Multilitteratus Incognitus

This particular post has been in my drafts folder for a while now.  The post started off as some ponderings, based on tweets from fellow instructional designers (over the summer), that lamented the fact that faculty members really didn't attend professional development opportunities that they had worked so hard to put together. With the start of the new academic year just ahead of us (at least for my campus) it seemed like a good opportunity to return to this post.  This is my local view, framed chiefly from my experiences where I work, but also from chatting about this with local colleagues at other institutions nearby over the last 15 years.  Yes...the problem ain't new! One thing I've seen over the years is the reliance on bad metrics and other various bad indicators like foot traffic through the ID offices, the number of workshops offered, and butts in seats at the workshops. This isn't new.  Even as far back as when I was a training manager for our academic lib...

  A while back a tweet caught my eye that really piqued my interest. I don't remember who posted it, but it was responded to by someone I follow with a confirmatory story of their own.  The tweet went something like this: I finished my [graduate] degree x-many years ago. In this time, I have not been contacted by my [alma matter] department to participate on panel discussions, webinars, submit updates on my professional activities, articles I've authored, write a guest blog- or newsletter-post, give a talk, facilitate a workshop, etc. Let me say that I can totally understand! If my experience is any indication it's probably not you but rather how the organization functions.  As most blog posts go, I have some anecdotes! These are both from my experiences as an alumnus of an organization and  as a staff member of that organization.  Student & Alumnus Perspective Let me start with my experiences as an alumnus. I graduated from my programs in 2004, 2007, 2...

Airport Lounge (looks inviting, yet it's temporary) I'm back, baby! (just picture me as Frank Constanza from Seinfeld 😂) OK, dissertation done(ish)  [just waiting for final approvals], and oral defense passed.  So, I guess I have some more free time to blog, and MOOC [if a MOOC were to become available 😉].  It's been a rather...interesting 18 months.  I've been wanting to work fully remote for years and I got my wish.  I just wish that we didn't need to have a global pandemic as the reason for it.  This fall, we're slated to return to campus, and I am a bit apprehensive. More on that perhaps in future blog posts. For now, I wanted to write some thoughts that came by reading my friend Lance's most recent [unpublished] IHE piece.  You can read the entire piece, titled "Instructional Designers on Campuses" here . There's no doubt that we've learned a lot during this pandemic. How much learning loss  administrators and faculty experience, onc...

This post has been brewing in my head for a couple of years now. Since I am waiting for IRB clearance for my dissertation I thought it would be a good time to jot things down and see what others think.  I usually tend to have people in my network who either teach or work in some sort of instructional designer (or faculty developer) capacity.  I don't (think) I know too many people in the higher education administration aspects of my work to discuss these kinds of things with (so I may just be speaking to no one 😝). Anyway, one thing that's been gnawing at me for the past number of years is how one enters into graduate programs.  I'll focus more on the master's level for a few reasons.  I manage an MA program, I teach for an MEd program, and from observation, I've seen that masters programs probably don't have as many administrative constraints: for example, [virtual] classroom space, working with a cohort model that's more tightly integrated [as co...

Back in December, I was searching for the #tenure hashtag on twitter.   There was some discussion (probably stated by Jesse Stommel 😜) which prompted me to search for this #hashtag out of curiosity to see what was tagged.  Along with heartwarming stories of people who've just earned tenure (a nice perk right before the winter break!), there was this wonderful tweet specimen... I'm not gonna lie.  IT BUGS ME. It bugs me as a learner.   I've always completed course evaluations and I tried to give honest feedback to the professor.  If the course was easy, hard, just right, I wanted them to know.  If I was appreciative, I wanted them to know.  Yes, sometimes I've half-assed it and just completed the Likert scale with a "loved the course" comment at the end, but many times I try to be more concrete about the feedback. It bugs me as a program manager. I am the individual who sets up, collects, and often reminds students, about the course ev...

Summer is usually the time for some professional development, after all during the academic year things are going at such a fast and furious pace that it doesn't leave much time (let alone brain/mind-space) to undertake much professional development.  This summer (because of "factors") professional development was not as easy going  as it has been the past few years, so I needed to pick a time to do schedule in the PD rather than pick it up throughout the summer.  This year one of my big work projects was  to manage and lead an OSCQR review of my department's online courses.  I started out with a manageable goal of 10 courses (our core courses consisting of 80% of the required curriculum for all of our students), but once I saw that our I am our three fabulous summer student aides were cracking through those 10 courses in about half the time I had originally budgeted, I decided to utilize the resources that I had on had (three great reviewers) and add an...

In my last blog post I was responding to the academy that isn't - or, perhaps, as some comments indicated, the academy that never actually was .  This past week I was at MIT's LINC conference.  It was a good opportunity to attend (since it was local), listen into some interesting panel discussions, and meet some folks from all over the world doing interesting things.  It was also a good opportunity to connect with folks (via twitter mostly for me) to think about academia (and the role it has) from a systems point of view.  I was rather happy to have been there to see Peter Senge speak at the end of LINC 2019 as he is a systems person, and someone whose work was foundational in my instructional design learning. Now, I wasn't really planning a follow up to my last post.  I sort of wrote it in order to contribute my 2-cents to the discussion, as a response to @Harmonygritz (George), and also point people to it when they ask me if I want to pursue a tenur...

Have PhD...( source ) George Station had posted this article titled " The academy I dreamed of for 20 years no longer exists, and I am waking up " with the lead in of: Ellen Kirkpatrick has yearned for an academic career for many years. But 18 months after finally earning her doctorate, she is no longer sure she wants to remain in a sector defined by precarity, exploitation – and ‘quit lit’  George asked us (tried to bait us? 😏) to see what we think about it in his Fb posting, and I am surprised (given the circle of people George and I follow) that no one else jumped into the discussion.  I though I'd give it the old college try and write a blog post about it.  It is something that's been on my mind in the past couple of years. Once the coursework component of my EdD was done people started asking me what I plan to do after I earn my EdD.  I am still at the proposal stage (one of these days I'll write about it), but inching forward, so I guess the end wil...

A week or so ago...well...maybe two weeks by now♣, the topic of eLearning 3.0 was identity , and the video guest of the week was Maha Bali .  I finally managed to view all of it, even though it was in 10 minute increments. My Pocket's save-for-later is getting rather lengthy now that I am saving articles on the daily to read at some other future time. This time of the semester is rather busy, so I guess that's my disclaimer for this post: I am only commenting on the video and points that were brought up. In looking at the notes I took during the vConnecting session during week 4 (mid-way through the MOOC!) there are a few organizing factors that sort of came to me, so I've organized the post in this manner. What's in a name? At the beginning of the conversation Stephen had a bit of a hard time getting the native pronunciation of Maha's name. It's interesting to kick off a discussion about identity in such a mundane way, but I think that the concept of a n...