Syndicate and Hague

I’ve been feeling disheartened lately. In the news and in life, it seems that online learning has become the mythical goose who laid the golden eggs in the eyes of a funding-starved public higher education system.

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.

There’s lots of talk in my academic life of “authentic learning,” something I’m personally quite the fan of. But I’m thinking of it in terms of my writing. I had this dumb idea that I would create a second blog that would be just for compiling all of my research into one place and commenting on it.

Why was this a dumb idea? Because it’s not at all how I actually process information.

I don’t think it was a dumb idea to start a second blog to save you good people from having to read things about academia and research (not that I’ve even written anything yet, that’s how dumb this idea was). It was just a dumb idea to think that it was useful to force a round peg like me (learns by talking about ideas/informal discussion) into a square hole (an empirical blog - seriously! dumb!).

It really shows some deeply embedded (and wrong) philosophy in my own brain about what writing is. It’s what I’m going to call “Research Paper 101 writing.” Like forming coherent paragraphs and boring sentences somehow means you know something/learned something. I don’t believe that even in theory, so why do I believe it in my gut? It feels like a religion I have to unlearn, to get deprogrammed from.

And so it goes. Screw empirical writing on blogs. That’s totally inauthentic. Give me colloquial…fragmented sentences…thinking out loud and in public…sticking my foot in my mouth…setting myself up for a challenge…