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I will admit that it is at a minimum ironic that The Chronicle of Higher Education has the article, “Online, Bigger Class May Be Better Classes,” parked behind a firewall.  And I have some sympathy/some level of agreement with this post from Alan “CogDog” Levine about how this is bad, along with the complaints of one of the main sources in this article, George “elearnspace” Siemens.

But here’s the thing:  perhaps this is evidence that at the end of there is no such thing as “open learning education,” for two basic reasons.  First, perhaps what we’re getting at is the age-old difference between “learning” and “education.” Here’s a quote from the article (from behind the firewall, btw, which I get access to because of my connection with Eastern Michigan University):

“We have to get away from this whole idea that universities own learning,” says Alec V. Couros, who teaches his own open class as an associate professor of education at Regina, in Saskatchewan. “They own education in some sense. But they don’t own learning.”

Of course.  People can “learn” about all sorts of things without any connection with any sort of institution, and with college classes taking place in the open– in organized ways, as they discuss in the article, or less organized/visible ways, as I’ve been doing with my classes for years– and all the other “stuff” that is out there on the internets, it seems to me that someone self-motivated enough could literally learn damn near anything nowadays.

But if you want an education, something that is tied to some sort of institution, that involves a program of study/curriculum, where you have (in theory) reliable and trained instructors, and– and this is critical– where you get some sort of degree or certification that is recognized by others, if you want these things, it ain’t free.

Now, in some fields, it used to be there was no difference between learning and an education.  Someone can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I believe that it used to be possible for someone to become a lawyer/member of the bar simply by “reading” the law– that is, literally going to a law library, reading on one’s own, and then taking a test.  But I’m pretty sure that has not been the case in the U.S. for quite a while.  And while someone could sit at home, in libraries, and/or in various online forums and do all the reading required to earn a PhD, I guarantee you that no university in the world– even one promoting “open learning/education”– would hire someone who claimed to have earned their education by participating in “open learning/education.”

Second, open learning isn’t really “free” and isn’t really completely “open” since it depends on “non-free” and “closed” institutions. As far as I know, everyone who has anything to do with the open learning movement is somehow tied to a “real” university.  In other words, the folks who are engaged in open learning/education really couldn’t do it without the financial support, resources, and credibility that comes about from being associated with a distinctly not open, traditional university.

Don’t get me wrong– I think that the idea and theory behind open learning is great, and it’s one of the reasons why I advocate moving classes from behind the firewall of CMS like Blackboard.  Education should be a public experience, and I think these folks– Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, many many others– are doing great things.  But I also think that open learning is not going to transform education until we get to the point where we don’t think a college degree as a credential for a particular occupation.  And I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon ever.

I say “eventually” because most of my pre-fall term thinking as of late has been occupied by the impending faculty strike, which I predict here will begin on September 1. I’m sure there will be more posts/news on EMUTalk.org about all this.  All I will say here is that it annoys and frustrates me that we’ll probably be going on strike, mainly because of insurance and the Board of Regents micromanaging.  It seems avoidable to me, but it will almost certainly not be avoided.  Hopefully, since classes won’t begin until September 8, that won’t happen this time around.  Hopefully.

Anyway, the new school year is still on my mind, and as I have written in the past here and elsewhere, the new school year feels more like “the new year” to me than the actual New Year in January. I tend to measure things more in school years, which I suppose is a given since I’ve been doing this stuff for a while.  Actually, this year I start my 23rd year teaching in college (counting my time as a graduate assistant), which means a) I am about to cross over to a point where I have teaching college classes for more than half my life, and b) I am not at a point where I am old enough to be a parent to all but the “non-traditional” undergraduates and most of my “traditional” graduate students. Insert music here about drag getting older, etc.

This fall, we go into the year in exile while the building my department is normally in is closed for remodeling.  For the next 18-24 months, our offices are in a dorm and our classrooms are all over campus.  I’m hoping to do a CCCCs talk about this dislocation, actually.  Stay tuned for details.

I’m teaching English 328, which I’ve probably taught 50 times by now.  So not much new there from what I’ve done in the recent past, though I had some good experiences/experiments this summer with peer review I will try to repeat, and since this is an online class where there are some collaborative elements, I want to play around more with some things like Skype and Tinychat to do some synchronous discussion.

I’m also teaching English 505, which is a grad course called “Rhetoric of Science and Technology” I’ve now taught twice before, once online and once in person.  It’s a bit of a bear of a class to teach, because it is one of those classes that is (potentially, at least) about everything, and also because this is the rhetorical theory class for students in our professional writing MA program.  Without getting into the wisdom of that, what I’m going to be doing to get students “up to speed” is to this time teach Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students as sort of a “basically, this is what rhetoric meant/means” before we get on to the more contemporary stuff.  We’ll see how it works out.

And last but not least, I’m teaching an Honor’s Section (that has to be capitalized, right?) of first year composition.  I did this years ago, and I think honors students are an interesting lot to work with.  I haven’t completely figured out the syllabus for this yet, and given some of my challenges with the 505 class, I probably won’t figure it out completely until either the term strikes or we go off strike, whichever comes first.  But basically, I’m going to have them watch RiP! A Remix Manifesto early on in the class and requite students to develop research topics around it.  I think it is generally a good idea and it is also something I hope to talk about at the CCCCs in Atlanta.  Once again, stay tuned/we’ll see how this works out.

A lot of potential out there right now, no?

I have in mind a few more blog posts over the next few days about the end of the summer term/beginning of my 13th school year at EMU, but I’ll start this morning with some of the things/links/thoughts I’ve come across lately about publishing, reading, and writing.  Most of these have been left open in my browser for well over a week, and it’s time to clear them out.  And the clean the desk and then the kitchen.

First, there’s this helpful info-graphic, I believe from Newsweek:

Click on it to read it more clearly. Much more after the jump.

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Earlier today– I can’t remember if it while I was on my bike ride, grading/wrapping up stuff for the summer term, reading my Google Reader feed, or what– I had this feeling that my long suffering and delayed project, Blogs as Writerly Spaces, had kind of run its course.  I mean, I haven’t done anything with it in months and months (I have poked at it more recently than my link above might suggest, but still), and I kind of have a bit of a “milked dry” feeling about the whole thing.  I’ve worked my survey data (such as it is) and other research into at least five different presentations over the years, and it has been feeling a little wrung out to me.  Besides, blogging is kind of “been there, done that” nowadays, right?  How do I write a book-length project (or hell, even a decent article-length essay) about this phenomenon that has either become irrelevant in the shadow of Facebook, Twitter, and whatever is next?  Who cares about a medium that has either faded away or has been subsumed/consumed by MSM to the point where even freakin’ Stanley Fish has a “blog” as part of the New York Times?

Anyway, this was all in the back of my mind while listening to the radio on the way to Costco and I was listening to “Here and Now” and they had a story (mp3) about this story in Salon by Justin Elliott, “How the ‘ground zero mosque’ fear mongering began,” and I had a tiny twinge of second thoughts on my project.  Maybe there’s something there there after all.  Elliott has a time-line how this mosque/community center/whatever it is controversy got so out of hand, and how a right-wing conspiracy theorist blogger named Pamela Geller (her blog is called “Altas Shrugs”) started and fueled this whole thing.  Elliott has a time-line and corresponding links to Geller’s blog to make a pretty compelling argument how her blog made this into a story.  Granted, Geller is more “connected” than most bloggers (her bio points to appearances on various news outlets, and she was apparently on Hannity’s radio show, etc.), but I think Elliott makes a pretty compelling argument that this non-story turned into a story in part because of Geller’s persistence and blogging.  Take a look at Atlas Shrugs now and it’s clear that she’s still using this story, or it’s still using her.

The politics here are interesting in a way, but the dynamics of the rhetorical situation are much more interesting to me.  And maybe I ought to not completely close up that book project yet.

Read Write Web had a piece I’ve been meaning to blog about for a few days:  “So-Called “Digital Natives” Not Media Savvy, New Study Shows.” A quote from the beginning:

Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it’s legit.

This study isn’t really so much about the extent to which young people “automatically know” how to use various computer/internet/device tools just by virtue of being “native” to the technology– in other words, “the kids today” just automatically understand texting and facebook and whatever because they are kids and have never known anything different.  Rather, this study is about how young people (the study included just over 1,000 college freshmen, I think) aren’t particularly thoughtful about evaluating the credibility of things they find on the Internet.  These students more often than not just picked the first thing that came up in Google, paying no attention to any citation information (authors, dates, sources, etc.).  It also turns out that students in this study thought less about the reliability of Wikipedia, perhaps because so many high school teachers hammered into these students that “Wikipedia is bad, m-kay?”

And then the comments on the article tell their own story about who is (and isn’t) “digitally literate.”  First, many commentators complain about the study itself as being too small (there was a typo that it was 100 instead of 1000 subjects) and not really to be about what it claims to be about.  Then there were a wave of comments that more or less say “I don’t believe it because I’m digitally literate,” along with a lot of comments that agree with the study’s results.

Well, first off, if you are reading and commenting about anything on ReadWriteWeb, you are not in the “general population” demographic, period.

Second, I suspect if you studied 1,000 (or more) people in the general population without any controls for age, class, education level, etc., etc., you would get similar results:  that is, one thing I always see missing from these studies is the acknowledgment that maybe the basic assumption that the age of users is not as significant as proponents of the “digital native” argument might think.

Third, it is hardly surprising to me (and to anyone else who has ever taught first year writing) that freshman doing research usually settle on the first piece of research they find, regardless of the quality and usefulness of that research.  Google searches and the like make it a lot easier to find that piece of research, but I can tell you as someone who started teaching freshman long before people just “googled it” that doing what can only be described as “lazy research” is not a new phenomenon.

We are at the main destination/reason for our westward trip, Ashland, Oregon, the town where Will was born in 1997 and where I took my first tenure-track job in 1996. We were only here two years, frankly because my job at Southern Oregon University was bad and also because Annette’s job prospects at SOU and in the area were poor. I’m leaving a lot of details out of that last sentence, details I’m not going to dwell on for mostly obvious reasons. Let’s just say that if we had stayed here, I’m pretty sure neither one of us would have stayed in academia.

Anyway, I’m happy to visit now as a tenured and content professor at EMU, one who happens to be married to someone who was just granted tenure, and I’m happy that we are sharing our trip down memory lane with our 12 year old son who left this town where he was born before he was one. Here’s a link to a bunch of flickr pictures of the area (including Crater Lake) so far; more details after the jump.
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The other day, Inside Higher Ed ran a story called “Burning Out, and Fading Away.” Here’s a quote:

In an analysis of professional burnout among professors, a Texas Woman’s University Ph.D. candidate found tenure track professors had more significant symptoms of workplace frustration than their tenured and non-tenure track faculty counterparts.

Janie Crosmer, who conducted the survey of more than 400 full-time faculty across the U.S. in December 2008, said she was unsurprised that the high stresses of pursuing academe’s most coveted status led to burnout. As she discussed those stresses during a presentation Wednesday, audience members nodded in agreement, and one faculty member among them described the pursuit of tenure as “a living hell.”

The comments on the piece suggest that for at least some, that burn-out/living hell thing continues into tenure, promotion, emeritus status, and beyond.

On the same day, Dean Dad (aka Confessions of a Community College Dean) had a post titled “Lions in Winter,” in which he takes up this post by Tenured Radical, in which TR contemplates Helen Thomas rather sudden  retirement and how her situation and obvious deterioration (I believe Thomas is about to turn 90) is similar to that of some “Venerable professor famous for irascible personality and eclectic remarks goes right over the edge one day and has to be forcibly retired, when in fact the signs of ineffectiveness and mental decline have been clear to close colleagues for several years: inappropriate remarks, fits of rage and/or confusion, memory lapses of gargantuan proportions.”

Dean Dad goes on to lament this situation:

Since the Supreme Court decided — absurdly, in my view — that tenure is fine but mandatory retirement isn’t, there’s literally no way to push the declining self-caricature out the door short of a documented public meltdown. Of course, by the time that happens, there has typically been a long train of abuses that either weren’t public or weren’t quite enough in themselves, as documented, to stand up in court. (Part of that usually has to do with the power that senior faculty have, and the fear that others have of that power. Fear of retaliation for coming forward is powerful, and it prevents the effective documentation of some very real behaviors.) And the combination of age discrimination laws, tenure, unions, the ADA, and public sympathy can make it effectively impossible for even a conscientious administrator to solve the problem.

So, on the one hand, faculty are burnt-out, bitter, stressed, emotionally exhausted; on the other hand, they hang on to their tenured positions far too long, sometimes to the point of being far beyond their prime.

Now, I can think of colleagues who fit both of these caricatures.  Because the tenure and promotion requirements in my department are both modest and humane, I think my colleagues here who see that process as a “living hell” are more or less creating that for themselves.  The self-inflicted notion of all this is something I’ll return to in a second.  The very senior colleagues who appear to be “losing it” is arguably more common at EMU, perhaps because the place is less of a “living hell” than the kinds of places where faculty burn-out long before they reach senility.

And I can also think of faculty who are both burnt-out and bitter, and appear to be “losing it” and behaving more and more irrationally.  Actually, this is not an uncommon combination in the aged, right?

Still, there’s something of a contradiction to me here.  How is it that faculty can be both burnt-out and holding on to their jobs far too long?  Is the suggestion that there are basically two different kinds of faculty, those who are burnt-out and bitter and thus retire/exit academia as soon as they are able, and those who aren’t burnt-out and outstay their welcome?  I’m not sure.

I’m at an age where I can see retirement conceptually, kind of like the way I could see what it might be like to have a “real job” when I was twelve, but I have a hard time right now imaging retiring. As I said to a colleague the other day, what would be the point?  What else would I be doing?  I pretty much get to do what I want to do now as it is.  A lot can and will change in the next twenty or thirty years of course– assuming I make it for that long and (hopefully) longer– but right now, I suspect I am more likely to leave academia as that “crazy old guy” as opposed to the more bitter/burnt-out one.

But it also seems to me that those who are being identified in Crosmer’s study as being burnt-out are perhaps in that state of affairs more because of who they are rather than their chosen profession.  There is a link between the two, but I’m questioning the causality; in other words, I would suggest that it isn’t the work of academia that inherently burns people out, but rather, that the people who go into academia tend to be of the type who are going to burn themselves out and describe any number of work/life environments a “living hell.”  I’ve worked any number of low-stress (and generally low-paying) jobs over the years, and from what I can recall, there are lots of people who are able to turn almost anything into a “living hell” with their bad ‘tude.  What I think is probably the case is academia attracts more of these kinds of folks than some other fields.

In my own experience, I experienced “workplace frustration” most acutely as a PhD student, especially when I was trying to finish that diss.  “Living hell” is a bit strong, but the situation for me at my first job at Southern Oregon was “challenging.”  But once I got here, and especially once I got tenured and promoted, the workplace frustrations– while still clearly present– became more manageable.  But as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I think that most academics who feel burnt-out and miserable about what they are doing ought to spend some time doing something like shoveling coal or cleaning toilets.  Suddenly that stack of essays and administrative busy-work doesn’t seems so bad.

I’ve come across a lot of articles about reading on the iPad lately, and thought I’d pass along some of them with some thoughts:

• Jakob Nielsen doesn’t think the iPad is that cool in terms of usability. I dunno, seems a little like he’s a hater, though Nielsen does raise some interesting points about how the iPad exhibits the growing pains of moving from one kind of literacy technology to another.
• How to self-publish a book for iPad. Really, how to self-publish a book for ePub format period.  This combined with this NYTimes editorial from Garrison Keillor, “The End of an Era in Publishing,” makes me think.  On the one hand, I don’t think that “self-publishing” is automatically going to spell the end of publishing business simply because there has always been self-publishers trying to get their work out there. Some were, for their time, pretty successful too– I believe Leaves of Grass was initially self-published.  On the other hand, this certainly changes the ease and scale of delivery possible with self-published electronic books.  Print something up on paper and your distribution point is pretty much limited to the street corner, maybe the trunk of your car; make an ePub book and the distribution point becomes international.
• An interesting review of reading on the iPad, comparing iBooks, Kindle, and GoodReader. I personally think the differences between iBook and Kindle are pretty negligible, and really, Kindle has two possible advantages right now.  First, amazon.com/Kindle has A LOT more books available than Apple/iBooks.  Second, I can read Kindle books in multiple places.  So, for example, I have been reading (very slowly, in fits and starts) The Omnivore’s Dilemma on Kindle.  Sometimes, I read it on my iPad, but as often (maybe more often, since I do this at the gym while on the stationary bike) I read it on my iPhone.  What’s nice about Kindle is the book syncs up to my place.
• I think a lot of the “love of the object” of the book is sort of misplaced, sort of like the sentiments in this NYTimes editorial, “Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader.” Verlyn Klinkenborg is mostly lamenting the loss of paper and look, probably smell and touch too.  Interestingly, it seems to me that a lot of what’s going on with the iPad is also a love (or hate) of the object.  I don’t think that the iPad or other tablets is going to completely eliminate the sort of fine books that Klinkenborg feels she (or he?  what is Verlyn?) might miss, but what might be a good thing is that these devices might save a lot of trees.  As the post “To Kindle or not to Kindle?” from “Limited Prerogatives” points out, a lot of those wonderfully smelling and feeling paper books end up wasting a lot of trees.  She quotes a NYTimes article about how the book and newspaper industries harvested something like 125 million trees, and something like about a third of books printed are returned to the publisher and/or “pulped.”
• And while I don’t have any links to it, I’ve heard some interesting reactions to the Wired iPad App, which I (of course!) bought.  I don’t think it’s fair to complain about it because of all of the ads, because a) the print version of Wired is basically a Geek Glamour magazine, intensely heavy on ads that many of its readers actually want to read; b) a lot of the ads are pretty cool and interactive, and c) it’s how magazine publishers make money (dirty little secret).  I don’t think it’s fair to complain that it is just the print version on the iPad since I never had a print version of Wired that included video and audio.  And I also think it’s only a little fair to complain about how the Wired iPad app doesn’t allow for “cut and paste” copying or bookmarking, because while I would agree that these features would be nice, Wired is not exactly the kind of thing I read to “cut and paste” from.  Besides, they still have a web site.

  What I thought was more interesting with the new Wired App and all of these other things is how they are the latest in a long history of what happens when we make the transition from one literacy technology to another.  A number of people talk about this with the transition from early handwritten manuscripts into printed books:  at first, the printed books looked a lot like the handwritten ones, but then, after people figured out the capabilities of the technology, they looked different.  We still call web pages “pages” because they initially looked a lot like “words in a row” pages with some links, and once we figured out the technology, they ended up looking a lot different.

  But I’m not going to keep paying $5 a pop for it.  They either are going to have to set up some sort of subscription service (the print version delivered was about a third of the price on the newsstand), or they are going to have to drop the price for me to be a regular reader.

• Finally, I downloaded and installed onto my iPad (as part of my iBooks library) Cory Doctorow’s new YA book For the Win. Despite his dislike of the iPad, I like Doctorow’s thinking and writing a lot, and I very much admire his practice of putting books up online for free.  But the iPad and similar devices raise an interesting question about the sustainability of this practice:  before the iPad, I might have been inclined to buy one of Doctorow’s paper books because as a matter of convenience and form, I would much rather read the paper book than the PDF (or whatever) on my computer screen.  As a result, Doctorow (and his publishers) would still sell a lot of books.  But if I’m inclined to read one of his books on an iPad or similar device anyway, why would I do anything but download the free version?  In other words, since the “free” version is no longer is a means of selling/promoting the “not free” version, how long will it be before Doctorow starts charging something to download the ePub from his site?

With the whole CCCOnline thing off my chest, I decided to divide this up into two parts because of my adventures with the iPad (as I mentioned before, I decided to take it instead of a laptop to the conference)– I’ll post about that one later.

Anyway, as usual, Computers and Writing was great, that one conference I go to every year where it really is “my people.”  There are a lot of conferences like C&W, actually– Rhetoric Society of America, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (and their conference is coming up in July), writing center folks, etc.  I like going to the CCCCs and participating in its “big tent,” but it’s a little more comfortable to be in the smaller tent (side show?) that is C&W.  Here’s how it went for me, more or less in this order:

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In the course of procrastinating/poking around on the Internets, I came across this CHE article, “Professors in Texas Protest Law That Requires Them to Post Teaching Details Online.” It’s behind their firewall, so I will paraphrase.  And let me say at the outset that I am obviously uncomfortable in finding that I agree with conservatives, let alone Texan conservatives.  I fear I am missing some of the more controversial points of this provision, so if anyone who knows better can correct me on what I’m not getting, please do so.

Here’s how the article opens:

Faculty members and administrators in Texas are speaking out about a recent state law that requires them to post specific, detailed information about their classroom assignments, curricula vitae, department budgets, and the results of student evaluations.

A conservative group whose administrators have close ties to Gov. Rick Perry lobbied for the law, saying it offers important “consumer protection.” Opponents counter that it has created an expensive and time-consuming burden and offers little benefit to the public.

Beginning this fall, universities will have to post online a syllabus for every undergraduate course, including major assignments and examinations, reading lists, and course descriptions.

Curricula vitae must include a faculty member’s teaching experience and contributions to professional publications. All of the information must be no more than three clicks away from the college’s home page.

Colleges are required to assign compliance duties to a campus administrator and, every other year, send a written report to the governor and legislative leaders.

Okay, I have some questions/concerns– what exactly does the law mean by “specific, detailed information,” for example?  And what’s the nature of this report to be submitted to the governor and legislative leaders?

Still… what’s the big deal here?  I mean, I have posted pretty specific classroom assignments, readings lists, course descriptions, and the like on the web for years and years.  Lots of people I know have some version of the CV up online, including me (though mine is not at all complete and it is a little out of date).  Basic results of student evaluations have been available to students at EMU for years, and there is a little site called ratemyprofessor.com that has been doing a problematic version of public student evaluations for years.  I think it would awesome if the administration would be a little more forthcoming about institutional budgets. And quite frankly, given all the horseshit reports that administrators make faculty write in the name of program review, accountability, and “strategery,” I think it is more than fair to make the administrators write a few horseshit reports themselves.

Here’s how the article ends:

Theresa J.C. Norman, an instructor of philosophy at South Texas College, calls the reporting requirements “a waste of time.”

Ms. Norman, who is also president of the South Texas Faculty Association, also resents what she sees as the law’s underlying assumptions. “You get the feeling that the government sees us as slackers,” she says. By requiring professors to list every assignment, she says the law interferes with her ability to respond to students’ interests and current events and shift to different topics during the semester.

Texas Tech University has spent $85,000 upgrading its server and hiring an administrator to train faculty members how to create digitally-searchable CV’s and syllabi that will meet the law’s requirements, according to Valerie O. Paton, vice president for planning and assessment.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lois W. Kolkhorst, wanted to protect students and tuition-paying parents at a time of rising college costs, according to her chief of staff, Chris Steinbach. “Enrolling in a course and finding that it’s not what you needed can be an expensive mistake,” he says.

If this law means that faculty have to give REALLY specific details about assignments to the point where it is not possible for changes/modifications to the course, then I would agree.  But is that what this law is saying?  Really?

And an $85,000 server upgrade and training for faculty?!? Really.  Really? How hard is it to slap a PDF up on the web nowadays?

Now, I will admit that I teach in a state and at a university that is considerably more left-leaning than Texas, and I also don’t teach in an area that is particularly controversial.  I mean, the public at large gets a lot more “excited” about the politics of teaching evolution in biology or “dirty books” in literature than they do about teaching the controversies about writing and technology.  I don’t think I have to worry too much about Teabaggers coming after me for English 328.

Still, what’s the big deal here?  What am I missing?