A look back to 2022 - Part III


This is part III of V of a look back at 2022. The first part discussed peer review requests in 2022, and the second part discussed professional development more broadly.  As I was pondering professional development, a branch from that thread started vining out and sort of developing in my mind as related to, but distinct from, professional development.  Thus, part III will be dealing with...

Charting out the next phase of academic development

As I was pondering professional development in my previous post, I started to veer into the area of academic development.  I continued to write my previous post, but I decided to stop myself and separate this section out because I realized that I think of PD and AD as two different (but sometimes overlapping) entities.  In my view, PD tends to relate much more closely to one's work. What you learn is usually applicable to your work environment sooner rather than later.  Professional Development is also something that you might be able to do on company time (at least to some extent), with examples of this being going to a conference, attending time-bound workshops, or being given some unstructured time every month (as is the case with my IT colleagues) to explore some topic that interests you professionally.

Academic development, on the other hand, tends to be a little more of that geeky side that I mentioned in my previous post; the reason I studied Applied Linguistics even though I didn't have any concrete plans to become a language teacher (or teach in K-12 for that matter), or the reason I jumped into cMOOCs back in the day.  It's also something that tends to be more of a hobby and "off the clock," so you don't do these kinds of activities during your day job. In my dissertation, I called this kind of learning kefagogy. I think one of my RhizoMOOC co-participants framed it best when they said something like: the learning experience being about what it made them think rather than getting through some content (yes, I am really paraphrasing here). Ultimately these kinds of ponderings make their way into my more academic pursuits, like teaching and writing, but they start off with mere curiosities. 

I think my biggest challenge is really picking a topic (or a narrow set of topics) to explore. While I was working on my dissertation I had mentally bookmarked a lot of topics that seemed of interest: ludology, games in education, developing a TTRPG to run as a class on instructional design, stuff about lurking in educational settings, stuff about networked learning, broad topics on distance learning, I wanted to do a deeper dive into communities of practice, go back into linguistics-related topics, heck even some stuff about XR in education settings (I know there are XR geeks out there reading this!😜). My bookshelves are full (and my "to-read" folder on my desktop is bursting with academic articles📂), but I find myself in a sort of m'eh mood 🙄. It's not like these topics are not interesting, but I think they've gotten a bit dusty on the shelf while they've been waiting for me to be "done with school."  This has got me pondering: Has the sheen worn off these topics for me?  or do they need a bit of a dusting off?

One of my friends from my EdD program messaged me the other day and suggested seeking a research associate position (something part-time) to get those academic neurons firing again. This isn't a bad idea!  For a few years now I've been thinking about asking a friend in the field of linguistics if they'd be willing to have me tag along on a research project of theirs so I can learn more and dive deeper into the linguistics side of things dealing with corpus and computational linguistics while taking a "break" from (or slowing down a bit in) distance education research. After two waves of "OMG, online learning is the new hotness but it's so good/bad that it's good/bad" these past 10 years (once with MOOCs and then again with ERT), I feel like I'm living in groundhog day. I am not sure I want to dive deeper into topics relating to distance education just yet. IDK...maybe all fields have this issue, but it's exhausting at times 😅

What are your thoughts? How do you differentiate PD and AD?  What do you do with those topics that you've bookmarked that seem like cool rabbit holes, but when you return after a while you have no energy for them? 🤔  

Also, as a fun and irreverent side-question: I have a tagline in this blog "Pondering what my next degree should be 😂".  Pitch me your ideas!  What field should I study next? What BA, MA, or PhD should I pursue? No answer too silly (or too serious)!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil...
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have ...
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the ...
Read more