Categories
Education Family Leadership Life

The Doctor is Done

In mid-February, after more than four years, I successfully defended by dissertation and completed my PhD in Leadership program at the University of the Cumberlands. As a break, I am taking some time to think about what this might mean for what I do with my research, this blog, by career, etc.

However, I do want to share a picture from right after the defense. I was not expecting my coworkers and family to be there to celebrate right after I had completed the degree and it was a really touching, if unexpected, gesture.

celebrating the completion of my doctorate
Categories
Education Life

Is a PhD Worth It?

Is a PhD Worth It? by Chris Cornthwaite

As I continue working toward my own PhD I have found the discussion around the worth of a PhD to be interesting, if not terribly exciting. However, this specific article I think is well-balanced and, in the end, brings it all together with the fact that every educational endeavor’s worthiness is ultimately up to the individual.

Categories
Life

Let Children Get Bored Again

Let Children Get Bored Again by Pamela Paul

The ability to handle boredom, not surprisingly, is correlated with the ability to focus and to self-regulate.

I can think of many boring summers on the farm and the endless number of books I ended up reading. I am very thankful for those uninterrupted stretches afforded me by my parents.

Categories
Education Life Technology

79. Self-Learning vs. Online Instruction

79. Self-Learning vs. Online Instruction

Research shows that online classes are most effective when there is substantial interaction among the students and between the students and the instructor. In this episode, Dr. Spiros Protopsaltis and Dr. Sandy Baum join us to discuss the possible adverse effects of proposed changes in federal regulations that may reduce the extent of this interaction.

This is a great episode which talks critically about how online education programs can also fail those same people they are meant to serve. For me, lost in some of the discussion around “access” is that online programs have allowed professionals like myself to pursue higher education degrees when I would have just stopped otherwise.

A lot of time and ink is given to other communities, and rightly so, but I am very thankful for the online opportunities that I have been given and is part of the reason that I continue to teach online as well.

Categories
Education Technology

teaching from the Kindle

teaching from the Kindle by Alan Jacobs

And let me tell you, friends, teaching a book from a Kindle stinks. Big time.

That is the money quote. Read the comments as well because they are quite good and extend on the article quite ably and usefully.

There is the need to adjust teaching methods to make the most of the tools available, where that is appropriate. However, this is an issue I ran into when working through grad school: so much of the technology and applications available today are really quite bad for educational purposes. It isn’t that the technology is bad itself, but that within the educational context, they are not as useful as they could be if time was spent working on what the needs are within education (and at this point, higher education).

Trying to work out a workflow for digital discovery and note-taking for my capstone was painful. I ended up having to switch between three or four different applications to make it all fit together, and even then it was less than ideal.

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit to make scholarship and writing better utilizing digital tools. Kindle is just an example.