Blogs

Social media are not technology. Please, for the sake of dialog, think about that statement for a minute or two. Now, think about this: Communications is not just social media. And finally, ruminate on this for a while: Technology assists, enables, and provides a platform for communications.

In economics, we talk about purchasing machinery that is used in producing a product as “investment” in capital, and in acquiring skills and experience that will help an employee perform a job more efficiently as “human capital investment.” It is this later type of investment that seems to be on the forefront of the minds of many of my fellow parents who I run into lately.

Many times, I've chuckled at Congressman Earl Blumenauer's 2009 invocation: "Let's have a moment of silence for all those Americans who are stuck in traffic on their way to the gym to ride the stationary bicycle."

One of the most pleasurable parts of my new administrative position is ordering new books on teaching and faculty development for our center’s library. I’ve given up my earlier naïve attempt to read each one before shelving it. However, Rachel Connelly and Kristen Ghodsee’s Professor Mommy was a book I couldn’t put down: a smart, readable description of the hurdles facing women who have children while in graduate school or on the tenure track.

Since it started last fall, I’ve heard the 36-week experimental #change11 course 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.

The first thing we should all do is encourage discussion about edX. This is big, important,and exciting news. Faculty get excited about ideas, and the edX announcement contained some great ones.

This is one of those “thinking out loud” posts, as opposed to some sort of fully thought out proposal. Constructive feedback is very, very welcome.

Last week I felt depressed about how many automated approaches to producing and grading writing were coming on the market and I ended my gloomy thoughts with an exhortation. Think about your assignments that ask students to find sources and write about them. What are you hoping students will learn? Are they learning it? Is there a way to make the whole process less mechanical? I got an email suggesting that it would be useful if I actually tried to answer that question myself. Fair enough. I'll give it a shot.