Starbucks U.

When I was in college, back around the dawn of time, the central gathering place was the school coffee shop, the Gizmo. Constructed like a ski lodge of stone and timbers, it had a fireplace conversation pit and a lower level with big windows that looked out over a patio that became a skating rink in winter. It was a cozy, friendly place, perfect for meeting after class or on a study break from the library. Discussion of weighty topics and frivolity were present in equal measure. When I get that warm, alma mater feeling, I always picture the Gizmo.

As a young person in the late 60s and early 70s, I was involved in the intentional community movement. My hope was to help build a community that was designed for and around education: the activities necessary for the community's development and survival, e.g. planning land use, growing food, building structures, developing support industries, etc., would be designed to educate in a cross-disciplinary, experiential, project-oriented way, obviating the need for schools as distinct institutions. Unfortunately, I lacked the charisma to influence community development, and intentional communities were generally too poorly funded to accomplish anything, including, in most cases, survival. Too bad we didn't think of inventing Starbucks.

Later in life I contemplated a different take on the same idea. In this scenario, a school would attempt to attract a few small businesses and teachers with research grants. The students would be the workers and research assistants, thus helping generate an income that would make tuition unnecessary. If they were having fun, the students would work hard to keep the school afloat. It was just an idea. I never took it anywhere.

Starbucks' remarkable commitment to tuition for its workers to complete college degrees online has caused me to think about such things again. Although I've been been interested in online education as long as there's been an internet, and although the ubiquity of free online courses is widely regarded as making higher education available to the masses for the first time, I have some issues the idea that physical colleges might become irrelevant. In the first place, I don't think replacing many diverse voices with a few loud ones, however respected those might be, is a good idea. 

Even if courses don't serve thousands of students, there's a disconnect between what I found valuable about my college education and what MOOCs provide. Every bit as much as the lectures, my college education came from interactions with my fellow students. Online education tries to emulate this with social media, including video  conferencing, and perhaps this is enough, but I doubt it. Online sex may be exciting, but until virtual reality becomes a lot more sophisticated than it is now, it doesn't strike me as a good substitute for the real thing. In the same way, doing anything with one's fellows online lacks a dimension found in physical proximity. So are we stuck with paying a lot of money to live in dorms in order to get the college experience? Maybe not. Maybe Starbucks is onto something even more than they know.


If you work at Starbucks and live at home, taking online courses, you will be in physical proximity with fellow students. You'll be doing things together. Sure, it's just making and serving coffee, but we've probably all had a lot of fun with our fellow workers while doing nothing more challenging (and besides, that's not as easy as it looks). You may be taking some of the same courses as others, so you can discuss and study together. Working at Starbucks and taking online courses just might be a lot more like going to college than taking the same courses by yourself at home, because, although you could hang out with friends in the latter case, you and your friends wouldn't be doing the same thing together. I think that makes a big difference. 

If other companies would build on the Starbucks model, making a positive contribution to education rather than demanding breaks on education-funding taxes for building in a given town and then bitching because American schools don't turn out enough qualified tech workers, maybe an ecosystem of work/college environments could develop. 

When I was in college, ideas were encountered in the classroom, but  got discussed, refined,  and tested in the coffee shop. Maybe they can be again.

I Should Have Thought of Homeschoolers

Created mainly for the MOOC  E-learning and Digital Cultures, (#edcmooc), I'll use this space to make public the musings on and around education that I've been jotting down privately for years. Since it turns out that most of these thoughts have already been expressed better by others, I'll be linking to those expressions as well. Although I've  managed a website since 1997 and started blogs before over the years, I never really took time to understand how blogs work (what the hell are "permalinks"?) so bear with me.

"Twenty years of schoolin'
and they put you on the day shift."

For most of my working life, I've been in publishing, in the restaurant business, and in the nursery (plant) business. It's been a great many years since I attempted to teach in a classroom, and those attempts were complete failures. After an academic career aimed at teaching, I turned out to be a really lousy teacher, and I've spent the last 40 years trying to figure out why, by examining my own experiences and those of my kids, as well as by reading theorists. I've come to the somewhat satisfying conclusion that it wasn't entirely my fault; I was working in a system whose definition of education was too narrow. I didn't have the personality for the "jug to mug" model, in which the teacher pours knowledge into the students. While that process is an important part of education, it's not as important as the system makes it out to be. There's plenty of room, and need, for other approaches, and certainly for other teaching, or mentoring, styles. My main hope now is to help flesh out the ways in which those other styles and approaches can be combined into a system that replaces the old one. And do I think it will have to be replaced, rather than reformed. The traditional system of education has too much inertia for tinkering around the edges to have much effect. It needs to come down, and I think it will, eventually, from its own weight and pressures from newly-available alternatives.

I also want to explore ways in which corporations, which have pretty much usurped our democracy, can be kept in a subordinate position with regard to education. Private enterprise is fine; a feudal system isn't. Many people want to reduce the role of government in education, and it does seem to me that the government should guarantee equity in opportunity and then stay out of the way. But what many anti-government critics fail to understand is that the government is mostly under the control of corporate enterprise. It's a two-headed snake, and it doesn't matter which head bites you.

I'll be commenting on and listening to others on issues such as how and why to implement truly student-centered education, how doing and making can be a primary means of learning, not secondary to the accumulation of information, how cheating....er, collaboration and teamwork can take precedence over individual accomplishment and reward, how assessment can be done without recourse to one-size-fits-all standards, and how technology, from MOOCS to mobile phones, can help form a new system, as opposed to putting the old one in new containers. Other than that, I haven't much to talk about.