Trying to get [out of] it

Decision making is tough, I know. So many considerations, so many complications. And then to have to make decisions for events that will transpire in almost a year - like course offerings for summer 2008 - asks for a fortune-teller of impeccable reputation (or an administrator with accurate data).

Despite not attending the summer course selection meeting, I've been asked to teach a literature course for summer 2008 - I'm happy to do so in order to ensure that the course won't be cancelled. Being a good departmental citizen is important to me, and I'd also like our literature offerings for summer to continue to be robust.

Because faculty members can select the literature courses they'd like to teach - within reason - I reasonably chose one that fulfills two certificate programs (Women and Gender Studies, Global Studies) and two Minnesota transfer curriculum goals (Humanties/Fine Arts-06 and Global Perspective-08) in order to make the course an attractive choice for students. The more bang-for-their-buck, the more likely they are to select a course. It's also a course that will not have been offered any other time during the entire 2007-08 academic year, follows well in sequence with another course we offer, and is one I like teaching.

The last time I taught such a summer-session literature course, it was two-thirds full, mainly with students who were full-time at another institution: intelligently (if we consider the marketing message our community colleges send out), the students were "fulfilling their generals" at a "cheaper price" so that they could continue with their four-year degrees at Augsburg, Bethel, Hamline, St. Kate's, Kansas State, River Falls, the University of Minnesota.

Thus, although I don't have scientific data to support my choice of a summer course, I do have some experiential data and some good intentions.

But I'm told that it's not a good choice because it's a women's lit course and they have "problems with enrollment." Yikes. Surely that assessment can't smack of the sexism it implies. I guess I'll need to have a conversation with a dean even as I try to extricate myself from campus activities - something that's been tough for me on the sabbatical year. How does one truly "rest" and get away when the long arm of the schedule reaches out for another victim?

Addendum: Had the talk with my department chair listing the above reasons, and he's going to talk with the dean, who "will probably go for it" but wants me to know the course is "still a gamble."

Technology Survey

I just had my "in person" interview today on the phone with Amir. It felt good to air some of my concerns - frankly and bluntly and directly. I hope that what we faculty have to say finds its way to decision makers. That hasn't happened in the past, if you ask me.

Now for a couple of videos about the future of education:
TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson is kind of funny, and his British accent makes his message more palatable.
EDU@2020 looks bootlegged, but Katz's video needs to be seen by lots of us!

Oh, here's the script for the Michael Wesch talk I heard on Friday. I also had a great talk about Educause with an IT expert from Carleton College

Rethinking/Reteaching

Okay, maybe I should just write "thinking" because that's what Michael Wesch reminds me to do. See his videos here: "A Vision of Students Today" and "Information R/Evolution"

Great stuff. But he's challenging educators to give up a bit of their status/cache as "knowers" when he asks them (us? me?) to give students tasks that are meaningful instead of teching them in a 19th-century way.

He also reminds me to tag my entries here - which I keep forgetting!

And St. Thomas University, where I'm typing this and which hosted him, has ended his talk with a spread of food that's embarrassing in its luxury: white linen table-clothed tables with bbq'ed meatballs, chicken satay, cheese and crackers, shrimp cocktail, bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, egg rolls, artichoke dip, red and white wine, pop and bottled water. All to serve 100, but only 60, max, attended his talk. I guess that private school tuition pays off.

Just in Time

The guy who made this YouTube video, "The Machine is Us/ing Us," is Dr. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. He will be at St. Thomas University tomorrow, and I just registered to hear his presentation called “Human Futures for Technology and Education.”

Another cool thing I've just been reading about on my techrhet list is a website tool called "Late Night Writer." It's a fabulous series of prompts to help reluctant writers (and who hasn't been one of those?) compose either a review or a report. Aimed at junior high and high school students (I think), it looks useful for community college composition students, too!

Forgetting and remembering

I've been forgetting to update the list of "what I've been reading" that appears at the end of this blog page. (Perhaps because it's at the end of the page! Design really is everything.)

Right now, I'm working on Grace Paley's short stories; she's our bookclub writer this month. Her Collected Stories is out, but I have two old copies of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and The Little Disturbances of Man. I hadn't opened them in years, and when I did yesterday, I happily found that Grace had signed them to me. I saw her read when I was at St. Kate's - probably 25 years ago now. Wow. I remember her energy and wit and white hair - and especially how different she was from any woman, younger or older, that I'd ever known or seen. I'd never met a "city woman" before, and she made me want to visit New York City.

In this 1998 Salon.com interview, she claims that "all my habits are bad." You've just gotta love a writer (or any person) who claims this identity.

Clearing/Cleaning

Out and/or up - I never know which verb phrase to use when I'm sorting through my email inbox that is crammed full of messages. I've found a bunch of interesting things, though, from the techrhet list I'm on (a really good listserv with smart people sharing/conversing about the use of technology in rhetoric/composition courses).

Interesting courses:
at RPI called Teaching Communication in Technologically Mediated Contexts
at Miami University called Writing and Writing Studies in a Digital Age
at the U of Minnesota Teaching Digital Writing

This article about "literacies" from a K-12 journal (but still applicable to community college professors/students) called "The New Literacies" provides some good "spoof websites" (including one for a tree octopus!).

College Life

- Or should I say "University Life" - surely is more robust with extracurricular activities. Tonight I watched the University of Minnesota's women's volleyball match against Illinois. The Gophers lost, but what a pleasure to see these athletes perform. The university band was terrific, too.

A community college just can't replicate this kind of enrichment - what can we do instead??

The people knew

Back in the day, as the students say, in the 2000 election, the voters in this great country chose Al Gore for their president. Now he's won a Nobel Peace Prize.

(P.S. Anyone remember the Butterfly Ballot from the 2000 election?)
(P.P.S Speaking of elections, anyone care to look at the REAL distribution of votes in the 2004 election, a visual representation that shows the HUGE bias in the media's "red state, blue state" characterization? Scroll down to see accurate color coding. This cartogram was prepared by professors at the University of Michigan.)

Three Big Surprises

They're from Ben Reynolds of the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. Today, in an email sent to a listserv I'm on, he wrote that we higher education professionals have the job of telling undergraduates these three surprises:

"Everything some grownup puts in print isn't True."
"Some questions have no one, correct, answer."
"We [professors] want to know what you think."

A great list, I think, and I'd like to think that all three of these are true for my colleagues, too.

First One

In my sabbatical plan proposal, I said I would be doing primary and secondary research on pedagogy. My primary research would consist of observing colleagues from other campuses.

So tomorrow is the first observation: Dr. Ruth Cronje in the English Department at UW-Eau Claire, has graciously allowed me to sit in on her first-year composition course and her scientific and technical writing course. She'll be teaching about summaries in the comp course and syntax in the stc course. It'll be great!

Beautiful October

Today's the kind of weather that I remember from the past five years' worth of first weeks in October: it's sunny blue sky, yellow leaves, bright windy sun. The past five are memorable to me because I've spent them driving to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter for the annual Nobel Conference. The drive follows the Minnesota River for quite a while: a lovely valley. I didn't go this year - and yesterday was full of rain, so not going was a good thing.

But I'll get my driving fix in this weekend when I go to Chicago for the TYCA Conference, where I'm on a Saturday morning panel with folks from Century. Still not sure what I'm going to say! But the drive should give me good thinking time.

This noon, I had a shiatsu massage for the first time. I'm getting Rosy of Blue Heron Bodywork to help with my old shoulder injury. She's a former student of Josh's, and he gave me two sessions with her as a Christmas present. Today's session felt great, although I'm ruining it by sitting at a computer!

Okay, David

This post's for you.

I've been ignoring this blog in favor of the personal blog - mainly because I'm trying to wean myself away from Century. It's really hard for me: I still read some college emails, still volunteer to go to meetings about a new college initiative I'm interested in (a "publishing center" at Century, which would be so cool and would be a good thing to have for our students). I get razzed by my pal Cullen, who sends me emails saying, "Why are you reading this email?! You shouldn't be reading your college emails, except those from me." I love Cullen.

And also, I've done almost nothing related to college work or my sabbatical work - just read for fun as I clean out my bookshelves. I figure I should read the books before throwing them in the Goodwill box. Last week, I started and then skimmed through Silence in October by a Danish writer named Jens Christian Grondahl. It was awful, despite the good review here, because the narrator was so mannered and full of himself. An entire novel inside the head of one man (or woman or girl or chicken) should be a novel inside an *interesting* head, say for example Mrs. Dalloway. But this Danish musing on lost love and the inability to really know other people was just really irritating.

Today I finished a great epic, depressing, invigorating 1992 novel called Was by Geoff Ryman. He calls it a fantasy/history, but I see a collage (or bricolage?) of voices, times, characters, facts, dreams that all circle around the Wizard of Oz: the play, the movie, the fans, the actors, the story. Frank Baum's a character in the novel, as is Judy Garland, Aunty Em and Uncle Henry, Dorothy and Toto. It's a brutal, beautiful work.

How's that, Dave? Why don't you post info on your Duluth conference?

Resources I don't want to lose

The EPIC movies
EPIC 2014 on YouTube

"Lesson in Manipulation"

This video from the Christian Science Monitor shows how easy photographs can be manipulated. We all know this, of course, but this video shows how common this "editorial technique" has become. Many would say, "What's the problem? You want to make a certain statement with your photograph - visuals are messages, after all - so why shouldn't I emphasize what I want so that my message is stronger?"

Ever hear of ethics?

I think this video would be a good teaching tool for lots of classes.

"Wikipedia Editors"

I'm intrigued lately about the news that a 24-year-old graduate student has created an online tool that will allow anyone to identify the editors of Wikipedia entries. It's called WikiScanner and you can link to it here.

(Just a side note: I'm so proud of myself for figuring out the HTML to allow me to put links manually into my blog's body instead of just the title, which can be done via WYSIWYG using Blogger's tools. This need only appears when I'm using Zoe's MacBook; on my home or office PC, the Blogger WYSIWYG tools allow in-text links -- I wonder why the difference.)

Okay, back to the cool WikiScanner: you can't really find out the actual *person* who made the edits (for example, I edited Century College's page - correcting some mechanical errors and adding the name of our WGST chair). But you can find out the owner of the computer that was used to edit (such as the CIA or PepsiCo or the Republican Party). You can then make the logical inference that an employee of said entity (or person who has access to the computers owned by these entities) made the edits.

Find out more about Virgil Griffith, the fellow who created this tool.

"Inside Higher Ed"

I'd forgotten about this blog until a colleague pointed out yesterday's viewpoint article: about losing one's work because a thief stole one's laptop! I'll have to remember to read this blog regularly if I'm going to feel connected to higher ed during my sabbatical. But maybe I'm not supposed to feel connected - maybe that's what the sabbatical "rest" is about?

What to do?

When almost all of your friends and relatives are getting ready for the new school year and you're not? I read good junk (Robert Wilson's espionage novel The Company of Strangers was yesterday's candy), organize my bookshelves (an ongoing project), attend public readings (last night's included my excellent pal Cullen Bailey Burns as a winner of and plan a trip across country (which will involve visiting friends/relatives who are beginning their new school year!).

Sabbatical is hard.

"Victoria Mikelonis, RIP"

Yesterday, I received word that my former professor from the U of M, Vickie Mikelonis, died as a result of her two-year battle with cancer. I've been scouring the web for obituaries, planning to link to one, but I've not yet found anything. I guess that means I'll have to write up a little bit for myself:

I got to know Vickie when I took an Intercultural Communication course from her in about 1996. She was a strong, extremely knowlegable professor, slightly scattered because she had so many interests and informative opinions on topics, but always student-centered. She pushed us to think beyond the classroom and beyond the theories we were learning, encouraged us to think of ourselves as research professionals instead of mere students, and then provided us with the tools and contacts in order to become those professionals.

Thanks to Vickie, I traveled twice to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The first trip was to conduct a three-week, eight-country research project involving technology transfer in medical institutions, a project that had its origins in an assignment from Vickie's course. My colleage Doreen Starke-Meyerring and I interviewed about 40 doctors, medical professionals, and administrators about how they were using the computer equipment and access provided by the American International Health Alliance (AIHA). The resulting report is here: http://lrc.aiha.com/English/ProjectInfo/Eval-innov-Eng.pdf

The second trip was a direct result of the first, and I was invited by AIHA staff to conduct a 10-day "Train the Trainers" course in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Vickie helped me tremendously as I prepared curriculum. She prepped me for teaching folks who had experienced education under a communist educational system, folks who were used to following orders instead of innovating, folks who saw the world hierarchically instead of collaboratively (or "flat" as Thomas Friedman might say).

She encouraged me to borrow one of her exercises, and I did: she passed out bundles of Tinker Toys (I used K-nex) to groups of students and asked them to build the highest structure that they could build using the toys. The students typically work in their small groups to complete this task. After they finished, Vickie would explain the lesson: she hadn't told them to create *individual* structures; rather, they could have built an even taller structure if they would have pooled all of their toys instead of keeping only those they were given in their groups. Although some students would complain of a "bait-and-switch" feeling to the assignment, Vickie's point was that we come to a task with lots of previous experiences doing tasks. To truly innovate and move beyond what gets us stuck, we have to work with others in ways we haven't before. This exercise was especially important for people who had grown up in the Soviet Union and were now living in independent states.

I'll never forget the consternation I watched in the dimly lit, chalky-walled, Russian-language-filled room where my students worked with their structures. This lesson about innovation came up later in the role-plays they conducted (also scripted from ideas I got from Vickie), so I guess the students learned through their discomfort.

Thanks to Vickie, I had two unforgettable opportunities in an amazing part of the world at the end of the 20th century. She was an extraordinary teacher and human being, and she will be missed by so many of us. Good bye, Vickie.

Snafu U

Could be the name of our college because of all the screw-ups this fall. Right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Folks in charge who don't know enough about what they're supposed to be doing. Dependence on technologies that are only partially functional or usable. Reliance on folks who talk rather than do, alientate rather than conciliate, pose rather than problem-solve.

I'm supposed to not care about these things for a year because I'm on sabbatical. This, perhaps, will be the hardest thing for me to accomplish while I'm away.

"A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto"

Click on this link to find a strong message relating to information sharing, storing, retrieval, expansion, and use. I found this YouTube video by accident on the blog of a Capella University librarian (!).