Or, as Dr. Crazy puts it, “Excellence without Money.” I’ve appreciated greatly the conversation going around the blogosphere that Dr. Crazy links to surrounding the issues of asking faculty to take one for the team. In some cases, that means no raises, cutting travel funds, or increasing class sizes. Sometimes it means giving up a percentage of salary. Dr. Crazy analyzes this situation quite well, and I agree with her attitude that this job is a job and she shouldn’t have to give the blood of her first born to help out her employer. I can’t find the references now, but a whole back, there was a whole conversation about how academics struggled with this perception that their campuses were like their families. Some even brought out a priesthood metaphor. I think all that rhetoric about families and priesthood is used to cover over the fact that many faculty are not properly compensated or appreciated. I agree with Dr. Crazy that there’s only so much belt-tightening that one can do.

On the staff side, when things get tough, the situation is even grimmer (and perhaps this applies to contingent faculty as well, but my experence is the order of layoffs is staff, part-time contingent faculty, full-time contingent faculty). Dr. Crazy acknowledges that she’s in a position of privilege as a faculty member. The janitor, whose job gets outsourced, not so much. As Dr. Crazy said, someone earlier in their career hurts more when the raise doesn’t come. For many staff, the lack of a raise is the difference between being able to commute to work or not or between paying the heating bill or not. Most staff (and I’m guessing faculty too) have seen their real incomes decline over the years. I experienced a downturn in my first 6 months on the job. I got no raise the first year and only a paltry one the second. The 3 years after that were fine, but still, overall, I saw my salary decline. Add into that that faculty have the opportunity for merit raises–a sizable one when getting promoted to associate or full and yearly ones based on teaching, research and service accomplishments–while staff do not and you end up with some real inequalities that cause some serious pain during hard economic times.

I’m not putting forth this information to say to faculty, you don’t know how good you have it, but to say that I think staff, too, should not take on more sacrifice. Too many of them do. They look at themselves as part of a family or team or whatever and put in extra hours without pay or offer to donate to the college(!) or suck it up when they go without raises for a couple of years. I was pretty hard-nosed about my work hours. I went in at 9 and left at 5. Although there were a handful of times I worked extra or at odd hours of the day, it was truly rare and I often took an extra hour or day off to compensate. Most policies include a phrase about “working until the job is done.” That means as a salaried employee, you’re expected to get your work done even if it means working 50-60 hours week, bringing your actual hourly pay down to just above minimum wage. You can really only ask that of workers for so long before they say, “Do your own damn work.”

Yesterday, I got a request from our school district to fill out a survey about “21st Century Learning.” I did. They asked a lot of the right questions. Although they did ask about whether all children should have laptops, most of their questions were about whether web 2.0 tools should be used and how and what kinds of things would the school need to do to make that happen. One of the things I said was that it would be nice if they could make it easier for parents to participate in their kids learning process through the use of these tools. Right now the extent of my technological participation is a Course Management system that just lets me see grades after the fact and email. Yes, some of the teachers post their assignments on the web, but that’s not participatory. What I suggested was, something along the lines of what Will Richardson has done in the past, having parents reading the same books and commenting on student blogs about those books or learning about science together. If I knew what my kid was doing in his classes, then I might be able to participate in a more meaningful way.

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I’ve also been reading the Net Gen Nonsense blog, which I highly recommend to advocates of technology in education. I’ve been an advocate of technology in education, especially socially-oriented and user-creation-based applications, not for the sake of developing technology skills, but because these tools enable better and deeper learning, if used appropriately. And yes, our students are using some of these tools, but as I’ve said time and time again, they need help using them for learning, especially the kind of in-depth learning required in college and that will hopefully continue throughout life. A key quote from a recent study cited by Mark on his blog:

“Students make limited, recreational use of social technologies such as media sharing tools and social networking sites…the findings point to a low level of use of and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies.”

I’m reading Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital, which spouts much of the ideas this study is trying to knock down–that “kids these days” are living and breathing web 2.0 and so we need to change our educational and work systems as a result. Actually, what I’m seeing is that there are a handful of students who are using these tools creatively and intelligently and many of them are pushing for changes in work and school, but it’s a very few. What keeps me up at night are actually the vast majority of students who either don’t have access to these tools or worse, who do and either don’t use them or use them irresponsibly. I think we need to change not because students are demanding the change (because quite frankly, they aren’t), but because we need to have studets who are creative, collaborative thinkers.

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I’ve also been finalizing parts of my Gender and Technology course for the spring, and I’ve found myself thinking over and over again–what can I do here to drive this point home or to have students experience this more directly rather than just reading about it or hearing me talk about it. So, I’m including some gameplay, some experiences in Second Life, lots of blogging, building a network graph, and creating mashups and multimedia assignments. The hard part about including this stuff is that everyone is going to be at different comfort levels with the technology. And I hate it when technology gets in the way of the experience. It makes me wish we had a lab section. And I think that’s the rub. I’m comfortable with all this stuff and will find a way to use it effectively and help the students get past the technical hurdles so they can see the point. But most people a) aren’t comfortable and b) don’t have the time and/or patience to deal with the hurdles. It makes me wonder who is going to be left behind.

So far, I’ve made breakfast, two lunches, wrapped two presents, looked up addresses to ship said presents, and collected the recycling for today.

It’s going to be a long week.

• Routine, what routine? This week has been filled with disruption. The first two days were half-days, doctor’s appointment on Wednesday, and today, thanks to a forgotten permission slip, I’m retrieving my oldest from school at 9:00 while the rest of his team goes on a field trip. Sigh. Not to mention, Mr. Geeky was away yesterday and today, so there was no help to be had.
• Holiday stuff. Presents are almost all purchased and sent. It was a book year again this year. Every couple of years, we just head to a book store and start buying stuff we think our family members will like. We still have stuff to get for the kids and for each other, but mostly done. Greeting cards purchased and will likely be filled out and mailed slowly over the coming weeks.
• Work. Coming along. Made some some progress on deadline-oriented projects yesterday especially. Also did some contract work on Monday. Still feeling a little more disjointed than I’d like, but it’s probably a result of the disjointed week more than anything.
• Housework. Feeling like it’s mostly under control. I’ve moved a lot of bigger items that were in the way out of the house. This weekend, I hope to engage the family in some cleaning projects, however briefly. I want to be prepared for the chaos Christmas will surely bring.
• In other news. I have a few things I want to blog about, but I’m going to wait a while. I’m still gathering thoughts. If anyone wants to hear about something in particular, feel free to leave a comment.

One of the things we’ve instituted since I’ve quit is tighter control over the kids’ screen-based leisure activities. We were sort of half-heartedly doing this over the last year, kind of taking it day by day, but now we have Rules (with a capital R no less). Geeky Boy’s obsession was the computer, spending hours playing games, watching YouTube, etc., while Geeky Girl plopped herself in front of the tv for far too long. So now they each get an hour a day during the week and 2 hours/day on the weekends. This has led to their having to get creative about entertaining themselves. They’ve played shuffleboard, read books, come up with some kind of ball game that involves stairs and the cat, created videos, and occasionally driven us a little crazy.

Geeky Boy has actually expanded what he’s doing online, so in addition to just playing RuneScape and finding cool YouTube videos, he’s been working on an Inform project, and he started a new blog. Now that all that activity must take place within the span of an hour, he finds himself faced with decisions about how to spend that time. All good I think.

Believe it or not, Geeky Girl is less attracted to reading now than Geeky Boy, but she’s pulled out the last Harry Potter book again in addition to revisiting her Flip video camera. I’m hoping the increased non-tv time will lead to even more reading.

And they also both have chores–kitchen duty and room cleaning–that they must attend to every day as well.

It’s been an adjustment for them, but they’re not really complaining about it much. Every once in a while, we’ll get a “just five more minutes” or “can’t I have a 1/2 hour more today” but for the most part, they’re adjusting just fine.

The conversation that started on Mama, Ph.D., which many of us picked up, continues. Tedra brings out some pretty scary stats on the rate of tenured and t-t female faculty who are married with children as compared to men. It raises the question, once again, of why people question whether women can handle both family and career. As many of the commenters have said on my earlier post, it has a lot to do with the balance of work at home. As I said somewhere in there, I just think women are still more likely to care whether the house is in decent shape and the kids have doctor’s appointments, etc. So sometimes they just do it and don’t ask. But I think we should ask. And I think husbands/partners should jump in more and as Libby said, they should push for more flexible schedules, too. And Libby added universal health care to the list, which I think is a fabulous addition. And, can I add affordable college, too? That was a big part of my struggle in deciding to quit.

This is one of those weeks where, if I were working full time, I’d be juggling a few too many balls. Today and yesterday, my youngest gets out at 11:30. Mr. Geeky could have managed yesterday, but today, I would have had to get child care or take 1/2 day off from work to deal with not only my daughter, but the parent-teacher conference. It’s not that I don’t want to do the parent-teacher conference, but the double-whammy of having the conference and the lack of child-care is problematic.

Because it’s been a day where I couldn’t even get 5 minutes in front of a computer, here’s a hilarious video, courtesy of Geeky Boy, who always finds the coolest stuff on the interweb.

A video

I’ve been working on various things that have to do with taking advantage of social software to create active, collaborative learning environments for students. When I talk about using social software, I’m talking about using blogs or wikis or Facebook or Twitter or other freely available web applications and leveraging them for educational purposes. Anyone can do this without having access to an educational institution. I could set up a whole class using Blogger, Facebook and pbwiki.

Blackboard was originally created as a simple way for faculty to put course material online back in the day when putting up a web site meant knowing how to code html and navigate the pathways on a server to get your files in the right place. Most faculty didn’t know how to do this. And so Blackboard and a couple of other companies sprung up as solutions to this problem. Ten years ago, this was great! The web was very interactive anyway and this made it easier for people to post syllabi and course documents. Blackboard was not, however, any kind of innovative technology. It certainly didn’t change the teaching and learning game. It was, and is, still built primarily as a one-way communication medium. Faculty post information and students read it.

Social-software oriented education allows students to create a more personalized learning environment and create a many-to-many communication channel. They no longer have to (nor can they, if done right!) sit and wait for information to flow from the professor to them. They can post their own information, ask questions of each other, see out new information and share it, comment on it, all without needing the professor to intervene. Social-software oriented classes that are open and public also benefit from interacting people not in the class, creating a broader audience for their work and learning from broader perspectives beyond the confined walls of school.

The factory-model of education treats, as the video below explains, students as widgets, as one size fits all. Blackboard perpetuates this model by not allowing for much customization, few communication tools, especially those that allow many-to-many communication, by keeping everything behind a password and not allowing for interconnection even within a single institution. Faculty cannot share course materials. Students cannot interact with students from other classes, much less with people outside of the class. Blackboard is built on the concepts of education from the industrial age, even though it was built in the information age.

As I say all the time, the software matters when it comes to using it for teaching and learning. The layout, its flexibility and interface, its ease of use all will affect the teaching and learning experience. Blackboard creates a really unfriendly learning environment. It’s contained and closed off, which gives the message that education only happens within the confines of a “course” and not in the interstices of courses. One can learn, it says, only the information I give you. It pretends, as Michael Wesch is fond of saying, that information is scarce, when it’s not. It makes education and learning narrow and defined when learning is huge and broad and takes place all the time over a lifetime and that is the message we need to be sending.

I used to think Blackboard was okay as a stepping stone to other things, but now I think it’s not. I think it’s okay to use it to keep your copyrighted materials and maybe your grades, but I don’t think it’s okay to use if for learning.

I can’t decide what to blog today, so you can decide for me: