A Health Update on Me

The diagnosis has come in on what was causing the pain in my leg that I complained about since the Thanksgiving Holiday. It's arthritis, in both hips and my lower back, coupled with some bone spurs. None of this is too severe at present, but the bone spurs can apparently irritate a nerve. Mostly it is under control with some mild pain medication, though I've had a bad day or two since the semester ended. (I'm not counting the Missouri game in that.) If I was cross with you during the last few weeks of the term, I apologize for that. That is likely the explanation (though it could still have been your word usage). ;-)

I hope you are having a fun and relaxing break. That's what is't been for me.

Drum Roll, Please

I'm now done with the grading. (Yippee!) Here's what I did.

On your reflections - I made comments on your Portfolio posts for the world to see and then in Compass I made comments for just you along with the points for your posts. Those are in the discussion area.

On the sub projects for the class project, I made comments for the world to see where your posted work appears. There are no analogous comments in Compass. The sub projects were so different they really couldn't be compared. So, in the end I opted just to give you a participation credit for that. Everyone got full credit. I likewise did that for class participation. Perhaps a little sneaky of me to do it that way, but I trust nobody will object to that outcome.

Grades have been entered in Banner. I have no clue how long it takes for you to see them. If you don't see them by Monday, let me know and I'll post them in the Compass grade book. I hope, however, that won't be necessary.

Have a great break. Once you've put some distance between our class and what you will then be doing, if you have a chance for one last reflection about our course I'd be curious on that score - whether your perspective has changed and any consequences of our course on other things you are doing.

Take good care.

Professor Arvan

Update

As of about 2:30 today I was caught up in evaluating the reflections portfolios. For each of you who had submitted that final blog post, you should find in Compass an evaluation message in a discussion topic just for you along with a numerical score. As the rest come in I will try to get at them with no more than 24 hour turnover.

To keep my own intrinsic motivation intact in doing this I'm avoiding doing the clerical part of this work till the end, meaning I've not yet created a spreadsheet with scores and not looked at your overall performance for the course based on those. Here I just want to tell you what I plan to do.

If you've been a professor as long as I have you learn to "massage" grade information to produce a desired outcome, which for me is to minimize if not eliminate conversations with students of the form, "Professor, I was so close. If I only had x more points I could have had a (one grade higher) instead of a (what they were actually assigned). All the bargaining power is with the students in these conversations, and in a course like ours where the grading is clearly subjective and there is no certification of competency in the subject that needs to be upheld (but see my comment to R. Irfan's portfolio post), my belief is to go to the equilibrium of that bargaining game straight away and not have the conversation at all. This is consistent with my statement when we had the in class discussion about the reflections and I talked about how they should be graded - effort not outcome. That's my intent here.

For the class project, subgroups, I've not yet evaluated the work. Will figure out how to give the feedback to you when I do.

Some problems are fixable

As to the issue of finding stuff on the course site, the following is a little clunky but it does work. Try this in a regular Google search - not the blog search.

"designing for effective change" I am a fugitive from a chain gang

That should bring up the unique post in the course site that has mention of the movie with Paul Muni, I am a fugitive from a chain gang. In general do a search with the course name in quotes followed by whatever you are looking for. That should work.

I guess we should have provided that info earlier in the course. ;-(

Survey Link

Here is the survey from Angelica, Kim, and Sofia.

The update doesn't seem to be working

So here are the last few calendar entries

Class Session

Visit by Hester Eleanor Prynne - Sofia's bunny. The Tipping Point - we'll discuss in an unusual way by asking the question - can "big ideas" tip? Let's start with something we haven't talked about before in class - "going green." Has that tipped already? If not, what would it take to make it tip? Then let's turn to the issues the class has taken up over the semester. What would it take for some big idea about that to tip?

December 7, 2009 12:00 PM

Class Session

Since this is the last class session we will try to wrap up on the class project, discuss any deliverables and then ask a different question. Is there a coherent theme to what we've talked about and done? Does the course "make sense" as a way of thinking about the issues? Also, should it be offered again and if so with what modifications? We need to save some time for the written evaluations.

December 9, 2009 12:00 PM

Last Reflection

This is a self-critique on your blogging for the semester. In it please identify the posts you want to included in your portfolio. (One from the first three weeks, another from the next three weeks, and then two other posts that signify your best west work.) Explain why you choose each and then talk about your own learning as a writer/blogger as well as aspirations you might have in this domain beyond the course. Please consult the post in the Syllabus that explains the rubric for evaluating the reflections.

December 11, 2009 5:00 PM

Being a Kvetch/Multimedia Presentations/My Situation

I've been on muscle relaxants since Wednesday. My brother, who is a doctor, asked me today, do they make me drowsy. I responded - only in the daytime. Anyway, my ability to concentrate is not as good as it should be and I'm more than a little crabby because I can't get comfortable while I'm sitting, which makes working at the computer a bit difficult.

--------

I've been suggesting to several of you who have turned in multimedia presentations to modify the presentations in certain ways. There are two reasons for this:

1) I'd like to repost the presentations on the class blog. Have a tag for them and that way have a gallery. I hope they have a half-life beyond this semester. So I have some aspirations for them beyond your own learning.

2) In several cases I thought the tie in to the course could be made stronger. So I was encouraging that.

On both of these, my being a pain notwithstanding, I'm going to follow the standard approach between author (you) and editor (me). Author has final say. Editor gets to give reactions and make suggestions. So make the changes I suggest or not as you see fit and do let me know whether I can put your presentation into the class gallery.

--------

I really don't like to nag, but there is a variety of course work for several of you that has not yet been done. We need to get closure on that. Consider yourself admonished.

In preparation for tomorrow's class

In the second part of the class, where we discuss the reflections, I'd like you to think back to Monday where we talked about personal mastery as following intrinsic motivation and perhaps losing a sense of self with that, getting so absorbed in the activity. I'd like to know whether that ever happened with the reflections and thus if you came to look forward to writing them.

Of course, on the flip side, there is writer's block. Believe it or not, I have it too on occasion, some quite recently. It is pretty common, even among very accomplished writers. Since I'm a big fan of The West Wing (the TV show), I thought might like to read or view (below, the audio needs to be cranked up) this scene where Toby, the main speech writer for the President talks about his problems with writing.

Perhaps of Interest - a Seminar this Friday

From: College of Education Announcements List [mailto:ED-COLLEGE-ANNOUNCEMENTS@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU] On Behalf Of Grady, Rebecca J
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 4:38 PM
To: ED-COLLEGE-ANNOUNCEMENTS@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Subject: [ED] Higher Education Collaborative Friday, December 4, 12N-1:30P More Than You Think, Less Than We Need: Learning Outcomes Assessment in American Higher Education

Higher Education Collaborative

Seminar Series

National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment

Making Learning Outcomes Usable & Transparent

Stanley Ikenberry, Regent Professor and Interim

President Designate, University of Illinois

George Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor and Director, NILOA

and Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research

Staci Provezis, Project Manager

Jason Goldfarb, Natasha Jankowski, Gloria Jea, and Julia Makela,

Graduate Research Assistants, University of Illinois

More Than You Think, Less Than We Need:

Learning Outcomes Assessment in American Higher Education

Friday, December 4, 2009

12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

College of Education Room 242

Refreshments will be served.

Documenting what undergraduate students learn, know, and can do is of growing interest. The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), established in 2008, seeks to discover and disseminate ways that academic programs and institutions can productively use assessment data internally to inform and strengthen undergraduate education, and externally to communicate with policy makers, families and other stakeholders. The speakers will discuss the NILOA national survey report, “More Than You Think, Less Than We Need: Learning Outcomes Assessment in American Higher Education,” the NILOA Web review of over 700 institutional Web sites, and the NILOA study on regional accreditation’s influence on student learning outcomes assessment.

Mark your calendars for these Spring 2010 Higher Education Collaborative Seminars.

Date & Time	Speakers	Presentation Title
Friday, February 26, 2010 12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m., Room 242	Jennifer Delaney, Assistant Professor University of Illinois	Earmarks and State Appropriations for Higher Education

Rebecca Grady

Educational Organization and Leadership

1310 South Sixth Street, RM 347

Champaign, IL 61820

PH 217 265 5409

FAX 217 244 5632

email-rgrady@illinois.edu

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Some follow up to today's class session

Here are some points we didn't get to. I simply note them here.

1. We should have tied Senge on Personal Mastery to Bruner on Intrinsic Motivation and the other things we read on intrinsic motivation. In some sense, personal mastery as a path is a commitment to lead a life driven by intrinsic motivation.

2. In our discussion we assumed that the origin of the shared vision is the CEO. But that needn't be the case. The origin can come from within the organization.

3. However, one reason why people leave big companies to become part of a startup is because the shared vision is hard to achieve from the bottom up in a big company.

Also, I made comparison between Personal Mastery and Maslow's notion of self-actualization. This is a very accessible site about Maslow. Scroll down to about the middle of the page and read the section on self-actualization. The list of meta needs that follows is interesting. I wonder whether you yourselves feel those needs (all or a subset) and if you think your education has made you aware of them.

Update on Anth 143

A week ago Friday, I had a second meeting with Professor Clancy, this one with Geoff Brewster in attendance. Geoff works for ATLAS. Starting off the meeting, Professor Clancy informed us that the Anthro head had just alerted the department that they were taking a 4.5% rescission. (The entire Campus has been planning for that rescission since the beginning of the fiscal year. Most units held back the funds, so they wouldn't be spent on something else. Apparently Anthro did not.) The upshot is that they will not have TAs this spring. That is how they are taking the budget hit.

Anth 143 is the largest course offered by the department. It is only taught in the fall. (There is a small section taught by a grad student in the summer, but there is no offering in the spring.) Will there be TAs for it in fall 2010? It's hard to imagine a 700 student course without TAs. But it is equally hard to envision having TAs when there is no cash in the system to pay them.

Needless to say, this news created a detour in the discussion of our class project - having mentors to help teams of students do their project work for the course. Can there be realistic intensive student projects if there aren't TAs to grade the projects? We talked about possible work arounds - calibrated peer review, for example. But there is a lot of set up work for the instructor to implement any of these and that is a big part of the issue in implementing any sort of change in such a high enrollment class. So we spent some time whining about lack of resources and the campus not having its priorities right. Not anticipating any of this going into the meeting, I'm afraid I contributed to the doom and gloom. I had no rabbit to pull out of my hat. I didn't see our project working if there were no TAs.

After railing about the issues for a while, we spent some time talking about the use of mentors, as a hypothetical. We did talk about how the mentors might be deployed, scheduling evening sections (perhaps Sun - Thurs), one hour per week, to have a fixed time and space for the mentors to meet with the groups. We also talked a little bit about how that might go and designing the course up front so the teams could get through any stumbling block they might encounter early on and have the mentor help them with that, also so they would bond in advance of the project work they'd do later in the semester.

The other avenue of this we talked about is a totally online version, possibly in the summer, maybe in the fall as well offered as an 8 week course during the second 8 weeks of the semester. It seems that getting the summer calendar in sync with the fall and spring calendars might happen by dividing up the longer semester into halves. I'd favor that. It is a very long semester.

In any event, I thought you should know it isn't full steam ahead, but there still are possibilities.

Another piece for Wednesday's class

The conference I'm attending online had a keynote yesterday where the question was posed - Newspapers have been blind sided and decimated by the changes from without - mostly Internet alternatives. Is Higher Ed next? The piece below from earlier this year is kind of a Paul Revere's ride. Regarding mental models, the issue is whether the message is getting through.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky via kwout

A warm up excercise for Wednesday's class

This piece from Nature Magazine that compared Britannica to Wikipedia for accuracy is from several years back. It confounded conventional wisdom, which said "authoritative writing" of encyclopedia entries is necessary to ensure accuracy. Do you have other examples where conventional wisdom proved wrong? And can you explain why conventional wisdom failed in that case?

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head : Article : Nature via kwout

Recording of Mary-Ann Winkelmes Visit

The recording is now available in Compass.

Follow up on class today

I've become aware as of late that instructors and students often see the same thing quite differently and that some things instructors say that are intended as throw away lines get taken quite seriously by students while other things instructors mean in earnest get ignored. Taking that to heart, the rest of this post concerns three things:

1) goals statement,

2) topic choice of the reflections, and

3) the importance of the reflections.

On the Goals Statement, this is the post I made about it in the syllabus. If it is adequate, it might be referenced from time to time to assist in determining what course work would be effective a la Drucker. If it is inadequate, it might be helpful to critique it before producing a goals statement created by the class.

On topic choice in the reflection, below is the relevant paragraph from the syllabus post:

Subject matter-wise, I will try to give you suggestions as to a general theme, but you are always free to choose another as long as you can make a good argument that it is relevant to the class. The main purposes are to get you to reconsider the recent readings, attempt to identify the gist of the arguments being made if we haven't already hit the nail on the head in class discussion, pose questions that haven't yet been answered, and especially to flesh out where your own experience speaks to the issues under consideration.

As a matter of practice, to exercise your option to choose a theme of your own making, you almost certainly have to get to that earlier than Friday. If you are turning to the reflection only then, you are reactive/meeting a deadline/doing the writing out of obligation to course imposed rules. Being creative on your reflections makes for a different sort of obligation, to your own standards of producing something of worth and to the class in making something of relevance. That takes forethought.

On the importance of the reflections, please note that I believe the reflections are very important for your own learning quite apart from whether they are effective a la Drucker. I've articulated this often, but most notably in the post about Slowing Down, especially where it talks about identifying structure and then testing that out, and in the post A Reflection On Reflections On Reflection where there is specific reference to the work of Donald Murray and his notion of discovery through writing. Having reached the part of the course where we are doing the course project, we are much closer in structure to organizations that Drucker has something to say about than we were earlier in the semester. So it seems appropriate to me to bring in his notion of effectiveness, where it wouldn't have made much sense to do so earlier in the term.

One final point not on my list of 3 points. I have tried to conduct the class in two distinct ways. One in ensemble mode. The other in one-on-one mode with each of you. This parallels what I was saying at the beginning of class about the role of a whip in a committee. The instructor role is not the same as the whip role, but there are certain similarities, at least in my way of thinking about it. The one-on-one mode has been facilitated by the reflections, but it has also involved emails and some face to face conversations requested by students beyond those everyone had on the reflections. In the one-on-one mode, the student is much more of the driver than in the ensemble mode. I've been scratching my head for the last several weeks whether the reflections are necessary to make the one-on-one mode work, and indeed if something like them would be necessary for peer mentoring to working similarly. I still don't have a satisfactory answer for that. I'm writing about it here because I think it is an interesting question to ask and important to the class project.

Some thoughts for tomorrow's class

1. The two reviews of the Declining By Degrees video endorse having students watch it, to make the issues we are trying to address seem more real. So tomorrow I'd like to

a) spend a few minutes trying to orchestrate a viewing for other students who'd want to see it.

b) talk for a few minutes about whether CHP students are insulated from the themes of the movie and/or whether the Disengagement Pact is real on our own campus.

2. It would be good for students to have read and reflected up my longish post summarizing and analyzing the class last Wednesday. If you are looking for the big picture on the project, that is the place to look.

After doing those things, we'll get you back into the groups you were in last Monday. I hope that will recharge you on the purpose.

Please Link

Greg is the first to write a post according to this week's prompt. He references a post by Tiffany. It is best practice in blogging to link to other posts that are referenced, indeed to any Web pages that are referenced. This doesn't directly benefit the author of the post at all. The benefit is to the reader who can find and track down those references more easily. If we all link this way, it should help in making us a tighter knit group. That, in turn, would benefit each of us as authors.

Here's a how to post on linking.

Deliverables for the class project

This post will be easy to understand and straightforward for you. (I hope so, anyway.) The next post will be longer, more involved, and *maybe* suggests a different component to the class project.

1. Process deliverable. Each subgroup should supply minutes on a weekly basis. These don't have to be eloquent writing nor do they have to be lengthy. These should be posted on one member's blog and tagged with "subgroup minutes." The idea here is ensure all members of the subgroup sees this as do I and other members of the class. We can better track what is going on this way.

2. Product deliverable. One part of this will be a write up like the write ups for the in class interviews. Another part is a deliverable that you deem appropriate, which may vary from subgroup to subgroup. It could be a recommendation. It could be information collected. It needs to be labelled either as "complete" or as "work in progress." If the latter, it needs to be left in a way where others might receive a baton pass and continue to work on it after our class has concluded. If you suspect you will end up with a work in progress, some though should be given as to how you will pass the baton.

Content from Last Monday Posted

The pdf file of the BTW 250 report on Advising in LAS is posted. It is available on the class homepage in Compass. The recording of Monday's session is also available in the Class Recordings folder.

Movie Night Food Choice

If you are planning to attend Movie Night tomorrow, please complete this very brief form, so I can order the right stuff.