Multilitteratus Incognitus

High School Hallway by Matt Dempsey CC BY-SA "You don't know what you're consuming!*"  It's a loose translation of what my grandmother used to say to me when I refused to eat something 'exotic' (in my view) that she had cooked, like rabbit stew or cuttlefish. My sophomoric response was "I know exactly what I'm eating" since I didn't want to even try what she'd cooked. I suspect that Grandma meant to say "You don't know what you're missing," but somehow Grandma's malaphor was always one of those things that we shared a tacit understanding of. Anyway, the other day I was reading a post on IHE on Online Classes and Conflicting Desires . The crux of the argument is a conflicting relationship with what people say and their actions (um, surprise?)... I’m seeing it in the push-pull of students wanting a more robust on-campus college experience while simultaneously crowding into online classes. The desire for a robust o...

Maybe I shouldn't take the bait, but I guess I couldn't leave this one alone either 😂.  I might as well have a little fun with a clickbait-style title for this post 🤣. Reading IHE and JK feels like it's bad for my mental health. Anyway, instead of rage-writing, I thought I would expand a bit on his arguments.  JK, over at IHE is opining again about things . This time it's a reaction to the CHLOE7 report (I somehow managed to miss CHLOE1 through 6, but that's OK). It's not that I disagree with JK about what he writes, but I think he is rather naïve, he doesn't dig deep enough, and he doesn't question current systems of power and authority.  This, I feel, is a cautionary tale of being careful what you wish for... At the center of this thought exercise is a figure (10%), that's the number of online leaders that indicated that their ID capacity as of  Fall 2021 was "fully sufficient" and that given "COOs' projection of significant f...

 This grew out of a response on Facebook to an IHE column by Josh Kim recently posted, titled  10 Inconsistent Ways That I Am Thinking About the Future of Academic Work . I was content with leaving this response as a social media reaction, but I was prompted and prodded a bit to clean it up a bit and write about it. It seems like I ended up writing more than I intended. Anyway, I am not interested in submitting it to IHE as an op-ed, so I figured I'd post it on my own blog (for whatever it's worth - maybe I can get the google juice instead of IHE 🤣).  Josh posts 10 things that give him cognitive dissonance about remote work in higher education, but I find the list rather contrived. Worse, I find it to be a list that might live on someone's blog as a quick pondering rather than on something that purports to be a higher-ed news outlet. tl;dr: For what it's worth, I think the fetishization of campus culture, exhibited both in this article and elsewhere in the world of aca...

  Courtesy of Redbubble After one-too-many "news" posts on IHE about plagiarism and "rigor" I decided to stop subscribing to IHE's RSS feed.  Idiocies that used to be a comment left in an actual news article (one which you could ignore) now have been promoted as opinion pieces on IHE.  To put it quite simply the junk-to-treasure ratio is now completely off on that site and there is no longer value to keep checking it as part of my regular news feed. That said, there was an article back in August (wow, a month went by!) by Ray Schroeder that I wanted to respond to. The article is titled Demise of the Baccalaureate Degree  and it provokes the reader with the following lede "Overpriced, outdated and no longer required by an increasing number of employers, is the baccalaureate in a death spiral?"  Let me just say that this is BS, right now. Go ahead and read it, if you'd like, and come back after that. It's disheartening to see a leader in distance...

I was reading this article on InsideHigherEd the other day about Drake University's "Outsourcing" of language learning. In short they replaced formal classes lead by tenured faculty (or just faculty who had second language acquisition experience) with the following: small discussion groups led by on-campus native speakers, a weekly session with a scholar of the language, a one-semester course on language acquisition and the use of several Web-based learning technologies. In other words, lower paid undergraduate or graduate students from abroad that probably have little experience with actual second language acquisition. I don't doubt that a learner, when immersed in a foreign language and foreign culture situation can pick up conversational skills. For this I would go back to the learning-acquisition hypothesis --> Acquisition being a "natural" and subconscious process of picking up certain information while Learning being a more structured way of pickin...