Steven Bell notes an article in the NY Times, The Professor as an Open Book. This article highlights one of the issues I have struggled with the most as an instructor at a small college that caters to traditional age students. My facebook profile, for example is not invisible but you have to be specifically searching for it to find it. Of course, since my students are facebook-addicted, it was inevitable that it was eventually found, but I told all my students that my policy was that I would not “friend” them until they graduate. I see them in a classroom several times a week, so it’s not like we need to develop rapport. It’s not an issue of being hip or accessible–there are just not enough levels of access in facebook. Someone is your “friend” or they are not, and although I don’t do anything of interest in facebook, I am actually linked to people I know. I know, I know, that’s SO old school. Even worse, many of my “friends” in facebook are family. Those are the people I have to worry about putting up suspect content that will reflect poorly on me, a la Doctorow’s analysis.

Actually facebook bores me these days, and there are plenty of other venues where I broadcast (this blog, another blog, twitter). They don’t require “friending” me to have access to my thoughts and interactions. I treat these as public representations of myself, but I have majorly cut down on how much of myself I put out there because of a new sense that I have a private identity to protect. Which is pretty funny if you think about it…I’m willing to say whatever if I know no one cares, but suddenly I am aware of a potential audience and I want to preserve my credibility with them…so I blog less.

But what is the responsibility of a teacher in this time of collapsed private versus public identity? How do other people navigate their online versus face-to-face identity with students?

The tenure system is a hot topic right now (or at least a few days ago, but I’m slow) in the academic blogosphere, specifically due to Andrea Smith’s tenure denial at the University of Michigan. The banter on the one hand reassures me that I am not the only person who finds this system perplexing, and on the other hand confuses me because I don’t know what would be a viable alternate system. To sum up some of the best posts on the Smith decision and personal experience with the tenure process:

• Tenured Radical’s post highlights the emotional impact of the tenure process;
• Tim Burke’s post notes that the process is necessarily confidential and mystical to protect professional identity;
• Oso Raro problematizes the aspect of “fit” in the tenure process and how fit might operate as a code word for sexism, racism, or just not liking someone else professionally.

And then the proposed solutions:

• The Constructivist suggests movement towards strong faculty unions; and
• Community College Dean (Dean Dad) suggests multi-year renewable contracts.

I want to believe that Dean Dad’s multi-year contract idea would work. I worked at an institution that had converted to that model (and was, as I understand it censured by the AAUP for doing so). Though there were some of the same issues that I see in tenure environments, I felt like my opinion as junior faculty mattered. A lot. On the other hand, I’m sure the 50% of the faculty body that were adjuncts might not have felt quite the same way.

A key issue is also portability. Tenure is the collateral of higher education. If some institutions move the cheese, while others do not, I suspect faculty will become even more invested in their “type” of institution than they already are. At the same time, at the community college level, for example, where the only requirement is effective and intensive teaching, and where tenure operates similarly to the public school system as in automatically after x years of service (and I’m sure I’ll get flak for this but seriously, why do public school teachers need tenure?!?!?!?), what is the point? (Please correct me if publications are required at some community colleges, but my experience was that the teaching load was so high that it was not realistic to expect.)

But the key elements Dean Dad calls for are transparency and reciprocity. I would call the review practice in my tenure track job pretty transparent. All department faculty and all students evaluate tenure-track people every year. Anonymously. Tenured professors get evaluated once every five years or something. That feels pretty transparent actually, though I might have enjoyed it more the first time around if I’d been informed of these processes before they happened. (YES, I realized I was going to be evaluated by students). But the stakes are high for the institution, because if they agree to tenure me, they (feel they are) stuck with me for the next thirty years of my career. It’s the all-or-nothing aspect of tenure that is the most inhumane, the rest-of-your-life or FIRED mentality, but I can also see how the abuse of a contract system or creating different tracks of faculty (tenured research versus untenured renewable contracts teaching) and other variations of unfairness might be just as inhumane.

And then reciprocity. What *is* the issue between administrative and faculty power? I’m not literally asking for an explanation, I just don’t understand why many in higher education feel that higher education is somehow exempt from planning and standardizing curriculum, identifying key objectives across courses, assessing outcomes–both student and institutional, supporting students in other areas besides their coursework, and so on. Higher education might not be corporate, but it is still an industry.

Ultimately though, I think this has been such a hot topic because the tenure system is already broken beyond repair. The only people who truly benefit are those who are tenured or on the tenure track. A recent study at least supports The Constructivist’s suggestion for unions in the sense that more faculty at institutions with unions are tenured or tenure track as opposed to adjunct. The army of adjuncts that do the majority of teaching speak to the true injustice in the attention given to one tenure decision of a top researcher.

The one theme I haven’t heard in any of these posts is what tenure means for students? I don’t know of any institution of higher education that exists without students. For the majority of institutions of higher education, teaching and working with students is still essential. Does the tenure system with jobs for life, painful rejection, and army of adjuncts help or hurt students? Thoughts?

While I read this post about the headache caused to an end-user by diigo’s “find your friends” feature with interest, I had linked to the post because I was expecting to read something more along the lines of how the diigolet (really bad name, by the way–reminds me a little to much of toilet) or the diigo tool bar slowed Firefox way down after install. That’s my end-user complaint and it’s based in no fact, and other than that, my other big complaint is that I keep hitting my “post to delicious” button when I’m on a page I want to bookmark since it’s such a force of habit. And then I have to wonder if it even matters because I have so many bookmarks and tags that my only hope of ever finding something I’ve bookmarked is by using the search feature and praying that at the time of reading I labeled what I was reading in such a manner that will allow me to pick the same key words six months later.

But I did not title this post “my inefficient social bookmarking habits.” So first, my unpopular comment. I think this blog post is a little unfair. Back last fall, I received an invite for Quechup and joined and went through the invite your friends routine. And as has been noted by others, instead of checking against one’s email address book and giving a list of names, Quechup emailed everybody. Now I can certainly understand Dean’s frustration with Diigo, since I was extremely annoyed (understatement) with the Quechup incident. And here is my confession: Despite how annoyed I was with that Quechup incident, I still did the “find your friends” search with Diigo, even while thinking, “These people could be total jerks like that Quechup site was and betray my trust and send an email to everyone I know.” And yet I still did it. Even though I was irate beyond belief last September, I still put my trust out there again. And didn’t click the button to submit to everyone who wasn’t in Diigo already and didn’t spam everyone and their mother’s realtor’s brother accordingly. Clicking a button that is labeled in a way that indicates no one will be emailed –and having everyone emailed –that is duplicitous and underhanded. But when an end-user is led through a series of steps that they do automatically, but which produces undesirable results (from the end-user’s perspective), this is a usability issue but not necessarily an unethical company at work.

What can be done to address this as a usability problem? How important is it to an end-user to invite all their “friends”? If it is not very important and a company’s main goal is user satisfaction, is there a way to make it an extra, purposeful step to invite friends that don’t already use the site? Does anyone even use this feature, especially with gmail, where every contact you’ve ever emailed is saved automatically to your address book?

 This ties in nicely with a comment from a student (and I mean this, to quote a colleague, “with love and respect”) who noted with surprise that some materials I required for a class by an esteemed older scholar were really interesting and very relevant. This student had been surprised because based on appearance, this would not have been his/her assumption about what the content would contain. We ALL have made such assumptions from time to time, but it’s time to fracture the assumption that “kids today” are “digital natives” and that more seasoned contributors can’t possibly know what they’re doing with digital technology.  I loved Henry Jenkins’ post last December fracturing Prensky’s terms and I applaud Nate’s tribute to the same debunking of digital native myth:

So today was an extra day off, and I spent it catching up with “the web.”  Since “the web” is such a close, personal friend. Regardless, making this blog happen (bear with me IE users, while I fix that bugginess, or better yet, just pull the content to an aggregator). I have twittered from time to time, and the recent publicity from Dave Parry caused me to give it a second chance. I can definitely see the potential of twitter, though from an academic standpoint, I could understand where there might be skepticism since there is no room for flowery description.

What I had not been aware of, in regards to twitter, is the gaming taking place. I had noticed that quite a few users have references to “red team” and “plaid team.” When I had only noticed red teamers, I assumed it was a linux thing. (Maybe it is a linux thing?). Thank goodness someone else had already been sleuthing, and this explanation should have been enough. However, there is an official call for participation for Color Wars 2008. It reminds me a little bit of summer camp, but on a much bigger scale. It also speaks to the motivation that people have to participate in community, competition, creativity, and interactivity.

Wow, now that I have my blog home all set up again, I’m so inspired to comment on the massive comments in my aggregator. Through a chain of reading, I see Nate talking about Clarence’s post, which discusses the concept of how students should be assessed in a world where the classroom walls can extend globally and where collaboration can be made transparent through wikis and other web 2.0 tools.

In the original post to which they refer, the author relays an exchange that highlights a huge issue not just with the web 2.0 world of assessment, but with group assessment in general:

Jeff Utecht: How would you assess a student who changed a single word?
Ryan Bretag: Think about contributing one word from a poetry standpoint, how critical is one word? Writing in a hypertext society makes that one word critical.- From the Strength of Weak Ties.

If a group of students is working together and one student serves as the student who conceptualizes an idea, and the other students work diligently to carry out the idea at the direction of the first student, did the self-selected/group-elected leader contribute more?  And now, when collaboration takes place through a more transparent record, for example, if you use a wiki, how do you ascertain individual student’s contributions. One of the references on The Strength of Weak Ties is to a wiki that uses a framework of significant contribution versus constructive modification. The creator of that rubric, David Kuropatwa noted previously on his own blog the distinction between these two varieties of contribution and the special challenge of “constructive modification” as a critical thinking process is addressed. In determining assessment strategies, one could also do as Ben Wilkoff did and turn it over to the students to discuss.

I encounter more often the issue raised by another blogger who noted failure to integrate wikis in a way that led to student creation of content.   Even the earlier example of the math wiki is very structured, with questions I assume were determined by the teacher for students to answer.

Not in these posts and discussions but in society at large, I see a lot of confusion about the purpose of a wiki. And for that matter, a lot of suspicion about externalized collaboration in education. Though a wiki is in written form, it is, for me, at least, an externalization of thought process and collaboration. At its most elaborate (for example wikipedia), it can be a valuable resource, but most of the time it will reflect information that is targeted for a specific community. In some cases, the information gathered might have outlived its purpose (not unlike, by the way, many websites!). The wiki exists not to document forever and ever, but to provide an opportunity for collaboration as those collaborating make connections in their own minds and developed their own questions, ideas, and analyses. That too is the power of the wiki, that it can change and grow as its purpose and function expand. Wikis offer an opportunity to externalize the work of a collective mind, which directly contradicts the typical education model which requires us to assess each student purely for their individual contribution (most of the time). And there are a lot of students and teachers experimenting with how to make it work.

Via Burnt Out Adjunct I read about Amanda Baggs’ description of her interaction with her environment is as viable a mode of expression as spoken language. Wary of waxing utopianist about the benefits of technology, the assistive tools used by Ms. Baggs and others who might not otherwise be able to communicate their thoughts to others (i.e., where technology tools serve as vehicles for translation) are examples of the connective powers of ICT. Other research on autism indicates that there might be lessons to learned about how we, meaning all humans, learn to use language. It has been noted that at the same time autistic people have difficulty learning language, autism might also create problems grasping the social functions of language. In fact, pragmatic
function of language is the most challenging aspect of learning a language to grasp, and while many of us take for granted our interpretation of nonverbal and tonal clues to language, these are also especially nuanced. When contextualized accordingly, though Baggs’ video contains sounds and motion that we may not have access to interpreting without her key, they are no more concrete than the nonverbal and tonality of “normal” communication.

I should have just kept my domain hosting updated to my most current email address. Months ago I forgot to renew the domain for my site “Cultivating Minds” at the same time that I was starting to not like that blog title anyway. Actually, I found the title of that limited. First of all, I’m not a big gardener. Second of all, the title seemed to presume that minds are something that should be…”cultivated.” As my thoughts about learning and lifelong learning evolve, this metaphor just doesn’t work for me. Learners need to take responsibility for their own interests, and while formal education can be helpful in guiding people in directions that they hadn’t previously considered and posing provocative questions, it’s less about something I as an educator do for others and more about the avenues that people open for themselves with guidance. Maybe if I’d called it “cultivating learning?” But why did I ever think that people’s minds were something to be tilled. (Never mind the potential puns as this naming moves from tilling to webbing, but I digress).

But that’s besides the point. When blogging, it feels important to have a home. I have blogged in a bunch of different places, but it makes me feel scattered. When foraging through the many tools available on the internet, it feels important to have a cohesive identity. (I want to note that this state of multiphrenia is well-noted in CMC literature, but not succinctly in a manner that would make sense to link.) I’m tying more of my disparate resources into one place. What’s posted here is a start of identity organization, and it will continue to morph over time.

So even though this blog probably isn’t much to look at, it’s the result of several days of wrestling with my hosting to get out of some circular redirect loop that wouldn’t let me just point my content differently, dumping data from one table to another in phpmyadmin and all sorts of other contortions. And now the colors are making me bored. As I said, work in progress, but at least we have a start.