Week 6/7-ish of Composition I

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Steve Krause

I actually don’t have too much to report about the Duke Composition I class because, well, not much has been going on in it lately– other than me not getting some things done that I should have gotten done.  Nothing is really different; there is just more of it. More on this below, but just to get repetitive: it still feels very anonymous and locked in lost time to me.  When a class like this is taking place face to face and in a small group, the interaction becomes critical to the whole point of the class.  When that’s not there, well, what’s the point?

But first, many MANY MOOC article links and the like, so many I’ll just mostly link here:

  • I was going to post this list of links and my latest response to the Duke MOOC earlier this week, but I got distracted and busy with other things.  I’m glad I waited now because just the other day from CHE comes “Why Professors at San Jose State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC” by Steve Kolowich.  Go read the whole thing– well worth it– but to summarize:  faculty in Philosophy at SJSU (which MOOC followers will recall is one of the first universities in the U.S. to very publicly incorporate MOOCs into engineering courses) have refused to teach a philosophy course with an edX MOOC developed by Harvard’s Michael Sandel because the SJSU faculty see MOOCs as a tool to replace them, and they go further to suggest that Sandel and “professors who develop MOOCs are complicit in how public universities might use them.” Sandel wrote this response where he claims to know “very little” about what edX was going to do with his course and where he says he “The last think I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions.” Three observations/tangents here:
    • Alert readers will recognize that Michael Sandel is the guy that Thomas Friedman has a middle-school crush on in this column from March where he once again spouts off crazy stuff about MOOCs and transforming education.
    • I’ve been raising the concern about MOOCs from elite institutions having the effect of further marginalizing the likes of SJSU (and EMU) for quite some time.
    • You know, I’m not going to say that Sandel is lying in his response where he says he had no idea how edX might try to use his online course materials. But either Sandel is not being entirely truthful or he is not quite as brilliant and broad of a thinker as Friedman and the folks at edX might think.
  • “I’m Failing My MOOC” by John Warner, from Inside Higher Ed and also about the same Duke Composition I course.  I mostly agree with Warner’s main review: the content of the MOOC is okay to pretty good, but “content by itself is a very limited part of what matters in terms of teaching and learning.”
  • “Students Avoid ‘Difficult’ Online Courses, Study Finds” in CHE by Ann Schnobelen. I don’t know if this is really about MOOCs and I don’t know if this is really about the kinds of online courses I teach, but basically, the study (with only 46 students) suggests that students pick classes to take online that they find easy to “teach themselves.” I can see the point and see how it connects with the potential role of MOOCs, but in my experience, most of my students who choose to take classes online because of how it fits into their schedules and lives.  The most typical student in my undergrad online courses are women (single or not) with babies or very young children at home.
  • “MOOCs and the Quality Question” by Ronald Legon, an Inside Higher Ed piece about the evolving nature of MOOCs. The term “MOOC 2.0″ comes up, which strikes me as a tad premature.
  • “Of Machine Guns and MOOCs: 21st Century Engineering Disasters” by Pat Lockley at Hybrid Pedagogy.  It’s kind of an interesting analogy, but I’m not sure it’s an argument that really holds together for me.
  • “The War on the Humanities has Three Fronts (Part 1: The Right Wing),” a post on Karen Michalson’s blog.  I think Michalson has a lot of good points here about how things like MOOCs are favored by the right wing (which generally is not that crazy about paying for this pesky “public” education in the first place) and she links to a lot of good stuff. The problem though is she avoids the hard to escape reality that MOOCs in higher ed are getting the most traction in Democrat-thick California.
  • “The World is Not Flat” by Ry Rivard is an interesting (albeit long) InsideHigher Ed piece that makes a pretty compelling argument that the American/English-speaking version of MOOCs might not work in all parts of the world and may represent a sort of “intellectual neo-colonialism (PDF).” That link leads to a book/collection of essays published by the Commonwealth of Learning in 2012 called Open Educational Resources and Change in Higher Education: Reflections from Practice.  Definitely something worth looking at later: basically, it’s a collection of essays about international trends in Open Educational Resources (OER) and online instruction in higher ed.
  • “Before MOOCs, ‘Colleges of the Air’” by Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez and on the CHE  blog/site about classes that were offered over the radio back in the 1920s and 30s. Good stuff, and another one of those pieces that suggests to me that there might still be a project in me about technologies of teaching before the computer– especially in “distance ed” and “correspondence” formats.  And this quote rings especially true for me:  ”The problem of what MOOCs add up remains. While some universities have promised to accept them for credit, in the long term, we may find, as proponents of radio did, that the courses play at best a minor role in helping students earn degrees.”  Oh, and speaking of which:
  • “MOOCs, History, and Context” in Inside Higher Ed where Arthur Levine talks about literally hundreds of years of transformations in higher education to MOOCs in, well, context.
  • “Duke Faculty Say No” also by Ry Rivard and Inside HigherEd.  Faculty at Duke forced the university to back out of a deal with nine other universities to “create a pool of for-credit online classes for undergraduates,” apparently with an outfit called Semester Online and a deal that has been in the works since 2012. And as a reminder of something I’ve mentioned here before: while Duke seems perfectly willing to support its faculty developing MOOCs that might someday be offered for credit at other institutions by Coursera, they are not willing to accept those credits at their own institution.  By the way, Semester Online seems somewhat reasonable to me:  ”Unlike massive open online courses, or MOOCs, only a few hundred students were expected to enroll in each course – which would feature a mix of recorded lectures and live discussions – but each course would be divided into sections of no more than 20 students led by an instructor, perhaps a graduate student.”
  • Finally, there’s this strange “map” of the “Major Players” in the MOOC Universe from CHE:

There are many problems with this, but I’ll just mention two for now.  First, Khan Academy is not a MOOC in any way, shape, or form. Not even close. Second, Cathy Davidson is just not that big of a player in the “MOOC-iverse,” and even she says this in this post, which ultimately brings things back to HASTAC.

Okay, after all that (!), a few words about the Duke Composition MOOC:

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Posted in MOOCs, Teaching | 3 Comments

Week 5 of English Composition 1

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Steve Krause

Before news about Composition I, some MOOC reading round-up:

  • As Nick Carbone pointed out on the WPA-L mailing list, it seems like journalists taking and reporting on MOOCs has become all the rage as of late. Just goes to show you that contemporary journalism gets everything interesting from blogs like this one. From the Larry Gordon of the LA Times comes “Hitting the MOOCs instead of the books” about his experience in a “Principles of Public Health” course from UC Irvine, and in the New York Times A.J. Jacobs’ “Two Cheers for Web U.!”  I think I like the NYTimes piece a bit better because of its humor and snark (favorite line: “The professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon.”), but both pieces are ultimately pretty fluffy written by good writers who haven’t thought a whole about education since they were in college.
  • “MOOC Mania: Debunking the hype around massive open online courses” by Audrey Watters on The Digital Shift blog is a solid essay about MOOC stuff, though I have to say it sounds like something I’ve read already.
  • “They mean to win Wimbledon!” is a post by Jonathan Rees that circles around an obscure Monty Python sketch to make the point about MOOCs being this invasive species trying to take over higher education. Interesting enough reading, but….
  • …. the main reason I’m linking to it is because it discusses this essay from Inside HigherEd, “EdX Rejected.” In what is clearly at odds with the race into the MOOC business by so-called elite institutions, Amherst College said thanks but no thanks to edX’s invitation to join their consortium.  It’s a good read that speaks highly of both Amherst’s administration and faculty.  My favorite responses quoted in the piece are from Adam Sitze, who is a law professor.  There’s this:

Sitze, though, compared edX and MOOCs to a litany of failed dotcoms, including other education ventures with similar ambitions. He said MOOCs may very well be today’s MySpace – a decent-looking idea doomed to fail.

“What makes us think, educationally, that MOOCs are the form of online learning that we should be experimenting with? On what basis? On what grounds?,” Sitze said. “2012 was the year of the MOOCs. 2013 will be the year of buyer’s regret.”

and this:

Faculty also worried about edX and its broader effect on higher education, particularly edX’s plans to grade some student writing using only computer programs.

“They came in and they said, ‘Here’s a machine grader that can grade just as perceptively as you, but by the way, even though it can replace your labor, it’s not going to take your job,’ ” Sitze said. “I found that funny and I think other people may have realized at that point that there was not a good fit.”

Amherst is an unusual institution even among elite institutions, teaching all of its courses in seminars and never with multiple-choice exams. Still, I think it’s an interesting development.

Anyway, on to English Composition 1:

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Posted in MOOCs, Scholarship, Teaching, Writing | 5 Comments

An idea for a CCCCs panel: How about the teachers amongst us who have been MOOC students?

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Steve Krause

I might have an idea for a proposal for the annual Conference of College Composition and Communication, which will be happening in 2014 in Indianapolis March 19-22.  The theme in the call for proposals (this is a PDF) is “Open | Source(s), Access, Futures,” and it’s right up my alley in a number of different ways. But one of the bulleted prompt/questions is:

How can composition and communication help shift conversations about MOOCs and other kinds of online courses and mobile learning away from market driven fantasies and into pedagogy in the service of a critically engaged democracy?

On the one hand, I am a little leery of proposing something “MOOC-centric” because I think I’ve done enough MOOC writing between this blog and some other things coming out/in the pipeline. And I am sure there will be lots of other panels with titles like “MOOCing Around With the Future:  Open Source(s), Open Access(es).”  On the other hand, MOOCs really are an important topic right now and lord knows I’ve been doing enough writing and thinking about it to have something to say at this conference. And I know I’m not alone on that.

So how about a panel of CCCCs-like people (professors, grad students, non-tenure-track folks of various stripes, etc.) who are in the field in some general sense as a teacher (writing or otherwise) who have taken a MOOC or two as a student and are reporting back on that to this group? I think this might be useful and interesting because I continue to see a lot of articles written from the perspective of people who have (or will) teach in a MOOC environment and a lot of articles written by people who are really just speculating on what MOOCs might be like, but I still haven’t seen that many pieces from students., even when those students aren’t really “students” but more like curious participants.

I’m imagining something more roundtable-like:  that is, rather than 15-20 minute presentations from three people, I think the ideal format for this would be a half-dozen folks offering five to seven minute opening thoughts and then a discussion.

Anyone out there interested in something like this or some other MOOC-like idea?

Posted in MOOCs, Scholarship | 13 Comments

Week 4 of Duke Composition I

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Steve Krause

This is the last week of classes here at EMU this winter (what everyone else calls spring) semester, and I am in a kind of calm before the storm, so to speak, so I thought I’d spend a little time sorta/kinda getting caught up in English Composition I: Achieving Expertise. Just a few observations/notes, more or less in order:

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Posted in MOOCs | 4 Comments

Yet another MOOC reading round-up

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Steve Krause

Before I post more about the Duke Composition I MOOC (maybe tomorrow?), I thought I’d also catch up a bit on some of the articles and other things MOOC-related I’ve come across lately.  More or less in the order of how closely I read them….
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Posted in MOOCs | 6 Comments

English Composition I Week 2 and 3

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Steve Krause

April is always the cruelest month in academia because it’s near (or, at EMU, is) the end of the semester, which means there are all kinds of last meetings, end of the school year celebrations and recognitions, planning for spring/summer teaching, etc., etc. So I’ve fallen behind in the English Composition I MOOC, though I did manage to throw together write an essay for peer review. Here’s an update on some of what’s been going on in the class, at least for me. It rambles on quite a bit in part because this post (and other posts, of course) are as much notes for future MOOC writing as they are anything else.

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Posted in Academia, MOOCs, Scholarship, Writing | 9 Comments

Week 1 in Duke’s “English 1″ MOOC

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Steve Krause

Every time I turn around, there are more good/interesting MOOC articles to post about/write about, but since I am already behind in getting this post up and running, those new articles will have to wait until I post again later this week. But before I get to some thoughts on week one of “English Composition 1: Achieving Expertise,” which is a Coursera MOOC by Duke’s Denise Comer (and a cast of others in various support roles), a bit of a link round-up in MOOC news that I thought was interesting:

  • A whole different/similar thing is happening “down under” with an Australian MOOC Platform.
  • “Who Owns a MOOC?” From Inside Higher Ed, this is about how these Coursera courses might figure into collective bargaining issues and issues of who owns the content of courses. What this article says and what I’ve heard before is the faculty doing these courses are essentially giving away their content and time: that is, Coursera has contracts with universities and not professors, and so the extent to which faculty are beging compensated for this work depends entirely on the institution, and from what I can tell from what I’ve read, most faculty are doing this MOOC thing as an overload because vanity? ego? they want to participate in a new and interesting experiment, or, in the case of Comer’s MOOC, research (see below).

California is a complicated place when it comes to MOOCs since we’re seeing them roll out there as experiments, which obviously has a lot of people nervous. But as I understand it, one of the more unique situations in California is you’ve got thousands and thousands of students out there who can’t even get into the community college system because the classes are full and the waiting lists are long. In other words, MOOCs aren’t the immediate threat that they would be if EMU started taking that credit. At least I don’t think so.

  • Along these lines regarding California and MOOCs:  “A Massively Bad Idea” by Rob Jenkins in CHE, which points out clearly and calmly the simple facts that MOOCs (and online classes, for that matter) are not a good idea for “remedial” classes and/or “underprepared” students.
  • “SXSWedu: A MOOC Love Fest,” which reports on a keynote panel that featured Andrew Ng, edX’s Anant Agarwal, and some of the other usual MOOC suspects. A lot of self-congratulations here, basically.
  • “The Professors Who Make the MOOCs” by Steve Kolowich at CHE. It’s the results of a survey of some of the faculty who have taught MOOCs, and as is typical of surveys like this, the results seem contradictory.  On the one hand, in response to the question “Do you believe MOOCs could eventually reduce the cost of attaining a college degree in general?” 45% said “yes, significantly” and 41% said “yes, marginally.” On the other hand, 72% of those surveyed did not think the course deserved “formal credit” at their institutions and 66% didn’t think their institutions would be granting credit for MOOCs either. So how does a course that doesn’t lead to credit help lower the costs of higher education?
  • But it would appear that a lot of the mainstream media is (slowly but surly) starting to raise some questions about MOOCs as being the solution to everything.  For example, there’s “Open web courses are massively overhyped” by Michael Skapinker from the UK’s Financial Times (with an annoying login process).  The basic three reasons he says MOOCs are overhyped:
    • “What students learn is less important than where they learnt (or didn’t learn) it.” That’s spot-on, IMO, which is why the pecking order in higher education is still alive and well.
    • “It is difficult to concentrate on a video lecture.” Maybe. It’s difficult to concentrate on a badly produced/delivered lecture, especially if that lecture is nothing more than a talking head.
    • “The number of people who attend lectures in person is growing.” And here he’s talking about speakers at festivals and such. I don’t exactly see the connection to MOOCs or regular teaching, but whatever.
  • I’m not sure how I came across this, but from Quartz comes “The dirty little secret of online learning: Students are bored and dropping out” by Todd Tauber. It more or less covers a lot of familiar territory but it’s worth taking a look at even if you’ve been down this MOOC road already because he has a boatload of good links in this piece.
  • Finally I stumbled across it via Stephen Downes: as far as I can tell, Laura Gibbs is already offering some pretty solid feedback and critiques of Duke’s English 1 course, here so far. There’s a Google+ community for the class that I just joined, too; though since I don’t do a whole lot with Google +, I don’t know how active I am likely to be in said community.

Okay, on to Duke’s English Composition 1:

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Posted in MOOCs | 11 Comments

In defense of machine grading

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Steve Krause

In defense of machine grading?!?! Well, no, not really. But I thought I’d start a post with a title like that. You know, provocative.

There has been a bit of a ruckus on WPA-L for a while now in support of a petition against machine grading and for humans at the web site humanreaders.org and I of course agree with the general premise of what is being presented on that site.  Machine grading software can’t recognize things like a sense of humor or irony, it tends to favor text length over conciseness, it is fairly easy to circumvent with gibberish kinds of writing, it doesn’t work in real world settings, it fuels high stakes testing, etc., etc., etc. I get all that.

We should keep pushing back against machine grading for all of these reasons and more. Automated testing furthers the interests of Edu-business selling this software and does not help students nor teachers, at least not yet.  I’m against it, I really am.

However:

  • It seems to me that we’re not really talking about grading per se but about teaching,  and the problem is writing pedagogy probably doesn’t work when the assessment/ grading part of things is completely separated from the teaching part of things. This is one of the differences between assigning writing and teaching writing.
  • There’s a bit of a catch 22 going on here. Part of the problem was that writing teachers complained (rightly so, I might add) about big standardized tests of various sorts not having writing components. So writing was added to a lot of these tests. However, the only way to assess thousands of texts generated through this testing is with specifically trained readers (see my next point) or with computer programs. So we can skip the writing altogether with these tests or we can accept a far from perfect grading mechanism.
  • I’ve participated in various holistic/group grading sessions before (though it’s been a long time), which is how they used to do this sort of thing before the software solutions. The way I recall it working was dozens and dozens of us were trained to assign certain ratings for essays based on a very specific rubric.  We were, in effect, programmed, and there was no leeway to deviate from the guidelines.  So I guess what I’m getting at is in these large group assessment circumstances, what’s the difference if it’s a machine or a person?
  • This software doesn’t work that well yet, especially in uncontrolled circumstances: that is, grading software is about as accurate as humans with these standardized prompt responses written in specific testing situations, but it doesn’t work well at all as an off-the-shelf rating solution for just any chunk of writing that students write for classes or that writers write for some other reason.  But the key word in that last sentence is yet, because this software has (and is) getting a lot better. So what happens when it gets as good as a human reader (or at least good enough?) Will we accept the role of this evaluation software much in the same way we now all accept spell checking in word processors? (And by the way, I am old enough to remember resistance among English teacher-types to that, too– not as strong as the resistance to machine grading, but still).
  • As a teacher, my least favorite part of teaching is grading. I do not think that I am alone in that sentiment. So while I would not want to outsource my grading to someone else or to a machine (because again, I teach writing, I don’t just assign writing), I would not be against a machine that helps make grading easier. So what if a computer program provided feedback on a chunk of student writing automatically, and then I as the teacher followed behind those machine comments, deleting ones I thought were wrong or unnecessary, expanding on others I thought were useful? What if a machine printed out a report that a student writer and I could discuss in a conference? And from a WPA point of view, what if this machine helped me provide professional development support to GAs and part-timers in their commenting on students’ work?
Posted in Computers, technology, etc., Teaching, Technology | 2 Comments

ATTW & CCCCs in Vegas

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Steve Krause

Before writing this post, I looked through what I wrote last year about the CCCCs in St. Louis and in a lot of ways, this CCCCs in Las Vegas was remarkably similar to that CCCCs: my semester/year is/has been complicated, I went to some okay panels, stayed at kind of a crappy hotel, etc., etc.  In somewhat chronological order:

  • Let’s get the hotel and Las Vegas issues out of the way: the Riviera is definitely the low-rent district of the strip, kind of a dump, though not really the worst hotel ever. I have empirical survey data on this. I asked at least a dozen people (maybe more) the following: “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best hotel you’ve ever stayed in and a 1 being the worst, how would you rate this hotel?” The answer was about a 4– maybe 3.5, though I had one outlier rate it a 7 (grad student).  The room was fine (albeit beat up and small), service was good, the wifi was robust, and the conference space was pretty good. But even at this price I doubt I’ll be staying here or at the Circus Circus the next time I come to town on purpose/for fun.

The conference hotel/city choice has been a dilema for the CCCCs for as long as I remember. It’s a big conference, but it’s not quite so big as to be able to leverage both a great location and a good rate on conference hotel rooms. So I can understand why people were kind of grumpy about the hotel because it wasn’t nearly as nice as almost anything else on the Las Vegas strip. On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I’ve been able to afford my own room at the CCCCs conference hotel. 

So it’s kind of a lose-lose situation for the CCCCs. I am sure they could have had the conference in Las Vegas in a nicer and significantly more expensive hotel, and then people would have complained about it. Instead, they opted to hold the conference in an affordable hotel, and people complained about that.

As for Las Vegas: well, so much to say, really. I’ll probably report more on my own adventures with Annette and Will here later– or maybe just on Facebook. But generally speaking, it seems to me few people are neutral on Las Vegas; it’s either “Ooo, Vegas is a lot of fun! Great food and shows and gambling and people watching!”  or “Why on earth would anyone go there?” There’s not a whole lot in-between.  I enjoy Las Vegas quite a bit, but in modestly low doses– for about three days every five or so years. So sure, I understand “the haters” among the college professor/English teacher crowd. But if the CCCCs is going to be somewhere in the west every three or so years, then Las Vegas strikes me as a pretty good choice. Besides, I am pretty sure a lot of the haters just stayed away entirely this year, and judging from my Facebook and Twitter feeds, a lot of these writing teachers let their hair down and put their birkenstocks aside and went out on the town and had a lovely time.

  • My main conference this year was actually at the ATTW, which I attended in Louisville but I actually presented at it this time around.  I saw a panel on visualization that had some good moments and one on posthumanism that was really two different panels because two of the folks– Jim Henry and Byron Hawk– were more or less presenting on the same topic, while the third panelist, Liza Potts, was added on to round out a full panel.  Interesting combination, though I would have liked to have asked at some point “for our purposes, what would you define as posthuman?” not because I am unfamiliar with the term but because I am familiar enough with it to know it is a term that is complicated. Of course, part of my problem with the first two sessions is I was “multitasking” and taking advantage of the fine wifi at the conference center. A blessing and a curse since it allowed the likes of me to continue/catch up on some teaching.
  • My presentation/panel was a roundtable called “MOOCs in Professional Writing: Could We? Should We?” with Bill Hart-Davidson, Jeff Grabill, and Marcy Bauman– Asao Inoue couldn’t make it.  Bill talked about rethinking the way we embrace modes of delivery, Grabill talked about what might be the MOOC model tried by MSU, Bauman talked about a very local alternative she’d like to see happen at Lansing Community College, and I talked about how MOOCs as we currently know them are pretty lame.

This was my first slide, which drew applause before I could even speak:

I thought it was a good roundtable because we were all right in our own ways– that is, if Grabill et al attempt a MOOC, it will be better than what I’ve seen so far and/or be an “interesting failure” (I believe that’s how he put it) and I think I am right in that the hype around MOOCs right now simply does not square with the realities of what they currently are. Anyway, a good conversation.

  • On Wednesday night I went to part of the MA Consortium that John and Derek are leading. Then Thursday I gave/delivered/stood next to my poster for my poster session about iBooks Author.  Here’s a link to a web site about that. I actually showed up with a poster, printed on paper and everything, and I guess I didn’t get the memo because everyone else had some kind if experience/web site/whatever projected on a screen. I have mixed feelings about the whole poster thing. It could be a bit more “real” of an event, though I have to say I submitted it after my proposal for a presentation was turned down by the CCCCs this year (and I gave up second-guessing the CCCCs on who gets in and who doesn’t a few years ago, though this year was, IMO,  very heavily skewed to first year writing and simultaneously away from technology).  Having it actually in the program for the CCCCs and having the event in an accessible location would help with that a great deal. But as it was, I thought it went well in that I did get to talk about my attempts at an iBook with several people and I also continued some side discussions on MOOCs.
  • I attended a nice session done by some current and recently past graduate students called “Constructions of Composition Students as Exigencies for Change: Four Critical Perspectives on Going Public.” That was pretty interesting and they did well. And I did a bit of socializing and a bit of business through the course of the that until we left town.
  • But really, I spent most of Friday and Saturday being a tourist because that’s when Annette and Will showed up.

Overall a success, but I am once again reminded of the shifting value of big academic conferences in my career– that is, it’s not the CCCCs, it’s me. When I was a grad student and new faculty member, the CCCCs was important because there was a lot more to learn and because giving a presentation in and of itself constituted scholarship. But at this stage, I need another presentation on my CV like a hole in the head, and while I still learn things and enjoy engaging in the conversations, it’s just not the same as it was.

At this stage, I get a lot more out of smaller events like Computers and Writing or even smaller (and free!) events like the WIDE-EMU.

Posted in Academia, MOOCs, Scholarship | 5 Comments

MOOC and Pony Show

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Steve Krause

(And that blog title was brought to you by Derek who named my just completed trip the “MOOC and Pony Show.”)

A while ago (maybe two months ago?), I was invited to give a talk about MOOCs at the American Federation of Teachers Higher Education Professional Issues Conference in San Diego. It just goes to show you what happens if you keep blogging about something long enough: pretty soon, people (might) like what you say and (might) think you know what you’re talking about. Sort of.

Anyway, a few highlights and not a lot of details for now because I am woefully behind on planning for ATTW and the CCCCs which will take me back to the Pacific time zone (this time in Las Vegas) in less than 60 hours:

  • Here’s a link to a Google sites version of my talk– the script and the slides. It’s long because it was what they called a “workshop presentation” though it was just me for a 90 minute session.  I also include a bunch of links to the things that I cite here too. Putting it together was a bit of a procrastination writing when I should have been doing other things, but it was also some work that might come in handy later if I keep doing this MOOC scholarship. Anyway, the format was I talked for about half of the time and then we discussed.
  • I have to say I was a little worried about how this was going to go over.  I’m far from a MOOC enthusiast, but given some of the responses from academic labor to MOOCs, I was afraid they were going to be mad I even brought up the topic. One of the things that I quote and cite as more or less a straw man is this piece from Inside Higher Ed “Unthinking Technophilia,” which was written by a group of community college faculty members in the San Diego community college district (and the article was reprinted on the California AFT web site, too). So I was prepared for some pitchforks and torches in the crowd.

But the folks who came to the workshop (I don’t know, somewhere between 50 and 100) were all curious and even enthusiastic about the possibilities of MOOCs. I was surprised, but then again when I asked “how many of you teach online?” and about half raised their hands, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, we heard the “technophilia” rhetoric about the emergence of online courses a little over a decade ago and it turns out the sky didn’t fall then either. And as one of the folks said to me when we were talking about all this after it was done, “Faculty aren’t scared of innovations in pedagogy. They’re interested in that. What they’re worried about is what administrators are going to do with this.” And I share that fear too.

  • I did go to one panel that I thought was pretty interesting about some different ideas for funding higher education in a way that would make it more affordable and robust and such. These folks have a web site that is probably worth checking out– Campaign for the Future of Higher Education. Of course, the main problem (as one of the speakers said) is a lack of political will in this country to take the issue on; I guess I would also add a lack of political priority too.
  • That was pretty much all I did at the conference itself. I didn’t actually know anyone there and while I am supportive of academic labor unions like the one I am in, I’m not really interested in it the way that these people were. I mean, these folks were all union organizers, AFT local presidents, etc.
  • I did do some touristy things in San Diego, though purposefully not the zoo. I like zoos and all, but I just didn’t think it made sense to go there by myself. Instead, I spent a fair amount of time walking around the Gaslamp Quarter (near the conference hotel) and then I rented a car the next day and drove around to various beaches and such. Lovely.

And now on to ATTW and the CCCCs.

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