracies in the Late Republic. This was perhaps a result of Harris' desire to remain true to the historical record as it relates to Cicero's life. Unfortunately, many of the extant primary sources consist of Cicero's political and legal treatises -- hardly ideal fodder for a gripping piece of historical fiction.

There are two other books that I have also been reading at a far slower pace. Both relate to Chinese history. They are Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, edited by Cyril Birch, and Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man, by Jonathan Spence.

These books aren't meant to be rushed, especially the anthology. The appeal of the two books ties into my studies here -- much of my coursework centered on ancient and modern Chinese history. Both of them contain beautiful English translations of ancient texts written in classical Chinese, and I have to appreciate the skill involved in bringing them to life. Classical Chinese carries a special set of challenges in terms of translation, that goes beyond simply knowing Chinese characters or reading modern prose. The following is an excerpt from one of my last school papers, written for Matthew Battles' history of publishing course, entitled "Written Chinese: An Elitist Script, or a Language of the Masses?" In it, I explain the nature of classical Chinese, and some of the difficulties related to understanding it:

The Zhou dynasty (1122 – 256 B.C.E.) saw the rise of several important Chinese religious and philosophical movements, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. These sophisticated concepts were recorded in a series of important texts using a spare writing style called wenyan wen (lit. “literary language,” or “patterned words”). In English, it is known as “classical Chinese,” in reference to the five Confucian classics. Owing to a lack of audio recordings or historical descriptions of common speech, it is uncertain how closely the vernacular and written matched during the Zhou dynasty, but by the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E. – 220 A.D.) spoken Chinese (baihua wen, or “unadorned speech”) had evolved to a considerably different state from written Chinese.

For this reason, classical Chinese was (and still is) difficult to read. While spoken Chinese contains numerous words made up of two or more syllables, most classical Chinese consisted of monosyllables, or single characters. Sparse passages tended to suggest meaning, as opposed to clearly (or precisely) describing it.

My source for this information was Richard J. Smith's China’s Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983). On page 105 was a very interesting comparison of a famous passage from the philosopher Mencius, written in both vernacular and classical Chinese. The vernacular version was 38 characters, compared to just 24 in the original classical text. My wife -- a native Chinese speaker who grew up with traditional characters and has been exposed to classical Chinese through her own education in Taiwan -- understood all of the characters in the original, but was unable to translate the passage itself when I showed it to her. When I showed her the passage written out in vernacular Chinese, "Ah!" -- she got it right away.

So, when I read the beautiful translations of essayist Zhang Dai's (张岱) autobiographical accounts in Spence's book, and especially the poetic renderings by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound in the anthology, I not only had to appreciate their skills as translators, but also their talents as writers.

They may have even taken poetic license a little too far in some cases. Consider this poem by the Tang's Han Yu (韓愈), translated by A.C. Graham, and appearing on page 262 of the anthology:

The Withered Tree

Leaf and twig are gone from the old tree,
Winds and frosts can harm it no more.
Its hollow belly has room for a man,
Circling ants quest under its peeling bark.
Its single lodger, the toadstool which lives for a morning;
The birds no longer visit in the evening.
But its wood can still spark tinder.
It does not care yet to be only the void at its heart.

(There is a footnote at the end of the last line says "The phrase equates the hollow hear of the tree and the Void Mind of Buddhism, emptied of desire and illusion")

This is a stunning poem in English, but I have to wonder about the challenges of making an appealing translation while remaining true to the original Chinese literary devices and references. In my years of working as a journalist in Taiwan (often with translators, editors, and other native Mandarin and Taiwanese speakers) I found that it was very difficult to take a Chinese phrase that includes complex emotions, concepts, or artistic expressions, and turn it into natural-sounding English that conveyed an accurate sense of the original. Incorporating literary flair involved an extra dimension of complexity.

The footnotes and other explanations by Spence, Birch, and the others are very helpful in terms of putting these works in context. It would have been helpful to include some of the original Chinese, but I understand the technical and economic reasons for not doing so. While I can't read classical Chinese, I do know a few hundred characters, and it's fun to look up others in the dictionary or ask my wife about them.

(Below: Classical Chinese in cursive script by Wang Duo (王铎), who grew up in the late Ming era and painted this sample in the early Qing. From the University of Maine website, which was sourced from the Shanghai Museum)

401 posts!

2008-06-03T23:30:00.000-05:00

I just discovered that I've written 401 posts on this blog since May of 2005, including this one. In my final post, which I'll put together sometime in the next few weeks, I'll do a rundown of some of the highlights.

Caps, gowns, and batons

2008-06-02T21:31:00.002-05:00

I went to the Coop this evening to pick up my cap and gown for Commencement. The gown rental is $75, but we get to keep the cap and tassle. I am getting up very early on Thursday morning -- we have to be on site at seven in the morning, meaning I will probably leave my home at around 6:30 in the morning. I'm taking a cab -- parking in and around Harvard Square will be very difficult as tens of thousands of grads and guests descend upon Harvard Yard.

After getting my regalia, I attended a reception at the Harvard Faculty Club for ALM Liberal Arts concentrators. Maybe 40 or 50 of us were there, and it was nice to see some old friends and talk with other 2008 grads whom I had never met. More than a few people had traveled from out of town to be here for Commencement on Thursday, and it was interesting to hear their stories.

ALM program heads also revealed the names of the ALM prize winners. There are a few prizes that ALM Liberal Arts concentrators are eligible for, on the basis of high GPAs or outstanding theses, including The Thomas Small Prize and the Crite Prize (see descriptions and the list of 2006 winners here). It was fascinating listening to the titles and descriptions of some of the thesis work, especially among the ALM biology and biotech concentrators. Their thesis directors -- most of whom are Harvard Medical School Professors -- had very high praise for their work. A few will apparently see their work published in a journal or other format, which says a lot about the quality of the biology and biotechnology programs.

There was also one ALM/humanities concentrator who wrote a thesis on Shakespeare's plays that questioned the conclusions of a book written by a top Shakespeare scholar and Harvard faculty member. Her thesis director? The very same faculty member! He was hard, but the result was a top-notch thesis that won the Dean's Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in the Humanities.

I didn't win a prize, but my 3.96 GPA resulted in another honor: I was recognized as one of two Class Marshals for the ALM/Liberal Arts class of 2008. We have some special responsibilities, and will even be wielding batons during the morning and afternoon ceremonies. So you there -- back in line!

Tomorrow is another reception, my first for the Harvard Extension Alumni Association (HEAA). I know one of the HEAA officers and recent grads, but it will be great to meet others who have graduated from the ALB and ALM programs.

The Kennedy School remarkets itself

2008-05-29T22:32:00.003-05:00

I just noticed this today: The Kennedy School of Government -- which used to be referred to as "The Kennedy School" or "KSG" by University staff, when I worked there -- is now the HARVARD Kennedy School. Check it out -- the old Web URL, http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/, now redirects to http://www.hks.harvard.edu/, and the once blue-themed website has been replaced by a sparse white and crimson design with a prominent new logo for the HARVARD Kennedy School.

The Crimson article on the name change cites Dean Elwood as saying "lack of a consistent shorthand" is behind the change, but soon the real reasons emerge: The old name wasn't "Harvard" enough. From the article:

“One of our key findings was that we were not leveraging our affiliation with Harvard as effectively as we could be,” [communications officer Melodie L. Jackson] said, adding that the school shares the Kennedy name with more than 900,000 other institutions around the world.

Jackson said the rebranding is a response to poor name recognition of the school beyond Harvard.

“There’s a lot of confusion out there as to who we even are,” she said.

Wait a minute. There are 900,000 other Kennedy Schools of Government around the world? Or people are confusing the Kennedy Middle School in Cupertino with the Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge?

Whatever the case, there is no confusion anymore, with the new name and new logo with the uppercase HARVARD in its name.

Or is there? I noted this quote from one of the HARVARD Kennedy School students, about a very important word that's now missing from the new name:

Stephen C. Chan, a second-year joint degree student at the Kennedy School and the Business School said, “I think it’s strange that the school is focusing on something superficial.”

Chan also expressed surprise at the removal of the term “government” from the school’s new name as it falls in line with Harvard’s other professional schools.

D'oh!

Now that's dedication: Dealing with the HES residency requirements

2008-05-29T22:08:00.000-05:00

These days, a lot of people are taking advantage of the Extension School's distance education offerings. Courses are mostly offered as a combination of streaming video, class websites, and online discussions via email and other tools (there are a few exceptions -- see my earlier discussions of virtual world-based instruction at the Extension School).

But it's currently impossible to get an ALB or ALM degree just by taking online courses. For instance, the undergraduate ALB degree has a 16-credit residency requirement. Students who live far away -- and many of them do -- have a few options to attend classes in person, short of moving to the Boston area for two semesters. One is by taking four classes through two terms of the Harvard Summer School, which has shorter sessions and on-campus housing. Another, as Richard over at ClueHQ describes, is commuting ... by plane!

It’s not easy. From my front door to Harvard Square, it’s about 4 hours if everything goes right. When it doesn’t, it’s about 6-8 hours. That leaves me with about 12-24 hours in Boston before I was on another flight back. My days were about 36 hours straight, after which I would crash into bed.

Richard tried a bunch of strategies to handle the evening classes, including sleeping at the airport (not easy), hanging out at an all-night cafe, and eventually, springing for a hotel. It was expensive (he says commuting costs were about $4000 per semester) but worth it, as he describes in this paragraph:

It’s amazing what we can do when we really want something. It isn’t often that you hear of self-sacrifice when it comes to attending school, but it isn’t entirely uncommon either. Many, many people work long day jobs and then spend all evening on-campus in class to finish a degree. Students at HES are no exception.

But it is instructive to see just how far a person will go to attend this prorgram and that speak volumes about its quality and the experience it offers. If you live within a plane flight of Boston and you think you might be willing to give it a try, I encourage you to contact me and ask what I think of your plans.

Richard also relates the story of another ALB student who is commuting from Detroit every week to attend classes in Cambridge for his residency requirement, on top of having a full-time job and a family with young children.

2008 ALM Thesis Forum

2008-05-27T12:49:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the late notice about this, but I only just found out that the second annual thesis forum is taking place this week, from May 27 to the 29th. It's at Hilles, and the thesis presentations are grouped by concentration: Humanities on Tuesday night, biology and social sciences on Wednesday night, and professional concentrations on Thursday. Names, titles of presentations, and other details are here.

I participated in the first thesis forum last year, and really enjoyed it -- it was an opportunity to discuss my research with a wider audience, and also hear about what other ALM candidates and graduates had been working on. I won't be able to attend this year -- I'm traveling this week -- but I encourage other ALM students to check it out.

Publisher buys 02138, but quality may not improve

2008-05-12T07:42:00.004-05:00

The independent Harvard alumni fashion magazine, 02138, has been sold to a small magazine publisher, reports the New York Times:

Manhattan Media bought 02138 from Atlantic Media, publisher of The Atlantic and National Journal, and the magazine's young founders, Bom Kim and Daniel Loss, who held a minority stake. The price was not disclosed.

The deal was something of a surprise; Manhattan Media's involvement had been kept quiet, and published reports said in April that Sandow Media, publisher of Worth magazine, was on the verge of buying 02138, which is named for Harvard's ZIP code.

The plan is to expand 02138's web presence -- including social networking -- and create additional alumni titles based on the other Ivy League alumni populations.

I have to say that the Web ideas are way overdue; the original 02138 blogs effort was poorly handled and the 02138 RSS feed is seldom updated. However, creating a new Harvard social network will be a tough sell, considering Harvard alums already have two established competitors -- post.harvard and Facebook.

I also don't hold out much hope for an improvement in editorial quality under the new owner. According to the New York Times article, 02138 founder Bom Kim will be staying on as publisher and Manhattan Media hopes executive editor Richard Bradley will stay as well. These are the same folks behind 02138's current editorial character, which I find to be lacking. At the top of this page, I described the publication as a "fashion magazine," and that was only half in jest. While 02138 has gotten one or two scoops and puts out some interesting profiles, its advertiser-friendly "Passions" section ("Harvard-meets-Hollywood lifestyle: where to live, where to go to get away, how to get there in style, and the clothes and jewelry that will guarantee you look the part") limits the publication's journalistic integrity. I also question the dedication to quality and accuracy after reading pieces like "Open Enrollment," which mistakenly described Harvard Extension School programs as a way for people to "purchase the Harvard brand" and called HES degree programs a "perk."

You know your FAS account has been deactivated when ...

2008-04-30T15:10:00.000-05:00

... The hourly flow of redirected spam ceases flowing to your Yahoo inbox!

Seriously, I won't be missing Harvard's FAS email system, or, for that matter, Harvard's computer services for students. The spam, the 1990s-style UIs, the constant prompts to log back in to the Harvard PIN server, the weird password policies ... this was the reality of using Harvard's student-oriented computing systems.

I have better hopes for Post.Harvard, the alumni website. So far, no spam, I appear to remain logged on even after several weeks of inactivity, and I see they just updated the interface.

A Korean recipe for admission to the Ivy League

2008-04-27T08:13:00.002-05:00

Today's New York Times takes a look at the Daewon prep school and the Minjok Leadership Academy in South Korea. Both schools have perfected a system for admissions to Harvard, Yale, and top-tier colleges in the United States, which includes a regimen of non-stop cramming, instruction from foreign teachers in writing and other subjects, and an enormous amount of pressure from parents and administrators to succeed. Naturally, there is little time for personal interests, suggests the article:

Both schools suppress teenage romance as a waste of time.

“What are you doing holding hands?” a Daewon administrator scolded an adolescent couple recently, according to his aides. “You should be studying!”

But the administrators at the other school, Minjok, appear to be a little less heartless -- the school recently deactivated the dormitory surveillance cameras used to prevent students from dozing off in late-night study sessions.

According to the article, Korean society grants great social status to people who graduate from Ivy League colleges in the United States. This certainly helps explain why parents and students are willing to accept the Daewon and Minjok lifestyle, and may also explain the Azia Kim episode at Stanford and a recent string of scandals in South Korea involving high-profile figures who lied about their U.S. academic credentials.

I don't agree with the methods and attitudes at the two Korean schools, but students have to be admired for being able to do so well on the American SATs, coursework, and especially their writing skills, considering English seems to be a second language for most of them, and they are growing up in a Korean-language environment. They're not getting into Harvard based on legacy status or the Z-list ...

Rules for Harvard freshman: 1741 edition

2008-04-24T09:02:00.000-05:00

Spotted on the Boston 1775 blog, operated by writer and historian J.L. Bell: A list of rules that Harvard frosh had to follow in 1741. A sample:

... 18. No Freshman shall call or throw anything across the College yard, nor go into the Fellows’ Cuz-John.

19. No Freshman shall mingo against the College walls.

20. Freshmen are to carry themselves, in all respects, as to be in no wise saucy to their Seniors.

21. Whatsoever Freshman shall break any of these customs, he shall be severely punished.

"Mingo" is a piece of street slang that passed out of usage long ago, and while rule #20 no longer holds at Harvard, it is alive and well in our nation's military academies.

The remaining rules can be seen on Bell's blog, or in the book that I believe Bell says it originally came from, John Patrick Diggins' biography of John Adams.

(Ref: Universal Hub)

Extension Student forum goes offline

2008-04-23T14:19:00.002-05:00

Richard over at ClueHQ alerted me to a problem with ExtensionStudent.com, which I now see is offline. If you visit the URL, you'll see that the domain is "parked" with a bunch of cheesy hair extension ads. This probably means that the registration or hosting expired, which would make sense, because the site was created last April 23 (see my interview with the founder) and registrations typically last for one year, after which time you can renew ... if you receive the notice from the registrar.

The situation is bad, but hopefully the founder, Catamount, can get back the domain and the data. I tried to email him, but his old FAS email address is no longer in operation -- which may explain why he didn't receive the expiration notices.

Update: Extension Student is already back online. That was quick ...

An open letter from a disillusioned Harvard KSG acceptee

2008-04-07T09:17:00.002-05:00

I was just cc'ed on a letter to President Faust from someone who has a big problem with Harvard's graduate student financial aid policies (my own commentary follows the excerpts):

A few weeks ago, I received the wonderful news that I have been accepted to study at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (KSG), but my initial euphoria was soon stamped out as a second KSG email arrived announcing that I would only be offered loans as financial "aid." KSG suggests that I take out more than $130,000 in loans to pay for my two-year Master's program. $130,000? I want to attend KSG to get the best possible preparation to enter the public sector. How am I supposed to work in the public sector strapped with $130,000+ of education debt? Being accepted to KSG has turned out to be a pyrrhic achievement indeed. So, I write this letter to bring attention to my dilemma in the hopes that future KSG acceptees do not have to face the choices currently before me.

At first, I thought KSG must have made a mistake in calculating my aid, considering my limited financial resources (I have spent the last two years as a volunteer in a developing country) and considering Harvard's much publicized push to increase financial aid, even to upper-middle-class undergrads. But no - KSG considers my financial need "met," by offering loans only. The KSG Financial Aid website says, "Financial assistance is a partnership." I have kept my end of the bargain - I live frugally, I do not have much consumer debt, and I applied (in vain) to a number of external funding sources. I do not feel like much of a partner in this relationship, however, as KSG is not offering me a single penny of assistance.

The author then discusses the contradictory messages sent by the KSG administration, which on the one hand stresses public service, while at the same time forcing students to take on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt (if interest is included) to attend Harvard. He or she concludes with this:

I therefore implore you, KSG, and Harvard University to increase financial aid to KSG students - through fundraising, through a capital campaign, through bake-sales, or however - so that future students are indeed able to enter public and non-profit service after their education at KSG instead of having to sell themselves as private sector consultants in order to be able to pay back their loans. Otherwise, KSG is guilty of making this country and this world worse, by pushing those who are most able and motivated to serve in the public and non-profit sectors into the private sector. Crass financial calculations are not sufficient justifications for this.

The author brings up a lot of valid points. It is unrealistic to expect students interested in entering the public sector to take on such huge amounts of debt. Moreover, if Harvard can do so much for College undergraduates in terms of tuition wavers and other financial aid, why can't similar benefits be extended to students at Harvard's other schools?

Update:

The full text of the letter can be found on the Critical Mass blog, along with some comments.

Legacy admissions and the "Z List" at Harvard College

2008-04-05T09:30:00.006-05:00

The New York Times takes a satirical look at legacy admissions at Harvard College:

Here at Harvard’s Office of Admissions, we have some very exciting news for you. While your SAT scores and grade point average fall below the threshold for acceptance to Harvard’s class of 2012, your Harvard parents’ dogged participation in our annual fund-raising appeals — including their generous contributions to Harvard’s recombinant DNA lab and IMAX theater — have gained you admission to a unique new program called LegacyPlus™.

With LegacyPlus™, you, the Harvard double legacy, will enjoy all of the perks of students who actually got into Harvard — except for the education part.

There's more than a grain of truth here. Earlier in the decade, The Crimson's Dan Rosenheck documented Harvard College's "Z List," which the admissions office strenuously denied was a legacy list. Rosenheck did some digging, and found otherwise:

... If you talk to enough of these students whom the admissions office makes a special effort to bring to Cambridge, you’ll find they do have something in common: Their parents went to Harvard.

The Crimson obtained information about the legacy status of 36 of the approximately 80 Z-list students at Harvard in 2001-02. Though McGrath Lewis insists the Z-list is “not a legacy list,” 26—or 72 percent of the 36-student sample—were legacies, compared with 12 to 14 percent of the class as a whole.

Even if none of the remaining 44 or so Z-list students were legacies, 33 percent of the 80 students would be legacies—still well above the proportion of legacies in the class as a whole.

College counselors at Harvard’s feeder schools—high schools that routinely send large numbers of students to the College—are nearly unanimous in characterizing the Z-list as Harvard’s preferred conduit for qualified legacy candidates who don’t make the first cut.

Daniel Golden was even more critical in his special feature in the inaugural issue of 02138:

Harvard actually has different levels of legacy preference, systematically and in some ways elaborately distorting its standards on behalf of a certain group. While children of middle-class alumni enjoy a modest edge, which may be heightened somewhat if the parents volunteer to interview applicants or organize reunions, the offspring of major donors receive in effect double preference - both as legacies and "development cases," whose admission is considered vital to fundraising. They fly first-class through Harvard admissions, often enjoying personal interviews with Fitzsimmons and slots on the exclusive "Z" list, which ushers in, via a one-year deferment, well-connected but often academically borderline applicants.

(Golden also wrote a book on this topic, see Harvard College and the children of America's elite).

This is one area where the Harvard Extension School's undergraduate ALB program holds a definite edge over the College. Family alumni status and wealth have no impact on admissions, and neither do standardized tests. The only thing that will get you into the program are several semesters of dedicated study and good grades. In other words, it's a meritocracy.

The Chinese media responds to Tibet with tough talk

2008-03-31T06:14:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I made a few predictions about the challenges the Chinese government would face over the Tibetan unrest in the runup to the Olympics:

... most Chinese do not sympathize with the Tibetan independence movement. According to the New York Times, Chinese-language news outlets are not reporting the riots in Lhasa. But when the news starts to leak out into unregulated, free-wheeling discussion forums and blogs in China, watch out. I believe many Chinese will demand that authorities crack down even harder in Tibet ...

The Chinese blog chatter started almost immediately. You can see a translated sample here, keeping in mind that this is the relatively tame stuff. And according to today's New York Times, now the Chinese media has weighed in, and not surprisingly, the government is playing up the nationalism angle and trying to look tough to its Chinese readers:

For two weeks, as Chinese security forces have tried to extinguish continuing Tibetan protests, Chinese officials and state news media have tried to demonstrate the party’s resolve to people like Ms. Meng. They have blasted the foreign news media as biased against China, castigated the Dalai Lama as a terrorist “jackal” and called for a “people’s war” to fight separatism in Tibet.

If the tough tactics have startled the outside world, the Communist Party for now seems more concerned with rallying domestic opinion — both by responding to the deep strains of nationalism in Chinese society and by stoking it. Playing to national pride, and national insecurities, the party has used censorship and propaganda to position itself as defender of the motherland, and at the same time to block any examination of Tibetan grievances or its own performance in the crisis.

What I also found interesting in the NYT report was the reference to overseas Chinese getting involved, by joining the anti-Tibet, anti-foreign media online crusade.

Former Berkman fellow and CNN journalist Rebecca MacKinnon has lots of commentary and links on her blog. See Tibet... is discussion possible? and Anti-CNN and the Tibet information war.

The downside of picking a "hot" thesis topic

2008-03-28T07:22:00.001-05:00

Chris over at the Mission Control ALM blog shares some of the challenges of picking a "hot" thesis topic. Chris' thesis will explore issues related to contractors in the Iraq war. While these issues have been in the headlines in recent months, and there's tons of journal articles, books, and primary sources to reference, the challenge is finding an original topic that hasn't been explored:

I see now that I picked a topic that had some research difficulties built into it. If you choose a subject that's current, hot, and much-written about, it's that much harder to sift through what's out there and find a thread that hasn't been worked on or needs more done on it. First, start with an avalanche of materials -- primary source and secondary. Then, skim through it and see what hasn't been covered. Next, come up with an idea that is both insightful and substantive, that can be explored, and for which you can find solid evidence.

I had a different sort of challenge for my thesis -- identifying existing research for an obscure topic, and whittling down the focus to something manageable and testable. Primary sources weren't a problem (I used thousands of articles from the Xinhua News Agency) but there wasn't much recent literature on the foreign policy issues involved -- in fact, the two sources that I tested my data against were a journal article from the late 1980s and a book from the early 1990s. And while the computer content analysis literature is quite extensive, I was unable to find any specific studies that were based on Xinhua's English-language service.

I suppose a safe middle ground between my approach and Chris' approach would be finding a topic that's not too hot, but has enough existing, recent literature behind that points to a clear path for new research.

But that would be too easy, wouldn't it?

Open enrollment at Harvard and Columbia

2008-03-26T22:18:00.001-05:00

Richard over at the ClueHQ blog has written a great post about admissions to Columbia's video-based distance education program. Richard is an ALB student at the Extension School, and is already scouting out masters programs in computer science and IT. He had this to say about open enrollment:

The degree programs at Harvard Extension School and Columbia Video Network both require you to make a formal application for admission. In the case of the undergraduate/graduate programs at Harvard, the main discriminator is the successful completion of the required three classes with required grades. Because of this, it’s more certain that everyone who applies has been exposed to the coursework and can do the work. GRE scores and recommendations from previous professors are not required.

Since the Columbia Video Network is a part of the Fu School of Engineering at Columbia, their process is a bit different. You must make a formal application that has more in common with the traditional graduate programs. Applications must include current GRE scores along with two recommendations from previous professors. A CV or resume and a personal statement is also required. Transcripts from all undergraduate coursework are also required. Admissions are handled on a rolling basis throughout the year.

My take on open enrollment at the Extension School is that it is great for casual learners, but when combined with the Extension School's stringent degree requirements, is more effective than a standardized test and admissions essay in terms of determining who is capable of completing the coursework and research.

Richard has been reading Harvard Extended for years and has taken many of his ALB classes via distance ed. He probably knows more about distance education at the Extension School than anyone else, so his assessments of the Columbia program are worth paying attention to. He describes the CVN program here, and I hope he'll keep us appraised of his graduate school plans in the months to come.

Recognized in the Neal award for "Best Blog"

2008-03-26T08:03:00.001-05:00

One of my blogs has received a pretty cool honor. A post from The Digital Media Machine (my old Computerworld blog) has been recognized in the Neal Award the publication received for "Best Blog." Neal Awards recognize "editorial excellence in business media publications," so I was happy to hear the news. Computerworld has the story:

The blog award recognized three blog posts in particular, one from the Web site's daily IT Blogwatch written by Richi Jennings, and others written by Ian Lamont and David Ramel. Computerworld participated in the categories for sites with more than 500,000 unique visitors per month.

Dave and Richi are friends and great bloggers to boot, so it is pretty cool to share the honor with them. Richi has written about this on his own personal blog, and there's a video of the award ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York.

The post that was recognized in the award was actually prompted by something I read on Slashdot, which in turn prompted a blog post on my I, Lamont blog: MMORPGs training "Generation G" for corner-office suites. For the Computerworld follow-up, The gaming world meets the corporate world: Generation G grows up, I tightened up the thesis, did some research into the demographics, added a YouTube video, and engaged in an interesting dialogue with some of my readers. Later, I wrote another post about Generation G in Taiwan.

I am not blogging for Computerworld anymore -- I have a new job as managing editor of The Industry Standard -- but it's still pretty special.

Doctor who?

2008-03-15T08:26:00.000-05:00

Spotted in the Washington Post:

Under a little-known Nazi-era law, only people who earn PhDs or medical degrees in Germany are allowed to use "Dr." as a courtesy title.

While the Germans have extended the right to other Europeans, American PhD holders living in Germany cannot use "Dr." on their business cards. The police there have actually investigated American scientists and other scholars for "title abuse," and the article cites a few cases.

The wildcard for Tibetan dissent: The Internet

2008-03-14T08:55:00.001-05:00

Tibet's capital, Lhasa, is under a curfew after Tibetans fought Chinese security forces today. The New York Times has the report. I've been reading about monks making protest marches throughout Tibet, but this is the first report of violence that I've seen.

The timing is notable. China is trying very hard to pull off a controversy-free Olympics, and preemptively cracking down on a range of potential problems -- such as foreign performers showing support for Tibetans -- seems to have been one of the PSB strategies. This, and the fact that Tibetans know China will be closely watched in the runup to the Olympics by the outside world, are two key factors contributing to the unrest, in my opinion.

The wildcard is the impact of the Internet on events in China. Internet-driven dissent is a problem for Chinese authorities in urban regions, but most Tibetans don't have Internet access, and most Chinese do not sympathize with the Tibetan independence movement. According to the New York Times, Chinese-language news outlets are not reporting the riots in Lhasa. But when the news starts to leak out into unregulated, free-wheeling discussion forums and blogs in China, watch out. I believe many Chinese will demand that authorities crack down even harder in Tibet, which will put the PSB and the government in a tight spot. China wants to put on a friendly face for the Olympics in Beijing, and a bloodbath in Tibet -- spread by pictures and video uploaded to the Internet -- would result in international condemnation and protests at the Olympics.

Fifteen years ago, China could easily hide news of protests and riots. In the age of widespread Internet connectivity and cheap digital cameras, it's just not possible.

(The picture below is from the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, India, and shows armed troops massing at Drepung, Tibet, last year after the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal. Drepung is the location of one of the monasteries where monks have been protesting.)

The Extension School's 88% dilemma

2008-03-09T21:34:00.001-05:00

Another ALM history grad (and his wife) have described last year's Harvard and Extension School Commencement ceremonies on their blog. It's a great post. The author explains everything in detail, and provides pictures. Maybe I'll do something similar when I receive my diploma on June 5.

There's something else I would like to highlight from Tim's post:

I was one of only 14 History majors graduating this year. The Dean of the Extension School stated that, in the 97-year history of the program, less than 1% of people who enroll in the Extension School finish their degree requirements and graduate. (and No, there should not be an extra number after the "1" in 1%).

Wait a second, you say. Didn't the Harvard Extended entry on ABTs a few weeks ago state that the completion rate was 52%? What gives?

Well, the 52% figure that I shared with readers refers to the all-time percentage of matriculated students in the liberal ALM programs who had finished their degree requirements and graduated as of 2006. The number that Tim heard from the dean refers to the percentage of *all* students who enroll in Extension School classes who actually end up receiving their degrees.

I am not sure if the 1% figure just applies to the ALM program, or whether the ALB and certificate programs are also included. Regardless, it points to an important fact about the Extension School student body: The overwhelming majority take classes on a casual basis. One DCE administrator recently told me in an email that "88 percent enroll in a course or two for personal enrichment, career advancement, or to test the waters for future graduate work." I regularly find evidence of this in my Google blog search RSS feed -- see recent entries from Free Range Chick and Unpunished Rapture.

This has been the nature of the student body since President Lowell established the program near 100 years ago, and Harvard has benefitted greatly because of it. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them from nearby communities, have been able to take classes and sample the Harvard experience while bringing in revenue and furthering the University's community outreach goals.

However, this has also led to an unfortunate situation for those students who are not taking classes casually. Amongst some members of the Harvard community and the public at large, the Extension School's reputation is associated with the temporary experiences of the majority, as opposed to the serious, long-term academic commitments of the minority. For instance, a press release that was apparently composed by two Harvard officers named Eric Sinoway and John Longbrake makes a point of distinguishing the Extension School from Harvard's "principal academic units," and describes the student body as casual class-takers. This article in the Harvard alumni magazine 02138 portrays the Extension School as an avenue for people or companies that want to "purchase the Harvard brand," and calls Extension School degree programs a "perk." Alexandra Petri, a columnist for The Crimson, thinks even less of Extension School students, judging by a quip in her recent discussion of the Core curriculum.

Never mind the dedication of the ALM and ALB candidates who can matriculate only after proving themselves in EXPO or the ALM proseminar, the contributions of the Extension School students who work closely with Harvard faculty as teaching and research assistants, or the accomplishments of the 1% who complete their coursework and research requirements and graduate. For those who have never bothered to find out about this subset of the Extension School student body or the degree programs they belong to, the HES does not appear to be much different than the typical continuing education program at a local community college, providing casual classes for people who want to satisfy personal interests or give their careers and educational goals a boost. In their eyes, the 88% defines who we are.

Don't get me wrong: Casual, continuing education is a great thing. It helps individuals and benefits society. I've personally benefited from taking classes for personal enrichment and/or career advancement, such as the Mandarin courses I took at the Taipei Language Institute in the 1990s and my very first class at the Extension School -- an introductory short story writing class that I took through the Summer School in 2002, almost on a whim. It was for undergraduate credit and had no impact on my graduate coursework or research, but it was a lot of fun -- it gave me a chance to indulge my interest in fiction and creative writing, and also produced a short story that was later published in the Harvard Summer Review.

My ALM journey was a completely different experience. It was academically rigorous and intellectually demanding, and took years to complete. The ALM thesis requirement goes far beyond the writing and research assignments found in many "traditional" masters programs, and can in no way be considered fun. It therefore disappoints me that those of us who have been admitted to the Extension School's degree programs or have earned our diplomas are not taken seriously in some quarters. On a person-to-person level, it's very easy to correct misperceptions. But when 02138, The Crimson, and Harvard's own officers promote the casual Extension School identity and even negative stereotypes, it's very difficult to highlight another perspective of the Extension School experience. This in turn makes it harder for serious Extension School students -- and the programs we belong to -- to get the recognition we deserve.

You know you've graduated when ...

2008-03-07T07:29:00.001-05:00

... Your .edu email address gets cut off! I got this in my inbox yesterday:

Dear FAS Computer Account Holder:

Your computer account is scheduled to expire on Sunday, April 6, 2008 because we are unable to find a current FAS affiliation in your name. If our records are mistaken and you are still an FAS affiliate, your account can be extended by following the instructions below. ...

They probably send the same message to every ABT whose time runs out, but graduates can get a Post.Harvard email forwarding account, which I have already registered for. Going forward, I can be emailed at ianlamont -at- post dot harvard dot edu, not ilamont@fas.harvard.edu.

A.B.T.

2008-02-26T08:17:00.003-05:00

A few years back, I had a discussion with one of the ALM administrators about the graduation rate for the ALM program. He revealed that the all-time graduation rate was just 52% for the liberal arts concentrators (i.e., excluding the IT and professional ALMs such as journalism, biotechnology, management, and museum studies, which are not liberal arts degrees).

There are a couple of issues raised by this figure. First, while the graduation rate may seem unusually low, it's in line with the national average for graduate programs, says the Extension School. Second, it does not include the many people who take lots of graduate-level classes at the Extension School with the intention of officially entering the ALM program, but never matriculate, either because the proseminar is too difficult or they move away/stop classes before they have a chance to matriculate.

Of those students who do matriculate, but still don't graduate, there's an additional factor that comes into play: ABT status. They've completed all of the required coursework, including the proseminar, field courses, writing-intensive classes, and electives, and only have one hurdle to go: The thesis. Until they get that out of the way, they are "A.B.T.", or "all but thesis" (not to be confused with A.B.D., which refers to doctoral candidates who haven't completed their dissertations).

The thesis is what makes the master's program at the Extension School so special. It entails serious research that can take years to complete, and lets students work closely with some of the top academic experts in the world in their respective fields of study -- Harvard professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, the Kennedy School of Government, the Medical School, etc. The thesis goes beyond what many "traditional," full-time masters' programs require, including those at Harvard's other graduate schools (for instance, this Master of Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education only requires eight classes; there is no thesis). Approved ALM theses have been turned into journal articles, have been used as stepping stones for advanced degrees (at Harvard and elsewhere) and careers in academia.

As I've discussed many times on this blog, the ALM thesis is a huge challenge -- not just an intellectual challenge, but also a management challenge that requires tremendous organizational skills and lots of time.

It's also mostly self-directed. Students have to conduct the initial research inquiries, choose topics, and compose thesis proposals on their own, and follow the guidance of the research advisor and thesis director in terms of conducting additional research and developing the thesis itself. If a student procrastinates, fails to complete a certain step, or doesn't hear back from his or her TD in a timely manner, the thesis will die -- no one is going to do the work for the student, or constantly nag the professor on his or her behalf.

It therefore doesn't surprise me that so many ALM candidates fail to receive their degrees. Moving away or stopping classes are possible reasons, but I think the thesis requirement is a tough hurdle for many people. If a student is ABT for too long, his or her ALM candidacy will come to an end. Not only is there a five-year requirement for completing the degree, but also there is a nine-month window to write the thesis itself.

I've known two people who matriculated into the ALM program but never finished. Both were ABTs. The first was a Literature and Creative Writing concentrator who finished all of her coursework, and couldn't decide on a thesis topic. After a few years, she didn't really feel interested anymore. Later, she took another Harvard Extension School class relating to legal issues, and decided that this topic area was more intellectually rewarding. However, she moved away before she could take any more law or government classes, and the five-year limit eventually expired. The other ABT has also fought procrastination, but has an incredibly demanding job that places very real limits on the amount of time and effort that can be devoted to thesis research.

I can relate to both situations. If I had lost my passion for Chinese history, media, and computer-aided research, getting started on my thesis would have been difficult, and completing it would have been nearly impossible. And if I had my current job -- a new position that requires 10-hour workdays and frequent travel -- when I started my thesis research back in 2005, it's highly unlikely I could have completed it, without burning myself out or putting serious strains on my family.

Another Extension School blog ...

2008-02-23T12:58:00.000-05:00

"The Halls of Harvard" is a new blog jointly written by a student taking undergraduate classes through HES, and her husband, who I believe is taking graduate-level classes at the Extension School.

There are a few other ALB blogs and bloggers out there, including ClueHQ and the author of Cyber Oppression, who recently finished his ALB degree requirements.

In terms of ALM blogs which I am aware of, there's my blog and Mission Control, which is written by an ALM government concentrator. The author just received approval for a thesis topic -- a very important step and a sure sign that the thesis research is on the right track.

A March graduate and Harvard Commencement

2008-02-23T10:33:00.000-05:00

Even though I will be taking part in Harvard Commencement on June 5, I will technically be graduating next week after finishing the last of my degree requirements in January. The Extension School has rolling graduation for people who finish mid-year or in the summer, so it's possible to graduate in November or March. While there are no ceremonies at these times, graduates can participate in the Commencement exercises with all of the June graduates.

One of the disappointing things about graduation is loss of access to special student services. I am not so much concerned about losing my spam-filled FAS email account, but access to Factiva, LexisNexis, and the special student computer discounts will be missed.

Delays ...

2008-02-14T21:55:00.000-05:00

I haven't updated any of my blogs for about three weeks now, and there's a reason for that -- I've been incredibly busy. I'll be back with an update about what's going on toward the end of this month.

Thoughts on the ALB program: "The best undergraduate education possible"

2008-01-21T15:32:00.000-05:00

My Google Blog search feed delivered an interesting item today: An appraisal of the Harvard Extension School's undergraduate ALB program, from a student who just finished his last class. Here's what the author of the Cyber Oppression blog had to say about his academic journey:

Overall I feel that I received the best undergraduate education possible. It was a great honor to study and then be a TA under Tom Hayes and run the Physics 123 lab — I think it’s entirely possible that Tom is the best introductory circuit design teacher in the world, and I know I am in great company. It was also a great honor to study cyberlaw at the Berkman center of Harvard law — as an undergraduate, I was able to take more IP, patent, copyright and digital law classes than are available at most law schools, including Larry Lessig’s former class “The Technology and Politics of Control”. I also learned Spanish with Professora Zetterstrand, studied the history of Boston under Robert Allison, and of course studied number theory, probability, topology, calculus, linear algebra, group theory, graph theory, etc. under professors Martinez, Boller, Winters, Bamberg, Towne. Astronomy at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Physics in the science center… comparative religious ethics and modern/contemporary American fiction in Harvard Hall. Museum studies with Mary Malloy (and the future directors of a couple dozen museums in the museum studies program), game theory with Neugeboren (who himself studied under Schelling, whose son Robert is also a close personal friend), psychology under Fersch, and the history of electronic music with Marshall all were brilliant courses also. So many of these professors were the best at what they do — leaders in their fields, the ones who wrote the books. And even though this was a "night school" program, Harvard refused to lower the bar and never failed to challenge me; many of the professors talked about how the curriculum in the college vs. night school was exactly the same, and in a number of cases the student projects and work in the night school exceeded that produced by the day students.

He's not the only person to note that some Extension School students do better than their Harvard College counterparts; this was one of the findings of a 2006 Crimson article (see Crimson: Some virtual Extension School students outperform Harvard College classmates).

The author of Cyber Oppression also discusses how physically and mentally taxing his ALB studies have been over the last six years. I can really sympathize -- as I have noted repeatedly on my own blog, the research and writing demands associated with the ALM program are punishing, and go far beyond simply attending class. For those of us who have full-time jobs and families, study generally takes place late at night and on the weekends, usually at the expense of personal and family life. The ALM or ALB programs at the Extension School are not casual endeavors -- they require major intellectual, academic, and personal commitments, and take years to complete.

No More Questions about the Harvard Extension School?

2008-01-21T09:22:00.000-05:00

Shortly after launching Harvard Extended in June 2005, I started getting emails from people interested in the Harvard Extension School. The messages generally came from out-of-state residents who were researching the quality of the school, and/or had specific questions about the ALB and ALM programs. Most had seen the Extension School's official website, but they wanted to hear from a real student. Through Google, they found me.

Although I couldn't answer all of the questions I received, I usually tried to the best of my ability to relate my experiences at the Extension School or point them to other resources. On several occasions, I turned some of the questions and answers into blog posts, for the benefit of others who had similar questions (see Questions from a prospective Harvard Extension School student and Acceptance rate for Harvard Extension School graduate programs?) but I stopped after the trickle of emails turned into a steady flow. I received dozens of messages -- in August of last year, I remarked that I was getting about two emails per month. In the same post, I noted that some of these contacts were actually relocating to the Boston area to attend the Harvard Extension School:

It's interesting to see how readers have turned to the Harvard Extended blog for information and even inspiration. I started the blog for research-related reasons, and to chronicle my experience in the Extension School's ALM program, but for a few readers it has helped them make major life decisions.

It's a good feeling knowing that I've helped people in this way, but it's also a little unsettling. Changing one's career or academic path is very common in our society, but moving across state lines -- or across the country -- to attend the Harvard Extension School takes things to a different level. We local students can drop out of a program, or take a break from studies without any major impact on our jobs or family lives, but the folks who move to Massachusetts have already quit their jobs and said goodbye to family and friends. They have made a huge commitment, and it's much harder for them to stop or take a break. I really do admire them -- I think the ALM program is fabulous and worth all of the time, effort, and tuition I have put into it since 2003, but I am not sure I would be willing or able to quit my job or relocate my family to take part.

Shortly after writing this post, the flow of emails stopped. Around November, I realized that it had been some time since someone had emailed me about the Harvard Extension School.

What happened? While some people coming to the Harvard Extended blog find what they need and no longer need to ask additional questions, I believe that the dropoff was mainly caused by the rise of other online information resources about the Extension School, and their prominence in Google searches. These resources include the Wikipedia entry for the Extension School and the ExtensionStudent.com online forum, which includes a large collection of discussions which unaffiliated members of the public can read. There are also new HES blogs popping up, such as ClueHQ (ALB student) and Mission Control (ALM/Government), which provide additional information and opinion about the school.

It's a positive trend, especially considering that my own studies have wrapped up and the information on Harvard Extended will start to get dated. After I participate in Commencement this June, I am thinking about retiring this blog. It's been fun writing about the Extension School and my research interests, but with the end of my coursework, the successful completion of my thesis, and my graduation from the ALM program, the main reasons for maintaining Harvard Extended are removed. It will be time for me to move on.

Campus presence, student identity, and community

2008-01-14T18:37:00.000-05:00

The Crimson's June Q. Wu has written an article about a joint degree program at Harvard College, which allows undergraduates to simultaneously study for a Master of Music at the New England Conservatory of Music. According to the arrangement worked out between the two schools, the Harvard AB is awarded after four years, and the NECM master's degree after the fifth year.

However, one of the students quoted in the article noted a problem that many Harvard Extension School students will recognize -- a struggle to build a sense of belonging amidst infrequent campus visits:

[Harvard administrator Mary C. Gerbi] says administrators at Harvard and the conservatory feel the two schools should provide a stronger sense of belonging at the conservatory. This is vital during the first three years of the program, when students make the trek across the river only once or twice a week for private lessons.

"My first year was not that great. I didn't really feel I was a part of the NEC community," says jazz pianist Malcolm G. Campbell '10, a chemistry and physics concentrator. "This year, I made my own initiative to go there more, and it's been great."

At the Extension School, there are many opportunities to participate in on-campus activities, but often I sometimes feel like an outsider at these events, as the other people are usually from different Harvard schools and departments. Even within Extension School programs and activities, there is no sense of class identity. People finish their degrees at their own speed, and some of the friends I've made over the years in class I've lost touch with later on as we've gone on to different classes meeting at different times and semesters. The author of the ClueHQ blog -- an ALB candidate at the Extension School -- once suggested creating class cohorts based on admit year, which is a great idea. We've all been boosted by the Extension Student online community, but the struggle to build and maintain a sense of community is something most HES students will continue to struggle with, particularly the remote students and people in distance-ed programs.

Presenting at the Boston Digital Media Summit

2008-01-13T11:39:00.000-05:00

I am blogging from Boston College at the second day of the Boston Digital Media Summit, and have seen some great demos as well as interesting discussions about virtual worlds, games, and potential educational applications in 3D, computer-generated environments (the theme of this year's summit is Immersive Education).

One of the most amazing things to observe is how far the graphics have come in just a few years. Photorealism is coming. Less than two years ago, I presented at the "SIGGRAPH summit," which was the first installment of the Boston Digital Media Summit, held at Boston City Hall. The most impressive graphics on display were the demos by Jeff Kleiser, a professional visual effects artist who has worked on Tron, the X-Men movies, theme park installations, and television commercials. The games-based demos, including mine (I showed a machinima called The French Democracy), were far more limited -- textures were rough, character movements could be jerky, lighting was simplistic.

Not anymore. One of the BC students showed a demo of Crysis, an FPS that depicts a series of commando attacks in the year 2020. The graphics were stunning, albeit processor-intensive (it was set up on a custom PC running some major graphics hardware). Plants have always been tough to model in 3D, which I suppose is one of the reasons why even professional 3D CGI animation seems to prefer to environments that don't have plants -- witness Cars, Ice Age, and Pororo: The Little Penguin. Not with Crysis. A large part of it is set in a jungle, and the movements of the plants was very realistic -- the leaves were individually rendered, the physics of characters or other objects brushing against them was convincing, and even the little breezes that moved the leaves on individual branches of a bush looked like the real thing. It would be a stretch to call it photorealistic -- the mouths of the players still need work -- but photorealism is definitely on the horizon. I would embed a trailer in this blog, but the ones that are available are violent. You can see some Crysis trailers here; note that all are rated M.

I am joining one panel in the mid afternoon, and giving a presentation at the end of the day. The title of the presentation is "Grokking Generation G: Digital Media and the Video Game Generation," and gets into the demographic and technology trends that will impact the development and consumption of 3D media in the coming years. It's the third presentation I've given this week (I gave two earlier this week on online communities and video production at work) and the panel will be the second one I've participated in, after the discussions at the Social Media Club Boston event at Bentley College on Thursday night. After this is over, I can take a little breather -- I don't have any public speaking engagements scheduled for the next few months.

Dissertation horror stories

2008-01-10T12:56:00.000-05:00

A fellow Harvard ALM blogger who operates the Mission Control blog writes an interesting aside at the end of a recent post, relating to doctoral dissertations that went horribly awry -- like the graduate student who discovered that his "great idea was completely wrong, no such thing existed," but was still forced to run with it by his advisor. Read the reason why, and a few other PhD tales of woe, at the end of this post.

Related entries:

Gary North on the Ph.D. "Glut"

Thesis proposal: Start, write, throw away, rewrite

ALM thesis writers' meeting/Revisiting Vietnam?

Writing an ALM thesis: Solo effort, a personal marathon, and finding a sounding board

Thesis update: Done!

Last. Class. Ever.

2008-01-08T23:03:00.000-05:00

Tonight was the last session of my last class at the Harvard Extension School. My final paper isn't due until the end of next week, but it's already 90% complete. I can submit it via email, so I won't be going to campus ever again to attend class, hit the stacks, or meet with professors.

Graduate school is basically over.

It felt strange leaving Boylston Hall and walking out into the Yard for the last time. It was dark, quiet, and muddy with all of the melting snow. Kind of dank, actually. Not the type of scene that would typically evoke sentimental feelings, but I felt very keenly that it was the end of an era for me. My graduate studies began five years ago this month, and with the exception of the fall of 2004 (when my son was born) and the summer of 2007 (after my thesis was substantially complete) there hasn't been a semester that I haven't devoted major amounts of time to course readings, class, writing, and research. As of next Friday I will have written nine final papers (typical length, 20-30 double-spaced pages), several dozen smaller papers and essays, a thesis proposal and my thesis. Almost all have required multiple drafts and revisions. I will have also spent hundreds of hours in class and many thousands more studying, writing, or conducting paper and thesis research. Even during my commute to work, I am thinking about class and research. After next Friday, all of this comes to an end. It will be odd to not have these requirements and routines dominating my life any longer.

I usually stroll quickly back to my car parked on Mt. Auburn Street, so I can get home before my wife goes to sleep. Tonight, I passed slowly through the dark Yard. I passed Mass Hall and walked through the gate for the last time as a student, and then crossed Mass Ave. On the other side, at the mouth of Church Street, I turned back, and noticed -- for the first time in a long time -- the giant, ornate clock on the upper floors of Mass Hall, facing the street. It was dark, but I could see that the hands read 9:20. Behind it and to the left, I could see the slim steeple of Memorial Church with the lantern burning inside. That steeple at night has always been one of my favorite campus scenes -- it really gives me a sense of peace, even when I have been hurrying to catch a class or have been exiting Widener with a bag laden with books.

This time, even though I am no longer dealing with such pressures, it still brought me a sense of peace, and perhaps a sense of finality as well.

Free Fouad

2008-01-08T00:29:00.000-05:00

(Thanks to John Palfrey for the link)

aka "Crazy Week"

2008-01-07T07:36:00.000-05:00

I have a very difficult week coming up, loaded with public speaking, writing, and some kids-related activities, outside of my full work and family schedule.

This afternoon, I'll give a presentation on online communities.

Tonight, I'll burn the midnight oil, in order to finish the draft final paper for From Text to Hypertext. The topic touches upon Mitchell Stephens' book, The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the World. In a nutshell, he thinks "new video" will grow to dominate mass media. My argument: Formats based on computer-generated, 3D environments will overshadow most video content. The explosion of new 3D media formats in the entertainment and news fields is something I've discussed at length before, but the paper has allowed me to hone my thesis. (I'll post excerpts when it's done). The paper will probably be around 25 double-spaced pages. I hand in the draft tomorrow night, the last session for the course, and my last class ever at the Harvard Extension School -- after this, all I need to do is submit my final version of the paper by the 19th, get a passing grade, and my ALM requirements are completed.

Thursday, I am taking part in a panel at Bentley College in Waltham on social media -- blogs, online communities, video, podcasting, etc. It's a gathering for the Social Media Club (Boston). I've presented to this group before, when I introduced Shark Bait early last year. This time, I will be talking about video -- one of my responsibilities at Computerworld, and an area of growth in the online world.

Saturday, I am attending the first day of the Boston Digital Media Summit. I have volunteered to serve as the press contact. On the second day of the summit, I will be taking part in two panels and giving the closing presentations on demographic factors that are shaping the next generation of digital media. I have a title -- Grokking Generation G: Digital Media and the Video Game Generation -- but I still have to gather stats and video clips, and put the presentation together in PowerPoint. I'll probably work on that Friday evening.

And lastly, we will be celebrating my daughter's birthday that weekend, probably Saturday night. I still have to find the time to get her a present ... most likely during one of my lunch breaks this week.

Upcoming Event: The Boston Digital Media Summit

2008-01-03T00:26:00.000-05:00

I wanted to let local readers know about a special event taking place at Boston College next weekend. It's the Boston Digital Media Summit. The focus of the summit is Immersive Education, related virtual reality and digital media technologies, and pedagogy.

You may recall that the Harvard Interactive Media Group hosted a discussion of Immersive Education less than a month ago at the Graduate School of Education. The Boston College event is more extensive. There are two full days of demonstrations, panels, and presentations on Saturday, January 12 and Sunday, January 13. On the second day, I'll be participating in two of the panels and giving a presentation relating to one of my research interests, the video game generation and their media habits (see MMORPGs training "Generation G" for corner-office suites and My new media manifesto: "Meeting the Second Wave"). It's being sponsored by The Grid Institute, the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, and the Federation of American Scientists with the Kauffman Foundation.

There is a tentative program for the Boston Digital Media Summit, and registration is now open. I have a few guest passes for the summit; please contact me if you're interested in using them.

Next week, I'll post more details about the event and generate a map for people who are unfamiliar with the BC campus.

A new Extension School blog: ClueHQ

2008-01-02T14:12:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned other ALM bloggers in the past (see Priorities: An ALM Management student takes a break and Another ALM thesis is progress) but recently discovered the first blog written by someone in the Harvard Extension School's undergraduate ALB program. ClueHQ was started late last week, and the author is focused on information technology:

So far, I haven’t found a better program for non-traditional undergraduate education. The classes are rigorous and relevant. Many of my courses have focused on the theory of computer science but a few classes focus on more practical aspects of computer science, like programming in a particular language or working within a particular development environment.

The author of ClueHQ wants to earn a master's degree in CS, and is currently looking at the Columbia CVN program, a distance ed program that's part of Columbia University's School of Engineering & Applied Science. The Harvard Extension School's ALM in IT program isn't a good fit, for reasons outlined in the first post of the blog entitled Earning a Masters Degree in Computer Science via Distance Education.

Generation G in Taiwan: Age gaps in Internet usage and blogging

2007-12-30T12:25:00.000-05:00

On The Digital Media Machine blog, I recently discussed Generation G -- the under-40s who belong to the video game generation. I wrote:

Most people in this demographic grew up with games, and many of them still play now. They are familiar with gaming conventions relating to movement, exploration, cooperation, competition, and communication. Additionally, interaction with video games from an early age has created a foundation of familiarity and interest in computing technologies.

While I noted that more than 80 million people in the United States belong to this demographic, I did not get into the international dimension. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were nearly 4.5 billion people under the age of 40 as of mid-2007. Obviously, many of those in developing countries may never have seen a video game console or touched a computer, but in other countries parts of Europe and Asia, video games, computers, and the Internet are a way of life for people in this age group.

The ESWN blog found a report that supports the Generation G hypothesis in Taiwan. The United Daily News (lian he bao, 聯合報) reported the results of a telephone survey of 15,007 people from all over Taiwan that polled them on their 'Net habits, and broke down the results by age. The inset graphic is from the United Daily News website, and shows the data. Not surprisingly, almost 100% of the youngest bracket (aged 12 to 20) were Internet users. Most of the 21-30 and 31-40 groups were also online. But there was a steep dropoff from the 30-somethings to the 40-somethings, and just over one in five of the over-50s were online:

Age 12-20: 99.8%
Age 21-30: 94.4%
Age 31-40: 84.2%
Age 41-50: 58.6%
Age 51+: 21.9%

The survey also asked about blogging, and I was quite surprised to see how active Taiwan's teenagers were in this respect: Nearly half of the 12-20 year olds said they blog, and about 30% of 20-somethings do the same. 30-somethings in Taiwan are far less likely to blog, with just 12.5% saying that they maintain one. This matches with my own experience -- most of my Taiwanese friends are in their 30s and 40s, and I only know one who has a blog.

Thoughts on the Extension School's Health Careers Program/post-bacc

2007-12-26T18:20:00.003-05:00

When talking about Extension School programs on this blog, I've concentrated on issues relating to the graduate liberal arts ALM. On occasion I've mentioned the professional ALMs (ALM in Management, ALM in IT, etc.), as well as the undergraduate ALB but have seldom discussed the other programs at the Extension School.

Today, though, I thought I would highlight one of the standout non-degree programs at the Harvard Extension School, the Health Careers Program. The HCP, often referred to as the Harvard "post-bacc", is intended for people who have completed their undergraduate studies but need to take additional science courses in order to apply to medical school. While the Harvard Extension School awards a Diploma in Premedical Studies to students who have completed the eight required introductory science courses, a far more valuable document to students is an HCP sponsorship. A sponsorship has a stringent set of requirements (for instance, it takes into account students' undergraduate GPAs), and comes with composite letter of recommendation that apparently is well-regarded by medical school admissions committees (adcoms) across the country.

The HCP does not release statistics relating to the number of students who have gone on to medical school, but several students have posted their assessments of the Extension School's post-bacc on the StudentDoctor.net website. I am excerpting some of their comments, which are generally quite positive about the quality of the program:

Curious Tom:

03-14-2005, 11:58 AM

It all depends on individual backgrounds and qualities. Generally speaking, though, the program seems to have people going to not just any med schools, but top schools if that's what you want to hear. Each year about 50 people get sponsored and most of them get accepted somewhere. I myself am debating between a sunny UC school (I'm from CA) and a private in cold northeast (both are top 15). But remember, many people in the program are from ivy undergrads or have very interesting backgrounds. Apart from that, based on my limited experience with the schools I interviewed, this program itself is well perceived by the adcom.

chlorineK

03-14-2005, 12:17 PM

I graduated from columbia and then did the harvard post-bacc and so far, I am going to duke. So it worked for me, too.

twicetenturns

03-14-2005, 12:34 PM

I finished HES's Health Careers program last spring and couldn't have been more pleased. To date, I have been fortunate enough to be accepted to Harvard, Hopkins, Cornell, Northwestern, and Stanford. The program is perfect for people who want to work during the day (research, clinical, etc.) and not go broke. Plus, they write really nice letters. Owen actually sounded personally insulted when I told him that I didn't get into UCSF. But alas, not from sunny Cali.

ads99:

03-14-2005, 08:20 PM

I did the Health Careers Program at Harvard Extension and am choosing between University of Chicago and University of Pittsburgh. Everyone in my study group from school has been accepted to a competitive med school program. One of these people applied very late to schools and is now choosing between several top 20 programs.

As someone mentioned, a lot of people in the extension school program have interesting backgrounds. People like TwiceTenTurns blow us away sometimes, but that just makes the student body that much more interesting. Half of the people in my study group went to ivy undergrads. *But* the other half of my study group attended state schools. The program definitely is perceived well by ADCOM's. I think it was an excellent excellent value and am ecstatic with where it got me. The advising was great and, in my opinion, the classes were very well taught and very well organized. :thumbup:

XildUpNawth:

05-14-2007, 06:12 PM

I went to a liberal arts college with no grades for undergrad, then did an MPH with grades (good ones ;) ), then finished and/or retook my pre-reqs through HES HCP. I was sponsored and applied through the HCP. I have been accepted to BU, UAB, U Miami, U Maryland and USA. I was on hold at AECOM and UF, but dropped off the hold list. I'll be attending UAB. HES is a great opportunity and I highly recommend it.

Mae16:

05-21-2007, 07:56 PM

How tough are the classes at HES? The lectures have 300, 400 people, right? Were you able to get help/tutoring if you needed it?

Also, does the scheduling work out such that you can complete the necessary courses in two years (eg, classes that you needed to take weren't scheduled simultaneously, correct?)

thanks!

Lokhtar:

08-16-2007, 07:39 AM

Someone said that he learned more in Harvard Extention bio course, than he learned in two years of bio, and one year of genetics and part of the first semester of his medical school.

He might have been exaggerating, but the coursework is very tough and time consuming, and part of the reason why it is looked so favorably by adcoms everywhere.

punkindrublic

08-16-2007, 09:03 AM

The coursework is really demanding. You're going to be required to know a ton, and not just regurgitate it, but to apply it to new situations and presentations on exams. It's really pretty fair for the most part though; all the professors give you practice/old exams to study from so you'll be familiar with the structure and timing before you take the real thing.

That said, bio is absolutely brutal. Fixsen will expect you to know everything inside and out, but it was really an interesting and enjoyable course, and prepares you beautifully for the MCAT.

HanginInThere:

08-16-2007, 10:41 AM

As punkin and Lokhtar say, the courses are challenging. In my experience, they were similar to what I'd expect from taking the same class at a competitive undergrad school.

I thought the intro class sizes averaged closer to 100-200 students, rather than 300-400. But that's just a guess from glancing around lecture halls - regardless, they're your typical big intro science classes, where you'll get personal attention from your TAs ["TF"s, actually, because it's Haah-vaahd!] but you'll never speak to the professors unless you actively seek them out. But they all have office hours, so if you want them to get to know you it's definitely doable.

Tutoring/help is easy. You're assigned to discussion sections with Teaching Fellows which meet regularly - one hour a week for most courses, if I remember right. That's your first stop for review/help/etc. If you need more, the TFs and professors have office hours, and everyone seems happy to work with you as much as you want. The whole system is set up to offer you all the support you'll need. If that still isn't enough, I think there are people who offer unofficial paid tutorial services, but I don't have any experience with that. (Oh, and you should look to your classmates for help, too. People will organize study groups, or you'll just get to know the people around you and discuss stuff informally. This is a great resource. Everybody I met was friendly and in interested in collaboration - I never saw any stereotypical cutthroat premed behavior.)

For scheduling, yes - you can do it in two years. General Chemistry and Organic are scheduled for the same time on purpose, because gchem is a required prereq for orgo and they want to be sure you don't double up. Physics and Bio are different nights from each other and from the chems. You can take them in whichever order works for you and finish in two years, no problem.

Of course, these are anonymous, online posters to a two-and-a-half-year-old discussion board thread, but I am inclined to believe that these people have taken HCP classes and are being honest about their medical school acceptances. There were no highly critical appraisals of the post-bacc in this thread.

While I have been in contact with one person who is taking HCP classes, I don't know anyone who has completed it. Current or former HCP students are welcome to add their thoughts below. I'd be interested in hearing what you thought about the classes, the sponsorship, and for those who have completed the HCP, how it helped you navigate the med school admissions process and first year of med school.

Research advice

2007-12-26T07:05:00.000-05:00

Some solid advice for grad students considering major academic research projects:

1) Use graduate school to tech up. You'll have time to learn how save the world later, when you're actually in it. Learn all of the theoretical, statistical and other difficult-to-acquire skills you can while in grad school, because you won't have the time later on. You, your cause, and your job prospects will be well-served by the technical skills you build.

2) Hang in there. In the first year of any grad program you will encounter a lot of required material that will feel too theoretical, too divorced from social change, and (occasionally) like too much nonsense. Much of it is good for you (see point 1), even if it doesn't feel like it at the time. After a year of metrics and micro theory, I was ready to run to the real world to do what I thought I really wanted to do. The best advice I ever got (from one of my pre-PhD advisers) was, "Shut up and hang in there; by your second to third year you will discover all the people doing interesting applied work soon enough and be free to work on whatever you want by your third year." He was right.

3) Take chances. The second best piece of advice I ever received came from my dissertation chair, shortly after my oral examinations committee told me that my prospectus was poorly thought out, uneconomic, and overly risky. They were 100% right, and I benefitted from hearing it (although at the time I was miserable). Where I think they were wrong is that they told me to abandon my plans for risky and expensive field work. They favored the less risky route that could get me to a completed dissertation faster. My chair's response: "Hey, if you really want to do this, why not? Give it a shot. If it doesn't pan out after three months, then come back and work on something else. Worst case scenario: you lose a few thousand dollars and a summer, but you have a great experience." I plan to give the same advice to my students.

4) But minimize your risks by being prepared. Don't embark on a big project, especially field work, without a solid hypothesis, research design, and plan. Think through the theory beforehand. Write down your assumptions, your logic, and your econometric regressions before you collect data. Especially write out your regressions. I am still guilty of rushing to the field too quickly, and am continually reminded of the costs.

The author (Chris Blattman, an assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale) has six additional pieces of advice. The post is intended for people considering economics-related research as part of a PhD program, but some of the tips can be applied to what ALM students are doing at the Extension School. Tip #4, above, seems especially relevant -- in my proseminar and in the ALM thesis writers' workshops, other students would sometimes propose complicated paper-based surveys, or ask extremely broad research questions (e.g., "does religion encourage war?"). Fortunately, the ALM program has processes intended to help candidates find realistic, solid research topics -- namely, the proseminar and the thesis proposal.

(Thanks to Greg Mankiw for the link)

Related entries:

Gary North on the Ph.D. "Glut"

Thesis proposal: Start, write, throw away, rewrite

ALM thesis writers' meeting/Revisiting Vietnam?

Writing an ALM thesis: Solo effort, a personal marathon, and finding a sounding board

Thesis update: Done!

Boston Globe: Faust gets "high marks"

2007-12-24T08:25:00.000-05:00

The Boston Globe has a nice writeup of President Faust's first six months in office. The article zeroed in on the administration's quick moves on College financial aid, as well as her openness, which was on display at a summertime gathering in the Yard:

That July day, she gave a self-deprecating talk, then strolled onto the grass in Harvard Yard and mingled with one group after another, attendees recalled. Faust, who had invited faculty, students, and staff at every level to the ice cream social, spoke with all who approached her. And, she listened.

"It defined her presidency," said James Kloppenberg, chairman of the history department. "I wandered by where she was and thought this was unprecedented for a Harvard president to make him- or herself available to anybody who wanted to chat."

I have to agree. While I did not attend the ice cream social, I did write Faust after receiving her letter to the community in the fall. I wanted to draw her attention to an issue that I feel needs attention and resources (see Online education, sharing knowledge, and a proposal for Harvard and Thesis Update: Formatting horrors, and the Extension School's electronic archiving problem) and she actually replied -- not with a form letter, but with a personal email.

This doesn't mean the electronic archiving issue will be tackled soon, but it was the right response.

... For now.

Related entries:

Thoughts on Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's next president

I get a message from Larry Summers (I think)

The pitfalls of automated Chinese-English translation

2007-12-22T22:28:00.000-05:00

I've talked about issues related to simplified and traditional Chinese before, but the Ritter's Life blog brings up an issue I hadn't considered: Bad words cropping up in the English translations of otherwise mundane simplified Chinese phrases:

In "Gan: whodunnit, and how, and why?" (5/31/2006), I explained one of the sources of this phenomenon: several Chinese characters pronounced GAN1 or GAN4 -- and meaning such widely disparate things as "dry," "calendrical sign," "to do," and much else beside -- all got collapsed into one simplified character: 干. This has led to enormous confusion, especially when people who know next to no English rely on machine translation software to convert Chinese into English. The chaos caused by this combination of circumstances is vastly exacerbated by the fact that this little, three-stroke symbol also has a vulgar meaning when pronounced in the fourth tone ...

The "vulgar word" begins with an F and ends with a K, and has led to some bizarre signage in restaurants and department stores all over China, says Ritter. The Chinese in one example shown on his blog is a listing for fried cabbage with dried shrimps, but the English translation is quite twisted. There are many other examples (with photos) on the blog, and Ritter and his readers have actually identified the Chinese software programs that are likely responsible for the messed-up translations.

You may laugh when you see the signs, but this simple three-stroke character (see inset photo) has probably sunk more than a few international business deals when used incorrectly in translated correspondence or email.

(Thanks to ESWN for the reference)

Priorities: An ALM Management student takes a break

2007-12-15T21:46:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a blog by an ALM Management student named Rick for the better part of a year now. Once More Unto the Breach chronicled some of his classroom experiences (distance and on campus), his travels to Africa and Alaska, attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual conference, and an extended stay in Britain. I enjoy checking up on Rick every now and then, and his writings have even prompted the occasional reaction post on my part, such as A Mac In Africa over on ilamont.com.

But Rick is apparently taking a break from the ALMM program, and putting off future plans to get an MBA. There was a hint of this in late September, when he dropped an Extension School class, but an entry from early December explains that he has been reconsidering his priorities:

I've been thinking an awful lot about my life lately. I've been accomplishing a lot, but sometimes I have not been happy with the direction. I feel like I paid my dues living on Riverside Drive for seven years in a small apartment and missing out on things to stay cheap and save money, and I'm ready to collect. This is part of what has been behind this last year of insanity. Going forward, I don't think I can pay more dues with another two years of business school and two more suffering in a high paying job that insures I never seen my friends or family. That was the plan, after all. Suffer as a banker for two to three years then get out of the game. Live incredibly cheap, save two years of banker salary plus two years of lawyer salary, and then get out of the game. But it will make me miserable. I can achieve the same thing without banking, it will just take longer. I calculate about ten years longer, but I wouldn't lose four years to unhappiness.

What makes me happy? Friends. Fireplaces. A dog. A camera. Investing my own way. That is the good life. I think I was smart to come up with the suffering plan knowing I could get out of the game altogether at 30, but I think it would have been a miserable four years, and the opportunity cost of being in business school isn't negligible. I also don't feel like being away from Sarah for another five months, and I worry about the strain that would put on the marriage. Is it worth it?

For these reasons, I've decided to delay business school for another year. I plan to live [leave?] my current degree program, and go back to Austin with Sarah. I will concentrate on managing our investments, building my firm Citadel, and writing for the Motley Fool. When she graduates law school in May, we will be able to move right away to wherever she gets the best job offer (likely Austin or Dallas). I still plan to leave cheaply for two years before buying a house.

It is time to start living life the way I want to rather than worry about impressing other people. Warren Buffett was talking to some kid from HBS a little while ago who was talking about taking a job he really wouldn't like for a few years because it would really boost his resume (my guess is that the firm was probably McKinsey, which these days is an incubator for Fortune 500 CEOs). Warren told him he was crazy. He said to do what he loved, and as smart as he is, the money would follow. It may not be as much, but he would do just fine and would be much happier. He compared taking the job to "saving up sex for your old age. It doesn't make any sense."

This was obviously a tough choice for Rick, especially after committing so much time and effort to school and his other ventures. But at the end of the day, he decided his aggressive educational and career goals would put too much of a strain on his family and personal life.

That's not to say that he's giving up the Extension School and MBA plans. The ALM program can be completed within five years of matriculation, and he already has a few classes under his belt. His GMAT scores also have a long shelf life.

But even if he doesn't go back to school, Rick will do well. He obviously has a drive to succeed and to make the world a better place, and I respect him for that.

The Extension School may be losing a student, and I may be losing a fellow ALM blogger, but it's all happening for very good reasons.

Good luck, Rick.

The HLS Berkman Center explained

2007-12-15T16:54:00.000-05:00

The Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society is an interesting organization. I subscribe to a few of their e-newsletters, sometimes read blog posts written by Berkman fellows, and also met a few of the Berkman staff when I was in Singapore for State of Play V. Readers may recall that the Berkman Center has teamed with the Extension School to create for-credit courses in virtual reality -- see Interview: Harvard's Rebecca Nesson discusses teaching in Second Life, and Harvard on the cutting edge: A virtual Law School/Extension School class.

A few days ago, the Compete blog published an interview with HLS Professor John Palfrey, the Berkman Center's executive director. He gives a good overview of what the Berkman Center does on a day-to-day basis, as well as its mission:

It’s crucial to us at the Berkman Center that we’re not just another ivory-tower think-tank. It’s important that we do some work that is theoretical and even abstract. We trust also that our work is intellectually rigorous and that our methodologies are sound. But at the same time, we try hard to be certain that we are speaking to an audience online that is bigger than our immediate circle of students and colleagues and other friends.

One way we do that is through our various modes of research, teaching, and activism. We believe in building out into cyberspace as we study it, so we have terrific developers on the team who put up the first blog server at a university, supported the first podcast series, built real-time teaching tools for the classroom, and a whole lot of code for specific research projects. Pretty much everything we do we publish to the web – whether on a blog, on our website, on a podcast, or by video. We are never as successful at this as we’d like to be, but it’s a constant area of focus. We think of our work as relevant to a broad audience and strive to avoid navel-gazing wherever possible.

The Berkman Center is now in its tenth year, and there are several anniversary events scheduled to take place next spring and summer. Check 'em out, they look pretty interesting -- especially the release of the book Born Digital, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. For an overview of what the book is about, read Palfrey's blog post, "Born Digital."

(Thanks to Planet 02138 for the link)

Chinese media, international news, and foreign policy

2007-12-07T16:44:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times has a great article on Chinese media coverage of international news issues and events. The article notes that while domestic Chinese journalism is in the midst of a "golden age," foreign news is generally sourced from a handful of state-run news organizations that have foreign correspondents, including Xinhua/NCNA (新華社). As a result, says the article, Chinese audiences get a heavy dose of propaganda when they read about international events:

News media critics say one result of this lack of vigorous independent reporting is that what most Chinese news readers know of the world closely conforms with government policy and propaganda.

“By and large, China’s international reporting is a mirror of China’s diplomacy,” said Yu Guoming, a journalism professor at People’s University in Beijing. “As government mouthpieces, their international reports are linked with the government’s diplomacy. It’s not free, so what we’re really talking about is China’s diplomacy, not its media.”

This is a major problem for China and Chinese audiences, but it can't last, considering the problems Chinese authorities have controlling the Internet and networked communications.

On the other hand, as long-time readers of Harvard Extended know, this media/diplomacy connection in China's state-run press that allows observers to better understand the policies and actions of the Chinese government. Political and military experts have long used Xinhua and other official news sources to fathom internal power struggles (see my description of Beijingology), and I used a computer content analysis of Xinhua content from 1977 to 1993 to gauge Chinese policies toward Vietnam during the Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) era.

In any case, the NYT article is a good introduction to the topic of international news censorship in China. To learn more about domestic news in China and the challenges Chinese reporters face, I recommend reading some of the reports filed by Edward Cody of the Washington Post over the past few years.

Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

Immersive Education Day reminder

2007-12-07T12:00:00.000-05:00

I wanted to remind local readers that Immersive Education Day takes place tomorrow afternoon (Dec. 8) from 2-5 at Askwith Lecture Hall in Longfellow Hall at 13 Appian Way, Cambridge (part of the Graduate School of Education). If you haven't been there before, it's very close to the Harvard Extension School HQ at 51 Brattle St. -- the map below will show you how to get to 13 Appian Way.

Immersive Education is a suite of virtual reality technologies and processes for education. This is an area in which the Harvard Extension School has a lot of experience, owing to the joint Law School/Extension School classes that have been held in Second Life (see my interview with instructor Rebecca Nesson.) The Harvard Interactive Media Group, a campus group which I recently joined, is putting on the event, and has lined up five experts and practitioners (more info here). Virtual reality has started to make an impact on distance education, and it will be interesting to see what the panel has to say about future development.

Hope to see some other Extension School students there!

View Larger Map

Quoted: Mitchell Stephens' The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word

2007-12-03T22:32:00.002-05:00

More great reading from my final course, From Text To Hypertext: A Survey of Publishing. This week, I've been reading Mitchell Stephens' Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), which tracks the rise of television and other screen-oriented mass media, including the Web. His thesis: We are still at the early stages of the video revolution. Television largely copies what came before, such as drama, serials, discussions, music, and news, and real innovation has yet to come: "I will argue that once we move beyond simply aiming cameras at stage plays, conversations, or sporting events and perfect original uses of moving images, video can help us gain new slants on the world, new ways of seeing," Stephens says on page 18. "It can capture more of the tumult and confusions of contemporary life than tend to fit in lines of type."

A few other choice quotes, starting with a comment on the decline of reading, from page 9:

"In a society where professional success now rewquires acquaintance with masses of esoteric information, books now are often purchased to be consulted, not read."

From page 11:

"The video revolution is, by my reckoning, humankind's third major revolution, and the disruptions occasioned by the first two -- writing and print -- are surprisingly similar to what we are experiencing now. The stages in which the new technologies were adopted seem comparable, as does the profundity of the transformations they cause. Even the anxieties and anger sound familiar."

From page 22, after examining the transition from orality to literacy in ancient times:

"Now we are in the early stages of another great communications revolution, surrendering what Emerson called 'these traditional splendors of letters' in favor of the moving image, in favor of video. This seems at first glance quite a powerful new tool, especially when compared to the little scrawlings Thoth was promoting, Indeed, were visitors from Plato's time (or Emerson's) to find their way into one of homes, they might marvel at the machines we have invented for cooking, cleaning, calculating, and sending mail electronically; but would not their gaze be transfixed by that box in front of the couch, with its constantly changing array of images, its miniaturized people, intense dramas, and brilliantly colored scenes?"

From page 27, after noting repeated attacks on TV programming:

"Most educated people, eminent or not, find themselves asking why video can't more closely resemble more respected forms of communication, such as books, theater, concerts or conversation."

Related:

My final paper for the class, discussing the future of imagery on the Web (cites Stephens' book):

Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web

A short essay I wrote for The Industry Standard, based on the above paper:

The future of the Web is 3D, not video

Online education, sharing knowledge, and a proposal for Harvard

2007-12-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

Spotted in a Boston Globe article entitled "An MIT education is now just a click away":

On Wednesday, the school celebrated the completion of a six-year initiative to put its entire curriculum online, with all 1,800 undergraduate and graduate courses - lectures, readings, labs, even problem sets and exams - available with just a few clicks and a spirit of scientific curiosity.

The initiative, the first of its kind, has been enormously successful, so far attracting some 31 million visitors from nearly every country who are drawn to such classes as Electricity and Magnetism, Classical Mechanics, and Introduction to Algorithms.

The misleading title aside (while the OpenCourseWare program places course materials online, including some video lectures, but does not provide textbooks, interaction with instructors, or credit), the article describes one of the most important Web-based educational projects in existence. Millions of students from around the world have taken advantage of the online materials in English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Thai. MIT deserves a great deal of credit for undertaking such a bold and expensive experiment.

Meanwhile, Harvard has been very cautious in its own experiments involving Internet-based education. The Harvard Extension School has the most experience with online education, and has developed some interesting Second Life-based courses with the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, but the University as a whole has lagged in terms of sharing lectures, course materials, and research with the rest of the world.

This is not the first time I've blogged about this problem. Here's an excerpt from last year's post, Yale to offer free course video over Internet. Why not Harvard?:

... Why isn't Harvard taking more of a lead in sharing its academic resources with the global community? We see some piecemeal efforts involving individual schools and departments placing some class materials on the Internet for public consumption. FAS and the Harvard Extension School have actually posted Computer Science podcasts online, but video of class sessions is closed off to the public -- if you want to see anything more than a few samples, you have to pony up thousands of dollars to register for the classes, even if you aren't taking them for credit.

Yes, I understand that video production is expensive, and FAS wants to turn online video into a sustainable endeavor. But it is possible to strike a balance between serving the global public (one of former President Summers' big interests) and creating a successful, self-funding academic program. Can't Harvard at least match Yale's efforts, and provide some complete courses online for free without credit? I mean, seriously -- how big is Harvard's endowment now -- $29 billion dollars? Can't Bok or Knowles sign off on a little seed money and staff time to get something off the ground, perhaps using Extension School Distance Ed programming from previous years?

I have another proposal for Harvard: How about organizing a free, indexed, online database of educational research from Harvard and other institutions? In the electronic age, it's remarkable that almost all of the research and analysis taking place in colleges and universities today ends up as droplets of ink arranged on thin white rectangles of processed wood pulp, intended for an audience of one -- a professor responsible for issuing grades. This knowledge is almost never shared with other researchers or the public, thereby stifling learning and the spread of human knowledge. In the age of print, universities had an excuse. Now that the Internet is here, there is no reason to keep this information stuffed in filing cabinets or locked up in individual hard drives.

Would such a project be difficult to carry out? Sure. But MIT has proved that massive online educational initiatives can work and can yield tangible benefits for the public.

The Extension School and campus organizations: My experience with the HIMG

2007-12-01T20:43:00.000-05:00

I first started taking classes at the Extension School in 2002, and formally matriculated into the ALM program in 2004. However, other than attending some seminars and symposia over the years, and joining a few Extension School gatherings, I haven't been involved with clubs or other extra-curricular activities at Harvard. Besides being far too busy with school, work, and family, I also haven't been able to find an on-campus group that really aligns with my personal, academic, or professional interests.

Until now. When I was in Singapore for State of Play V, someone distributed copies of the Harvard Interactive Media Review. It was an interesting read. The first issue contained an interview with Berkman Center founder and Law School Professor Charles Nesson (who helped bring Harvard's first virtual worlds-based course to the Extension School) as well as essays about business in the metaverse, new media literacy, and virtual learning. Some of the issues dovetailed with what I have written about in my personal blog, on Computerworld.com, in Terra Nova, and elsewhere.

I found out that the Review was published by an on-campus organization called the Harvard Interactive Media Group, which is an official student group of the College and has members from a few of Harvard's graduate/professional schools. According to the HIMG FAQ, the group aims to "bring together Harvard students and professors with members of academic and development communities beyond to explore the form and impact of interactive media, video games in particular." The FAQ also notes that Harvard has been lagging in this field:

While certainly our projects are valuable in and of themselves, we view them also as a means of establishing momentum, as facts on the ground, in our longer-term bid for an official interactive media program here at Harvard. Schools around the country—MIT, Carnegie Mellon, USC, Indiana, Madison, and others—are moving aggressively into the interactive media space. Harvard is being left behind.

In the past, be it with digital computing or Psychology, Harvard has been a leader in the exploration of burgeoning academic fields. We believe that Harvard should reprise this role, and ensure that its leadership carries over from the physical world into the virtual one as well. For now, we’re networking with various departments around the University. In the next five to ten years, we hope that the HIMG will be a launching point through which Harvard, as an institution, can leap into the field.

This semester I have started to participate in the HIMG meetings and activities. Through the group, I was able to attend a panel discussion at the Business School a few weeks ago ("The Business of Video Games: From Virtual Worlds to Casual and Serious Games"), and next Saturday afternoon we are holding an on-campus event on Immersive Education. (preliminary information here, and I'll post the official description of the event in a separate entry).

Besides the HIMG, Harvard Extension School students participate in other on-campus groups. A friend of mine joined the Kendo club, the Harvard Graduate Council has included ALM students in its governance and activities over the past few years, and Extension School volunteers have joined Phillips Brooks House Association programs. Many clubs and organizations welcome students from across the University, and these are great opportunities for Extension School students to participate in campus life beyond taking classes and conducting research.

1907 and 2007: The late Qing press vs. the current Chinese Internet

2007-11-17T22:18:00.000-05:00

I'm currently doing some research for an essay in my final class (Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext) and stumbled upon a passage worth sharing here. The essay is about the rise of the Chinese press in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the influence of Western newspaper models. The passage is from page four of Joan Judge's Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), and discusses the connections between the Chinese press and revolutionary politics toward the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911):

While print journalism served a political function in many nations, this role was particularly consequential in late Qing China, which had neither a system of political parties nor a representative national assembly. Independent of the dynasty and accessible to the reading public, the political press provided one of the few forums where reformists could advance their political agenda. Opening a field of mediation between the different spheres of late Qing China made it possible for reform publicists to challenge imperial authority and express popular grievances, encourage debate over government policies, and educate their compatriots about the urgent need to reform the structure of dynastic power.

Does anyone else see the parallels between what was happening at the end of the Qing dynasty, and what's happening now with the Internet in the People's Republic of China? We're not seeing much online debate in China about the CCP or the current political structure, but late Qing newspapers in the 1870s didn't have this kind of debate, either .... Judge is referring to newspaper activity several decades later, in the first decade of the 20th century -- right before the fall of the Qing.

Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

Strange database queries at the Harvard Business School, and a new model for downloading online music

2007-11-16T11:35:00.000-05:00

My Computerworld blog was recently updated with some new functionality and a new name -- The Digital Media Machine. The focus is mostly new media technologies, ranging from the Internet to virtual reality, but I also touch on some subjects that might be interesting to my Harvard Extended audience. For instance, yesterday I blogged about a strange incident at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library:

The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard, has a report of an unusual incident in a campus library. Administrators at the Harvard Business School library were forced to block a user's IP address from accessing Factiva, an online database of news articles and other text documents, after determining that the user had downloaded millions of articles in the span of a few months.

It turns out that the user in question was (probably) building a very large census of news articles and other text documents for a computer content analysis, using a script that scraped the articles from the password-protected Factiva database. I can totally sympathize: As some of you may remember, I also carried out a very extensive content analysis of news articles from China's Xinhua News Agency for my thesis, and was frustrated by the manual processes involved in getting samples and query results from LexisNexis Academic.

There's another new post on my Computerworld blog that might interest anyone who pays for online music: A proposal to revamp the per-song and per-album pricing model from a flat fee (e.g., iTune's 99 cents/song scheme) to a scaled pricing model that actually evaluates whether or not you value the song.

"Economic Nationalism" and patient safety in China

2007-11-16T11:14:00.000-05:00

What used to be called "protectionism" is now known as "economic nationalism," at least when China is involved, according to a source quoted in today's New York Times:

“There is clearly a growing economic nationalism in China that is leading to discrimination against foreign investors in pillar sectors of the economy,” said Myron Brilliant, vice president for Asia at the United States Chamber of Commerce. “It’s not only a threat to foreign investors but it also undermines China’s transition to a market-based economy.”

The issue at hand are Chinese regulations that dictate safety inspections for imported medical devices, but not devices that are made in China. What's interesting to me is that the debate is being framed in terms of fairness in international trade, as opposed to a patient safety issue.

Sinocidal lampoons parachute journalists in China

2007-11-10T22:58:00.000-05:00

I got a chuckle from this: Sinocidal's satirical advice for foreign journalists attempting to write an article about China:

You've just arrived in your 5-Star room at the Shanghai Hilton and unpacked your fancy new Apple laptop. As you pull the top off the mini bottle of Hennessey XO, you finally turn to your instructions from the editor back home. 2000 words by Monday about the important issues facing China today. Easy.

But two days have passed and you are still staring at a blank screen. You're experiencing a stretch of writer's block as long as the Great Wall of China and the deadline is hanging over your head like the proverbial Sword of Damocles. It seems that more research than flicking through a copy of Wild Swans in the airport is needed after all.

The list of tips that follows is a hoot, ranging from getting sources ("ask a taxi driver!") to choosing headlines (using Sinocidal's 'China-headline-o'matic').

And there's more than a hint of truth to the account. It's known as "parachute journalism," and it occurs every time a local crisis or event makes waves in an out-of-the-way place, and reporters with insufficient knowledge of the local situation are flown in and attempt to interpret the news for the folks back home. You've seen articles or TV segments like this before that pertain to Chinese culture. You will see dozens more next year when thousands of foreign journalists who've never been to China and can't speak Chinese descend upon Beijing for the 2008 Olympics and attempt to "explain" China to the rest of the world.

(Thanks to Myrick at AsiaPundit for the link.)

Hedge fund uses Harvard Extension School distance education class as backup training

2007-11-09T10:04:00.000-05:00

Spotted in my Google blog search RSS feed: David Kane of Kane Capital Management -- a company that operates a hedge fund -- requires summer interns from Williams College to have a solid grounding in statistics. If they are unable to take the appropriate course at Williams, he has them take Government E-2001 ("a course [that] gives you the tools to build statistical models and useful in real social science research") through the Extension School's distance education offerings. He pays, too.

This is one example of how distance education at Harvard has potential applications beyond enabling Extension School students to take coursework online. Some of these high-quality classes can be used for workforce education in certain fields. Conceivably, these classes could also be used as substitute for-credit at other colleges or universities that don't offer such courses, offer them infrequently, or need to serve students who are not on campus because of a disability, military service, overseas study, etc.

The class that Kane refers to looks quite interesting. While Government E-2001 is "recommended" for government concentrators, it is not required, and I have the feeling that a lot of Extension School students aiming for a government ALM shy away from taking it, considering they already have one difficult requirement to get out of the way (the graduate proseminar) and the fact it involves a subject that so many social sciences concentrators dread -- math. In my experience, very few people who are ALM Government or History concentrators like math or attempt to use quantitative methodologies in their theses. Others may not realize until it is too late that they want to use statistical analysis, instead of more traditional qualitative approaches.

In hindsight, I wish I'd taken this class (or one like it) before I started my thesis, which used a quantitative methodology to study Chinese foreign policy during the Deng Xiaoping era. While I had studied computer content analysis schemes during my graduate proseminar in 2003, I didn't have any training in statistics when I started my research in 2005 -- I basically had to do a lot of extra reading on my own, and get advice from my thesis director and a few others in order to develop my models and analyze the data.

Undoing simplified characters: Traditional Chinese on the rise in China?

2007-11-05T23:30:00.000-05:00

My wife draws my attention to the Sunday, Nov. 4 edition of the Chinese newspaper she reads -- the 世界日報 (World Journal). The top article on the front page describes the proceedings at the 8th International Chinese Character Seminar in Beijing, and the discussions surrounding a 15-year-old international effort to standardize Chinese characters in China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

What's the big deal? Well, the proposal supposedly has received a major boost -- a department of China's Ministry of Education apparently agrees in principle with the proposal to standardize on mostly traditional characters (fantizi, or 簡體字).

If it's true, and the government follows through, this is major news. For the past 51 years, China has standardized its writing and printing systems using 2,751 simplified characters (jiantizi, 简体字) that are easier to remember and write than their traditional counterparts used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and elsewhere in East Asia. Most of the simplified characters were invented by high-level scholarly committees in 1956 and 1964 as part of an effort to spread literacy among China's largely rural and uneducated population. The inset photo (from a Chinese language primer hosted by Gonzaga University in Washington) shows the stroke order for a collection of simplified characters. The simplified version of "gate" is the first character in the second row.

The simplification movement has always been a bone of contention for purists of written Chinese, who treasure the traditional characters for their beauty and connection to ancient Chinese literature and history. Even in China, the simplified characters have been weakened by the spread of Taiwanese and Hong Kong media in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the rise of what I call "historical nationalism". Some younger Chinese we know say that they prefer the traditional characters. I suspect that this sentiment could be one reason why the proposal is now apparently being taken more seriously by the government in Beijing.

According to the article, the proposal calls for traditional forms to be adopted among member countries, except for certain simplified forms which were used in antiquity. For instance, the traditional character 門 ("gate") was simplified to 门 by some calligraphers in dynastic times, and this was adopted as the official simplified character form in China in the 1950s and 1960s (with Mao's blessing -- as Richard Curt Kraus has noted in his 1991 book "Brushes With Power," Mao was a great fan of some classical literature and calligraphy, and directed the simplification committees to use these alternate historical forms when possible). Because of this historical usage, the character 门 would supposedly remain in the proposed international standardization scheme.

However, many of the thousands of other simplified forms used in China for the past four or five decades would allegedly be discarded, as they have no historical precedent.

This is far from being a done deal. This is second-hand news, and I suspect many of the facts were not checked with the relevant authorities in China. Additionally, the article notes that more discussions still need to take place at the ninth meeting of the International Chinese Character Seminar next year to iron out key details of the proposal, and get more buy-in from Vietnam and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

Lastly, I am skeptical that the government in China is seriously considering such a move in the near future. The implications for China's educational system -- not to mention the local publishing industry, software developers, and government bureaus -- would be too much. A billion people have been brought up learning the simplified forms, and almost all books, magazines, newspapers, computer programs, street signs, manuals, and recent records created in China use simplified characters. The complexity and expense associated with such an effort would be unparalleled, and at the end of the day, it would be a lot easier to just live with the simplified characters.

Bible Study: Comparing Gutenberg's invention with the rise of the World Wide Web

2007-10-27T07:58:00.000-05:00

The course I am taking this semester -- Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext -- is getting quite interesting. In the past few classes we've gone over the transition from manuscripts to printing, and it's quite remarkable how the developments in Mainz in the 1450s parallel the Internet publishing revolution of the 1990s. Consider the page from this Latin bible (from the Library of Congress website):Compare it with this one, from a different bible now housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia:The top example is a Gutenberg bible, while the bottom image is from a "Paris" bible made two hundred years earlier. Gutenberg basically tried to mimic the illuminated manuscripts that had been made by scribes, in terms of the lettering and the use of hand-painted letters at the beginnings of new sections. He did not immediately see the potential of his application for new styles of books and new uses of printing.

When our instructor, Matthew Battles, showed us similar slides in class, I was immediately reminded of the Web publishing models used by many media companies in their initial approaches to the Internet. Web designs and content-production strategies were often based on the same strategies used for paper products.

It's not just a 1990s thing, either. Even though the WWW has been around for about 13 years, we still see print media models dictating website content. I heard from a Chinese magazine editor last year that their news cycle is based on the deadlines and submission processes used for their weekly print edition. A friend who works for a recently launched U.S. monthly said the Web design was carried out by the print graphics team, and was basically a copy of the print edition.

While I am comparing the rise of the printing press and the World Wide Web, it is important to note a few other historical developments. First, manuscript editions didn't immediately die out with the printing explosion that burst across Europe in the 1460s and 1470s. Manuscripts continued to be produced into the 16th century, many decades after presses had spread to most minor cities in Western Europe. Additionally, while the printers of this era quickly discovered new applications for printing presses (e.g., the use of scientific charts, the creation of mass-produced handbills, and illustrated children's books), they could have never conceived of the magazine, book, and newspaper innovations developed in the 20th century. We are seeing something similar happening right now -- paper-based printing is still widespread, while the Web world is gleefully experimenting with new applications and media models. And while we have vague ideas that virtual reality and virtual worlds are the future of the Web, we have no idea of what these technologies will turn into 100 or 200 years from now.

Quick Taipei

2007-10-13T09:36:00.000-05:00

Last April, during a family trip to Taipei, I took some video of life on the street and in the temples and night markets, and made a short documentary/travelogue about it, using iMovie. My intention was to immediately post it on Google Video, but the submission requirements for video were too stringent -- the Quicktime Pro export formats weren't acceptable.

How quickly the technology changes! Google has since bought YouTube, and now accepts many Quicktime export formats, including AVI and mp4. I had to mess around with the settings to get the file small enough (YouTube limits file sizes to 100 MB, and the only way I could get it that small was by using mpeg4), but you can still get the gist of the program, despite the resulting loss of quality:

You can see more images from my April, 2006 trip on my posts about Bishan Temple and Taipei street photos: Life under the overpass.

Harvard from street level

2007-10-10T18:52:00.000-05:00

I took these shots Oct. 5, when dropping off my thesis, and attending HESA's First Friday event:

The Old Yard, seen from one of the gates on the Science Center side:

Harvard Extension School HQ -- 51 Brattle Street -- as seen from Church Street:

An all-too-familiar rush-hour scene: Harvard Square from the Mass. Ave crosswalk at Church Street:

Memorial Hall, seen from the corner of Quincy Street:

Thesis printing

2007-10-10T16:16:00.002-05:00

Last week, I picked up my printed and bound thesis from the bindery. The Harvard Extension School recommends two binderies, Wells Bindery in Waltham and another in Chelsea. I used Wells, because it is quite close to where I live. It's located off High Street in Waltham, within walking distance of Moody St.

It was interesting to see the facility. It's old -- the building, much of the printing equipment, the office furniture and even the frosted glass doors appear date from the first half of the 20th century. There are a few computer terminals lying around, but other than that, stepping into Wells is like stepping back in time 50 years.

In many ways, it's not surprising. The technologies used for binding books rely on many of the same materials -- paper, cardboard, and glue -- that have been used for centuries. And while the president of the company told me that the early years of the Internet age led to a tough business climate, things have since turned around. Several parts of the operations rely heavily on digital technologies, including submission of draft materials (in PDF format), credit-card processing, and of course, communication with clients (via email and the company website). Wells now has customers from across the country.

Even if the publication of scholarly theses drops away in the decades to come, Wells still has a solid customer base serving libraries and doing custom restorations and reproductions -- such a project might involve recreating a high school yearbook, or making a duplicate 19th-century embossed book cover, I was told.

The cost of printing and binding my thesis was actually quite reasonable. Three copies using high-quality paper (100% rag) and even some color pages (to handle the charts) cost less than $150 total. One copy has already been submitted to the Extension School ALM office, and I dropped off another in the mailbox of my thesis director. The third is in my bookshelf at home, and the document exists electronically on my personal Harvard website until I graduate (click here to download a copy -- it's the hyperlinked title).

Writing an ALM thesis: Solo effort, a personal marathon, and finding a sounding board

2007-10-04T21:07:00.000-05:00

As I described earlier in the week, there is another ALM thesis blog in progress. The other student -- a government concentrator -- is in the early stages of thesis research, but made a few statements about the personal issues involved in writing a thesis. Here is an excerpt from the "Thesis Blueprint" entry:

There is no blueprint. There is a general thesis manual. There is an advisor. There is something of a ‘broad stroke’ roadmap but the specific focus, effort, and persistence is all on the student. A solo effort throughout the early phases — reading, searching, pondering, narrowing down.

But doing a thesis isn’t only about academics; it’s also about emotions. A personal marathon. Frustration, excitement, confusion, hope, uncertainty. Did I mention doubt? So there are two parallel experiences in the thesis: the academic one and the personal one. My personal blueprint: have someone close to you who will act as a sounding board, emotional conduit, a grounding force, a reality check. Academic friends who take the same classes or professors, live nearby, hang out at Pete's Coffee and share gossip — they are the support system we lack because as older grad. students, most of us have busy lives, quite separate from both Harvard Square and Extension.

I totally agree with several points that the writer makes. The ALM thesis really is a solo effort. We're on our own 99% of the time, without peer feedback and peer pressure. We are really responsible for keeping ourselves motivated -- we don't have departmental affiliations and the regular contact with fellow grad students and professors that exist at other graduate-level programs. It is kind of like a "personal marathon," albeit one in slow-motion.

However, I would like to say that the blueprint you use doesn't have to include "someone close to you who will act as a sounding board, emotional conduit, a grounding force, a reality check." It's great if you have someone like that who is willing and able to take that role, but I would like to note that you can get by without a friend or family member to serve as a sounding board.

That said, some feedback is useful, and important. I turned to this blog, and the ALM thesis writers' group to serve as my feedback loop.

Check out the rest of the Mission Control blog, on the Harvard Law School blogging site.

UMass undergraduate sues for poor grade

2007-10-04T07:55:00.000-05:00

From the pages of the Boston Globe this morning:

[Brian] Marquis, a 51-year-old paralegal seeking bachelor's degrees in legal studies and sociology, filed a 15-count lawsuit in US District Court in Springfield in January after a teaching assistant graded a political philosophy class on a curve and turned Marquis's A-minus into a C. Marquis contends that the university violated his civil rights and contractual rights and intentionally inflicted "emotional distress." ...

... Based on that formula, Marquis figured he scored a 92.5 percent, or an A-minus. But when the Lanesborough resident checked his grade online in early January, he saw a C and e-mailed Cushing to complain.

Cushing wrote back that he graded the students more stringently on the third exam because they had had a full semester to learn how to write for a philosophy class. As a result, Cushing wrote, Marquis got an 84 for the class. But the students' numerical scores struck Cushing as too high, so he graded everyone on a curve before assigning letter grades. Marquis ended up with a C.

Yes, making a federal case out of a bad grade is ridiculous, but I wouldn't be too happy about getting a C in such circumstances, either -- it seems arbitrary and unfair.

On the other hand, the UMass ombudsman says that "faculty have their own grading scales and that one professor might view an 84 as an A-minus, while another might view it as a C," reports the Globe.

UC Berkeley's free lectures on YouTube

2007-10-03T21:26:00.000-05:00

Last year, I pointed to the University of California, Berkeley, and its efforts to spread knowledge using audio podcasts and video. Now, UC Berkeley has expanded the video offerings to YouTube and its huge audience. CNet reports that 300 hours of lectures will be posted on the school's YouTube channel. Most are "hard science" topics. Here's a sample, a 2005 lecture, "User Experience Issues in Web Search":

There's a very lively discussion thread about this effort on Slashdot. Here's what some people have to say:

Anonymous coward:

I'm surprised the internet hasn't made us reexamine the entire nature of our higher education system. Is congregating people in one spot for four years to learn something really the best way to do it? Of course there are physical things that you need access to for a lot of classes, but we could be looking at a future where education is a lot more accessible, transparent, and open. If you could sit in on lectures and classes just because they interest you, there may be a lot more people learning things and getting exposed to knowledge they otherwise wouldn't have. You're right that there would need to be some way to certify and verify things, and that's really the main strength of the current system. I can't help but thinking there's got to be a better way.

GnarlyDoug:

This is the start of education for the masses. Books are nice, but they don't convey enough information of certain types. The lectures will help go beyond that. Even barely literate people will be able to use these to learn. It will also be a huge boon to people with dyslexia and other issues. Even more important is the time-shifting aspect. Learn when you have time. Thanks to this trend a lot of people who might not have otherwise been able to get access to this type of education will now be able to do so. In time they'll probably be able to take tests as well and for very little money get a degree at their own pace and within the needs of their own life.

The exciting thing about this is that it will actually allow the internet to do something really great. Provide effective, free, and high quality education to ANYONE who can get a computer and an internet connection. Which is rapidly becoming almost everybody in the world.

GnarlyDoug again, responding to a comparison with broadcast television (e.g., Open University, early PBS programming, etc.):

The fact that a handful of people said that about TV has what to say about this argument? The technologies aren't even remotely similar. Also, unlike with TV, we are already seeing that the educational possibilities are beginning to emerge on their own. It's not ivory tower speak. It's happening.

Posting content to the internet is basically free and mostly unregulated. The content is available on demand. The internet also provides a means for feedback, chatting, and community discussions about the content to instantly spring up.

Broadcasting on the airwaves is regulated by governmental monopolies and is a scarce commodity. It is regulated, censored, and horribly expensive. No ability for feedback loops or interaction.

The internet reduces the cost of transmitting, storing, and replicating all forms of information to almost zero. Education is mainly a form of information. That is why it will become a tool of education. Even if only 0.1% are interested in using it that way, it will provide that function.

GnarlyDoug again, responding to a comment about the role of books in education:

... This is just the start. Soon these educational videos will include dynamic information. You can't show a heart pumping in a book. You can't show a sterling engine in operation in a book. It's static. With video you can show, well, video. These lectures won't stay just being a video of some professor. Eventually someone will start putting out educational video that is much richer in content and leverages what you can do with video. There are tons of things you can do with video that you can't do with a printed page.

... Thanks to the feedback loops of the internet and network effects, the best videos will be found, rated highly, and rise to the top. So the best sources of information will soon be easy to find.

The current crop of videos aren't all that important. It's what they probably portend for the future that is important. Fully dynamic, multiple approach (written, visual, auditory), interactive, free, at will education.

You can read some more 'Net reaction/regurgitation via the blogs highlighted on Techmeme.

Another ALM thesis is progress

2007-09-30T20:39:00.000-05:00

If you want to see what an early-stage ALM thesis research project looks like, you should check out the "Mission Control" blog that an ALM/Government concentrator operates over on the Harvard Law School blogging engine.

The last two entries -- Learning from others - read the theses in Grossman and First Thesis Writers Group Meeting -- remind me so much of what I was dealing with 18 months ago. This ALM student has some solid advice for anyone else getting ready to launch their thesis research, or for anyone interested in researching the use of military contractors/hired guns in Iraq -- a particularly hot topic considering the horrific incident involving Blackwater a few weeks ago.

Harvard's Office of Career Services finally opens up to the Extension School

2007-09-30T09:47:00.000-05:00

The Harvard Extension School's Career and Academic Resource Center (CARC) has scored a few wins for HES students, judging by the contents of an email that was sent out a few days ago:

Office of Career Services at Harvard (OCS)

OCS is now offering a variety of career services to all Harvard Extension School degree and certificate candidates and alumni, such as access to the reading room, University Career Action Network (a database of internship listings), Crimson Compass (a database of Harvard alumni who have volunteered to talk about their career experiences with students and other alumni), and CareerBeam (a comprehensive online career research and resource tool). Visit the OCS website, for more information about the career services, http://www.ocs.fas.harvard.edu/students/dce-students.htm. ...

In addition, candidates and alumni can meet with Assistant Director Linda Spencer on a referral basis. Individual career counseling services can include Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (a personality assessment tool), resume/cover letter critiques, and mock video interviews. To schedule an appointment, download the OCS Information and Referral form, under CARC forms (available online at http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2007-08/forms/) and fax it to the Undergraduate Degree Office.

I highlight this news about the OCS, because until relatively recently this important FAS office only serviced students from Harvard College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Even though the Extension School also falls under the FAS umbrella, its students were not welcome to take advantages of the many services available there. I sent the OCS an email asking about this policy a few years ago and never even received a reply.

However, I must note that the OCS has not completely opened up to the Extension School community; besides the limited access to Linda Spencer, the CARC email notes "Due to specific funding regulations, OCS is NOT able to offer DCE students on-campus recruiting services."

Still, it's a start.

Incidentally, the CARC email has a lot of information about other HES/DCE workshops and activities that fall outside of the OCS services. You can learn about them on the CARC website.

Tool, math rock, and the Fibonacci Sequence

2007-09-27T19:37:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Daniel Miessler's blog comes this YouTube video, featuring the music of one of my favorite heavy rock bands, Tool, and a suggestion that the one of the tracks on Lateralus was composed with the Fibonacci Sequence in mind:

The author of the YouTube video is not the first person to make this connection. I never thought about the meter used in the lyrics, but I have heard the band's music called "math rock" before. I first started getting into Tool about seven or eight years ago, and I probably conducted half of my thesis research while listening to Lateralus and 10,000 Days. At 10:30 in the evening, when I was plowing through scores of database searches and manually updating my spreadsheets, having Tool playing in the background could keep me going for another hour or two. The music was methodical, ethereal, and strangely comforting. The ritual I developed required me to keep studying until the last song on the album (either Faaip De Oaid on Lateralus or Viginti Tres on 10,000 Days) had faded. Then I could shut down the computer and go to sleep ... or put on some classical music and keep going.

While I'm on the topic, here's a playlist of the albums I regularly listened to while working on the thesis -- as well as music that I found impossible to study to.

John Harvard gets a Halo

2007-09-26T18:21:00.000-05:00

I've been following the Halo 3 hype through my Computerworld blog, but never expected something like this:

Crave and Joystiq have more.

It's not the first time something like this has happened to poor old John Harvard. The MIT/Harvard rivalry goes back decades, but unfortunately the MIT kids always seem to think up the best pranks, which sometimes even manage to draw Yale into the fray.

Thesis update: Done!

2007-09-17T21:49:00.002-05:00

I can't believe it. I'm done.

Done!

Here's how it went down. My thesis director, Professor Alastair Iain Johnston, signed off in the late spring. I then had to go through a few formatting revisions with my Extension School research advisor, Dr. Donald Ostrowski. That took the better part of the summer, in part because he has a lot of other work to do, and I was in Asia for State of Play and a family trip to Taiwan for two weeks in August.

Finally, I got back the paper drafts at the beginning of September. I input the few remaining corrections -- adding a few missing periods in footnotes, and correcting some minor spacing issues -- and then sent the PDF file to Wells Bindery in Waltham, one of the binderies that Harvard uses for thesis and dissertation work. The hard copies won't be ready for a few weeks, but the content is final. Here's the complete text of the final grade report, written by Prof. Johnston:

This is a first-rate thesis. Lamont worked extraordinarily hard to develop a range of sophisticated quantitative content analysis methods in order to test their usefulness in adjudicated academic debates about the nature of Chinese foreign policy. In particular he used these methods to test whether Chinese diplomacy toward Vietnam from the late 1970s to the end of the Cold War was based on anti-Soviet motivations or based on distinct concerns about Vietnamese influence in Southeast Asia. Lamont did an excellent job of seeking out and using information about content analysis techniques from a number of top experts on content analysis at Harvard and elsewhere. he showed a great deal of creativity in playing around and perfecting the methods and he also demonstrated acute sensitivity to the analytical downsides of these methods.

I've temporarily archived it at the following location:

Making a Case for Quantitative Research in the Study of Modern Chinese History: The New China News Agency and Chinese Policy Views of Vietnam, 1977-1993

I hope to identify a permanent electronic archiving solution in the next few months (Update: The thesis is now available through UMI/ProQuest). A bound copy will be sent to the Extension School as well, and I assume it will either be filed in Grossman Library or the Archives.

There are a lot of people who I'd like to acknowledge here, in addition to Prof. Johnston and Dr. Ostrowski. Here are some brief summaries of how they contributed to my research:

Drs. Doug and Joe Bond of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs: The "Bond brothers" taught my graduate proseminar in 2003, and introduced me to modern mass media content analysis techniques.

Sally Hadden, Associate Professor of History and Courtesy Professor of Law at Florida State University and a Harvard Summer School instructor in the history of the Old South: She taught me how to prepare high-quality précis, which have been hugely useful in documenting the literature used in my research and cited in my thesis.

Philip Kuhn, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations: I took two classes with Prof. Kuhn that relate to modern Chinese history (China in Modern Times in 2003, and Modern Chinese Emigration in 2005), and he was the first Harvard instructor to evaluate a CCA that I had designed on my own based on NCNA/Xinhua data.

Will Lowe, formerly of the Weatherhead Institute's Identity Project, and now of the University of Nottingham: I never spoke with Will in person, but I have communicated with him by email several times. His free, open-source text analysis program, Yoshikoder, was one of the three software tools that proved instrumental to my research (the others were Excel and LexisNexis Academic, but I don't know who to thank for those!)

There are two other constituencies I'd like to thank here. One is my family, including my parents. But my wife deserves an extra-special thanks. I'll excerpt from the dedication that appears on page viii of my thesis, which sums up the sense of appreciation -- and love -- I have for her:

I would like to thank my wife Nicole, who has been the most patient and supportive witness to my academic journey over the past four years. There have been hundreds of nights and weekends that I have spent in my study, conducting research or writing, time that I otherwise could have spent with her and our two small children, yet she never once protested. I hope that I can reciprocate some day, but in the meantime, I would like to dedicate this thesis to her.

Lastly, I'd like to thank all of you. When I started Harvard Extended back in May of 2005, I had no idea that it would attract so much interest: The hundreds of pages on this blog have been viewed more than 100,000 times (my counter reads 85,891, but I didn't activate it until April 2006, nearly one year after I started it). Thousands of people have seen it. Many have been drive-bys or lurkers, but some of you have left comments or sent emails to give support. I've even met a few of you in person.

The words of encouragement have been important, but knowing that I have had this audience has been a strong motivator as well. I would have done the thesis without the blog, but I probably would have been much slower if it hadn't been for all of you looking over my virtual shoulder. Regular updates were required, and this really forced me to consider the progress of my thesis and research on a weekly or monthly basis, and plan the next steps, even if I wanted to procrastinate or take a break from my studies. So thank you, thank you, thank you!

I'll continue to maintain this blog for my next (and last) Extension School class: Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext. It starts tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Soccer balls and cultural misunderstandings

2007-09-16T17:49:00.000-05:00

Maybe handing out soccer balls is the wrong approach to winning hearts and minds in Iraq. Wired's Danger Room blog filed this entry from Fallujah:

The first thing Mac [McCallister, an academic working as a consultant for the Marines] tells military leaders coming into the area is to focus on shame and honor, not hearts and minds.

“I, as an individual, may want that kid to have a soccer ball. But consider the effect, okay?” he says.

Shame and honor are “limited resources,” Mac explains. “They’re exchanged like currency. And it’s a zero sum game. If I embarrass you, I take some of your honor, and you give me some of your shame. Now you want to do something to get it back.

“The father, off to the side, is thinking, ‘Hey, that’s my job.’ So you’ve shamed him. He might also know that the kid doesn’t deserve it. Shamed him again. And if you give the ball to the little kid, he could get beat up, since the bigger ones prey on the littler ones. More shame. So does that father grab an Ak-47 and do a drive-by, to get back some of his honor?”

Cultural gaffes committed by foreigners visiting a new territory are nothing new -- in China and Taiwan, some basic ones include not understanding "face" or guanxi. What's surprising about this (if it's an accurate assessment) is we don't have a handle on this aspect of tribal culture after four years of occupation -- and it's a life or death situation.

Pulling the plug on the Chinese Internet

2007-09-08T22:53:00.000-05:00

Yesterday on Computerworld, I blogged about China's latest preemptive Internet damage-control mechanism: Pulling the plug on entire data centers. Here's what I had to say about the episode, and its causes:

Despite regularly updating and strengthening the rules that govern the press and Internet communications, free-wheeling discussion on a wide range of topics continues to flourish.

Until now. Authorities in China have done something which I previously considered very unlikely: They are actually pulling the plug on the Internet. Or at least parts of it -- the troublesome parts. Data centers are literally being taken offline, because "inappropriate content" has been found on some servers hosted in them. Of course, such actions affect other Websites whose servers are hosted in these facilities, and irritate Chinese users.

Inappropriate content is nothing new to the Chinese Internet. This begs the question: Why are Chinese authorities taking such drastic steps to remove this content from the Internet? The reason is the upcoming Communist Party Congress in Beijing, which, according to China's official news agency, is slated to "mobilize the entire Party and the people of all ethnic groups to emancipate their minds, stick to the reform and opening up, advance scientific development, promote social harmony and strive together for a new victory over the building of a well-off society in an all-round way and the new development of building socialism with Chinese characteristics." Some highlights of the event include electing a new "Central Commission for Discipline Inspection," listening to endless speeches, joining banquets, and doing whatever else senior Party members like to do when they get together. While undoubtedly extremely boring, it's not that much different than what usually happens at these gatherings, which take place every five years.

Except for one thing: The Internet in China is not just an irritant anymore. It's a force to be reckoned with. There are more than 100 million additional Chinese Internet users in 2007 than there were during the last Party congress in 2002, and this population is far more comfortable using blogs, forums, and other tools (ranging from poems delivered by mobile phones to online games) to protest various domestic and international issues.

Beijing is not taking any chances. The government has the authority and the will to pull the plug on the Internet, even if it means angering their own people and upsetting 'Net businesses across China.

This type of heavy-handed approach can't be used whenever China gets nervous about discussion and criticism of the Party and state -- it will only frustrate more people, and make the government look even worse. Nevertheless, we may see similar actions next year. That's because the Chinese propaganda apparatus has another major event to worry about -- the 2008 Beijing Olympics -- and they don't want negative public buzz marring the competition. China is trying to clean up the city in time for the arrival of hordes of foreigners and the international media, but they will have a much tougher time cleaning up the Internet.

Iraq war blogs: Another ALM thesis blog, and Deeper Than War

2007-09-08T10:59:00.000-05:00

There's a new ALM thesis blog in town: International Security. It's written by an ALM Government concentrator who is in the early stages of thesis preparation -- namely, gathering research. I've been there, and it's tough, but if you're enthusiastic about your topic, ready to do a lot of reading, and organized, you'll do well.

From reading the entries on the blog, it's clear that this candidate is very seriously exploring how private security firms operate in Iraq -- there are entries about connecting with a former CENTCOM general, attending a RAND conference, and lists of online and print references.

One online resource that I recommended to this candidate was a blog called Deeper Than War. It was a surprise for me to learn about this blog a few weeks ago -- it's written by a high school buddy, Tyler Boudreau, who I haven't seen for years. He complete a combat tour in Iraq, and he's been blogging about it, and the aftermath.

A little backstory: Like a lot of guys in our group, he was interested in the military. Almost all of us were Boy Scouts. We obsessed about Vietnam. Five or six eventually enlisted and/or became police officers, including Tyler, who joined the Marine Corps. He rose through the ranks, and was prepared to turn the Marines into a career.

But then he went to Iraq. And it was disturbing. He left the Marines after his tour, and is still coming to grips with what he experienced:

My heart pumps out a lot of rage since coming home from war, and I ride the rapid blood streams like a lone paddler, thrashing desperately to stay afloat. Sometimes I spew a head full of turmoil at the passing scenery, and sometimes I manage a little stoicism, but I’m angry all the time, and what I’ve found most frustrating is that I don’t know who I should be angry at.

Later in the same post:

... You can’t have swords without bad guys. You can’t have dress blues. You can’t have valor. You can’t have medals. You can’t have sacrifice in battle. You can’t have armies. You can’t have patriotism. You can’t have any of it without bad guys. We need bad guys. The preservation of an age-old, time-honored, sacred institution depends on it. We love this institution more than we love our own freedom. This institution is war. So who are the bad guys?

Tyler is an amazing writer -- reading his posts, I was immediately reminded of Chickenhawk and The Things They Carried. He has a lot to say about military life, readjusting to civilian life, and the policies of our government and military commanders -- issues that everyone should be concerned with, considering the terrible toll this war has wrought.

An ALM student in Africa: A visit to the Intel School in Moshi, Kilimanjaro

2007-09-07T21:21:00.000-05:00

I take for granted that Harvard Extended readers have a basic understanding of computing technologies, own their own computers, and have some form of home Internet access. It can therefore be quite sobering when you read about the relatively limited impact of computers in parts of the developing world, despite the intense desire of the people there to learn more about them. Rick, the ALM Management student who maintains the "Once More Unto The Breach" blog, has shared a few observations about African computer use based on his travels around East Africa, and his visit to a private university, the Intel School in Moshi, Kilimanjaro:

Half the reason I was asked to come though was because the students and staff really wanted to see an actual Macintosh. They had all heard of them and wanted to learn about them, but they have never seen one and have no way to acquire one. I spent the last hour of class doing tricks on my Macbook Pro. It was amazing. This computer impresses people back home, so you can imagine the reactions I got here. Every time I clicked on something, ten people would go "oooooh!"

After class, they were so enthusiastic that they were following me out the door asking me questions. One really smart man who asked a lot of questions even got my e-mail address as I was walking out. He doesn't have internet. He's getting my address so he can pay to be at an internet cafe just to ask me questions through e-mail.

Stories like this make me think that the One Laptop Per Child project can potentially have an enormous impact in rural Africa and other parts of the world where electricity, Internet communications, and access to computers is limited.

Quick Yoshikoder/General Inquirer update

2007-09-07T20:29:00.000-05:00

In August, I described how I was constructing a modified General Inquirer negative dictionary to use with Yoshikoder, in order to perform a computer content analysis of press coverage of Second Life. I actually published the results on one of my other blogs, I, Lamont:

So, what does the data mean? The BW articles that were published in the latter part of 2006 generally had a lower percentage of negative terms than those published in the first four months of 2007. This agrees with the anecdotal observations by myself and a few other sources that BW hyped Second Life in late 2006.

However, the negative rates from the early part of 2006 were surprisingly high. In May 2006, the rate approached 5%, and that was the same month BusinessWeek made the famous pronouncement that "Virtual worlds abound in useful business applications." The analysis suggests that there was actually a stronger negative thread running through the BW coverage during this time, although that apparently dropped away during the summer, when the negative rate dipped to about 2.5% in August.

There are more data points, an Excel chart, and some notes about why I think the quality of the Yoshikoder-derived data quality is suspect over on my other blog.

Back from State of Play V: Conference recap

2007-09-04T23:12:00.000-05:00

For the past two weeks, I've been meaning to write about the State of Play V conference in Singapore. I gave a brief report about the opening night's entertainment (a documentary about Second Life) but I also wanted to talk about what happened over the following two days of the conference. It was the first time I attended State of Play, and it really was an eye-opening experience for me.

I only become aware of the extensive academic interest in virtual worlds relatively recently, through my Terra Nova experience, and reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, R.L. Taylor's Play Between Worlds, and Nick Yee's MMORPG research. Many virtual world researchers were on hand to discuss their work in Singapore. My panel included Henrik Bennetsen, a Stanford researcher who has spent the better part of six months inside Second Life; Aleks Krotoski, a Guardian columnist and University of Surrey PhD candidate who is studying social networks and online social influence; and anthropologist Thomas Malaby, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is in the midst of writing an ethnography of Linden Lab and its relationship to Second Life. I also met Ted Tschang, a Singapore Management University professor who has conducted some very interesting research into video game development.

The panel went well. It was entitled "Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants", and was described as follows:

As the virtual world landscape matures, industry and academic researchers are developing systematic methods of measuring user behaviors and understanding resident attitudes. This panel explores the value of quantitative and qualitative approaches to such investigations.

SoP V co-organizer Dan Hunter led the panel, which was in presentation format with a Q&A at the end. The others gave recaps of their respective research methodologies. I talked about the qualitative and quantitative approaches used by journalists, speaking from my perspective as a Computerworld editor and graduate student conducting media-related research at the Harvard Extension School. My main points: There is some stellar coverage relating to virtual worlds in the popular press and industry publications (I pointed to Wired and the New Yorker's Will Wright interview), but for the most part, journalists are quite limited in terms of the amount of time they can spend conducting research, restrictions relating to length and editorial focus, and problems finding and using quantitative research. Sensationalism, generalization, and poor use of statistical data are problems in many countries. I was able to give several examples from the American, Chinese, and Taiwanese media.

I concluded that the news media will play a major role in shaping the attitudes and understanding of the 90+ percent of the world's population that currently has no concept of social or gaming virtual worlds. I also revealed the results of some database searches I conducted, which support this conclusion: According to LexisNexis Academic, the number of references to "virtual world" or "virtual worlds" in "major US and world publications" (consisting of English-language newspapers and magazines from all parts of the world) has trended as follows, over the last three years:

July 2005: 45 results
July 2006: 81 results
July 2007: 199 results

I also searched Factiva for 虚拟世界 (xu1ni3shi4jie4), the simplified Chinese for "virtual world") in all languages, all companies, and all regions (which indexed results from publications in China, plus a few in Hong Kong and Singapore), and came up with the following numbers:

All of 2004: 271 results
All of 2005: 553 results
All of 2006: 624 results
2007 to June 30: 472 results

Assuming that the higher numbers reflect increased coverage, as opposed to the databases including more news sources, the data indicates that more people are indeed being exposed to virtual world-related concepts through the mass media. It will be interesting to see how their perspectives of virtual worlds and acceptable behavior in these worlds is shaped by what they see in the news in the years to come.

Besides the academics, State of Play V had large legal and industry contingents. The legal focus should come as no surprise, considering the history of the conference and its organizers, which include the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, Yale Law School, and New York Law School. The industry representation was dominated by people and companies working with social virtual worlds -- Second Life, There.com, HiPihi -- as well as several marketing and consulting firms. I've already talked about There.com on Computerworld, and hope to discuss HiPiHi on a later post here or on my Computerworld blog.

There are also supposed to be "video timecapsules" posted to the SoP V website at some future date. Henrik and I taped an interesting, half-hour discussion about Second Life, emerging software and hardware technologies, and issues relating to media coverage of virtual worlds. I'll post a link when it goes online.

Many thanks to Dan Hunter, Aaron Delwiche, and the staff of Harvard's Berkman Center for making my trip to Singapore possible!

When statistical analysis gets scary

2007-08-28T20:18:00.000-05:00

Statistical analysis finds evidence of human-to-human bird flu transmission, reports the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center:

The researchers based their findings on a cluster of eight flu cases within an extended family in northern Sumatra. Using a computerized disease-transmission model that took into account the number of infected cases, the number of people potentially exposed, the viral-incubation period and other parameters, the researchers produced the first statistical confirmation of humans contracting the disease from each other rather than from infected birds.

The cluster contained a chain of infection that involved a 10-year-old boy who probably caught the virus from his 37-year-old aunt, who had been exposed to dead poultry and chicken feces, the presumed source of infection. The boy then probably passed the virus to his father. The possibility that the boy infected his father was supported by genetic sequencing data. Other person-to-person transmissions in the cluster are backed up with statistical data. All but one of the flu victims died, and all had had sustained close contact with other ill family members prior to getting sick -- a factor considered crucial for transmission of this particular flu strain.

The close cousin of this type of research and analysis is predictive analytics -- and I find it somewhat alarming that a Google search for the following terms:

predictive analytics disease

.... turns up 209,000 English pages.

A note from a Harvard Extended reader

2007-08-25T19:58:00.000-05:00

Since starting this blog, I have gotten a regular stream of correspondence from people who have questions about the Extension School. In a typical month I'll get about two prospective students contacting me with specific questions about the school, the ALM program, and occasionally the ALB program. I used to report these conversations, and last year I started an interview series with several current ALM students, but the volume of correspondence got to be too large, and my time too tight, to blog about them all.

However, I thought I would post this message from someone who has been following Harvard Extended for several years:

My wife and I are planning to move to Boston from Los Angeles. For the last 2 years I've been reading about the Harvard Extension School, your blogspot, and the forum that you created. It has been a great resource for me, in terms of weighing whether or not I would want to go to the Extension School or not. I truly appreciate all the information you have put out there, and I just wanted to personally thank you.

It's interesting to see how readers have turned to the Harvard Extended blog for information and even inspiration. I started the blog for research-related reasons, and to chronicle my experience in the Extension School's ALM program, but for a few readers it has helped them make major life decisions.

It's a good feeling knowing that I've helped people in this way, but it's also a little unsettling. Changing one's career or academic path is very common in our society, but moving across state lines -- or across the country -- to attend the Harvard Extension School takes things to a different level. We local students can drop out of a program, or take a break from studies without any major impact on our jobs or family lives, but the folks who move to Massachusetts have already quit their jobs and said goodbye to family and friends. They have made a huge commitment, and it's much harder for them to stop or take a break. I really do admire them -- I think the ALM program is fabulous and worth all of the time, effort, and tuition I have put into it since 2003, but I am not sure I would be willing or able to quit my job or relocate my family to take part.

One other note: I would like to point out to the author of this email and other readers that if "the forum you've created" refers to the Extension Student online forum, that was actually created by someone else -- see the interview with him here.

Super Typhoon!

2007-08-17T21:28:00.000-05:00

Taiwan is mostly shut down today, thanks to typhoon Sepat, which has been classed as a "Super Typhoon." Top speeds are 209 km/h, which puts it in the upper range of a category 3 hurricane, according to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. In the north part of the island, we're getting rain and wind, but lots of breaks in the weather, too. I went out yesterday afternoon and got totally drenched, but in the evening there was a break in the clouds, and I could actually see stars. This morning, there have been a few intense, gusty showers, but it seems to be weakening. Down south, where the typhoon made landfall, the conditions will be worse -- I expect the newscasts this evening will have lots of footage of flooding, landslides, and washed-out mountain roads.

Tomorrow morning, I travel to Singapore for State of Play V -- I hope air travel will be back to normal by then!