Multilitteratus Incognitus

Part VI of my ponderings on all the things and wayfinding in academia. This is the last part of this series - at least for now. I don't know. I think it's time to move from retrospection to some kind of next phase 🤓 Anyway, I saved the most controversial topic for last hahaha 😂 OK, so before I get the rotten tomatoes🍅🪰, hear me out!😅 I am a big proponent of lifelong learning. In fact, I joke, on this very blog, that I am "Pondering what my next degree should be 😂" Go ahead, look to the top of this page, I'll wait. In case you're from the distant future and my blog's subtitle has changed, it basically said what's in the quotes, and I added this subtitle after I completed my doctorate in 2021.  Anywhoooo.... where was I?  Ah yes, Lifelong learning ! Since completing my dissertation and graduating in 2021, I've tried my hand at professional development through various means. I've done a month-long synchronous online workshop on coaching (one...

 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...

I was reading Twitter the other daaayyy (just picture someone from Letterkenny saying this😜) and I came upon yet another discussion that basically boiled down to online (or remote) versus face-to-face. I made the mistake of reading the replies🙄.   On the one hand, I was hoping that there would be a more nuanced discussion (and to be fair, I did get those types of replies from people I follow), but there were so many more about "online not being for everyone,"  about how people who teach face to face can "see if their points are landing and if learners are confused," or how "face to face is easier for building community" (maybe for you extroverts...🤨), or even "online works great if you love reading information off a screen and taking self-paced tests" (someone's learning like it's 1999...🤣) and other such (insert word/phrase of your choice). Obviously, the quotes are paraphrased. I became upset and irritated reading such non-sense pos...

Me, pondering OK, maybe the analogy isn't totally clear to you, so let me explain my context.  When I was in high school (mid-to-late 90s) the advertised (or expected) path after high school seemed pretty clear to me: go to college. There were really no "buts" about it, and there were no gap years considered (those were luxuries that well-off people had since they had money to burn). It was an expectation, from guidance counselors, from teachers, from parents, maybe even from society. Higher education was the path to a good middle-class life, and people were willing to take out loans to go to their dream school in order to achieve this goal. This was a pretty important goal for my parents considering that neither one of them made it to university and I'd be the first in the family (maybe even my broader family) to do this. No pressure, eh? ;-) One thing that seemed like an underlying current was how dismissive some (many?) people were about community coll...

The question of synchronous sessions in online learning has been swirling in my head over the past few weeks.  So has the term "remote" instruction (🙄).  I usually tend to sit on the sidelines these days, maybe throwing a few potshots on twitter here and there when I have time, but this article on IHE today was one where my eyes rolled too hard, and there was an audible grunt in the room... First of all, I guess I should explain my aversion to the term "remote" instruction.  Our field, distance education, has many terms to describe learning at a distance that actually mean something, and have actually had decades of research behind them!  Because the existing terms mean something, and usually have legalistic implications, it's like administrators are using a synonym for "distance" in order to avoid any sorts of contractual agreements that they have made.  For instance, at my institution, if a faculty member develops an online course from scratc...