Category: Blogging about blogging

Posted on

New School Year Resolutions

Well, sort of….

The 2024-25 school year is my 36th teaching college (counting my time as a grad student and a part-timer), my 26th year as a tenure-track professor at EMU, and my 17th as a full professor. So it’s probably no wonder that when I think of the “new year,” I think of new school year at least as much as I think of January. On the old blog, I usually wrote a post around this time of year, reflecting on the school year that was and the year that was likely ahead of me. No reason to stop doing that now, right?

I started Zepbound in the first week of January 2024 and, as of today, I’ve lost about 35 pounds. It’s not all the result of the drugs, but it’s— well, yes, it is all the result of the drugs. Anyway, my resolution here is to keep doing what I’m doing and (ideally) lose another 25-30 pounds before the end of the semester.

So, kind of in the form of resolutions, here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish this school year— mostly with work stuff, with a few life things on the list too.

Wade Deeper into AI in My Teaching— Much Deeper

This fall, I’m going to be teaching two sections of the required first year writing course (aka “freshman comp”), and a junior/senior level course called “Digital Writing.”

For first year writing, I have never let students do research on whatever they wanted. Instead, I have always had a common research theme; for example, a few years ago, the theme was “social media,” meaning students’ semester-long research project had to have something to do with social media. This semester, the theme for my sections of first year writing is going to be “AI and your future career goals.”

The Digital Writing course is one I helped develop quite a while ago and it has gone through various evolutions. It’s a course that explores literacy as a technology, and it is also about the relationships between “words in a row” writing and multimedia writing. I have always started the course with readings from Walter Ong, Dennis Baron, a selection from Plato’s Phaedrus (where Socrates talks about the nature of writing), and similar kinds of texts, and also with an assignment where students have to “invent” a way of writing without any of the conventional tools. Maybe I’ll post more about that later here. In previous versions the course, the next two projects were something more multimedia-ish: podcast-like audio presentations, short videos, comics, memes, mashups, etc. But this semester, the second two projects are both going to be deep dives into AI— and I’m still trying to figure out what that means. In that class (and among other readings), I’m assigning Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. I’m sure I’ll write more about all of that later too.

I don’t know how this is going to go, and I think it is quite possible that it will turn out poorly. I think it’ll be interesting though.

Try to be at least a little more “involved”

Being in my 36th year of teaching at the college level means that I’m getting closer to retiring— or at least officially retiring. I don’t think I can afford to retire for another seven years (when I’ll be 65), and I don’t think I’ll want to work much past 70 (12 years from now). Unofficially though, as the joke goes, I retired from service work six years ago.

Just service, mind you: I’m not “deadwood” because I’m still publishing and presenting (at least some), and I’m still trying to innovate with my teaching. But I’ve been unofficially retired from service and committee work in my department since about 2018, mainly because I spent 13 of my first 20 years here doing A LOT of service. I had a couple of different coordinator positions, I chaired a number of searches, and I had been on just about every elected committee at one time or another. I was burnt out, I wanted to get out of the way for younger faculty to step up, and I think my colleagues were tired of me being involved in everything. So for the last six years, I’ve been a lot more checked out. I meet with my fellow writing faculty about things, and I’ll go to a department meeting if there’s something important on the agenda, but that’s about it.

This year, I think I want to make more of an effort to be a little more involved with happenings on campus, I guess for two reasons. First, after six years away, I’m just ready to back, at least a bit. After all, I did a lot of service stuff for my first 20 years because I liked it and I was good at it. Second, EMU is going through some interestingly difficult times as an institution. Like most of the other regional universities in the state and a lot of similar places in the upper midwest and northeast, we’ve had falling enrollments for a while, and it seems to have gotten worse in the last two years. Falling enrollments have resulted in dramatic budget cuts and declining faculty and staff. At the same time, the administration tries to keep some money around the place with some dubious outsourcing decisions.

Just to add to the drama a bit: we’re going to have to have some serious conversations this year about the future of most of my department’s graduate programs; the dean has announced that she is taking an early buyout and is leaving at the end of the school year; and the president announced a while ago that he will be retiring at the end of his contract in 2026. Which, when I think about it, might be when the faculty union will be negotiating a new contract.

I could go on, but you get the idea. There’s too much going on around here now to be checked out.

I’m not quite sure what “trying to be at least a little more involved” means, and I’m not interested in taking on any huge service jobs. I’m not planning on running to be on the executive committee of the faculty union, for example. But I suppose it means at least going to more informational meetings about things on campus.

(I should note that I have already failed on this resolution: I attended a kicking off the semester department meeting this morning, but then decided to blow off the College of Arts and Sciences meeting in the afternoon).

Put together my next (maybe last?) sabbatical/research release project proposal

I have a few ideas, mostly about AI and teaching (not surprisingly). As was the case with my work on MOOCs and before that the emergence of different writing technologies and pedagogy, I’m interested to see what kinds of tools and technologies from the past were as disruptive in ways that are similar to AI. That’s kind of vague, both on purpose and because that’s where I’m at in the process.

Anyway, sabbaticals and semester long research releases are competitive, and I’m eligible to submit a proposal in January 2025 for a semester off from teaching to research in the 2025-26 school year.

Keep figuring out Substack

The look and feel of this interface versus WordPress is intriguing, and while there are features I wish this had, there’s something to be said for the simplicity and uniformity of Substack— at least I think so far. I don’t think I’ll be able to rely on revenue from newsletter subscriptions anytime soon, and that’s not really my goal. On the other hand, if could convince 1000 people to give me $100 a year for stuff I write here…

Keep losing weight with Zepbound

I started Zepbound in the first week of January 2024 and, as of today, I’ve lost about 35 pounds. It’s not all the result of the drugs, but it’s— well, yes, it is all the result of the drugs. Anyway, my resolution here is to keep doing what I’m doing and (ideally) lose another 25-30 pounds before the end of the semester.

Posted on

Bye-Bye Blog (sort of, at least for now)

This is the 2,677th post I’ve written in/on this blog, and it’s the last one. Well, probably, or as long as this Substack thing works out.

The first post published on this site was “A New Blog is Blogging,” back in 2003. The post is about moving my already created blog from a software I no longer remember called flipsource (which I ran on a desktop computer I was using as a server in my school office) to Blogger. I switched to Moveable Type (which I guess still exists) briefly but I’ve been using WordPress since about 2005. I’m going to keep using that here.

I actually sorta/kinda started blogging the year before that here in September 2002. As I wrote back then, I started my not a blog (just a static website, actually) as a way of updating/promoting an article I wrote which was published in the brand-new College Composition and Communication Online called “Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites,” and also to write some things for a talk I was going to give in March 2003 at the CCCCs called ““Why Weblogs Should (and Shouldn’t) Count as Scholarship.” That was the first conference presentation I gave about blogging.

Also a tangent: “Where Do I List This on My CV?” was “disappeared” by NCTE when they gave up on the new online version of the journal after one issue and deleted my article from their servers. Here’s a blog post about that experience. I can’t remember if the Kairos editors reached out to me or if it was me to them, but they published a follow-up “Version 2.0” of the piece in 2007. NCTE tried again to do an all online version of the CCCs a few years later that was a disaster and ended after one issue, though that still is online. No one at NCTE or the CCCs editorial office has ever done anything to restore my disappeared article. Funny how that goes, huh?

Anyway, I’m not quitting blogging, but I am moving that part of things over to Substack. I’ll keep using this space as my homepage, perhaps as a “depository” for other web things, like my textbook (which I am going to update some day, maybe). I explain why in my first post completed on the Substack platform— the other posts are ones I imported from this site.

But the “at least for now” thing is real. Looking back at the origin story of my blogging reminds me that back in the day, I switched platforms and hosting services a couple of times before settling on WordPress. So who knows what will happen in the next couple years.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far, this site isn’t going away, and come see me at Substack.

Posted on

My Talk About AI at Hope College (or why I still post things on a blog)

I gave a talk at Hope College last week about AI. Here’s a link to my slides, which also has all my notes and links. Right after I got invited to do this in January, I made it clear that I am far from an expert with AI. I’m just someone who had an AI writing assignment last fall (which was mostly based on previous teaching experiments by others), who has done a lot of reading and talking about it on Facebook/Twitter, and who blogged about it in December. So as I promised then, my angle was to stay in my lane and focus on how AI might impact the teaching of writing.

I think the talk went reasonably well. Over the last few months, I’ve watched parts of a couple of different ChatGPT/AI presentations via Zoom or as previously recorded, and my own take-away from them all has been a mix of “yep, I know that and I agree with you” and “oh, I didn’t know that, that’s cool.” That’s what this felt like to me: I talked about a lot of things that most of the folks attending knew about and agreed with, along with a few things that were new to them. And vice versa: I learned a lot too. It probably would have been a little more contentious had this taken place back when the freakout over ChatGPT was in full force. Maybe there still are some folks there who are freaked out by AI and cheating who didn’t show up. Instead, most of the people there had played around with the software and realized that it’s not quite the “cheating machine” being overhyped in the media. So it was a good conversation.

But that’s not really what I wanted to write about right now. Rather, I just wanted to point out that this is why I continue to post here, on a blog/this site, which I have maintained now for almost 20 years. Every once in a while, something I post “lands,” so to speak.

So for example: I posted about teaching a writing assignment involving AI at about the same time MSM is freaking out about ChatGPT. Some folks at Hope read that post (which has now been viewed over 3000 times), and they invited me to give this talk. Back in fall 2020, I blogged about how weird I thought it was that all of these people were going to teach online synchronously over Zoom. Someone involved with the Media & Learning Association, which is a European/Belgian organization, read it, invited me to write a short article based on that post and they also invited me to be on a Zoom panel that was a part of a conference they were having. And of course all of this was the beginning of the research and writing I’ve been doing about teaching online during Covid.

Back in April 2020, I wrote a post “No One Should Fail a Class Because of a Fucking Pandemic;” so far, it’s gotten over 10,000 views, it’s been quoted in a variety of places, and it was why I was interviewed by someone at CHE in the fall. (BTW, I think I’m going to write an update to that post, which will be about why it’s time to return to some pre-Covid requirements). I started blogging about MOOCs in 2012, which lead to a short article in College Composition and Communication and numerous more articles and presentations, a few invited speaking gigs (including TWO conferences sponsored by the University of Naples on the Isle of Capri), an edited collection and a book.

Now, most of the people I know in the field who once blogged have stopped (or mostly stopped) for one reason or another. I certainly do not post here nearly as often as I did before the arrival of Facebook and Twitter, and it makes sense for people to move on to other things. I’ve thought about giving it up, and there have been times where I didn’t post anything for months. Even the extremely prolific and smart local blogger Mark Maynard gave it all up, I suspect because of a combination of burn-out, Trump being voted out, and the additional work/responsibility of the excellent restaurant he co-owns/operates, Bellflower.

Plus if you do a search for “academic blogging is bad,” you’ll find all sorts of warnings about the dangers of it– all back in the day, of course. Deborah Brandt seemed to think it was mostly a bad idea (2014); The Guardian suggested it was too risky (2013), especially for  grad students posting work in progress. There were lots of warnings like this back then. None of them ever made any sense to me, though I didn’t start blogging until after I was on the tenure-track here. And no one at EMU has ever had anything negative to me about doing this, and that includes administrators even back in the old days of EMUTalk.

Anyway, I guess I’m just reflecting/musing now about why this very old-timey practice from the olde days of the Intertubes still matters, at least to me. About 95% of the posts I’ve written are barely read or noticed at all, and that’s fine. But every once in a while, I’ll post something, promote it a bit on social media, and it catches on. And then sometimes, a post becomes something else– an invited talk, a conference presentation, an article. So yeah, it’s still worth it.

Posted on

I should do this more in my own blogging…

From the “By the Book” interviewer with writer/blogger Maria Popova:

Do your blog posts grow out of whatever you happen to be reading at the time? Or do you pick books specifically with Brain Pickings in mind?

I don’t see my website as a separate entity or any sort of media outlet — it is the record and reflection of my inner life, my discourse with ideas and questions through literature, my extended marginalia. It is a “blog” in the proper sense — a “web log,” part commonplace book and part ledger of a life. Nothing on it is composed for an audience. I write about what I read, and I read to process what I dwell in, mentally and emotionally. The wondrous thing about being human — the beauty and banality of it — is that we all tend to dwell in the same handful of elemental struggles, joys and sorrows, which is why a book one person writes may help another process her own life a century later, and why a “blog” by a solitary stranger may speak to many other solitary dwellers across time and space.

Posted on

First (perhaps only) prediction of 2019: the return/rise of blogs

You read it here first (hopefully): I think 2019 is going to bring a resurgence (well, “return” or “rise” or “comeback” might be better words) of blogging. I freely admit this is not based on evidence. It’s a hope, a gut feeling, and/or a wild-assed guess. But a lack of evidence has never stopped me before from predicting things, so there’s no reason for me to stop now.

Predicting the comeback of blogging is in part a New Year’s resolution for me to blog more, a bit of wishful thinking. I keep resolving and hoping to start working on writing projects that have nothing to do with academia– or if they do have to do with my day job, they are more commentaries on the state of things, like this piece I write last year— and blogging is a good place to try to draft and play with some of those ideas.

I’ve been thinking about this for a month or so now after reading this piece by Matt “Community College Dean” Reed, and John Warner’s follow-up. Reed is right in that blogging (certainly in academia, and I am guessing in other careers as well) has it’s problems. “[S]ome people prefer to hire folks who don’t have paper trails. I’ll just leave that there” is true, and I am guessing there are opportunities I’ve missed because of something I have posted online. I have never had any delusions about being able to “make money” from blogging, so in the sense that the first rule of writing professionally is never do it for free, this is probably a waste of time.

On the other hand, most of the most valuable experiences I’ve had in academia as a writer and scholar connect to blogging. Writing here about MOOCs was why I got invited to speak about MOOCs at some cool conferences here and in Italy, why I was able to co-edit a reasonably successful collection of essays about MOOCs, and ultimately why I have a book coming out this year (knocking on wooden things) about MOOCs. My “greatest hit” of academic publishing (take both “greatest” and “hit” with a significant grain of salt) is still “When blogging goes bad,” an article that obviously wouldn’t have been possible without, well, blogging.

So there are very good reasons to try to go back to blogging more. Warner pointed out that the “freedom” to write what you want on a blog is the kind of freedom where you have nothing left to lose, and that is certainly the case for me. I mean, at this point of my life/career, I’m pretty much stuck situated at EMU– unless something strange and unforeseen happens, which, as the last couple of years in the Trump era et al have demonstrated time and time again, I suppose is unpredictably possible. All of which is to say that unless I write/do something quite foolish (also unpredictably possible, of course), I don’t see anything but an upside for me blogging.

But I think it goes beyond just me.

Social media feels kind of tippy-pointish to me right now. I increasingly have friends who have either opted out of social media entirely or who are now a lot more careful about how they dose on it. I cannot go two or three days without stumbling across some kind of article about the evilness of Facebook, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that is going to change anytime soon.

I’m kind of hoping for a blogging comeback sort of like what’s going on with vinyl records or independent bookstores. Yes, the vast majority of us are still listening to music on our devices and not that old-timey turntable. (Slight tangent: this might also be the year where I see if that old turntable in the basement still works). Yes, most of us are still buying a lot of our books from Amazon– if we’re buying and reading books at all. (Another slight tangent: I really ought to read more non-work books this coming year). But with the collapse of the big-box stores and a customer return/preference for actual print books, independent stores are proving to be modestly sustainable.

So yeah, it’s a niche. Maybe a small one. But hey, small worlds are still worlds.

 

 

Posted on

Where have all the bloggers gone?

Like I said last week, I’m committed to rebooting the whole blogging thing, both as related to my teaching and just my, well, blogging. So one of my errands was to clean up my RSS feeds to the blogs that I am/was following on Feedly. As far as I know, it’s the only decent-ish RSS feed reading site/tool out there, at least the only one that’s free. After I heard from Alan Levine in the comments here about Pinboard, I’m wondering if there is something else. I haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but even though Pinboard isn’t free, $11 a year seems like a good deal for a pretty robust service.

Anyway, this was the first time I had gone through my Feedly account– who I was following, how I had grouped these feeds– in probably four or five years. It was interesting to see how many blogs were no longer active, some not active since 2013 or earlier. But these ended blogs weren’t analogous to a place trapped in a historic moment by something like a volcano– Pompeii immediately comes to mind— because those people obviously saw what was coming. The plaster casts of their remains show them curled up in fetal positions in the face of falling ash and rock and fire. Rather, most of these blogs were left in place as if nothing odd at all had happened, as if they weren’t really ended at all. Most of these blogs’ most “recent” post was nothing new or dramatic– that is, there weren’t a lot of “farewell” messages.  Most of these blogs were like that apartment in Paris discovered untouched for decades, not so much abandoned in the sense that a sinking ship is abandoned; they were just “left.”

Back in 2009, I gave a presentation at the Computers and Writing Conference about blog “endings” and the research I was trying to conduct back then. One of these days, maybe I’ll go back to that project and at least make it something to put up here. It was difficult to find people who had admitted that they had quit blogging, even with bloggers who hadn’t posted anything in over a year. But I did track down a few people who served as “case studies” for my purposes back then. I basically concluded that my case studies had stopped blogging because of what I described as a “natural decay” of the rhetorical situation (a combination of the purpose coming to an end or a sense that there was almost no audience interested), or the complete opposite problem where the blogger was acutely concerned about audience. Actually, the example I recall was of a female academic blogger who quit because she had pretty good evidence that one of her male colleagues was quasi-stalking her via her blog.

In any event, the fall of some of the old blogs I followed was striking to me, and it makes me think that I need to seek out some new blogs to follow, too.

Posted on

Trying to reboot the blogging thing, a bit

A new semester is upon us here at EMU, and that (along with new year resolutions) has me rethinking about blogging again.

In terms of teaching, I’m returning to some blogging assignments. I’m teaching an online version of the undergraduate course “Writing, Style, and Technology,” a course I used to teach A LOT– like four or five sections a year sometimes– but now, for a bunch of different reasons, a course I haven’t taught in about three years. I use blogs in this class more or less as a notebook and pretty much the same way I described it here in my article “When Blogging Goes Bad,” which came out in Kairos almost a dozen years ago and it is still my “greatest hit” in terms of an individually written piece of scholarship. This assignment isn’t a “write whatever you want” sort of space; rather, it’s really just using a blog format/tool to collect and share a series of short (and assigned) writing prompts. It’s sort of like the old “keep a notebook” assignment, but without the hassle of paper and also the added feature that students can read (and comment on) each others’ entries.

For my graduate course, Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice, I’m giving a reboot to a blog assignment that is also kind of/sort of what I was describing back in “When Blogging Goes Bad.” I’m trying to get students to use a blog again as a sort of “writer’s notebook” to “reflect on readings and activities, to make connections to other research, and to give you a space to think about the final short writing assignment for the term.” And just to set up some clear criteria up from the get-go, I’m asking students to post at least 12 times during the term (a little less than once a week) and to comment on other blogs from classmates at least six times.

I’m doing this for my grad class mainly because I think blogging has been a practice that has been important to me for whatever limited successes I’ve had as a scholar. Facebook and Twitter and all of that are fine and they make sharing links pretty easy, but neither of these platforms makes it easy to search previous posts for links and references of various sorts– I assume that’s on purpose.  A blog is a much better notebook sort of space for me to keep notes/observations and just keep track of these kinds of links, at least in terms of scholarship. My blog is easily searchable, and I’m using previous entries quite a bit in the ongoing MOOC book project and in other things. Oh, and as an aside: this is why I still use delicious too, though yeah, I’m not that crazy about the way delicious works (or doesn’t work) anymore.

Beyond that, I have had tangible benefits from blogging in that some of my blogging (particularly about EMU and particularly about MOOCs as of late) have lead to some of the most important scholarly and writerly projects of my career. I don’t get a ton of readers here– I get around 2,000 views a month, which is a fraction of what a “popular” blog gets– but I am fairly confident in saying that in an average month, I get more “views” of content here than I have get of all of my published (and supposedly worthy) scholarship in a year– maybe every 10 years. And it seems to me that if you’re a writer (and scholars are writers), you want to share your writing with others. You want and need an audience. I know a lot of scholars and writers who seem hesitant about sharing their writing too early or in a format like a blog, but sometimes I think that goes too far (and if you’re a writer who doesn’t like the idea of other people reading your writing…), and for me, I’d rather share work in progress that helps me think and that others might find interesting. Thus the blogging.

Of course, if I’m going to give an assignment that asks my graduate students to write and read each others’ blogs about once a week, I probably need to up my blog writing game myself a bit this semester/this year. Thus this post.

Posted on

2015 Highlights

A quick and largely sequential set of highlights/lowlights around here for me in 2015:

  • Sabbatical! How long ago it seems now, but I was on sabbatical in winter 2015 (and basically during the spring/summer too). I did better than I did the first time I was on a sabbatical, not as well as the next time. Not that I know exactly when I’ll get my next sabbatical (if there is a next sabbatical), but I think a full year and one where I’m completely away from EMU would be interesting. Or maybe not; one of the things I learned about myself on sabbatical was/is I’m not close to ready to retire yet.
  • Yik-Yak hit the EMU fan in some interesting ways. I blogged about it a bit here, but more at the now defunct EMUTalk; here’s a good example of that.
  • I went to the CCCCs in Tampa, which was pretty good. Here’s a link to my talk.
  • I “dodged” the administrative track by applying for the position of Director of the Faculty Development Center. I have no idea if I didn’t get it because they meant to hire the person who was in the job before or because I dropped out of the search, but either way, it doesn’t matter. I’d say I’m about 90% pleased with the way this turned out, which is about as happy as I am with the way anything turns out. Interestingly enough, there’s been a lot of administrative turn-over recently. The person I would have reported to in this position, Kim Schatzel, is leaving EMU to become president of Towson University, which means that EMU currently has an interim president and an interim provost, and the College of Arts and Sciences is soon to have an interim dean too. This level of uncertainty might have been a good time to be a low-level administrator (like this position), or it might have been a terrible time to be an administrator. I guess I’ll never know for sure.
  • I went to HASTAC at MSU, which was interesting and I got to preside over a panel that was going on simultaneously between HASTAC and Computers and Writing. A lot of energy and excitement generated there, though unfortunately, there hasn’t really been anything in the way of a follow-up to the event.
  • This was a pretty popular post back in June— and I’ll want to/need to come back to this again soon for the MOOC book project (which is still moving along far too slowly). Of course, the big event in June was my son graduated from Greenhills!
  • Oh, also in June: I was in Ruston, Louisiana (of all places!) attending/involved with a “cyber-discovery” camp sponsored by the National Integrated Cyber Education Research Center, and I was involved again in a version of the camp we held here at EMU. And I’m still involved in all this by helping out in putting together a new version of the camp and by being a part of the second version of the camp we’re going to be holding here this coming spring. It’s a long story explaining what it is, the strengths and pitfalls, and maybe I’ll explain that another day. Just thought I’d mention it for now.
  • In July, my whole side of the family (with sisters, brothers-in-laws, and kids it’s like a total of 18 people) got together at a house in southeast Wisconsin to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was a lovely and fun time and lots of good stories; here’s a video of a particularly stormy afternoon on the lake.
  • EMUTalk wrapped up in August; here’s a link to the last post I had on that site. I have to say I don’t miss it as much as I thought I might. Maybe it’s because there’s still some “talk” on the Facebook page; or maybe I really did quit it at the right time.
  • We had a grand week up in the Traverse City area at a quaint little cottage in the woods. I think the hands-down highlight was a magical night on the beach with our friends John and Karen Mauk, a night where (sometimes all at the same time) we saw a zillion stars, shooting/falling stars, the northern lights, and a lightening storm in the distance.
  • Will moved out/moved in at U of M (and that’s been going well so far, I think).
  • I started to (and continue to) chair a search, I became the associate director of the first year writing program, and now (because Derek is on sabbatical) I’m the interim director. So much for avoiding all responsibility.
  • I went to my first international conference and my first “solo” trip out of the U.S. (and I took about 1,000 pictures, too.
  • And I didn’t blog as much in November and December as I should/would have preferred to do; my hope is to change that in the new year.

So yeah, 2015 turned out pretty decent overall. Let’s see what’s what next year.

Posted on

Recapping the Federica Web Learning International MOOC Conference & Some Italy Sidetrips

Last week, I was in Naples and Capri, Italy to attend the Federica Web Learning International MOOC Conference. My brief talk/presentation/position statement (everyone just gave small talks) was more or less called “A Small View of MOOCs: A Limited Look at the Recent Past and Likely Future of MOOCs at the Edges of Higher Education in the United States,” and that link takes you to a Google Doc version of my talk– the slides and the script I more or less followed. Here are links to my tourism pictures of Naples, Anacapri, and Pompeii on Flickr.

After the break, I go into way more detail than necessary about the conference and the trip. Read on if you’re interested, though a lot of it is really me writing/thinking out loud for myself, which is often the case on my blog, right?

Continue reading “Recapping the Federica Web Learning International MOOC Conference & Some Italy Sidetrips”

Posted on

When it comes to Education and Technology, “Efficiency” is not the point

One of my goals (one of many, far too many, goals) during the sabbatical is to post more here– probably still mostly about higher ed and MOOCs, but hopefully other stuff too. I think it would be a good idea to shift back away from Facebook and Twitter. Don’t ask me why I think that’s a good idea right now; it just seems like it is.

This seems a good place to start: from U.S. News and World Report (which I think is just a web site nowadays) comes “Professors Grow Weary of Idea That Technology Can Save Higher Ed,” with the subheadline “Some say bringing high technology to higher ed makes it less, not more, efficient.”  As a slight tangent: the author of this article is something called “The Hechinger Report,” which “is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University” that apparently generates a lot of articles about education that get poured right into a lot of mainstream publications.

Anyway, a quote:

Universities and colleges are marketing themselves to tech-savvy teenagers while promising higher productivity and financial savings. They will pour $10.4 billion into education technology this year, according to the Center for Digital Education, from computers to in-class gadgets such as digital projectors and wireless “clickers” that let students answer questions electronically.

But professors say they don’t have enough help to use this technology effectively, haven’t seen results from it, and fear that the cost savings administrators keep insisting that technology will bring could mean their own careers are on the line.

The assumed purpose of technology (e.g., computer stuff, basically) in this article is efficiency, and some version of that word/theme appears at least a dozen times in this 1,000 or word so piece. And– surprise, surprise!– it turns out that computer stuff doesn’t make education more efficient.

First off, duh.

Second, (to expand a bit on that first point), one of the main problems I always have with these kinds of articles is the assumed definition of technology. Instead of defining technology as any sort of tool like pens or paper or chalkboards or even literacy itself (Ong), technology is “anything that doesn’t seem normal to us, particularly computers stuff:” that is, “clickers,” “gadgets,” “digital projectors,” etc. Things that were recently “technology” often become quickly naturalized so they no longer qualify as “gadget” or “new-fangled”– email and cell phones, for example. Maybe it’s unfair of me to expect any definition of technology to be any more nuanced than that, but it’s still frustrating.

Third, (also expanding on my “duh”), efficiency is not the point. Modern computer technologies allow teachers and students to do things differently now than they did things five or ten or twenty or however many years ago, but that doesn’t necessarily (or even usually) make things more efficient. Take online courses in the broadest sense. Anyone who has taught or taken an online class knows that the advantage of the technology is it alters the time and space of a traditional “classroom:” you can be in class from wherever you can get a decent internet connection and you can engage in the class on your own schedule (more or less, and assuming the class is asynchronous). But online courses are a fairly inefficient way to convey information and to interact with each other. In a face to face class, we can all discuss a reading or an assignment in one time and place; in an online class, not so much. Often, this inefficiency shifts to the instructor– that is, it takes a lot more time to teach an online class than it does to teach a face to face one– and that’s one of the reasons why a lot of faculty have no interest in teaching online.

This ongoing quest for efficiency and cost savings (generally by employing fewer teachers and/or by having bigger classes) drives MOOCs and other online experiments, just as it was the motivation behind correspondence schools in the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the first wave of online courses a decade or so ago. For students (and parents of students), seeking efficiency makes sense. Over Christmas at my parents in Iowa, the conversation with the brothers-in-laws turned to the cost of higher education (one of them is preparing to send a kid to college next year), and this desire for efficiency came up. It wasn’t the right place or time to explain what I see as the actual reasons for the costs of higher ed (administrative costs, assessment, athletics, student amenities, and a sharp decline in state subsidies), but I did try to point out that education is an inherently inefficient enterprise, sort of like a string quartet (e.g., Baumol’s cost disease).  Education generally– teaching in particular– doesn’t scale the same way that content does. Efficiency is not the point.

I’m not sure I was very persuasive, and as a parent who is also looking down the barrel of paying tuition for our son next year, I share a lot of my brother-my-law’s feelings on this.