May 11, 2013

some surly thoughts

Eight years ago (as I was on the final approach to Retirement) I was wrestling with the discontinuity between my visions of Education in the liberal arts context and the gelid realities of liberal arts institutions. At that time I was in the habit of keeping running logs of thoughts and discoveries, and these four seem especially relevant to today's thoughts:

  • How It Looks at the end of March 2005
  • Endgame (March-August 2005)
    ...a place to accumulate odds and ends that have to do with preparing for retirement --ruminations, legacy stuff, things to do and not-do, etc. This is it. To some degree, it's also a continuation of The Disgruntlement File, but the Watchword is/should be Fuggeddaboudit!, liberally applied, with a dash of Master Kung:
    The Master said, "To learn something and then put it into practise at the right time: is this not a joy?
    To have friends coming from afar: is this not a delight?
    Not to be upset when one's merits are ignored: is this not the mark of a gentleman?"

    (Leys translation --but see the end of this page for other renderings of the passage)


  • SUMMARY from early June 2005
  • Ruminations on Infospace (10 June-4 August 2005)

In the nearly-eight intervening years my engagement in the scuffles and food fights of Education has waned to almost nothing --I still track some edublogs, but nowadays I don't usually feel inclined to try to influence anybody (something I used to take pretty seriously) or even to post my thoughts in the quiet backwaters of this blogspace. In the last year or so I've watched the buzz about MOOCs go from mumble to frenzy, and I haven't been provoked to register my own (jaundiced) opinions on this most recent version of The Emperor's Clothes. Here's the bit of what Cogdog said that got me started today:


I remain astounded that anyone with a fully functioning neocortex talking seriously about MOOCs being some model of saving educational costs when the word is each course rings up a tab of $250k (edx) or even more. What does an institution get for dropping a quarter of a million per course?

I can tell you what you do not get- an ongoing open sharing of the processes, of what worked, what did not work. Not a Udellian narrating of the process. It’s more like another loaf of pre-packaged Wonderbread off the racks.

And it ties back to what Leslie Madsen-Brooks recently summarized eloquently in using UMW as a case example of innovation on higher education. That’s right, look beyond the Ivies and the Silicon Valley darlings, and you land at a tiny, public liberal arts college in Virginia. Jim Groom writes it all in the title- the Innovation isn’t Technical, It’s Narrative.

I spent 6 months working at UMW thinking they had some magic in the water (did not taste any). But it’s a culture of open sharing, not the final products, but the makings thereof. It’s not a mindset of saying, “Look what we experts hand you like Greek gods”, it’s an ongoing narrative of trying, asking, failing, reflecting, of process, not just product.


Exactly. Ongoing narrative is precisely the Grail to which teachers and learners need to attend, and to which they need to commit themselves. I now think that it's always been true (though I didn't discover/realize it myself until maybe 20 years ago, after I made the leap from classroom to library), though we now have tools at our fingertips that make the individual narrative distributable and greatly broaden the possibilities of collaboration as a basic modality of education.

So once again I thank the lucky stars that I got out when I did.

Posted by oook at May 11, 2013 01:26 PM