{"id":1771,"date":"2013-05-11T13:26:14","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T13:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1771"},"modified":"2013-05-26T14:49:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-26T18:49:33","slug":"some-surly-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1771","title":{"rendered":"some surly thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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 <a href=\"http:\/\/oook.info\/meta\/disgruntle.html\">the gelid realities<\/a> 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&#8217;s thoughts:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/http:\/\/oook.info\/meta\/30iii.html\">How It Looks at the end of March 2005\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/oook.info\/endgame.html\">Endgame<\/a> (March-August 2005)<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;a place to accumulate odds and ends that have to do with preparing for retirement &#8211;ruminations, legacy stuff, things to do and not-do, etc. This is it. To some degree, it&#8217;s also a continuation of The Disgruntlement File, but the Watchword is\/should be Fuggeddaboudit!, liberally applied, with a dash of Master Kung:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Master said, &#8220;To learn something and then put it into practise at the right time: is this not a joy?<br \/>To have friends coming from afar: is this not a delight?<br \/>Not to be upset when one&#8217;s merits are ignored: is this not the mark of a gentleman?&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>(Leys translation &#8211;but see <a href=\"http:\/\/oook.info\/anth230\/analects.html\">the end of this page<\/a> for other renderings of the passage)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oook.info\/meta\/earlyjune.html\">SUMMARY from early June 2005<\/a>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oook.info\/meta\/infospace.html\">Ruminations on Infospace<\/a> (10 June-4 August 2005)<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In the nearly-eight intervening years my engagement in the scuffles and food fights of Education has waned to almost nothing &#8211;I still track some edublogs, but nowadays I don&#8217;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&#8217;ve watched the buzz about MOOCs go from mumble to frenzy, and I haven&#8217;t been provoked to register my own (jaundiced) opinions on this most recent version of The Emperor&#8217;s Clothes. Here&#8217;s the bit of <a href=\"http:\/\/cogdogblog.com\/2013\/05\/10\/breadlike-syllabus-making\/\">what Cogdog said<\/a> that got me started today:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI remain astounded that anyone with a fully functioning neocortex talking seriously about MOOCs being some model of saving educational costs when the word is <a href=\"http:\/\/s3.documentcloud.org\/documents\/605304\/financial-arrangements-x-universities.txt\">each course rings up a tab of $250k (edx)<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wiredacademic.com\/2013\/04\/is-the-price-right-a-mooc-startup-case-study\/\">even more<\/a>. What does an institution get for dropping a quarter of a million per course?<\/p>\n<p>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 href=\"http:\/\/blog.jonudell.net\/2009\/04\/28\/data-driven-career-discovery\/\">a Udellian narrating of the process<\/a>. It\u2019s more like another loaf of pre-packaged Wonderbread off the racks.<\/p>\n<p>And it ties back to what Leslie Madsen-Brooks recently <a href=\"http:\/\/thebluereview.org\/beyond-disruption\/\">summarized eloquently in using UMW as a case example of innovation on higher education<\/a>. That\u2019s right, look beyond the Ivies and the Silicon Valley darlings, and you land at <a href=\"http:\/\/umw.edu\/\">a tiny, public liberal arts college in Virginia<\/a>. Jim Groom writes it all in the title- the <a href=\"http:\/\/bavatuesdays.com\/umws-innovation-isnt-technical-its-narrative\/\">Innovation isn\u2019t Technical, It\u2019s Narrative<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I spent 6 months working at UMW thinking they had some magic in the water (did not taste any). But it\u2019s a culture of <b>open sharing, not the final products, but the makings thereof<\/b>. It\u2019s not a mindset of saying, \u201cLook what we experts hand you like Greek gods\u201d, it\u2019s <b>an ongoing narrative of trying, asking, failing, reflecting, of process, not just product<\/b>.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Exactly. <b>Ongoing narrative<\/b> is precisely the Grail to which teachers and learners need to attend, and to which they need to commit <i>themselves<\/i>. I now think that it&#8217;s always been true (though I didn&#8217;t discover\/realize it myself until maybe 20 years ago, <i>after<\/i> I made the leap from classroom to library), though we now have tools at our fingertips that make the individual narrative <i>distributable<\/i> and greatly broaden the possibilities of collaboration as a basic modality of education. <\/p>\n<p>So once again I thank the lucky stars that I got out when I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1886,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions\/1886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}