Multilitteratus Incognitus

"I go into the office for collaboration" - the collaboration... I suppose the title should be " some of what I learned...," since I probably can't fit everything in a blog post, but let's begin and see where I end up ;-)   The TL;DR: be careful about the word "choice," while choice is good, you might get results that you didn't expect and are ill-equipped to handle. I follow a Twitter personality who evangelizes about the remote office. I admit, I am biased and lean toward positive views of the remote office and remote work in general.  This morning one of the Twitter posts went like this: ~~~~~~~ Personality: Old people: young people need the office for social contact Young people: actually we'd like to live closer to our friends and family Respondent 1 (toward personality): My 20-year old son old prefers to go into the office and doesn't enjoy working from home the one day a week. People need choice. Working from home is not for ever...

I don't often get to put on my HR/management/talent development hat, but I came across this interesting tweet this past week that got me thinking .  I started to write a tweet reply to it, but it got too lengthy (so here we are - back in the blog😁). A week or so ago I met with some former colleagues and mentors (folks who've already retired), which also reminded me of the mini scramble when I resigned a position years ago, and when counteroffers were considered. The text of the tweet (for posterity) is as follows: Resigned today. Current employer is scrambling to counter.  This is my PSA to those with the power to promote - don’t wait until your best employees want to leave to give them an offer that shows you value them. I couldn't agree more with the sentiments expressed by the tweet.  When someone resigns they most likely have another job already lined up and are least likely to take you up on your counteroffer. At this point, you've already lost your valued employ...

I came across an article on Campus Technology last week titled  7 Tips for Listing MOOCs on Your Résumé , and it was citing a CEO of an employer/employee matchmaking firm.  One piece of advice says to create a new section for MOOCs taken to list them there. This is not all that controversial since I do the same.  Not on my resume, but rather on my extended CV (which I don't share anyone), and it serves more a purpose of self-documentation than anything else. The first part that got me thinking was the piece of advice listed that says "only list MOOCs that you have completed".  Their rationale is as follows: "Listing a MOOC is only an advantage if you've actually completed the course," Mustafa noted. "Only about 10 percent of students complete MOOCs, so your completed courses show your potential employer that you follow through with your commitments. You should also be prepared to talk about what you learned from the MOOC — in an interview — an...

Recently I came across a post by Josh Kim on whether LinkedIn will replace the traditional academic CV . My short answer to that is "no".  This isn't because I think LinkedIn is bad (it's not), or that the CV is awesome (it's not).  I've got a bone to pick with the traditional, paper-based, academic CV. The common wisdom, as Kim alludes to, is that a resume is short and targeted, while a CV is longer and is meant to include everything (and the kitchen sink) in your career.  Resumes, for me, seem constraining. How can you adequately describe yourself in 2 pages, especially for seasoned professionals who are older than I am and have a wealth of knowledge and skills?  At the same time a resume is a creative puzzle to solve.  It's a tool for communicating what you will bring to the team you want to be hired into when you apply for a job. A resume encourages your to look into a company and a department, and tailor it to fit where you want to be. It fits ...

Alright, so here it is, week 6 of NRC01PL. Even though I am technically  in the same week as everyone I guess I am still marching to the beat of my own drummer.  I wanted to join the live session on Tuesday, but other things intervened.  Oh well. The topic of this week is the personal learning assistant.  Hence my little callout to the four major virtual assistants (Siri for Apple, Alexa for Amazon, Cortana for Windows, and Google...for Google). I actually did try asking Cortana to "show me something to learn" but  I guess the bing search engine didn't know what the heck to do with my query. Google wasn't that much help either.  We haven't reached the point yet where they know enough about me in order to recommend something.  It's a little odd given how much data google probably "knows" about me. So, what is a Personal Learning Assistant (not to be confused with Personal Assistant for Learning)?  According to Stephen the PLA is a platfo...

I was reading this post on InsideHigherEd the other day by Joshua Kim.  The post, A plague of directors, which was a bit comical; the mental image that came to mind was one of plague carrying zombies with name tags that said "director" - yeah, I know, sometimes my imagination runs wild and comical video games like Plants vs. Zombies  get mixed in with titles like Josh's. Joshua wonders if titles mean anything anymore with this inflation of titles.   This reminded me of two scenarios over the summer that I came across.  First was discussing with someone, a professional staff member, that their supervisor wanted to promote them from 'coordinators' to 'directors'.  Of course the supervisor did not want to give them a pay increase, just a title boost. The job would be the same, but the title would be different.  This change would essentially be meaningless, other than the momentary ego boost of being a 'director'.  However, if everyone is a dire...

One of my resolutions, just before this new semester starts, is to not neglect periodicals that come in from time to time and at least thumb through them.  Don't let too much work, of any sort, detract from the professional development of looking through work related periodicals (sounds oxymoronic, doesn't it?).  Well, at least this way they won't pile up in the office ;-). Anyway, in keepting with this goal (let's see how long I last), I went through the July/August issue of Training Magazine.  This is something I signed up for last year when I wanted to keep more abreast of what was happening in the corporate instructional designing sector.  One of the things that caught my eye was this tidbit at the beginning titled Conflicting Perceptions on Education , which reported on a University of Phoenix and EdAssist report titled Are we playing the same game?: Employee vs. Manager Perception of Education and Career Development . From the report itself: Nearly ha...

Yesterday another faculty member took on the role and responsibilities of department chair.  This is quite exciting for a variety of reasons, but one of them that comes to mind is that I get to experience things anew.  "Training" a new department chair, even though my colleague and I report to them, provides an opportunity to explain to someone new what the operating rules of the university are, from HR and Procurement to new staff hiring.  It's also a great opportunity to really problematize current policies and ways of doing things at the university. Reading Audrey Watters' keynote from #DigPed also contributed (a lot) I think to this mental gear churning. The thing that perturbed me these past few days has to do with teaching, and the increasing 'accountability' that instructors, teachers, and professors are expected to have in this new working environment.  The problem, however, as I see it is that no one is connecting the dots.  One of these HUGE d...

Last week I caught something on inside higher education on the closure of Teaching and Learning Centers (CTL hereafter) in colleges and universities around th country, at a time, where seemingly, there ought to be more demand to keep them open, engage, and train faculty, and be a catalyst for a better college experience for everyone involved. This is what I remember from the article that I read when it came out (currently blogging from a boat crossing the Ionian Sea, no internet to verify, and will be too lazy to go back later to re-read everything). A friend, and colleague, later emailed me about this trend and also included a more snarky (albeit humorous, I think) Chronicle op-Ed which took the form of a memo from a director of one such center to a university big-wig (from memory this is what I recall anyway). In any case, I chuckled a bit with both stories because it's not really about centers for teaching, rather about the value that universities place on continuing profess...

Last year when I put out the call for the  Great Big MOOC Book , one of the submissions came from a colleague in Australia who is going to write a bit about MOOC experiments that they ran on the Australian Open2Study platform , which is sponsored by the Open University of Australia.  I had heard of the platform before, but I never really tried it out since I was testing out other platforms at the time.  Well, since there wasn't much on Coursera to keep me going (too much of the same makes for a dull MOOC), and since rhizo14 is winding down (to some extent) I decided it was time to check out this platform. I originally signed up for two topics: Teaching Adult Learners , and Becoming and Confident Trainer . The Adult Learner topic was mostly to see what others say about the topic since I've already taken courses on this topic as part of my master's coursework.  The confident trainer was a bit of a repetition, but it was also an interesting look into corporate train...