Discretion, Social Media, and Higher Ed Teaching

I am currently fulfilling an administrative role at my college.  It is interim, and I do not know my future other than I will be at that institution for a little while longer.  I enjoy it very much, although the two aspects of teaching I liked the most--the students and my teaching colleagues--are not as large a part of my life right now.

Between finishing my doctorate and stepping into this role, I have to admit to a different self-view and more reticence about what I put on my blogs.  Many things I would like to sound off about I realize it's best not to "go there."  At least while I am "assistant vice president," I will censor myself about
upcoming Supreme Court decisions
the fact that I got a solicitation from the Bill Clinton Foundation today (they want MY money?)
the democratic presidential candidates
The current president
Amtrak accidents
Affordable Care Act
murderers at the Boston marathon

But anyone who reads this can probably figure it out.

All that said, I have been following the brouhaha over the Boston University faculty member (actually, she's not actually there yet, but coming in the fall) who tweeted about white male college students.  Free speech aside, I think college faculty should just put away the tweet machine.  It is just too easy.  The medium is the message, and tweets simple cannot allow anything but potshots that are too easy to take out of context, too quick to go viral, and that lack the nuance of academic discourse. 

I have only gotten in trouble for something I blogged or Facebooked one time, and I learned my lesson.  I was being completely honest at the time and meant no harm, but it seemed so.  This is all so contextless and impersonal!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflecting on Reflection in Learning

Reflection is the subject of my next couple of presentations, so here are my recent jottings. Hopefully a reader can make some sense of them;however, the whole point of this post is that reflection can follow a structure but will not necessarily create a structured record. The reflection record will need to be reshaped to be palatable for a "judge" or "critic" or "instructor." Reflection tends to be framed negatively. If we dig too deep we will only find bad stuff; if we reflect on teaching practice, we will focus on what failed rather than succeeded. Why? Assessment focuses on finding the nonlearners and changing to get more learners, but it ignores that most of the students did learn, so why were there successes? Leads to burnout. Boud & Walker’s idea of validation not well developed but relevant. It is most close to critical thinking—testing it against other knowledge, theories, internal consistency, other data (other learner’s data) Ref
Read more

The LAST Word on Learning Styles

That title might be extreme, but this article nails it, plus giving some good links to other research. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/ What is mostly important here is that we do know what universally works in learning (time, multiple modalities, application rather than rote, spaced out study) rather than an overfocus on "what makes me special."
Read more

Lessons in Leadership Failure

This is the outline for a presentation I gave at Toastmasters recently. It was to finish a pathway in their curriculum, but it also my life. There is no lack of books, articles, magazines, and speakers about leadership. A quick look on Amazon shows there are X number of books with leadership in the title.  Ive even written one. But I would venture to say all of them have one thing in common: the writer thinks they are a good leaders and have this leadership things figured out. Although my topic today is leadership I don’t think I have it figured out and recently I learned a lot about failure in leaders and in myself as a leader.  I was asked to lead a large part of our accreditation. I’ve spoken on this before that it’s called a Quality Enhancement Plan, whereby the institution has to pick a problem and construct a specific plan to address it.  I’ve had a year not to reflect—or not—on how it went and what I learned about myself.  I could share  lot, but in the time I have
Read more