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I ran across an article on Chronice.com today that exemplifies my research on the Metaverse. During my inquiries and publications I have come to understand the many difficulties associated with the Second life environment as it relates to educational domains. This was evident in this article published yesterday on Chronicle.com. What I found most interesting about it is the fact that many universities are leaning to more proprietary solutions by building thier own systems and environments, and new providrs have identified the problem and are now beginning to address the core issues centric to educational initatives, both from a user and technological perspective. Given my affection and support for all things open-source and the immersive web, I find the trend moving in an ideal direction.

Recently, I have been barraged with a number questions regarding why I choose to pursue a doctorate when I already have a full-time tenure-track position in academia. These questions are phrased in a multitude of ways, including “if tenure means you have a lifelong job, does this not make your PhD irrelevant?”, “if the degree is not a requirement for tenure, then why not get tenure first and forget about the PhD?”, and my favorite “what do you stand to gain from a doctorate program that you cannot gain from your professorship?”. So, I have decided to post my rationale here in the hopes of providing clarification for the questioning, curious masses.

Allow me to begin with some background information. Tenure is defined as “guaranteed permanent employment, esp. as a teacher or professor, after a probationary period“. Under this definition, once can easily assume that once tenured a professor has a job for life, regardless of circumstances. Although this may be accurate in specific cases, the true intent of tenure is not to give someone a lifelong job. Rather, it is to provide one with a degree of freedom and protection to pursue academic inquiry without censure or attack from biased groups or individuals. It is necessary and beneficial to the human condition to protect and respect the discovery and dissemination of new and existing knowledge. This can only be achieved if proven teachers and researchers know the knowledge they acquire and communicate to others will not place them into a compromising position or lead to tribulation. This is why tenure is important.

In order to earn tenure one must be proven to meet a high standard of excellence as a teacher and a scholar. The tenure process is a arduous undertaking where candidates are given a finite amount of time to develop a body of work that exhibits a degree of expertise and ability to discover knowledge and disseminate it to others through teaching and research (given the process is facilitated with due diligence). Tenure has three official areas; teaching and learning, discovery/scholarship, and service/outreach (the fourth unofficial area is “colleaguality” – or the ability to get along with your colleagues and peers). Requirements may include developing outstanding teaching skills validated via tangible assessments on a multitude of levels, publishing books, chapters, articles, and papers in respected peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and providing service to local, regional, national, and international organizations and societies. All of this must tie in with one another into a focused whole, documented for senior faculty to review and critique year after year after year. The process is political, subjective and amorphous in nature. Survival is dependent on pure academic talent, an honest work ethic, and most of all outstanding people skills just to name a few.

Earning a doctoral degree is relatively similar to earning tenure. However, the intention of a doctorate education is very different. A doctorate is not designed for a specific position. Instead, the academic rigor of earning a doctorate is intended to expose and challenge you to your fullest intellectual potential in ways that you have not previously imagined, and this manifests through the academic work undertaken and the relationship with your advisors. Earning a doctorate is a test of your ability to discover and apply your intellectual capacity. It is an intimate, personal challenge whose benefits are unmeasurable, and so is the effort to achieve it.

Now to the point. My rationale for earning a doctorate degree is contrastive from tenure in two distinct ways. First, it provides me with an opportunity to further enhance and extend my ability as a scholar and educator beyond that of my professorship. Learning is a lifelong process that never concludes and need not be stagnated by one’s environment. By engaging in continued scholarship outside of my professorship, I will only improve my ability as a teacher and educator. Second, the doctorate will prepare me to be a scholar who’s contributions will last well beyond my professional life, and therefore one that may also outlast any professorship that I may hold.

So, in short…tenure may provide me with the freedom, security and validity regarding specific research endeavors that I may undertake,but it may not fully provide me with the ability or opportunities to grow and expand intellectually over my entire life. Thus, this is why I asked for more.

In this exercise, a subject was asked to construct a concept map of a topic. According to Eric Plotnick, concept maps are graphical representations where points (nodes) represent concepts and links (lines) represent the relationships between concepts. This concept map is intended to illustrate the causes for the current economic crisis in the US and how they are related. The map consists of three general cause areas; financial, societal, and governmental. The subject was instructed to provide specific reasons under each area and add new ones if needed.

Based on this map, the subject refers to several underlying causes for the crisis. Profit-driven mortgage brokers and lending institutions sold bad housing loans to unqualified home buyers leading to an inflated housing market. The lack of governmental regulation of lending practices allowed these institutions to manipulate consumers into signing for bad mortgages, to which underwriters repackaged and sold to investment portfolios on the global stock market as securities. Meanwhile, union practices, corporate outsourcing and overspending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which contributed to less support for domestic programs that could have created new jobs and business opportunities for American workers) lead to more domestic jobs being eliminated here in the US, resulting in an increase in domestic foreclosures. This led to a bust in the housing boom and falling home values, leading to a severe loss of value in mortgage-backed securities and a global financial crisis. As a result, to reduce losses banks and financial institutions stopped lending to consumers creating an economic recession. Combined with global markets writing off devalued securities backed by bad US mortgages, the recession has expanded into a full economic crisis.

The map above was created using MindJet MindManager.

In this experiment, a list of twenty word was read to a subject, each word item one at a time with two seconds between each word ( Paper, Seat, Tire, Love, Beach, Analysis, conjunction, brush, chairman, accurate, woods, green, hunger, gift, keyboard, number, bottle, jogging, wheel, system). Once I had read the list to the subject, I ask the subject to recall them. The subject was able to successfully recall 17 of 20 words, in exact order. I then told the subject the experiment was over and ended the session.

Three hours later, I contacted the subject via phone call and asked them to repeat the list of words I read to them. The subject only could recall and recite back 11 of 20 words, with five being exactly as a read them. The subject mostly remembered associative items from the list of word, like bottle-jogging, paper-seat, and keyboard, number. The other items were recalled in no specific order.

In summary, the subject seemed to keep items in long-term memory by forming associations that allowed the subject to remember specific words more. When a specific order was required, the subject failed to remember a vast majority of the items read.

Unlike linear media, hypermedia provides an effective method for learning via distributed, coordinated interaction while facilitating our ability to capture and communicate knowledge (Dede, Palumbo 1991). Hypermedia’s structure allows a user to browse a diverse and complex set of information and content and make associations between concepts not facilitated by traditional, linear methods. The cognitive load is much less when learning with hypermedia due to its associative and nonlinear nature. Linear media requires a user to learn concepts in a direct manner, usually from a top-down or bottom-up approach, which can be less effective for learning and memory functions.

Ideals for effectively comparing hypermedia and linear learning may include pattern matching, memory function, brainstorming, mind mapping, and re-contextualization. Each of these theories is associated with learning and cognition, and can be compared in tests with users on multiple levels of intelligence. Questions that may need additional or constant exploration include:

1. What contexts do humans retain more information using hypermedia versus linear media?
2. Can hypermedia or linear media improve cognition function across an array of contexts?
3. How is memory function associated with hyper and linear media? Which media form improves or limits core memory ability?

Of course, these are just a few initial ideas for dialogue. This topic is both diverse and deep in subject and theory, as well in the applied technologies that enable it.