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The Problem With EdX

In Bonnie's Posts on 2012/05/16 at 01:05

Bonnie Stewart, writing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada.

Since it started last fall, I’ve heard the 36-week experimental #change11course referred to – half tongue-in-cheek – as “the Mother of All MOOCs.”

Back when the course started in September, it seemed like a reasonable description. #change11 was designed and run by Massive Open Online Course pioneers George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, and had 36 separate facilitators lined up to cover everything from soup to nuts in the grand scheme of instructional technologies and 21st century learning.

Apparently, however, George and Dave should have kept the crystal ball from their Edfutures MOOC a few years back.

Because in thinking about the Mother of All MOOCs, it seems none of us in #change11 were thinking big enough.

Today, the New York Times announced that Harvard has paired up with MIT in a new non-profit partnership called EdX, which will offer free online courses from both universities, following the MITx model begun over the winter.

The New York Times called EdX a MOOC.

#change11, I think you’re gonna have to give that “Mother of All MOOCs” tshirt back.

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It’s too early to say what EdX is going to mean for higher education in North America. That two of the most prestigious universities in North America, however, have seen fit to join forces to go down this road of free and open online courses means the rush to figure that meaning out? Is on.

And the stakes – in a time when universities & colleges are already struggling with smaller demographics and tightened purse strings – are high.

For a while now, MOOCs have been hailed as “the Great Disruption” in education.

EdX is staking out serious ground in this new model of course delivery, framing itself as a clearinghouse platform on which other institutions can offer their own courses under the EdX brand. It’ll be open source, enabling other institutions to host their own courses if they wish, without having to pay for or license for-profit software. This challenges not only the traditional pay-for-learning model of academia, but the growing encroachment of startup edupreneur-style companies into the territory of higher ed.

EdX is clearly setting out to be the mothership.

And it may well succeed: reputation has always carried a lot of weight in education. When you combine two of the biggest names in academia with unlimited access to courses, you get interest. People want to affiliate themselves with what carries cache: in network theory, this tendency to connect to hubs that are already well-connected is called “preferential attachment.” If EdX turns out to be good at what it does, it will have the potential to take over the market in terms of massive open online courses.

It doesn’t stop there. EdX also has designs on research, not just teaching and learning. Its stated intent, according to today’s press release, is to “research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. The EdX platform will enable the study of which teaching methods and tools are most successful.”

And this is where I begin to itch.

It’s not that I don’t think free learning is a great idea. Or that I don’t welcome Harvard & MIT’s interest in the enormous and interesting task of researching effective online learning.

We live in a time when frictionless sharing of information makes massive open courses possible. And when learning analytics make massive amounts of data available from any online venture. These things are going to affect academia, make no mistake, and our current institutional models – our business models, our learning models, and our research models – are all going to have to adapt in response.

Until this sudden explosion of major institutional interest in the idea of Massive Open Online Courses, I’d thought the adaptation might actually move in the direction of – gasp – complexity.

The original MOOCs – the connectivist MOOCsa la Siemens & Downes, and the work of David Wiley and Alec Couros and others – have been, for the most part, about harnessing the capacity of participatory media to connect people and ideas. They’ve been built around lateral, distributed structures, encouraging blog posts and extensive peer-to-peer discussion formats. Even in live sessions showcasing facilitator’s expertise, these ur-MOOCs have tended towards lively backchannel chats, exploring participants’ knowledge and experiences and ideas.

They’ve been, in short, actively modelled on the Internet itself. They’ve been experiential and user-driven. Their openness hasn’t stopped at registration capacity, but extended to curricular tangents and participatory contributions and above all, to connections: they’ve given learners not just access to information but to networks.

They’ve been messy, sometimes, but they have definitely not been business as usual.

The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions.

Those who complete the courses will get a certificate of mastery, and a grade. Their data will be harvested to determine what learning methods help them succeed.

I see value in this, and suspect that for many it will open doors. But.

If you want to deliver mass courses to enormous numbers of people, and mastery and measurable, extrinsic success are your aims, you will be inclined to keep your offerings to the concrete and the certain.

Some types of knowledge are privileged in this kind of decision-making climate. Experimental, experiential knowledge tends not to be.

Particularly when the course delivery is itself an experimental undertaking to which sizable reputations – in this case, the good names of Harvard and MIT – have been attached.

Big reputations make careful, strategic changes, not great disruptive ones that go against self-interest. And thus the courses that EdX will offer and the research that EdX will produce are not likely to be modelled at all on the messy, distributed, peer-to-peer versions of knowledge production that the internet and the original MOOCs encouraged.

Words change with usage, of course. And “MOOC” certainly fits the EdX model, perhaps better than it did the original connectivist offerings: EdX will be more massive and far more a traditional course than the originals.

It’s ironic, though: this brand-new Mother of All MOOCs is, in the end, likely to do as much preserving of the traditional structures of education – especially in terms of learning – than it is to disrupt them.

This post was first published at http://theory.cribchronicles.comand was cross-published with permission from the author.

Bonnie Stewart is a Ph.D. student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. In higher ed since 1997, Bonnie has lived and taught on all three coasts of Canada and in Eastern Europe and Asia. Her research explores social media identity and its implications for higher education. Published at Salon.com and winner of the 2011 PEI Literary Award for creative non-fiction, Bonnie blogs ideas at  http://theory.cribchronicles.comand identity and parenthood at  http://cribchronicles.com. Find her on Twitter at @bonstewart.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Massive Open Online Courses: How “The Social” Alters the Relationship Between Learners and Facilitators

In Bonnie's Posts on 2012/05/10 at 08:34

Bonnie Stewart, writing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada.

We’re getting close to the tail end of the 36-week-long experiment called #change11, or “the mother of all MOOCs.”

How can I tell?

First, I’m getting ready to facilitate my week, exploring Digital Identities. I’m second-last in the lineup, so the fact that I’m on deck means the whole undertaking is drawing to a close.

But it’s also clear we’re winding down because the #change11 conversation hubs have begun to resemble, uh, ghost-towns.  Once there were lively debates and intense exchanges. As the winter wore into the spring of the year, though, the tumbleweeds began to tickle.

Note to self: next time you facilitate a MOOC module, pick Week #2, not Week #35.

Any course that runs from September through May requires stamina. When that course is voluntary on the part of both learners and facilitators, and runs as a series of totally separate modules, the drop-off can be fairly significant. Erm, even my own participation as a student has crawled to a stop over the last month or two.

I find myself wondering if the other learners will be keener than I’ve been? Am I going to throw a MOOC and have nobody show up?

I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m a teacher at heart. I’ll put the work into developing my one-week course whether there are going to be 3 students or 300. But as I’m preparing, I’m thinking about what it means to facilitate in a truly social, networked, voluntary environment like #change11.

Or the internet.

As the awareness of the MOOC experiment grows, the term is being increasingly applied to grand-scale enterprises like the Stanford AI course and MITx. While heady, this blurs some very important distinctions.

The MOOC model from which #change11 originates was built on the connectivist learning theory of George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Highly social in format, these courses tend to be experimental, non-linear, and deeply dialogic and participatory. Contributions from participants frequently direct the course of discussion, and the connections and ideas built between learners can be considered as valuable as the knowledge expounded by the facilitator.

On the other hand, the MOOC models offered by the big universities tend towards formalized curricula, content delivery, and verification of completed learning objectives.

Far more embedded in traditional paradigms of knowledge and teaching, these courses only harness the connectivity of social media insofar as they enable masses of people to link themselves to the prestige of a big-name institution. They offer discussion boards, but their purpose is content-focused, not connection-focused.

If I were teaching in an MITx-style course, I’d have a very different module ahead of me, one far more familiar to me as a higher ed instructor.

I’ve been teaching for eighteen years. I profess to be in favour of learner-centered classrooms. But until this MOOC module, every single course I’ve taught has on some level obliged the students to be there. I am accustomed to having the institutional powers of status, credentialism, and grading backing me in the classroom.

In the connectivist MOOC model, I don’t.

There is no bonus for learners who participate in my week of #change11. They won’t get a badge at the end, and there is no certification announcing they completed anything. There’s nothing specific for them to complete, unless I design an exit goal as part of the week’s activities. But that would be MY exit goal: not theirs. They don’t get to put the word MIT on their CV. And while some weeks of the #change11 MOOC have allowed participants to connect with leaders in the learning and technologies field – Howard Rheingold, Pierre Levy – I’m among the less well-known of the 30-plus facilitators in the year’s lineup. They won’t even get the relational perk of engaging with somebody famous.

Nope. But what they will get – in addition to what I hope will be a fascinating exploration of the idea of  Digital Identity – is hands-on practice in what it means to learn and connect and simply be in this networked, distributed age.

And I will get the opportunity to practice what it means to lead in the age of the internet: to share what one knows in a way that invites others to engage, to contribute, to participate.

Both models of the MOOC serve a purpose, but it is the connectivist one – for all it is less massive and far less a traditional course – that teaches both teachers and learners new ways of coming together to explore ideas.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Why Women Leave Academia

In Guest Blogger on 2012/05/08 at 08:06

Guest blogger, Curt Rice, writing from Tromsø , Norway.

Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as Ph.D. candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great.

This is the conclusion of The chemistry Ph.D.: the impact on women’s retention, a report for the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In this report, the results of a longitudinal study with Ph.D. students in chemistry in the UK are presented.

Men and women show radically different developments regarding their intended future careers. At the beginning of their Ph.D. studies, fully 72% of women express an intention to pursue careers as researchers, either in industry or academia. Among men, 61% express the same intention.

By the third year, the proportion of men planning careers in research had dropped from 61% to 59%. But for the women, the number had plummeted from 72% in the first year to 37% as they finish their studies.

If we tease apart those who want to work as researchers in industry from those who want to work as researchers in academia, the third year numbers are alarming: 12% of the women and 21% of the men see academia as their preferred choice.

This is not the number of Ph.D.s who in fact do go to academia; it’s the number who want to.

88% of the women don’t even want academic careers, nor do 79% of the men!

How can it be this bad? Why are universities such unattractive workplaces?

Part of The chemistry Ph.D. discusses problems that arise while young researchers are Ph.D. candidates.

Improving the Ph.D. experience requires taking account of these problems, including too little supervision, too much supervision, focus on achieving experimental results rather than mastery of methodologies, and much more. The long-term effects, though, are reflected in the attitudes and beliefs about academia that emerge during this period.

The participants in the study identify many characteristics of academic careers that they find unappealing. The constant hunt for funding for research projects is a significant impediment for both men and women. But women in greater numbers than men see academic careers as all-consuming, as solitary and as unnecessarily competitive.

Both men and women Ph.D. candidates come to realized that a string of post-docs is part of a career path, and they see that this can require frequent moves and a lack of security about future employment. Women are more negatively affected than men by the competitiveness in this stage of an academic career and their concerns about competitiveness are fueled, they say, by a relative lack of self-confidence.

Women more than men see great sacrifice as a prerequisite for success in academia. This comes in part from their perception of women who have succeeded, from the nature of the available role models. Successful female professors are perceived by female Ph.D. candidates as displaying masculine characteristics, such as aggression and competitiveness, and they were often childless.

As if all this were not enough, women Ph.D. candidates had one experience that men never have. They were told that they would encounter problems along the way simply because they are women. They are told, in other words, that their gender will work against them.

By following Ph.D. candidates throughout their study and asking probing questions, we learn not only that the number of women in chemistry Ph.D. programs who intend to pursue a career in academia falls dramatically, but we learn why. (See also Why go for a Ph.D.? Advice for those in doubt.)

This research and the new knowledge it produces should be required reading for everyone leading a university or a research group. The stories surely apply far beyond chemistry. Remember that it’s not just women who find academia unappealing. Only 21% of the men wanted to head our way, too.

Universities will not survive as research institutions unless university leadership realizes that the working conditions they offer dramatically reduce the size of the pool from which they recruit.

We will not survive because we have no reason to believe we are attracting the best and the brightest. When industry is the more attractive employer, our credibility as the home of long-term, cutting edge, high-risk, profoundly creative research, is diminished.

The answers here lie in leadership and in changing our current culture to build a new one for new challenges. The job is significant and it will require cutting edge, high-risk leadership teamwork to succeed. Is your university ready?

An earlier version of this post was also published on Curt Rice’s blog, Thoughts on University Leadership.

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Curt Rice is Vice President for Research at the University of Tromsø in Norway. He is hosting the webinar How to get more women professors on May 2nd.

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Publishing Through the Pain: Personal Trauma and the Ph.D.

In Guest Blogger on 2012/04/14 at 23:04

Gwendolyn Beetham, writing from Brooklyn, New York in the US.

‘You really should publish something from your Ph.D.’ The refrain is one with which all doctoral students are well-aware. In the past year, I’ve heard the words often: from mentors, my Ph.D. supervisor, colleagues, friends, even mentees. What they don’t know is that even looking across the room at the thick, bound copy of my Ph.D. fills me with dread. To go back to my Ph.D. is to return to a very painful period in my life.

While the completion of a Ph.D. brings relief, even excitement, to many, for me it is a marker of deep personal trauma. At the beginning of last year, a month from my Ph.D. submission date, my partner with whom I thought I would spend my life told me that she wanted to end our relationship. The decision was one-sided and unexpected, and it left me in shock. Over the next month we spent an hour a week in couple’s therapy and the rest of my time was spent desperately trying to focus long enough to revise my final chapters and write my conclusion.  One week after I submitted, my partner officially decided to leave the relationship.

Instead of excitement and sense of accomplishment at the completion of my Ph.D., I felt ashamed of my tenacity – how could I possibly have finished this piece of work while the future that I had imagined was crumbling around me? Although friends, colleagues, and my supervisor continually proclaimed their admiration that I was able to complete my Ph.D. and pass my defense under such conditions, I couldn’t reconcile this ‘success’ with the ‘failure’ of my relationship. The combination of the timing of the separation and the fact that my partner, also a doctoral student, had been perpetually stalled with her Ph.D., bolstered the feeling that I was being penalized. The quality that I had previously valued in myself – my ambitious work ethic (a quality which makes the completion of a Ph.D. possible, as articulated in this recent University of Venus article ) – was something which I now felt to be a source of pain. Since then, any attempt at going back to my Ph.D. has taken me back to those emotions; at first even thinking about the Ph.D. brought traumatic flash-backs.

It’s not that I haven’t published anything in the past year – in fact, I’ve kept busy writing book reviews, chapters for books, and articles for blogs; though none have been directly related to my Ph.D. topic.  I’ve removed myself far away from the PhD in other ways, completing a yoga teacher’s training course, traveling, taking a lesbian history class for fun. Yoga, particularly the core concept of simultaneously experiencing strength and softness, has been especially useful to my healing process.

While talking through this trauma and its ramifications with my therapist (I’m a New Yorker after all!), she proposed that I take my first stab at publishing work from my Ph.D. by writing through the pain that surrounded its completion. She suggested that the relationship between what is happening in our lives and our work is more complex than many academics might admit. Like one of my mentors, she also mentioned that separations during particularly poignant times in our lives – not only Ph.D. completion, but after one partner achieves tenure, a family member dies, or terminal illness – are not uncommon; if this was true, perhaps my story would resonate with others’ experiences.

Writing about my resistance to publish has helped me to remember a few things – including why I started working on a Ph.D. in the first place. As a feminist activist and scholar, I’ve always valued the connection between academia and the ‘real world,’ and I never wanted my work to be stuck in an ivory tower; I do think that I managed to make some potentially useful insights! While I don’t think that I will ever look back on the completion of my Ph.D. with a sense of happy accomplishment, I do know that, eventually, I will publish. In the meantime I’ll continue to heal, write, and, of course, practice yoga.

Gwendolyn Beetham received her Ph.D. from the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics. She lives in Brooklyn, where she does freelance work for gender justice organizations, edits the column, The Academic Feminist, at Feministing.com, and participates in feminist, queer, and food justice activism. Contact her at gbeetham@gmail.com or on twitter @gwendolynb.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed


Finding Yourself Where You Are

In Guest Blogger on 2012/04/07 at 00:36

Emily Isaacson, writing from Murfreesboro, North Carolina in the US. 

My husband and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary this past January; we have been together another two years. In the early days of our dating, my husband was game enough to seek out the odd and strange things that surrounded us in central Missouri. We have seen the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, the largest salt lick in the Western Hemisphere, the world’s largest concrete goose, one of the purported world’s largest pecans, the room where Jesse James was shot and killed, and a “castle” in the Ozarks called Ha Ha Tonka. Since we have moved together – and traveled together – we’ve expanded the list.  We’ve climbed to the top of the lighthouse in Key West (despite my near-debilitating fear of heights); stopped to photograph the world’s largest concrete peanut in Georgia; checked out the antiques mall at South of the Border in South Carolina; seen dinosaur tracks in Texas; seen the Hollywood sign; come near enough to alligators in the Everglades, thank you very much; and traveled the boardwalk through the Great Dismal Swamp.  Because of where we currently live, we’ve been able to take advantage of weekend trips to Washington, DC and day trips to Raleigh and Richmond.

In Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Jig asks the American, “That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?”  While the timbre of the story suggests that this attitude might be one to leave behind (they are, after all, trying to figure out whether or not they want to continue with this pregnancy), there’s always been something particularly alluring in that statement for me.  Part of it, I think, is that my husband and I do more than simply “look at things and try new drinks,” but we still also think that there’s some wonder in exploring and trying new things.  That’s part of what brings us together.

This gets me thinking about my life as an academic because academic careers mean moving – and sometimes moving frequently.  They also mean finding yourself in locations far from our stereotypes of college towns.  I currently live in a small town in the coastal plain of North Carolina (a euphemism for the extremely rural and swampy area in the northeastern part of the state).  While here, we’ve done many of the things that we’ve always done: we’ve explored the small and unusual locations, we’ve found friends with similar interests, and we’ve figured out ways to participate in the life of this community.  It’s been a series of discoveries, including the distinction in North Carolina Barbeques that I learned about at our local “PorkFest.” The joy of discovery and exploration in my life is the same thing that guides my research as an academic: it’s all about being curious about the world – how it is and how it was.

And the acceptance of interesting things in small towns has cropped up in my teaching.  To take advantage of what we actually have locally – and because our resources are limited – I decided that to teach my students about cultural materialism, we’d take a trip to our local nineteenth century cemetery.  Each student found a gravestone, photographed it and gave a presentation reading the stone against an Emily Dickinson poem, explaining attitudes about death.  A slightly imperfect project, but the students had the experience of actual research outside of the classroom.  A little bit of creativity, though, and the students got to move beyond the classroom.

I’m not saying there are things that I don’t miss living here (sushi and bookstores spring immediately to mind), but I am saying that there’s a point at which it’s important to acknowledge our surroundings and to appreciate them.  Curiosity and openness to the new goes a long way in creating satisfaction and fulfillment in life.  That openness doesn’t mean stagnation or forgetting about the larger academic community, either.  While I work hard at my life in my small town, I’m also working very hard at keeping up with my field outside of my town: I always keep in mind the larger picture of my career.

I don’t know what the future holds.  I don’t know if I’ll stay in the small town for my entire career, or whether a different small town beckons.  What I do know is that it is all part of the academic journey, and it’s one where I’m glad to look at things and try new drinks.

Emily Isaacson currently serves at Chowan University (Murfreesboro, North Carolina) as an assistant professor of English and the coordinator of the Chowan Critical Thinking Program.  She blogs about teaching introduction to literature at Bedford/St. Martin’s LitBits blog, and about everything else at The Seacoast of Bohemia.
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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Learning in – and from – the Great Disruption

In Bonnie's Posts on 2012/03/27 at 23:40

Bonnie Stewart, writing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada

Ever since MITx got announced last December, the voices of the futurists have been out in grand numbers, predicting what it all might mean for higher education. They’re calling it “The Great Disruption,” a brand name worthy of Nostradamus.

The Globe and Mail says it‘s about time.

The Atlantic is envisioning a post-campus America.

For those of us actually enrolled in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), though – or those like me who’ve enlisted both to teach and learn within these experimental course environments – this “great disruption” feels more like an augmentation than anything else.

I think higher ed has something to learn from the experiences that I – and learners like me, merging non-traditional avenues with formalized classroom experiences – are engaging in. Those of us who’ve chosen graduate studies in spite of the much-lamented death of the tenure-track professoriate have little reason to assume that we will have any sort of protected or privileged place in the academy’s next incarnation. Yet here we are. We are, at least for the moment, part of the system. But many of us are wary of being fully subsumed into it, because we’ve been cautioned against betting the farm on that tenure path. So we keep a foot outside the tower, seeking out alternative paths to augment our learning and research; we are keeping options open.

Yet neither do we necessarily reject the academy. For myself, I don’t belong to the Do It Yourself University camp that sometimes suggests that MOOCs and unstructured online network participation are The Solution to education in the 21st century. Our world relies too heavily on credentials for me to believe that the #change11 experience would remain as open as it is if it were suddenly forced to carry the burden of standards that falls, rightly or wrongly, on formalized higher education. The logic that drives open online credentialing experiments is, thus far, only experimental.

MOOCs do disrupt business as usual, yes. Those of us in the #change11 MOOC are engaged in the course at no cost, and nobody except us is holding our learning or performance to any particular external standards. Unlike MITx, the 36 week #change11 course offers no credential. These factors all make it a significantly different experience from studying at my bricks-and-mortar university.

What #change11 gives me, though, is access to a multitude of semi-organized ideas and expert facilitators, plus a semi-coherent network of peers to work through the weeks with. That network remains largely stable even as topics and facilitators rotate weekly.

It is this participatory element – the learning of being part of a large, distributed network of people from varied backgrounds, focusing on the same topic – that enables open online experiences to offer value, even to those of us already studying in conventional institutions. That, and the speed and flexibility inherent in networked learning.

In a Google-able culture replete with neo-liberal demands for reform, efficiency, and innovation, MOOCs help those of us interested in emergent ideas participate in a public learning experience that is otherwise not really available by conventional means.

As I forge ahead with my own research, the lack of fit between learning and success on academic terms and those that social media rewards and reinforces become increasingly apparent. Journal publications lag years behind blog posts in my area of specialization. The theory that guides my research seldom addresses the online contexts in which I’m trying to apply it. But my MOOC peers and facilitators do. And so I apply the ideas shaped by traditional academic environments to those shared in distributed digital environments.

The MOOC augments my Ph.D studies by making it possible for me to be a public thinker and learner; by giving me up-to-the-minute access to the conversations shaping and driving my field, and the opportunity to participate in these conversations. They are available on the wider internet, certainly. But MOOCs help curate and cohere them, and also overtly create them. MOOCs don’t just bring disparate networks and opportunities into focus; they carve out explicit teaching and learning spaces within the information overload of contemporary social media.

Will these type of practice ultimately have an impact of the teaching and learning spaces of traditional institutions? I hope so. But not necessarily in the ways heralded by media.

Too often, MOOCs – particularly the emergent big-name university offerings that have essentially harnessed the capacity of open online learning and scaled it – are written about primarily as dramatic new business models.

It’s true that there’s potential in that direction. And Sebastian Thrun et al seem intent on mining it, while all of watch breathlessly.

But that market lens on massive open coursework misses one of the central elements of the great disruption: education is not solely a business, or a credential-machine. It’s also about learning.

And with MOOCs, those of us acculturated to academia have the opportunity to learn new, responsive, participatory ways of fostering public knowledge, both inside and outside of traditional institutions. The disruption may be profound, certainly. But so may be the possibilities.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed 

Holy motivational force, Batwoman! Reflections on the first #femlead chat

In Guest Blogger on 2012/03/20 at 07:09

Reprinted with the permission of Liz Gloyn. This post originally appeared at Classically Inclined.

So, last night was the first Twitter chat of #femlead, which is a new project of the University of Venus. You can read more about the logic behind it through the link, but the main goal is to provide a space “for those who lead, those with vision, those who seek to support one another in the challenges and opportunities facing us in all areas of academic life”. I’d count myself in the second and third categories, and I’d like to be in the first category one day, so I thought this was a good thing to take part in – particularly given the lack of women in leadership roles in higher ed. My immediate concerns going into the chat were centred around what opportunities there are to develop leadership in the world of the short term contract, and what I could do to develop my skills and my career path.

I have to say that I got a great deal more than that out of the chat, focused around the topic of service vs. leadership, and which is now available over at Storify. A couple of broad themes emerged. Firstly, leadership has to fit into the wider narrative of who you are and what you do – there’s no point in taking on a leadership role if it doesn’t somehow fit your picture of yourself and where you’re going. There was also a lot of emphasis on noticing the rhetoric of how you present these things.  You need to talk about achievements as demonstrating leadership rather than be modest about them.

The chat wasn’t short of ideas about how to cope with the short term contract problem either. As I was often told, there are plenty of opportunities out there – you need to look for them and make sure it’s clear you are interested in them, and then present them in such a way in the next short term contract that more opportunities arise. There are opportunities for leadership that arise outside the institution you are based in, such as in professional organisations, that aren’t affected by moving about. Whatever the location, you should still be aware of the power structures and create mentoring opportunities, because that’s how you let people know that you want these kinds of responsibilities.

This gave me the toolkit to start thinking about how I had demonstrated leadership here at Birmingham, despite only being in a temporary post. Two things came to mind, both of which fitted into my internal narrative of who I am and what I do as an academic. The first is my fervent support of the one minute paper as a feedback mechanism in classes; I’ve talked about it so often that some colleagues are now experimenting with it, and it’s been mentioned in the staff-student consultative committee as a positive thing. That relates to the part of my identity that sees itself as an innovative and passionate teacher, and can be talked about as a kind of leadership that doesn’t involve being at the head of a committee. The second is my decision to produce a policy for interlibrary loan forms for graduate students in my capacity as library rep, as there currently isn’t one, and we should be providing an equity of resource provision for students that everybody knows about. That relates to my belief that we should make sure every student is well supported and aware of all possible resources open to them, and here is a clear and definitive action that I’m working on to make a difference on that front. Both of these things will remain at Birmingham after I leave, and hopefully will affect the institutional culture in a positive way. So small as they seem, that’s leadership.

The big take-away, and I hope the subject of a future Twitter chat, was the importance of strategic thinking. What else can I do? Where do I want to go? What skills am I lacking, and what training can I get to meet my professional needs? An important part of this is mentoring – including informal mentoring of the kind I was lucky enough to benefit from on #femlead.

And when I say benefit, I really do mean ‘benefit’. Because of #femlead, I started to think about my interest in learning and teaching as potentially something more than a commitment to my own praxis – as something that might be an agent of institutional progress. And so I thought about what I wanted to do with it, and remembered the article that I want to write about CIQs, and had a browse through the training options provided by the university, as it’s been a while since I looked. And lo, there was a course entitled Writing About Teaching, which seeks to give a bit of training on how to write pedagogical articles, upon which I am now booked.

It’s a small step. It’s always small steps at the moment. But it’s jolly amazing what you can manage on Twitter with a bit of focus inside of half an hour.


Far From Home

In Guest Blogger on 2012/03/06 at 01:53

Guest blogger, Juliann Emmons Allison, writing from California in the US. 

I read Itir Toksöz’s post on the merits of scholarly travel in August of last year, just as I was finalizing the details for my most recent trip to Brazil. Toksöz recognizes that traveling too frequently may be costly in terms of neglected “school” work, but argues persuasively in favor of traveling to conferences, in particular, as necessary for academic exchange and networking. I agree; however, scholars who are also parents need to consider the impact their work-related travel can have on their families.

Fall quarter instruction doesn’t begin on my campus until the very end of September, so my stint in Brazil earlier that month did not measurably affect my ability to fulfill my scholarly obligations. Rather, it destabilized my household in a way that took me entirely by surprise then, and continues to temper my decisions concerning travel for research and networking.

I was initiated into the ranks of Americans who must travel for their jobs before I was even employed. I attended a workshop on climate change in San Diego, CA – roughly two hours from where I was studying in Los Angeles, CA – just after passing my written Ph.D. exams; a year later, I presented the first substantive chapter of my dissertation at a conference on the political economy of climate change – in Chantilly, France. My spouse swears that I spent more time abroad than at home between that trip and the birth of our first child three years later.

Motherhood initially clipped my wings, confining my scholarly rambling – mostly – to short trips within the “lower 48” United states; however, I began accepting longer engagements and acquiring passport stamps at a steady clip once my youngest child was weaned. In the twelve months preceding my trip to Brazil last September, I was away from home up to a third of every month, including trips to Latin America, and West Africa.

My spouse uses his relatively generous vacation time throughout the year to play single parent while I’m away. This arrangement has worked really well. “Perhaps too well,” I’ve thought at times. My spouse works two counties away, meaning that I juggle the kids’ school schedules and athletic practices and other commitments, in addition to my own teaching schedule and other scholarly responsibilities, almost single-handedly on weekdays. In contrast, while I’m away, they’re treated to an überpresent  “Mr. Mom,” and appear to thrive in his care.

No wonder I was taken aback by the familial breakdown I faced during the week just prior to my departure for Rio de Janeiro. First, my very capable spouse started a “heated debate” by questioning my going so far away, considering our children had just started their fall school term. Then my 10-year-old came down with some variation on the common cold, and uncharacteristically demanded my ministrations. His veritable physical collapse was followed by my 14-year-old daughter’s retreat to bed with what she claimed was the same bug, but which turned out to be menstrual cramps. Finally, my youngest, then six-year-old Olivia, initiated her ongoing preoccupation with death. My eldest alone remained “normal” and unperturbed by my impending absence.

By the time I boarded the plane, I was emotionally exhausted and deeply torn – at once nearly ecstatic to be leaving the asylum, and downright guilty for abandoning my unprecedentedly needy family.

Their collectively odd behavior naturally prompted me to reconsider my tendency to embrace opportunities to travel – to conduct research as well as to attend workshops, meetings, and academic conferences. I know that my penchant for travelling is not unusual. According to the U.S. Travel Association, an advocate for travel in the United States, a fifth of working Americans have jobs that require travel. A recent Trip Advisor survey indicates that a majority of them consider such travel a perk.

Could there be a travel tipping point with respect to the contemporary work-life balance? The blogosphere appears to support scholarly research on this issue: it depends. At least, tenured professors like myself arguably belong to the fortunate few professionals who possess job security, work they enjoy, and a flexible schedule that permits optimal work-life balances.

So what gives?

I eventually discovered the roots of Olivia’s reaction. I left on September 12, just a day after the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I hazard to guess that the oft televised collapse of the twin towers had a indelible, frightening affect on her fragile psyche. My spouse routinely rehearses what he’ll tell our children if my plane goes down, this was the first time that Olivia associated mom’s airplane flight with disaster and death. Fantastic! Why couldn’t she adopt her siblings’ usual eagerness for me to go away, if only so I can return with carefully selected gifts for each of them?

Other than that insight, I can only say that we are clearly missed when we’re away. Whatever the reason for our scholarly travel, it creates a hole in our homes that is simply more difficult to fill than any corresponding rift in the fabric of our campus communities. Yeah, I’m feeling just a little stupid that it’s taken me this long to realize that.

Juliann Emmons Allison is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Riverside. Her research and teaching interests include environmental politics, gender and politics, international relations, and political economy.

 

,

Teachable Moments of Feminism

In Guest Blogger on 2012/01/07 at 01:32

Guest blogger, Melissa Sande, writing from Binghamton, New York, in the US. 

Teachable moments are sometimes incredibly ironic. Last week, when leading a discussion on feminist criticism for a literary theory class, I began by asking my students what questions they might pose when taking a feminist approach to a fictional text. I am often met with an awkward silence at the beginning of a lesson, and so, as usual, I waited next to the chalkboard for someone to respond rather than providing an answer for them. One of my male students finally said angrily, “I feel like you’re mocking us when you stand there waiting for an answer. You look sardonic.”

I was, of course, quite taken aback. I am certainly not mocking my students by waiting for them to answer. I like to think that I am making them articulate ideas about what they are learning in this class. In hindsight, I know now that this would have made an intriguing, albeit ironic, teaching moment: I simply ask what a feminist approach entails and a male student responds with frustration and calls me sardonic without further prompting. What does that reveal about the need to spend more time discussing the realization of these theories in practice, beyond their usefulness in approaching literature?

I told the student plainly, in front of the rest of the class, that the comment was irrelevant and somewhat rude, and that we needn’t consider it further, though now, I wish we had. I recalled, too, that when I taught the same class in a previous semester, reactions to feminism had been disagreeable then. The consensus that semester had been that feminism was something obvious that need not be taught alongside other types of theory, something most of the class rolled their eyes at and requested to ignore in the weekly discussion sections.

I relayed the story to a male colleague the next day, who has taught the theory class as well. He seemed less surprised by my student’s comments than I was, and when I questioned whether he is often met with resistance to a conversation about feminism also, he said, “Well, no,” and then asserted that he only hears of such troubles from female instructors because he suspected students have “less respect for women in that position of authority than they do men.”

This leads us to question whether we really have come “so far” with feminism. I often hear the argument that women in this country are now equal with men, and always treated so. Indeed, student reaction to reading Showalter or Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” is often met with the reaction, “this is outdated.” I have to disagree. Even more than the incident with my student, my colleague’s contention that female instructors get less respect from students generally is testament to this. Wasn’t it just this year that Michael Sanguinetti suggested that “women should avoid dressing like sluts” in order to remain safe?

I invoke this year’s SlutWalk alongside my teaching experience because not only do both events demonstrate that the problem of a strong aversion to feminism persists, but with each, a great deal of resistance to change exists as well. On my campus, SlutWalk was publicized, a small version was also organized, and I heard a great deal of male students mocking it and many of the fliers for it were torn down, drawn on, etc. As we try to draw attention to these issues, they are often oppressed. So I question how we can capture positive attention to an event like this and how we might, in higher education, get students to recognize that Rubin’s work is still pertinent, as are other founding works of feminist thought.

Attempting to explain to my student that his balking at my teaching style on a day when we were supposed to be learning feminism, and that he likely wouldn’t address a male professor in such an impolite way, would have been ironic, and probably would have further alienated him from the lesson as well. Is there actually a way to go about addressing it, and actually getting him to realize, without sounding like a martyr, or without having him dismiss me as a martyr and then, of course, the lesson as well? I think one of the biggest matters at hand for young women teaching at the college level now is precisely this one – and how, exactly, do we get the message through to our students and know that they’ve heard us?

 

Melissa Sande is a doctoral student in the department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric at Binghamton University, where she recently began work on her dissertation, titled: Decentering  Genealogies: Alterity, the Nation and Women’s Writing of the 1960s. She specializes in Caribbean literature and postcolonial theory and can be contacted at melraesande@gmail.com.
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

Two Worlds Colliding

In Guest Blogger on 2012/01/05 at 05:58

Bonnie Stewart, writing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada

So, I’m having the learning experience of a lifetime. I’m in doctoral student heaven.

With the context of my course structure this fall, there’s lots to read and lots to do. I interact and grapple with ideas from multiple perspectives. I mentor and teach; I am mentored and taught in return. I work through my ideas in writing and in casual conversation, and in video or podcast or any other modality I choose. I publish. I get critical feedback. On a variety of platforms, my fellow learners and I talk about theory and educational applications. We speak across disciplinary boundaries.

It’s heady, and challenging. It’s also not a course in my program. Or my university. There is no recognized channel by which to represent its value on my academic CV.

It’s a MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course: specifically, it’s #change11, a 36 week exploration of the theme of Change: Learning, Education, and Technology, worldwide.

There are 36 facilitators. I’m one, though my week of leadership comes near the tail-end of the course. I’m also a participant, with over 2000 other registered people. It’s free and unregulated: a chance to engage in coordinated conversations about learning and connect with folks whose interests intersect with and enhance my own.

It’s the largest and most ambitious in a series of MOOC-style courses offered over the last three or four years at the intersections of education and technology. And it’s a model that’s catching on: Stanford is running a much-hyped massive open online course on Artificial Intelligence this fall, with tens of thousands of reputed registrants.

It’s likely that only a few participants – in either the Stanford course or #change11 – will complete all the assignments set out by instructors. That isn’t the point of this kind of radically open learning experience. There are weekly topics, some with suggested activities, but the majority of engagement is what Axel Bruns calls produsage: a networked system in which participants both create and consume content.

Learners in #change11 essentially do what people have been doing on social media for years, within a loosely-organized structure: they write blog posts, create video, and expound on discussion questions, and then comment on the posts and videos and contributions of others, amplifying what they find most engaging. Conversations erupt, ideas are debated, and ties are formed between participants, all at once. With hundreds of posts coming through the #change11 course feed every week, taking it all in isn’t possible: I choose and contextualize, focusing on applications to my own practices and research. I’ve been involved with MOOCs for awhile, as both a participant and a researcher, and the repeated lesson for me has been that it’s what I do focus on that matters: the questioning, the exploring, the connecting with others.

Now, #change11 is not my only learning environment. I am also a conventional grad student, researching social media and identity in an Education faculty at a small university with a fledgling Ph.D. program. Three of us completed our residency last June. Two more are immersed in the coursework this fall. Obviously, for sheer numbers, the face-to-face experience can’t compete: the overlap of interests in my tiny cohort is minimal, especially when compared with an experience like the MOOC. But I like my faculty, and my colleagues. And I value the learning experiences I’ve been offered in this traditional environment.

Nonetheless, in an emergent and participatory field like social media, it goes without saying that I need to do some of my learning outside traditional academic structures. The publishing cycle is too slow to account for social media’s changes. My advisors’ expertise in theory and pedagogy and research doesn’t necessarily extend to Twitter practices. Luckily, the MOOC fills in. It’s perhaps closest to a regular, ongoing conference experience, in academic terms. Except, of course, it has no formal status in academic terms.

Thus I stand with feet in two worlds, trying to make use of each to enhance the other. This series, Postcards from the Participatory, will explore the benefits and challenges of both sides of the experience as I go.

Bonnie Stewart is a Ph.D. student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. In higher ed since 1997, Bonnie has lived and taught on all three coasts of Canada and in Eastern Europe and Asia. Her research explores social media identity and its implications for higher education. Published at Salon.com and winner of the 2011 PEI Literary Award for creative non-fiction, Bonnie blogs ideas at http://theory.cribchronicles.com and identity and parenthood at http://cribchronicles.com. Find her on Twitter at @bonstewart. 

 

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed .

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