So I was reading this article about the writer’s child starting college. And he wanted to know why we couldn’t get online modules created by professors at Harvard and MIT and Yale - let’s have the best of each world! Some faculty are already selling their courses to University of Phoenix!

Not too subtly implied in this is that we should do it too. I want to preface all of this by saying that I think that we should create things that can serve classroom purposes and that could be worthwhile to a larger market…

However, and this is a big “however,” I don’t think we’re creating education. I’ve been thinking about why that comment caused me so much discomfort and annoyance, and it just popped into my head this morning. You can already get information from the best of Harvard, Yale, etc. in things called “books.”

In essence, some of what we are talking about when we talk about open courseware or about selling online modules is a shiny, interactive, computer-based book. It is a form of instructional media.

Does this mean that our shiny, interactive, computer-based book is not worthwhile? Absolutely not! However, those who consider this as something to replace the need for smart faculty or that the interactions students have with faculty and each other isn’t worthwhile are missing an essential component of what happens during education.

And this is in terms of both access to power and in terms of the relationships formed.

Let’s talk about access to power, since I think everyone can reflect on the relationships they formed with friends and faculty during school.

When I graduated from my undergrad, I moved to NYC and started working at NYU Law shortly after that. During those years, I discovered how much access students there have to the most powerful and influential people in the country and world - whether those people are alums or the faculty or world leaders.

The thing I learned is this: you do not get clerkships for being smart; you do not get a job because your grades were good. You get opportunities based on who you know and who knows you, and that is one very big reason to go to top tier schools. Now, this isn’t to say that the NYU Law students weren’t smart, but rather that I am positive there were equally smart people all over the country without the kind of access the NYU Law students had. They were smart + connected. A huge deal.

It took me quite a while to understand that in my own life. Being smart didn’t matter nearly as much as being in the right place at the right time, having the right connections, or making new connections easily.

All of this is as much a part of education as coursework.

I really wish I had been able to think through to the “media is media” point during the meeting, because that would have underscored some of the points I was trying to make. None of what we’re talking about is wrong or bad or unnecessary, but education in general is different from a learning object/media of any sort.

(Just to note: I think most people understand this, but I also think it’s good to say this stuff out loud to help gel the ideas…)

For the entire school year, I was sluggish and tired. I blamed school/work stress. That probably was at least in part true. But what was also at play was a slowly building sleep deficit that was starting to drive me crazy.

Hi, my name is Sara, and I’m a night owl. Always have been, always will be. At around 9:30 p.m. I get a flush of energy - the desire to write, to play music, to clean - and tend to be pretty up until nearly midnight. It used to be 1 a.m., but I’m trying to go to bed earlier with Megan.

So, I’d been going on this sleep deficit, as well as the stress from work and school, and I just broke. I have to get up after 7.

To those people who would say “you think you have it bad!? I get up at 5!” I say thpbbbbbt. You probably also walk uphill to work both ways too. You are my problem, though, because you are the voice in my head telling me that going to work from 9-5:30 is luxurious.

It’s not, though. The last two days, I’ve been going into work at nine. I am a different person. I don’t spend the morning in a half-daze trying to get things done. I can focus again.

I came home tonight completely energized, carrying five bags of mulch with me and proceeded to deal with the yard for three more hours. Last week, I was incapable of doing this on a work night, where I came home and hovered in a daze until 9:30 at night when, guess what, energy came. I would fight and swear and curse at it. Why?

We as a society should spend a hell of a lot less time judging the tenacity of people by the time they wake up, and a lot more time looking at peoples’ actual productivity. Mine is up. Probably because I am.

In other, completely unrelated news, I was listening to music as I was gardening and an Ani song came up in the mix. An Ani song that gave me a revelation into things brewing in my life right now. I will repeat, I had a revelation while listening to an Ani song - because of that song. I don’t know that I could possibly get any gayer right now. I thought I would make that embarrassing thing public because, well, why not?

You remember what they did to the goose, right? And how that turned out?

One of the reasons I went back to school to get my PhD is because I very uncynically believe that education is transformational on many levels. I decided that if I cared at all about our students and the future of higher ed as we incorporate and rely on technology more, I had to gather the expertise and research experience to gain a voice in the discussion.

I love technology and the ways it provides us to collaborate and talk and experience life in ways that we may not otherwise be able to; I love teaching and being there with my students as they work through difficult issues or texts or problems with their writing; and I truly believe we owe it to all the people in the state to provide students with an exceptional education.

All of this being said, I am old enough and have been around enough work environments that I am cautious in my optimism and hope. It’s an experience that I don’t think people who go straight through school get - the experience of getting your hope and optimism beaten out of you and having to rediscover the source of it in yourself and know that everything is cyclical, everything is tidal, and you can create change by finding new pathways for the change you want to create.

A writer on a political blog I have an affinity for is leaving today for a new job at a different blog, where I assume he will continue to be astute and funny and asinine in no particular order. And he said on his departing post:

If I was “cynical,” meaning, if I didn’t believe that government was important or capable of or needing to play a critical role in American life, I wouldn’t be able to type this blog all day. Who would ever want to read and write about apocalyptic, depressing horror tales hour after hour for years if they thought things didn’t matter, or that they didn’t *have* to be better?

This is the kind of thinking I return to in trying times. It is a kind of personal masochism to get so distressed over something you literally have no control over, but all of this matters. In the blog’s case, it’s about politics; in my case, it’s about education. Even though sometimes I feel like I come from a different planet, I’m not going to stop making the case that the students and their learning experiences are not to be ignored and that we focus only on revenue generation at our peril.

Online education isn’t a gold-filled goose. It’s just a bird.

Boy in Video Arcade

Some see a lake of fire at the end of it,
Or heaven’s guesswork, something always to be sketched in.

I see a sullen boy in a video arcade.
He’s the only one there at this hour, shoulders slightly bent above a machine.

I see the pimples on his chin, the scuffed linoleum on the floor.

I like the close-up, the detail. I like the pointlessness of it,
And the way he hasn’t imagined an ending to all this yet,

The boy never bothering to look up as the sun comes out
In the late morning, because Big Deal, the mist evaporating & rising.

So Death blows his little fucking trumpet, Big Deal, says the boy.

I don’t see anything at the end of it except an endlessness,

The beauty parlors, the palm reader’s unlighted sign, the mulberry trees
Fading out before the billboard of the chiropractor.

The lake of fire’s just an oil speck.

I don’t see anything at the end of it, & I suppose that is what is wrong with me,
Among the other things. And it’s slow work, because of all the gauzy light,

It’s hard to pick out anything.

And now I want to talk about this poem. Dammit. Okay, I’m giving myself one paragraph of the troubles and then we’re talking poetry.

Apparently, there’s some consultant running around the University saying student engagement isn’t important in online learning, it’s about maximizing class sizes and delivering content. What this means for faculty, I think that’s a topic to be taken up by someone else with more knowledge of how they’re feeling in all this. But for me, it brings up issues of dominance; a basic tenet of what the U is to serve and what it means to be educated and to get an education. And it downright frightens me that there are people who would go into a university and tell them that student engagement wasn’t important.

You know what I would do if I found out my program wasn’t concerned with its students?

Quit. We’re all worth more than that. Thankfully, that isn’t the case.

So let’s see how that pans out, but I’m going to try to talk about the problems and philosophies underlying that as the weeks go on. Frankly, it makes me nervous for online education because they see it as a cash cow - more students, teacherless classess - we’re living the dream. Or some administrator’s dream. Sadly, it isn’t a student or teacher dream, but that is for another time.

Ah, but Larry Levis.

He makes me happy. I like that he ruminates on what it means to be alive by focusing on the bored boy, the sullen boy, the careless boy - and that the meaninglessness with which he conducts his life is situated in beauty he chooses not to see. And it is what it is - it doesn’t matter to him, but the beauty exists and the banal exists and this is what life is. A subtle moment doing something innocuous and mundane.

I’m not a believer in heaven or hell, which upsets some people. I think of it much differently. I am fond of going to visit my grandmother’s grave and driving by everyone else’s - her parents and brother and uncle; my grandfather and his grandfather and half-brother and step mothers; the Tracys - his aunt and uncle who raised my grandfather; and the oldest part of my Irish family here - Patrick and Elizabeth, who came over in 1845 for a reason I don’t know about and probably won’t ever.

Despite this fondness that makes me visit the spot where her ashes are, I still think she’s dead and done and everything about her that was uniquely and completely her is gone. What I figure is that the way in which we live on after we die is in the impacts we make. I’m not quite sure how this became about my grandmother, but sometimes I think about her hope for us, her faith in our education carrying us through life and making us more thoughtful, better people…and I worry. I worry that even though I believe so passionately and fiercely that postsecondary education can do wonders for your perspectives and critical thought development; I worry that others with more power than I have don’t have a remotely similar philosophy. Call it greed, call it “diminishing funding,” but there are philosophies being bandied about that I literally thought would be laughed out of the room. Things I’m going to talk about this week: the idea of a profit model for courses, “maximum seats” in an online course, media and team development on courses, feminist pedagogy, and general discomfort with the divide between administration and the people actually doing the work and research on what works.

I try to hold myself to standards that my grandmother set - be good, be nice, be smart, and don’t let anyone tell you what to do - because only you know what that is. That’s probably what’s living on in this moment, her message that we have the power to speak, and to speak well. I hope I achieve that most of the time.

Man. She was so great. You all really missed out not knowing her. I cannot believe it has been over eight years since I’ve gotten to talk to her.

For background reading, I suggest just going over to MPR. Here are most of their stories.

• How the budget may affect legislators
• Graphic: Minnesota’s deficit picture
• State faces unprecedented cash-flow crisis
• A closer look at Gov. Pawlenty’s unallotment cuts

• Explainer: What is unallotment anyway?

What I want to say about this is that I am so furious at Pawlenty right now. He and his legal team knew that what they were pulling had an iffy chance of not being overturned in the courts because the argument that it was not unconstitutional was not terribly convincing.

He used a law meant to bridge gaps to overturn the legislature’s decisions and do exactly what he wanted however he wanted. He passed all the spending, but not the revenue bills, which created the crisis situation that triggered his ability to use unallotment to change the spending bill to whatever he wanted it to be.

And now we’re in for it. Because of his cynical political move, our state is in an absolute fiscal crisis. I want to hammer home that it doesn’t matter where you stand politically - Republicans and Democrats should be outraged that he prioritized a ploy over our security as a state. He knew this was a possible outcome of his decision - even a likely one - and he did it anyway.

He sold us out. And I don’t know if it was to look tough on the national stage or if it was because he doesn’t know how to negotiate or compromise, but he sold us out.

I have a lot of ideas personally, but am wondering if anyone has input. I’m probably going to expand things a bit beyond the blog (which will stay), but am wondering - should I expand the scope of the site? Invite contributors? Change focus?

You can tell me in person/on twitter/comment here.

This is a sad development for a number of reasons.  One is that Minneapolis has a long tradition of awesome, free, creative events.  It’s one of the reasons people want to live here and talk it up when they’re elsewhere.  These free events build community in ways that paid events simply cannot - if only because the fact that they’re free means anyone can join at any time.

There is serious Minneapolis - and Minnesota - pride in this town.  Just go to I Like You or any of its ilk and you’ll see a wide array of MPLS/Minnesota/Midwest pride things to wear or hang. Adam Turman’s Minneapolis art is incredibly popular. And I saw two girls tonight alone with Minnesota tattoos on their arms. I’ve seen others with the tattoo, either outlined or filled in, with a heart or star in the place where the Twin Cities lie.

This is not an accident or a coincidence. This town has a wonderful quality of life and we know it. We’re proud of it, we’re proud of the businesses that support it, and we’re happy to support it ourselves. So when I see one of the iconic free events of Minneapolis slip away so quickly, it’s saddening and maddening.

Thankfully, the Walker’s (bad) decision probably won’t be the end of Loring Park’s movies and music. People are upset, and people are often willing to organize to support the things that make life special. And people are trying to get the ball rolling.

This has particular meaning for me as Megan and my first date after we met was at the Music and Movies in the park and it was perfect and really set the tone for our relationship from the start. Sourdough bread and brie from the Wedge. A cheap bottle of white wine from Humm’s. A blanket and us under the trees watching an old movie with hundreds of others, laughing along with the crowd. The bridge. The sculpture garden.

It’s an iconic event, and it shouldn’t end. But if it does, I have confidence that Minneapolis will pull things together. I have been to so many community-driven events in the last few years especially that I have great confidence in the creativity and ingenuity of the people in this city. I know we will fix things when organizations break them.

Today, two of my 6 coworkers were told that as of July 1, they would be laid off.

While I’m glad I’m not among the casualties, the skill sets that we are going to miss are so profound that it is going to be like losing our eyes and at least one limb.  I reserve a great deal of my vitriol in this for Pawlenty and his absolute hatred for higher education as evidenced in his budgets, but I am truly baffled by the decision-making process going on behind closed doors at the U.

Basically, if you’re at the U, take note: none of your jobs are safe. You may be mission-critical to a department, but that doesn’t matter anymore.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As I was leaving the post-conference Grumpy’s time, I was talking to @sh1mmer (Tom Hughes-Croucher) and he commented on what a great web community we had here.

I couldn’t agree more.

What I wish I would have had time to say is that the only reason we have a good conference is because we have a vibrant and engaged web community. We have been and strive to continue being something that responds to groundswells of need and allows our local experts to highlight interesting work and push us forward creatively and intellectually. Without a community of talented people who want to share and develop together, the conference ceases to be.

That’s all I wanted to say. And I hope anyone who didn’t see their needs met will submit a session proposal for next year!