Democrats have included in the latest higher education bill a provision to punish colleges and universities who do not “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.” Congress has been trying to get something like this through for quite a while. I wrote about this back in March. I don’t know what’s sadder–that Democrats are the ones pushing for this or that they’re sneaking it into a bill that hopes to lower college costs. Requiring colleges to purchase expensive subscription services or implement a technical solution is not going to help lower costs. Many colleges already have trouble keeping technologically current and many of the solutions require certain levels of infrastructure to be in place. I know a few colleges and universities are fighting the RIAA, but most are complying with requests that come in. I’m disappointed that our congresspeople would be so obvious about where their loyalties lie. I’m off to write letters.
For the last week and a half, I’ve been single parenting. Mr. Geeky was first in VA, returned, next day went to Seattle, returned, next day went to Buffalo and has now returned. During this time, Geeky Boy was grounded from video games, so had to find other ways to entertain himself. (For the record, we’ve now seriously limited his game playing time.) Instead of feeling completely stressed out, I was actually able to enjoy having the kids to myself. Last weekend, for example, we went to an early soccer game, then went out for breakfast and went to another soccer game. Later that day, we played board games and watched tv together. Every night this week, we’ve eaten dinner and watched the Simpsons and Family Guy together. The kids also did a fair amount of reading. Geeky Boy finished a book and we went to the book store to get the rest of the books in the series. He’s now almost through the third one. I got Geeky Girl a couple of Ramona books and she’s doing a book report on one of them. She doesn’t love them as much as I did. Which is kind of sad, but maybe she’ll find other books she loves.
It’s been nice to hang out with the kids and not feel like they’re “in the way.” Especially when the kids were younger, whenever I was on my own, I’d feel slightly insane by the end of my time with them. Trying to manage feeding, bathing, and putting to bed two kids all by myself after a long day at work completely stressed me out. And sometimes it wasn’t the work itself but just the mental pressure of knowing I was on my own. I also think there’s a little bit of changing my perspective here. Instead of thinking about how much work dealing with the kids is, I just went with the flow and found opportunities to make it fun–like having breakfast between soccer games. I tried to stay in the moment and not worry about what I needed to get done or what I was going to be facing at work the next day.
It’s certainly good to have Mr. Geeky home. We all missed him. But I think I’ll miss having the kids to myself.
One of my photos got picked up and used by Schmap, a pretty cool web 2.0 guide. Check it out.
Via the Wired Campus Blog, I found Pronetos, a facebook-like app for sharing research and connecting with scholars. I like the look and feel of it. It’s missing some of the more fun elements of social networking, but it’s definitely got potential. Of course, I set up an account. Like I needed another social networking account . . .
I’m a bit skeptical of this announcement. Sure, I’ll grant that many faculty like 24/7 access to digital resources and that they like the searchability of them, as evidenced by my last post. But I’m not so sure I agree with their conclusions that “faculty members want portable reading devices and more electronic content.” Obviously, those conclusions support their business model. And I think their numbers may be skewed by the fact that the solicited survey respondents via their web site. Faculty using the ebrary web site are obviously already using lots of digital resources and probably likely to use more. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but it doesn’t really jibe with what I hear from people.
This article from the Chronicle is one of the many reasons I’m a proponent of Open Access. Patterson explains how not having access to digital databases has made her research more difficult. She also explains how some researchers simply abandon certain areas because access to materials that would support those areas are non-existent at their home institution. She sums this problem up nicely at the end:
the digital divide between the ivory-tower haves and have-nots will be a defining one for our generation of scholars. It exacerbates inequalities already present and makes it that much harder for scholars hoping to enter the larger intellectual debate on an equal footing.
I’d say this is true for students as well, both undergrad and grad. Go read the whole thing. It’s worth it.
It’s blame the Internet for everything day! I don’t even know where to start. I guess I’ll start with the Paper of Record’s article on Teacher vs. Technology. I haven’t seen one of these in a while, but the tone in this one is particularly galling. The author calls a professor who smashes a cellphone with a hammer (a staged incident to make a point) a hero. Seriously? A hero for banning cellphones? My stock argument is that in order to keep students’ attention, you actually need to do something engaging in class. The author neatly counters that argument:
Naturally, there will be many students and no small number of high-tech and progressive-ed apologists ready to lay the blame on boring lessons. One of the great condemnations in education jargon these days, after all, is the “teacher-centered lesson.”
“I’m so tired of that excuse,” said Professor Bugeja, may he live a long and fruitful life. “The idea that subject matter is boring is truly relative. Boring as opposed to what? Buying shoes on eBay? The fact is, we’re not here to entertain. We’re here to stimulate the life of the mind.”
I’m sorry, but time and time again, educators have said that students need to participate actively, not sit and listen to a lecture. It’s difficult for most people to learn that way and there are very few lecturers good enough to engage every single student in a 300-person lecture. The author does not even begin to admit this possibility or discuss effective pedagogy at all. I, too, want my students to listen and participate and don’t like cell phones ringing in my classroom or have students Facebooking when they should be listening, but you can’t just blame the technology and be done with it. Here are some thoughts for solutions just off the top of my head, some of them inspired by faculty at my institution actually doing these things:
- No more giant lectures. Seriously, most people get lost in these things. Limit them to 50 people. Yeah, I know it’s expensive, but we’re talking about educating our youth here.
- Barring getting rid of lectures, how about making students responsible for the material immediately rather than just on midterms and finals? Maybe they have to post something that evening to a blog or turn in a response. Maybe you begin the following lecture with a quiz on the previous one as well as a quiz on the reading for this one. Or, here’s a technical solution. Call on the students with laptops to look things up during class and report back. Only lecture for part of the class and then put the students into groups. Make the students do the lectures. All kinds of possibilities here.
- Have students watch/listen to lectures before class. With iTunesU and YouTube, one could easily use last year’s recorded lecture or otherwise prerecorded material and assign it ahead of time. In class, students would be required to do something more active with the material they just listened to–an experiment, have a discussion, etc.
- Find ways to put the technology to use. I agree with the author that technology for most students is about entertainment, not learning. Then we need to teach them how to use that technology for learning. You may not find an educational use for Facebook, but you can certainly find uses for the Internet. Of course, if you’re not using technology for your own intellectual work, this might be a hard one. So maybe you need to do some of your own learning.
I’m sure there are more possibilities. Readers, anything you’ve done? Any suggestions you have?
As for the Internet making us stupid, see this Salon article on how we’re all living in an echo chamber. I thought it was going to be very Andrew Keen like, but it’s much more reasonable and thoughtful. Worth reading, especially after the snarky NY Times article. I have more to say, but that other article sucked the life force out of me.
Meanwhile, some institutions are fighting the RIAA’s tactics in court. And others are complaining that content owners, like the RIAA, have too much control over current copyright law and fair use is disappearing. I think that the battle between colleges and the RIAA is indirectly about fair use. The RIAA and other content owners continue to try to lobby lawmakers to extend copyright restrictions and make using materials illegal even in educational settings. They don’t seem willing to compromise on this issue and so colleges and universities don’t feel like doing any more than the bare minimum to follow through on RIAA requests to sue their students.
Anyway, I will not be able to elegantly retie all the threads I had going, but I’m going to try anyway. I’m normally a David (GTD) Allen fan, but today he has a post that I think I partially disagree with. There are two things I was immediately reminded of as I read this post. First, I thought of my post from earlier this morning, a post that was inspired by my beginning to make a list of all the house stuff. For now that list is separate from the work list and is actually on paper only. Second, I thought of the recent controversy spurred by Dr. Crazy’s announcement of making a cut for a job and her further explanation. In that discussion, very nicely summarized by Leslie Madsen-Brooks here, the issue of how much t-t faculty should be devoted to their institutions was central. Why did I think of these two things? Well, I realized that a) my house/personal life deserves some real attention and b) I have to balance that with my commitment to my career. This is a tough balance for academics, I think, one that institutions take advantage of and one that is obviously ingrained in the culture as evidenced by the discussion at Dr. Crazy’s. Most academics care about their work. Whether that translates into caring about the institution or not is another story. Many conflate the two, which is what ultimately causes problems. It is a classic tale, often seen in academic novels, where an academic devotes so much time to his/her work that he/she neglects his/her family (or never collects one to begin with). Despair ensues and sometimes the academic realizes that the personal part of life should have received more attention. That “work” is sometimes not about the institution. Sometimes it’s about ego and self-importance. This is often seen in the superstars who hop from job to job, usually because they’re being wooed by every top institution. Most academics fall in the middle–committed to work, but not neglectful of a personal life and/or pursuing personal career goals while being mindful of commitment to a particular institution. As some of Dr. Crazy’s commenters note, institutions often increase work loads and expectations in such a way as to make this middle position impossible.
As I started reading Allen’s post, I thought he would show a path out of this dilemma by trumpeting work-life balance or something along those lines. He was talking about putting your personal and work lists together and seemed to be suggesting a way to combine these two areas in a way that makes sense for you. He says this makes people uncomfortable. So he offered a possible underlying reason: “Perhaps it’s really the bigger question – you mean it’s OK to focus
with as much rigor and integrity on my personal life as on my
professional stuff?” I thought, yay, personal life gets the attention it deserves.
He goes on to talk about how we’ve only recently separated work and home life and quotes at length from a Division President of a Fortune 50 corporation who encourages integrating your whole life, which is messy, he says, but more realistic. What Allen really proposes in the end is that you set up a home office as your central workspace. I thought this was a cop-out. I realize he focuses mostly on making people productive, but in the end, he still seems to mean work productive, not life productive. Why not encourage people to do some of their “personal” stuff at work–within reason? For example, I need to make phone calls to contractors to do some small tasks around the house. These calls need to be made during business hours which is when I’m at work. Why not encourage these things? What about encouraging vacations to recharge? Taking a single day to take a long weekend with the family or just to decompress? Or why not mention ways to negotiate a flexible schedule or telecommuting situation? I mean if our personal life deserves “rigor and integrity,” shouldn’t we be allowed to devote some of our time at work to achieving that rigor and integrity. I’m guessing that the clients that he works with–mostly upper-level management–just do these things. (Or maybe they have people or spouses for that.) They don’t need to ask like some folks do. (I’m sure this is somewhat foreign to faculty who don’t separate quite the way we 9-5-ers do.)
And by the way, we already have two home offices and I know most academics have offices at home. We’re already decompartmentalizing. Now we need to balance.
As I was gearing up for the weekend and planning how I was going to juggle multiple soccer games, an evening out, and general housekeeping, I realized that essentially I could work 24/7 and still not get everything done. Rather than being discouraged by this, it was actually comforting to know. I have always been of the mind that if I spent just a little more time cleaning this or organizing that, my house would be perfectly neat, my bills would always get paid on time and my family would always still have quality time together. This is so not true. In part, it’s because of our family’s own habits. We aren’t good at putting things where they go or consistently marking things on calendars or giving enough notice for the school bake sale. In part, it’s because we’ve been gradually downsizing our living spaces while accumulating more stuff. In part, it’s because both Mr. Geeky and I put in overtime in our other jobs. All of those things are mutable, but not in the short term. I’ve decided just to accept that it’s likely these things will never change and so I should just work around it.
My feeling that I’d need to be constantly working to keep up with housework increased as I actually tackled some tasks for the weekend. I even made a list. I crossed things off the list and yet still wasn’t that much closer to house perfection. I reorganized some cabinets, washed three loads of dishes, five loads of laundry (and actually put them away), put away the summer clothes (finally), shopped for winter clothes for the kids, and went grocery shopping. I also managed to play board games with the kids, attend two soccer games, take the kids out for breakfast, go out with friends, and watch football, none of which I could do if I were aiming for house perfection.
I could have done more this morning in the hour and a half I’ve already been awake, but then I couldn’t have read the news and blogs or written this blog post. Priorities, priorities. Sure, it’d be nice to look around and see no clutter, but I think my brain would be completely empty at that point.
Recent Comments