Tag: Higher Ed

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Another Place: Living Water Leadership

I have been pondering what to do after my doctoral program for a while. I do have a number of outlets both at work and volunteering, but I have also been thinking through what to do with my research and continued study of leadership. I have finally come to some sort of idea … or at least an experiment.

Living Water Leadership is some part Substack publication, some part consulting business, and some part experiment around what can be done with slow, steady progress over time. At the moment I plan to write articles, post notes, offer consulting-like services, and see where it takes me. The introductory post, Introducing Living Water Leadership, provides a little bit of an intro to the entire endeavor, but there are not a lot of details to share at the moment.

The first series of articles will focus around some of the challenges facing higher education IT teams at this particular moment in time. Everyone in Higher Ed IT is not OK: Part 1 sets the stage for what I have been hearing over the past 12-18 months of speaking at various conferences and gatherings. Future articles will start to dive into how we might be able to meet these challenges in the future.

I do not plan on cross-posting items here unless there is a major announcement. I will also keep most of my leadership material over at that site. If you want to see those items, I’d recommend subscribing so that you do not miss anything.

This site will continue to be more of a hodgepodge of different topics over time of a personal nature.

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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.

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Education Life Technology

Laptop Required: Teaching Online While Mobile

It was not terribly long ago that I had almost completely rid myself of carrying a laptop. I was able to keep a desktop at home, a desktop at work, and a tablet for those times I was traveling and really needed to get online for something more involved than checking my phone.

laptop on tableHowever, that was then, and teaching online courses has tethered me to a laptop far more than being a sysadmin ever did. My dream of whittling my bag down to a tablet and various other small materials is essentially dead. Current online teaching platforms require a laptop to be effective while doing some of even the most mundane of tasks.

This is not a real complaint, more of an observation about how our tools are dictated by the platforms and the assumptions developers make. While my students could effectively handle most of their course from a mobile device (and I have in mind to work toward making the courses I have complete control over as mobile friendly as possible), the teaching experience still requires access to at least a laptop, and often a desktop with multiple monitors.

When Steve Jobs spoke about the stratification of computing into different categories (traditional PCs as trucks, tablets as cars, etc.), I thought the metaphor was apt, but I hoped to be able to stick myself into a car when it came to mobile computing.

Instead, I now carry a crossover in my bag so that I might be able to get work done even when I am away from one of my desks. While it works well, part of me wishes I could still stick with just a hatchback.

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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.

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Education Technology

yet another post about making distinctions

yet another post about making distinctions by Alan Jacobs

I have to move slowly with some of these things, because by and large my students mistrust and are deeply uncomfortable with such technologies. But all of them are, at least in potentia, pedagogically fruitful.

I know there is always talk about the new digital natives within the realm of higher education, but I think this paragraph hits on a good point. There is also a tendency to view things as inauthentic if they are not done well or there is no understandable benefit. Mistrust is a good word.

Bringing technology into pedagogy for the sake of technology can have limited or negative benefit. Intentionality, mastery, sound technology is important. If you’ve had to deal with something similar let me know at http://Bidtraining.com