Faculty Academy 2008

For the last several weeks, I’ve been trying to make a dream, reality. I had been seeing this bird house in my dreams, and as of October 30, 2008, I now have it behind my new home in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. So now that it is over (well, almost – as of this writing we still have a small truckload of stuff to move yet) I can apologize to my DTLT colleagues for being such a basket case the last few weeks. Alright, more of a basket case than usual. I made the classic mistake of falling in love with a house that I wanted to buy. I was also bucking the trend in these poor economic times of going forward with this major purchase. However, along the way I learned more about my determination and more importantly about my friends and family, to make this one of the most valuable processes I’ve ever gone through. This post is to remind me for the future, when I re-read it a year from now, or 5, 10, or 20 years from now, the value we put on things versus the value we put on people.

Now as for a bird, I don’t know how much thought is put into whether a given bird house is in a good neighborhood or not. I don’t know whether the contemporary design will lead to higher resale, or how the previous owners kept the place, but the one pictured above looks like a pretty nice unit. I wonder also if a bird flying in from high in the sky sees this house and wonders whether it’s still on the market. Do they get disappointed if it’s not available? If it is occupied, do they rationalize that “I guess it was not meant to be”?

This was a refrain that I heard from my wife numerous times as we went through the hurdles of buying a “short sale”, which previously I thought meant that the process of buying the house somehow is an abbreviated/quicker version of a regular sale. Boy, was I wrong! A short sale is one that “shorts” the bank who has the mortgage and they agree to sell it instead of foreclosing. The owners of these homes owe a considerable amount of money, so many times these homes are great bargains for the future buyers. We knew the house that existed in front of that bird house was a bargain – but was it meant to be OUR home? When things looked like we weren’t going to get this house, my wife said, “well, maybe it isn’t meant to be.” I said bullshit! (thankfully, I’m able to express myself this way to my wife, and she can be heard to express herself this way to me).

I have the answer to the question for everything as to whether something is meant to be or not. Whatever happens, is what happened. Period. Meant to be? Stop it. There is no plan and the sooner we realize this, the better off we will be. The fact that there is no plan is what’s great about life. If I had listened to my wife about maybe it wasn’t meant to be, then it wouldn’t have been. I would have given up. Now, some amazing things did happen to get this sale done. The title company said that it was the shortest (or at least one of the shortest) amount of time that they ever finished a closing. My real estate agent wanted this to happen as though we were her children. Let me also declare my unpaid endorsement of Virginia Credit Union for all your banking and mortgage needs! People made this happen because lots of hard-working people wanted it to happen. Other things, and people, were merely obstacles to be overcome. Many of the obstacles we encountered had many options for ways to deal with them. We got creative and I/we did our research to maximize our options.

Now, I have to question why I wanted it to happen. It’s a nice house to be sure, but is it better than our old one? There are many memories that we experienced in our old home, not the least of which is that it’s the only house my son has ever known. A few times I got emotional about leaving it. However, something in my wife and me said it was time to go. OK, so I wanted a place to build a new home theater. I wanted a bigger, flatter yard with less trees. I wanted a gas fireplace in the family room and a bigger, more up to date kitchen for my wife (she’s the better cook in the family, just so we’re clear – it’s not because I expect her to be in the kitchen). Of greater importance, though, were things I wanted for my son. A flat place to learn to ride his bike, and more kids his age to play with. I also wanted sidewalks for him and me to walk on, as well as woods (behind the bird house) we could explore together. And maybe, just maybe, there is one more little Rush to come into our family in the near future.

So there. It’s out of my system. I (and others) made it happen. I will invite the many people who were working for us, and cheering us on, over for a big celebration. Time to get to back to work.

Warning: rambling thought process below!

I have to say that I've been feeling a mounting frustration about school. My kids' schools, that is. But I'm completely and totally conflicted about it, too. Will Richardson writes today about a conversation with a principal about who's responsibility it is to teach kids digital literacy. I was also struck earlier this week by Laura at 11D's Weekend Journal post, where she says, "the traditional paths to career success are made for men and the childless" in part a response to her need to be available to her kids, both in the general parent way, but also to advocate for her son with the schools and because there aren't adequate after school programs for her youngest son. There are a couple of comments in the thread to Will's post that mention "bad parenting" or "less than stellar parenting." I have to admit, that gets my goat.

The thing is, I often feel stretched way too thin. My son comes home to an empty house. We usually talk a couple of times by phone and both Mr. Geeky and I try to get him to work on homework and do household chores from a distance. This is about as effective as trying to freeze water with a blow torch. There are a couple of after school programs that I just now found out about that he could attend, but no matter what, it's not the same as having a parent around, someone you trust enough to ask stupid questions and who brings you apple pie when the going gets tough. So, I do take some blame when my kids struggle.

On the other hand, I think it's far too easy for teachers to assume that a parent is home to guide a kid through homework, to help them get organized, etc. And so, they immediately assume that something's not good on the home front when things start to slide.* I get frustrated at times because I feel like two-income families are in a real bind when it comes to getting kids through school successfully. If your kids needs, or you choose to provide personal attention, that often means after dinner, taking away from your own time to decompress for work or get other things done. I don't mean to sound selfish here, but I always find it interesting when people talk about "family" time and they're usually referring to some idyllic time long ago when parents didn't come home and frantically throw together something for dinner after a long commute home.

I think my conflict comes from feeling that there are certainly things I could do to help make school a more successful experience for my kids, but that I'm trapped in a system that doesn't fully appreciate or maybe doesn't even recognize my conflict. I've never heard anyone at a parent-teacher meeting or back-to-school session talk about ways the school helps two-income families struggling with a compressed time-frame to work with their kids. I've never heard after school programs or clubs highlighted. I also find it frustrating at the lack of societal support for both education and raising kids. Schools lack money to have more innovative programs or to extend days (things that might help dual-income families). And local, state, and federal governments have few programs that provide quality after school services.

I'll keep trying to resolve my conflict, but I have to say, it really does keep me up at night.


*I have to say that my kid's teachers have made a valiant effort to make me feel like it's not my fault that things aren't going well for my kid, and that at this point in his life, homework is his responsibility.

It has been a busy week but I have had some enjoyable experiences. Last night, I covered Jeff Nugent’s class, Learning with Digital Media, while he was at the POD Conference. Today, I worked with the faculty of the Occupational Therapy program on instructional uses of the web. In both cases, I got to see light bulbs come on as people realized that it was not blogging, or twittering, or screencasting, or Slidesharing, or any specific tool - it was the mix of tools that made the difference.

With the Mass Comm class, we spent time talking about YouTube and Michael Wesch’s An anthropological introduction to YouTube. This class of juniors and seniors were pretty insightful in examining how YouTube, which has only been around less than 4 years, has become a cultural landscape where people are connecting, communicating, and sharing multiple aspects of their lives. Several of Jeff’s students blogged about the video in his class sandbox. I particularly liked how one of Jeff’s students, Frances, stated it:

“Throughout the course of the semester, I have been looking at the tools we learn about on an individual level, interacting with them accordingly. I appreciate how Welsh shows the audience how all the tools really connect as a user-generated machine. A video is created in Youtube and tagged through user-generated aggregation sites like Digg and Delicious. RSS feeds then serve as user-generated distribution. Content can ultimately get more and more views depending on what users like and find interest in. It is truly a massive user-dependent media machine. This knowledge makes me feel like my interaction makes me a part of the process.”

This morning, I met with the OT faculty as part of their every-two-weeks professional development. A month ago, Jeff had spent time with them discussing what the research suggested about how people learn and how students are using technology. My job was to follow up with a discussion on instructional uses of tools. I therefore surveyed them this week to see their level of interest on ten different web applications. The results were mixed, but in general the interest across the board was high. So we spent two hours today playing.

We started by creating a wiki in Wetpaint to hold the resources we found. We then spent time discussing possible uses of blogs. One faculty is taking some students overseas this summer and saw the blog as a way these students could both reflect on their experience and stay connected with their peers back home. Super idea!!! From blogs, we played with Twitter (with a tweet arriving from Jeff at POD). From some of the tweets they saw, we jumped into Flickr, which led us to SlideShare, and then back to Delicious. Lee Lefever’s CommonCraft videos got quite a workout! What they began to understand was how interconnected my network was across all of these tools…and they began to conceptualize how that fit their world.

As I said, a fun day!

{Graphic developed by Jeff Nugent}

Authored by Britt. Hosted by Edublogs. addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fbwatwood.edublogs.org%2F2008%2F10%2F23%2Fthe-interconnected-tool-set%2F'; addthis_title = 'The+Interconnected+Tool+Set'; addthis_pub = '';

I attended and presented at my first purely academic conference since 2003. I popped my head into the MLA in 2006, but I'm not really counting that. Having attended technology conferences and workshops for the past 5 years, going to this conference was a bit of a shock. First, there was the fact that I didn't know many people. I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but there were certainly groups of people who run into each other regularly. I'm sure this would change if I kept attending these kinds of conferences, so no big deal.

I'm used to going to conferences and being pretty wowed by the presentations, especially the keynotes. There have been exceptions (ELI 2008, cough, cough), but for the most part, presentations tend to be interesting and inspiring. I wasn't all that thrilled with the keynotes at this confernece. Given the names of the presenters, I should have been, but alas, I just wasn't. This may partly be due to my not being embedded in this discipline the way I am in the technology field, but I'm of the mind that a presentation should appeal broadly not narrowly. Even within a discipline, not everyone knows the ins and outs of every subfield or topic. The talk I liked the most was one that my disciplinary colleagues liked the least, in part because the speaker didn't seem to understand the discipline/audience. I liked the broadness of the talk, the fact that it wasn't entirely situated within the field. The panel presentations, given by mostly younger people in the field, were much better. More on this later.

Another thing that I'd forgotten about academic conferences was the ever-present name-tag glance. This happens at tech conferences, too, but my feeling has been that this is in the honest attempt to acquire a name, not to see if you're at the "right" kind of institution. The name-tag glance was part of a generally feeling of competition I felt at the conference. There were lots of conversations about job openings and about people being "on the market" (a phrase that conjures prostitution for me for some reason). And there always seemed to be a kind of grandstanding going on at all times. People were constantly trying to give their "elevator speech" about their latest research. The grandstanding was especially apparent during Q & A at many sessions. The questions weren't about the presentation per se, but were an attempt to showcase the questioners knowledge of the topic. I would contrast this to the tech conferences I attend where people are often on the lookout for collaborators and conversations center around mutual interests. Questions asked during presentations seek clarity so that the questioner can put the information presented into practice.

Another observation I made had to do with who was giving the keynotes. These tended to be the "older" people in the field, those who've been around for quite a while and who have made significant contributions. Of course, it is usual for these people to be the keynoters, but it would have been nice to see some of the "newer" folks doing the big talks rather than being relegated to the smaller panel presentations. There seemed to be a generational divide. It seems a shame to have to wait a generation to hear from some of the new contributors to the field.

Despite these criticisms, I still got something out of the conference. I saw some good talks and I had some very good conversations. I suspect that part of my criticism stems from my being out of the loop for a while. I've attained a comfort level with tech conferences that I just haven't gotten to yet with academic ones.