Higher Education Observer

 Very few people even come to this blog; I think mostly it's porn sites trolling me. But I write anyway.  Many, perhaps most, people in higher education claim this to be worst semester we have ever spent. Perhaps. Perhaps collectively; I would not say that for individuals, because Fall 2001 would have been really horrific for people in the Northeast, and there have been regional national disasters that have wrecked havoc (wreaked?) on colleges and universities. But COVID affects everyone, at some level.  We are wrapping up final exams, thankfully before Thanksgiving, and in the midst of grading at my college. I have been told how bad it is every day since August 1. Many of my colleagues said repeatedly, "We're going to shut down after two weeks, the cases will be so high." We did not. Cases did not get "spikey" until last week, and there are a few reasons for that I'll get into below. Many faculty prepared their classes in case of shut down in September....

Yes, I have recently realized that they are both an ecological issue (less paper and physical resources) and an equity issue. They are also a fiscal responsibility matter, as I discuss here in the draft of a speech I am giving to my Toastmaster's group in a few weeks (I have to learn it now, though).  (I'm sort of an expert on the subject.) Perhaps you’ve had this experience. It’s definitely not hypothetical, and has probably happened to you if you have taken college courses or your children have. You’re signed up for the course, your name is on the roster, and you’re excited about learning. Then you find out right before class, or on the first day, that there is a textbook for the class. All right, books aren’t that expensive, so you go to the bookstore to purchase the textbook. You find out it costs $300. Your heart goes into your throat, or your stomach, or somewhere $300 for a book? What’s it made of, diamonds? What kind of a scam is this?   ...

I have received countless emails since March about COVID about any number of issues. Many are from vendors wanting to sell some software, platform, textbooks, or seminar/workshop about higher education at this time. And yes, we are hurting. A couple of days this week I attended a REMOTE SUMMIT from a well known institution that has a mighty (and I mean mighty) online education program to complement its "brick and mortar" curriculum. One of the speakers in these (blessedly) short sessions was quite passionate about social justice in the classroom and at this time. I appreciated her passion and spirit, but she was quite fluent in buzzwords: interrogate, decolonize,  re-imagining, empowerment, deconstruct, co-create, intersectional, safety, community. All of these are either words I would not use or would have divergent meanings for than this speaker. But one of the terms I've hear a great deal and scratch my head over is "trauma-informed pedagogy." Whose tra...

One of the most classist systems in the U.S. is higher education. We don't mean to be; we really try to be egalitarian and open access and student-centered and all that. Yet I see the innate classism all the time. What I mean by classism here is also a form of cluelessness for those who grew up in, perhaps, more privileged circumstances. It might also be mixed with racism from a majority culture member toward a minority culture member, and therefore an assumption of "less than." Less prepared, less really interested in improving themselves intellectually, less aware of the real value of education beyond career readiness, maybe less intelligent. It may also stem from an idealized vision of what college education should be: four years of living in a dormitory, making friends for life, being fascinated by brilliant professors and life-changing content and books, being done in four years, rarely worrying about finances. Where this ideal comes from, I am not sure; What thi...

No one expected this at the beginning of the semester. Well, maybe they did. At least, systems have contingency plans for weather disasters and pandemics. But few who teach expected a two-month-long spring break. The number of emails I've gotten (usually spamish) from publishers, vendors, and organizations wanting to help me teach online is astounding? amazing? annoying? aggravating? I've taught online for 20 years, so the transition isn't that hard; I don't think it's the best though. Has anyone heard from students about this "transition"? I did today. I can't share it or anything about it, but let's just say it wasn't good. Comments?

T he following is the text of a TED TALK style presentation I'm doing on Open Educational Resources. It's not everything I could say, but my time is limited. My own research showed a discrepancy between OER learning outcomes at an access institution and an R1 (I published it in an academic book), which I ascribe to less student preparedness and their difficulty navigating digital texts cognitively.   I have a rockstar PowerPoint to go with this (you probably didn't get my irony there.)  Every year our college has a BOLD TALKS session by faculty. This is mine. Free money! Sounds good, right? But is there really such a thing as free money? Despite what some politicians would like us to believer, we know that free money is an oxymoron. However, what if you could receive a stipend of 2-5,000 dollars for changing the way you teach one of your courses? The University System of Georgia realizes that to motivate faculty to adopt open educational resources and te...

I've been thinking about the faculty member's power in the classroom. In spending time with some colleagues, I've been wondering how much of their teaching career is about that power over students rather than love of discipline, service to the community, career advancement, or something else. A related question, how much can we expect our students to "confess" their experience? I ask this because I sat in a session in a conference recently in which the presenter described an exercise they (gender unidentified here) ask students in the class to divide themselves in groups by subcultures. After that, they each have to sit in front of the class (in the group) and answer the question "What is hard for you as a member of your subculture about living in this country?" And they each must talk for two minutes on this. Obviously, this instructor has an agenda. I am appalled by this exercise. It seems a blatant use of the instructor's power. What if a ...

If you have not read Neil Postman's classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death , then resolve to do so.  I've read it three times. A related book is Mary Ann Wolfe's Reader, Come Home. It is no longer really debatable that our devices, the Internet, and digital reading has transformed/is transforming/will soon transform our brains. The question is what to do about it. Accept it, since all technologies change our brains to some extent? Writing certainly did, as Plato warned his contemporaries. Print surely did (another must read being Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy). TV did, as Postman prophesies (not so much in the futuristic prediction sense as the warning, preaching sense). And now our total dependence (she says as she types on her laptop for her blog) digitization of information and communication. Second, resist it by divorcing oneself as much as possible from their use. Possible for some, but not many. We do not really need social media, now, do we? Third, contr...

Thoughtful and fact-based essay on campus free speech victories and challenges, some from the supposed "victims." https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-legal-promise-and-sobering-reality I'm a major David French fan. My own campus is not exactly the University of North Carolina, but I have run into these tensions. Last year a drag parade/show was offered to the students and advertised on the campus media (the most reliable being the "stall wall," which I've also seen called the Daily Flush or the Flush Flash --"Everybody knows because everybody goes." I raised  a concern about this because I did not see how it was necessarily a positive depiction of youth who struggle with the sexual identity. Most are not interested in the flamboyance of that lifestyle, and they may not be comfortable with their struggle to be or not be "gay" being confused in the more public mind with drag shows. I also wasn't sure how donors ...

A recent edition of the podcast Hidden Brain has a fantastic look at learning. I highly recommend it. Although the idea of the clicker method is not applicable to liberal arts or knowledge-based courses, what he brings out about the emotional sides of learning and the teacher/student relationship is very insightful.

I am now involved in a faculty learning community (first one) on TiLT. We had our first meeting today, with a great discussion between a business professor, an education professor, a mathematician, two  literature teachers, a biological psychologist, an instructional designer, and me--not sure how to define myself, mostly communication, some English, some social science, and mostly administrator. We talked about our first thoughts, to some extent skeptical, about TiLT, and where we hoped to take this.  I'm excited about it, because I'll be teaching a freshman public speaking class later this semester and that is probably where TiLT is most needed. Our misgivings were sort of around "hand-holding" and not letting the students experience complexity, ambiguity, and ill-defined problems, to "muck around" in an intellectual task. That's valid, but not entirely what TiLT is against. It's against vagueness, purposelessness (perceived), and detachment fr...

Reflection is something that hovers around experiential learning and high impact practices. Eyler, a scholar of service-learning, stated, “ there is reason to believe that reflection gets rather short shrift in typical service-learning experiences” (2002, p. 520). Either its origins and theorists are not understood, or its processes are not really applied, or we ask students to reflect in a way that is superficial or simply “evidentiary”, and what I therefore call “rhetorical.” I would like to explore these three points. My ultimate goal is to create a portable taxonomy of reflection, whether in-action or after-the-fact, that students can be taught. In reaching that goal, I want to make an argument that in our assignment of “reflective papers” we are not so much encouraging or guaranteeing reflection from students (who are not given to reflection naturally) as we are saying, “Prove to me you reflected in a way that I as the instructor am satisfied with your structure, argument, s...

Sometimes I just use this blog for reposting articles I find interesting. As I am reading Bored and Brilliant right now, just read Mary Ann Wolf's book on reading, and plan to read Sherry Turkle soon, I deeply "into" the digital media's effects on learning, brain processing, reading, and overall, human thriving. Here's just one rant, reflection, insight from a college professor   https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/theyre-abysmal-students-are-cell-phones-destroying-the-college-classroom/?utm_source=pocket-newtab This is reality, so what do we do? Expect more. Don't give up. Resist. It's not futile.