Multilitteratus Incognitus

I've been trying to catch up with things I've saved in my Pocket reading list over the course of this past semester, and one of the articles (or blog posts?) came across was about how MOOCs have failed to democratize education, and given that this was one of the fundamental goals of MOOCs this is a problem. I don't think I know where exactly this goal, or rhetoric, about democratizing education came from.  I suspect that it was somewhere in the xMOOC discourse around the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012.  Even if xMOOC providers, and their proponents, didn't initiate this discourse, they certainly capitalized on it by providing cases of poor learners, who would normally not be served by higher education given their backgrounds, and MOOCs could help. It's easy when you have prodigies to start with, but that's a whole other story. The point is that xMOOC providers just added some fuel to the fire since this discourse suited them. And, it's not a bad...

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...

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...

[warning: lengthier post than usual] Before I left for December my mini vacation I had a holiday themed catch-up with a number of friends and colleagues on campus. With the semester winding down, and with the holidays as an excuse it was a good opportunity for people to get together and share some news about what had transpired over the past semester, share notes, best practices, and so on. One of my colleagues inquired how things are going in the office as far as admissions go. There seems to be some doom and gloom over falling admission on campus, but that's a topic for another day. Things are going well in my department (knock on wood), so much so that we are not able to admit all qualified applicants since we don't have enough people to teach for us. My colleague's solution (my colleague is a full time instructional designer, for what it's worth) was that we need to "change the model," instead of relying on tenure stream professors to teach our cou...