Moving Back the Deadline for the Book Review

Just confirming what I said in class today that the deadline for the book review has been pushed Back to October 16. I would like to see complete first drafts this week, preferably before the weekend, so I have a chance to react to those and so you can write a revision.

For those of you struggling with your reflections...

...and for the rest of the class too, you might get a kick out of this post and the video embedded therein with Scott Simon on how to tell a compelling story.

The same beligerent tactics on the left

According to Judith Warner, it looks like Michael Moore knows only Model 1. But Molly Melching practices and has been successful with Model 2.

The Shame Game - Judith Warner Blog - NYTimes.com via kwout

Push the Button

I've been scratching my head about recent faux pas I've made. You know about one of them. Before class on Monday, I brought my laptop, connected it to the audio port on the side of the cabinet, set the microphone level down to 5 (very low, for the last class it was around 10 which is also low but still too loud), launched the program Audacity which is what is used to record the audio, made a test recording and played it back to see that the recording was working well, and erased the test recording so we'd be ready to record for real when the session started. All the preparation was correct. I missed just one thing. I didn't push the record button for the actual session.

It's easy enough to understand why. There were multiple things going on - making the guests comfortable, worrying about whether Beth would arrive, hoping the team doing the interview was on its game, general antsy-ness. The fact remains that the recording didn't start because of my omission.

Yesterday, as part of my regular job, my team and I were doing a noon-time seminar about how to make micro-lectures online. My task was to demonstrate a particular application called Jing, which makes good fidelity short screen movies. It also has one click publishing, either to a site called screencast.com, which is run by the company that makes Jing, or to YouTube. As part of my presentation I wanted to contrast the plusses and minuses in publishing to either of these sites. I tried this out in my office ahead of time, to be prepared. Yet during the presentation itself, when I got to the YouTube site, something appeared on the screen that wasn't what I had practiced, so I looked quickly to get my bearings but didn't find what I was looking for and thus flubbed that bit.

In case you guys haven't figure this out about me yet, my habit is to take experience that jumps out at me and turn it into a metaphor for other experiences I may not have considered this way before. I know I didn't feel very good about those experiences and I wondered a lot whether they realistically could have been prevented. (The answer to the latter in this case is yes.) So I've been wondering when I see missteps with the class what I could have done to avoid those - suggestions in advance that if adhered to would have prevented the problem. I've also been wondering how to grade a situation that has such a misstep, a high grade for all the preparation or a low grade because the transaction wasn't completed. That one, I still don't have an answer for.

But I do have a simple enough suggestion for in advance that I hope will improve the reflections. It is this. Worry for a bit about your title. Then choose a title that is descriptive of your post. For the last couple of weeks I've been wondering why this hasn't occurred to you on your own, but mostly it hasn't. Instead, many of you have been counting the weeks. If you read that misc. post about school being a prison, that's a thing you do when you're in prison. If as social commentary you mean to do that for real, keep at it. But if there is no intent with the action, just no prior thinking on it one way or the other, the try out this title choice. It will impact your writing by now encouraging it to connect to the title. And it will create a loop of sorts because you'll have to ask, is there a simple idea that unifies what I want to write about.

Lesson Plan on Prep for Visit of the Deans

With this session we being to "make the case" for the issues the class project aims to address. Some of these issues we've discussed already from your personal perceptions of them. In this class we want to begin with what others have said about the issues and to identify root causes.

I don't want to talk about cures just yet. That puts the cart before the horse. But I do want to mention a belief that any cure has to exhibit leverage - killing two birds with one stone. So in looking for cures you do look for solutions that do that.

I bring that up here because I want to cement a lesson from the session with the CIOs. The importance of communication was emphasized in that session. How does a student learn about communication? The thought is that a mentor learns something about communication via mentoring. We'll return to that later, but I wanted to mention it here before the idea gets forgotten.

The goal in this session is to cast an underlying framework for the session with the Deans. The two main players we want to think about are first, students, and second, instructors, both those on the tenure track and those who are not.

The underlying framework feature a dual nature to the role of these actors. They are both customers and producers. Usually we think of people as being one or the other, but not both.

Students as customers is pretty easy. They pay tuition explicitly and they pay implicitly with their time spent at school, which could be spent on something else. Students as producers might have been an alien concept before taking this course, but it should be pretty evident now. Consider that Ross piece from Scientific American and stuff we read from the National Academy volume on experts. Their is work at becoming an expert.

The George Kuh article about what they are learning from NSSE says that there is a problem with students as producers, because the evidence suggests many students are not engaged and have unrealistic expectation about the time required for learning.

Let's turn to instructors. Understanding them as producers is easy. Teaching is work. Research is work. Public service is work. Understanding them as customers, which is what the Arthur Levine essay argues, might need some explanation. Work can be thought of as a means to an end. We think of jobs as paying wages, health care and other benefits. But work can also be an end in itself. According to Drucker, this is particularly true with knowledge workers.

When work is an end in itself and you are able to influence the nature of the work environment, you will try to shape the environment so it produces more of the customer benefit. We will spend some time talking about what this shaping looks like. If faculty were 100 per cent researchers, what environment would be most welcoming for that? We'll use that question to frame the answer to the customer benefit.

Given the duality of both student and instructor roles, the question is whether there is good balance with each. Or does the balance get out of whack? Kuh's piece argues there is a problem of being out of balance, which he refers to as the Disengagement Pact, where the customer side seems to overwhelm the producer side and this is true both for students and instructors.

Now throw into the mix what large classes do, which we've talked about somewhat. And put into the soup questions about cost and access. Try to address the Disengagement Pact seriously and it looks like you make the cost and access issues harder.

Consider our class. I hope (most of if not all of) you are engaged in what we are doing. But our class is very small, it is exclusive in being for CHP students only, and I can assure you I'm putting in much more time than I would if I were teaching this course on a regular basis and having other faculty burdens. Our course does not serve as a model to address the larger issues.

In talking with the deans, we want to ask them about the issues. They are struggling mightily with planning for budget cuts. So it is fair game to talk about courses that are lecture-discussion switching to straight lecture as an economy move and having fewer graduate students on campus. But what does that do vis-a-vis the Disengagement Pact?