A Modest Proposal

No, I am not suggesting that we should cook and eat software vendors. (Although...)

Blackboard is apparently entertaining purchase offers. It's a shame all the IHEs can't band together and buy it. It'd probably be cheaper in the long run than dealing with Blackboard itself.

Just a thought...

(Blackboard is an excellent example of the phenomenon of IHEs putting mission-critical components of their operations in the hands of for-profit entities that may not only not share the IHE's mission, but maybe indeed have diametrically opposed missions. This will be fodder for a separate blog posting or 3.)

You've got HOW many people working on that?

Today's Chronicle tells us that College Social-Media Efforts Are Hindered by Inadequate Staffing. Specifically, roughly half of respondents say that have 0.5FTE or less working on social media.

Anybody who thinks about it this way is completely missing the point.  You don't hire somebody to "work on social media." What's next? A social media department? This can parallel, presumably, your web department and your gopher department and your email department and your, well, your REAL communications/PR department.

Nobody should have any staff "working on social media." All employees who deal with the public, even tangentially, should be aware of social media and how it affects their job and their employer. (If they can't wrap their brains around this concept, they need to find another job. With encouragement, if needed.) Your best social media efforts are, almost by definition, organic.

You don't bring in somebody to work in blissful mutual ignorance from the rest of the institution. Whatever "medium" is "hot" right now will be gone next year. Or next month. (Did somebody say "gopher?") Your employees need to be able to adjust to this changing landscape. There's a fine line between always chasing the latest hot tech trend and hidebound unwillingness to engage anything except the old model. If you really want to walk that line--and you do, even if you don't know it--don't even think of hiring people to "work on social media."

"And who is my customer?"

If you work in higher ed these days, you hear a lot about "customer service." This has been going around in different contexts for a long time; it's been rampant in IT, at least in the "user support" world for decades. (OK, maybe using the plural is a bit hyperbolic.)

The students, after all, are our customers, we are told. And there is a lot of truth in this, considering where the revenue of most IHEs comes from. Many people, of course, resist the very sensible idea that we should strive to please the people paying our salaries. To wit, this piece on student classroom behavior by Brian Hall of Cuyahoga Community College.

My immediate reaction was, "here we go again." Another professor bemoaning the bad behavior of these kids today. Why, in my day... And although I thought the article was somewhat tiresome, because of its retreading of a subject endlessly rehashed over the years (generations?) (eons?), I found myself sympathizing with Dr. Hall. Interrupting when another person is talking? Taking phone calls? Pretty damned rude, right?

But aren't the students right? They do pay for these classes, right? (Or somebody does; don't get picky on me.)

The problem, in my view, is that there has been a breakdown in the understanding of what is being sold. In order to criticize today's students we must, of course, hearken back to the students of an earlier age, who were responsible, polite, hard-working, and respectful of their professors. They didn't get that way because the professors had power and stature that they don't have today, or because the students of that age had politeness to (if not actual respect for) authority beaten into them. (Though it is possible that they did, and they did. It's also possible I'm being overly polyannaish for dramatic effect.)

In a nutshell, I suggest that past cohorts of students understood that they were submitting their work to the professor in order that the professor would pronounce judgment on that work. Judgment on the work, and on them in relation to their peers, in the case of grades given out "on the curve." Did the students expect to receive value for tuition paid? Of course they did. But the value they expected tended to be the judgment (in every sense of the word) of their professors.

Fast forward to today, and we see students.... well, like the ones in Dr. Hall's piece. There is, in fact a word for a place you can go where you can pay your money and the management will uncritically supply you with what you want. And that word is.... no, sorry, it's not "brothel," it's Diploma Mill. Really, I'm serious! You think of a place where you go ask for, say, a B.S. degree, they name a price--"Would you care to supersize that to a summa cum laude?"--you pay it, and you take away your degree.

"My college is not like that!!!"

Isn't it?

Don't get me wrong. I am happy to see the Paper Chase era recede in the distance. But the more we enable people who don't want to learn to avoid doing so, and still pass their courses, the closer we get to diploma mill-hood.

Yes, I'm painting with a broad brush and overgeneralizing in my contrast of the halcyon past with the decadent present. But one doesn't have to accept anecdote as evidence to observe that there are a hell of a lot of anecdotes out there. If you're not satisfied I've proven my point, well, neither am I. I intend to develop this theme in future postings, as I bring it back home (well, home for me) to the world of information technology.

The perfect is the enemy of the good

It seems to me that one of the most basic rules of blogging, if one hopes to build an audience, is that one should blog regularly. Regularly, that is, at intervals of less than five weeks. So I failed already; we'll see if I can do better. I could whine about how I've been so busy, etc. etc., and that wouldn't be incorrect. But a more fundamental reason why I haven't posted in the past weeks is that I can't put together what I want to say in a way that satisfies me.

Amorphous, mutant forms float around in my head based on things I see and read about in academia and in IT. I can't be coherent, can't bring my analysis to bear on them in a satisfactory way. I have finally concluded: screw that: this is a blog. Expect disjointed, incoherent natterings. Perhaps the exercise of writing itself will help me develop the cohesion I want to have before "publishing."

You have been warned.