None of Us Ever Become Experts

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Alyson Indrunas

About two weeks ago, I attended yoga for the first time, I’m sad to say, in months. I walked to the studio seeking out two hours of suffering and total escape that I can’t seem to achieve on my bike. When I’m on the bike commuting, I’m worried about cars. When I’m on my mountain bike, I’m worried about how long my companions have been waiting for me. When I’m living my daily life, I’m easily distracted, and that style of yoga is the only elegant reprieve from the gerbil wheel of my mind and thoughts.

When I got to the studio, I laid my mat on the floor, and promptly fell asleep until the teacher turned on the lights to start class. Turns out, everyone in the room except for me and one other person were there to celebrate the last class of a fellow yogini. The teacher began by apologizing for the tears that were going to fall during our class. Apologies, she said to the two of us, this was not going to be a typical class, we’re losing a member of our community. She complimented the yogini, a beautifully fit woman leaving Portland for a job in Seattle, for her unwavering dedication to the studio. To their community. This final practice was going to be the yogini’s 2,704th class. Clearly by the tears in many peoples’ eyes, she was going to be missed.

The departing yogini then spoke up and said, “It may sound impressive that I’ve taken so many classes, but I want all of you to know that it’s never gotten easier. This yoga is never easy. Everyday feels like my first class. It’s important to protect this space as a place where we all feel safe to learn. None us ever become experts yet we continue to do this together. That’s what  has mattered to me. We continue to do this together.”

None of us ever become experts yet we continue to do this together. That is, truly, what matters. I was pretty moved by her little speech, and of course, I left studio thinking about teaching, learning, and leadership.

Here’s the thing.

When I work with folks newly interested in open education, I’m sometimes seen as an “expert” and it’s an uncomfortable place for me. I’m kind of a hack and charlatan who is willing to stand in front of people—like that yogini above—to share what I know. To share what I don’t know. To fail in front of people. To share ideas that I can’t prove will work. The most important part of what I do (hopefully) is to try to improve the conditions of where and how we learn. Together.

A year ago, I had a meeting with a book publishing agent, and ten minutes into our meeting, I could tell she was totally confused by what I care about as an educator. We met at a coffee shop, and I was presenting about OER as professional development.

Here’s my title and blurb:

Book Nerd, Meet Tech Geek: The OER Movement Improves Faculty Development

In my work as the Director of eLearning (tech geek), people are often surprised to learn that my background is in English studies (book nerd). Learn how open educational resources (OER) provide pathways for student-centered success while fostering collaborative professional development among faculty members. Discover strategies learned from starting a small grassroots OER movement on campus that will help you avoid common pitfalls and failures.

I need to admit that I remixed that title several different times in 2015 (it was a busy year). I now know that sometimes book publisher folks send agents looking for “talent” at academic conferences. She was a lovely gal, and she bought me a coffee. So tell me, she said, who is your ideal reader?

Anyone who thinks I remind them of Joan Didion?, I thought. Community college leaders who are looking for ways to substantiate funding for professional development centered on OER. I want leaders to care about adjuncts since they teach most of our courses, I said oh-so-academically.

Describe your perspective on OER. What’s your most effective method of gaining that audience’s attention?

I stand up on the table like Sally Field as Norma Rae with a sign that says UNION & OER, I thought.

Well, I try to understand their local barriers to this kind of radical change in pedagogy. I try to empathize. I talk about decreasing textbook costs as a catalyst for major change in higher education. I think this movement will progress in three phases. We’ll start with textbook costs, then we’ll address pedagogy, and then we’ll save adjunct teachers from burnout. It’s not that cut and dry, of course. There’s more to it than that, and it’s not a linear progression of transformation. It may not happen in my lifetime. When I can, I generate data from both the students and the teachers, I said oh-so-academically.

Hmm. So let me get this straight, how does OER connect to professional development? How does a teacher put a line on her CV about this work?

Somedays, I think CV should stand for Crap-tastic Vocation instead of Curricula Vitae, but I didn’t say that. Well, it’s not work that is directly valued by institutions at this point in time, but I believe in the future it will be. Someday. In the meantime, it’s the only meaningful professional development that I see that directly connects to the student experience. More importantly, it’s the only radical choice for adjuncts seeking true academic freedom in horrific labor conditions. I don’t have the data to support this, but I’d like to tell a story about why this work is valuable. How I’ve witnessed real change in the way people teach.

Okay, she said, so would you provide a business plan or some sort of metric for administrators to follow? Do you have charts that would accompany your narrative?

Who would ruin a good story with a chart or a business plan for the love of cats? Sheesh! The Quant Kills The Qual in My Heart: A Memoir. No. If that’s something you think is necessary, I think I could create something like that with a little help of my friends. (Oh my gawd, I’m citing Ringo Starr. Deep swallow of the coffee to end this meeting. I looked at my watch).

Chances are, if we publish this book, she said, it will take three years or more to publish. How will you work to keep this idea relevant in the meantime?

Wow. Is it too early to start drinking? I started packing up my things. I’m not sure what I’m doing is like that. I don’t own this idea–there is a community of people who care about these goals. Hopefully in four years things will be a lot different than they are now. Somebody somewhere could have a much better idea than me, and I’ll help them.

We shook hands. Exchanged cards. Smiled pleasantries. Promised to be in touch. I never heard from her again.

Here’s the other thing: I’m kinda done with academic publishing cycles. It’s part of that Crap-tastic Vocation (CV), and it’s part of the gig. You see, I had this realization playing Giant Jenga in a bar in Austin with two lovely colleagues. As we played a good game while chatting and laughing, I got to thinking. I think I’d rather focus on the piece-by-piece of what feels like progress rather than focusing on the performance of building . The game of the academic performance just seems like a waste of time.

For those of you unfamiliar with Jenga, it’s a game where you start with a tall tower of blocks and you take one block from the bottom few rows and you add it to the top. Eventually, you end up with a precarious mix of balance and hope (like yoga). Depending on who you play with, you might get help from your competitors. It’s a fun group game where you accept that one of you will lose with great flair and spectacle. The tower will fall. It will be messy. A group dynamic can take over where you help one another. Best of all, you can have a conversation and digress as long as you remember who’s turn it is. You can heckle and help one another. It’s fun for a community of people.

Or you can play with competitive types who offer no assistance. You’re on your own. There will only be one winner. The process is not as fun with these folks. Winning–or forcing somebody else to lose–is the most important action of the game. That’s not so fun to me. You focus so much on the tower that the block-by-block seems a means to the end rather than the purpose.

The tower will fall no matter what. Block by block, we will figure it out by trying to build something different. Block by block, we will figure it out. Either way, it’s going to be messy.

I’m kind of stuck on this Jenga metaphor about leadership, but I’m not sure what I have to say about it. For now. Maybe you will, dear reader, and that’s the beauty of open education. We share as we learn. Block by block. If I can go back to the words from the beloved yogini above, then I have my conclusion. For now.

This ______ is never easy. Everyday feels like my first class. It’s important to protect this space as a place where we all feel safe to learn. None us ever become experts yet we continue to do this together. That’s what  has mattered to me. We continue to do this together.

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University Folks, Explain Community Colleges to Me

Posted on May 14, 2016 by Alyson Indrunas

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

First of all, let me admit, this post has been in draft form for almost six months. My new job and my new life have taken up all of my attention these days. In fact, I’m in a bit of guilt spiral right now taking one minute away from the goals of my new job. Because I love it. Because I’m so thrilled to work with so many smart people who care so much about the same things I do.

I know this about myself: If my eyes strain too close, I lose focus. Taking this break to finish this post will feel like stretching a bit. It’s like gazing out at the window when I’ve been focused on the laptop screen for days. For weeks. For months.

Here’s the thing.

I have this fantasy that community college teachers have the time to debate on Twitter, blog, and go to conferences to share their experiences. I have this fantasy that adjuncts are the ones debating about what open education means and who it can help. I have a fantasy they are the ones talking about how to teach with open materials creatively in order to save their students money. I have this fantasy that people were more generous when they discuss the needs of our poorest students. Our poorest colleges. Our community of colleges.

The loudest voices aren’t always the ones who have the best answers. I’m riffing here, of course, with my blog title on Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things To Me.

Men (Still), Explain EdTech To Me, (why didn’t I think of that?!) is a refrain that Audrey Watters returned to twice last year with her keynotes. And it’s awfully awesome for feminists while at the same time reminding me about the sad state of journalism.

Allow me make a connection here.

My very good friend T. Andrew Wahl is a journalist and a comic book historian, and I’m incredibly thankful for all of his wisdom that he shared with me during the almost two years we were office neighbors at a community college north of Seattle, WA.

He and I have talked extensively about the history of the newspaper industry in the last twenty years and how it connects to some of the current challenges in educational technology.

So much of what frustrated me as an eLearning director/administrator, he experienced when the newspaper industry was trying to move from paper form to digital print. From the analog to the digital. From the known to the unknown. From the past to the future.

I’m beginning this blog post with a nod to the work of Audrey and Andrew because they are both journalists. Both writers. Both very influential to me as a thinker.

Andrew said to me one day about a year ago, “You know, you’re like the Cassandra of your field.”

I laughed hard and blushed brightly. “That title’s already been taken. Have you heard of the name Audrey Watters before? She’s the one. Not me.”

I got to meet Audrey IRL in 2015 at NW eLearn when I was on the planning board for that conference, and of all the work we put into making that event happen, I’m most proud of the introduction that Lisa Chamberlin read to the audience that I helped write with her and Maria Erb. Here’s our best paragraph in that introduction, and Lisa delivered it beautifully:

Audrey often gives voice to the things we cannot say in our daily work lives while she critiques institutions and philosophies around the intersection of education and technology. As someone who claims to be a serial dropout, we’d like to give her an honorary degree in Feminist Radness. And men, if you feel excluded, allow me to remind you that feminism is for everyone.

The Open Door Policy: A Memoir

Community colleges accept everyone who walks in the door. Students sign up. Community colleges say yes no matter what. They say yes. Look up Open Door Policy.

Universities, on the other hand, say yes, maybe, or no. Community Colleges always always always say yes. Never no. Never maybe. Yes. Programs that are in demand create a waiting list.

Come on in, students. Let’s see what we can do with you. Let us see.

I just want to make a point here to defend my colleagues who support online education at community colleges. I am no longer a part of a community college system yet I want to help online education succeed in every state. In every corner of this country. In every county. Of every state of every region.

I’m having a very hard time not writing “We” when I talk about community colleges. I’ve been struggling with this for months. So I’m just going to own it and use that pronoun.

A while back, another Twitter hero turned IRL pal Kevin Gannon @TheTattooedProf posted a link for some discussion for the folks at the POD Conference. Here’s the link:

The digital revolution in higher education has already happened. No one noticed by Clay Shirky. 

Right. Sigh.

This is the writer who was very public about not allowing students to bring their laptops to his class.

This “no laptop in my class” article, and the praise (the likes/the hearts/the favorites/the retweets) that surrounded the popularity of that edict made my blood boil at the time. I’m sure he’s a swell guy, but his assertion about the reality of teaching assumes that every student has a laptop to bring to class. And his students, no doubt, in fact do own them, and that’s wonderful.

But. Remember the open door policy of your local community college. These students are not always so lucky. So privileged. So connected. So supported.

Shirky’s article is the type of online journalism that a dean or an upper administrator reads and then emails to faculty as “professional development” or as a “must read” before department meetings. Check this out, they’ll say.

When really, these edicts about pedagogy, deserve a broader conversation. This idea deserves more than just a stance, a policy draft, or a forwarded email that says, “Aha! Technology allows students to multi-task. So bad! We don’t have to pay for it after all! Ban them in your class. This reinforces what I’ve always believed in about [enter banal assumption about teaching and learning here]. Technology, Bad. My Way, Good.”

Sigh.

And to me, when I read Shirky’s work, he’s not saying that technology is universally bad at all. He’s asking meaningful questions about the value of seminaring in the face-to-face setting. He’s questioning the value of presence in real time with a group of people seminaring together.

Note in that last sentence that “seminar” is used as a verb. To seminar. To seminar with students is something I believe in. To seminar with people is something I believe in.

But it’s not entirely yet possible with asynchronous learning, is it? It’s a luxury that only a certain percentage of students may enjoy. Online education, however, can step in to fill this void. Asynchronous learning, like it or not, depends on technology. How do we get the educational value of the synchronous seminar in an online setting? How do we make this style of learning meaningful? How do we get to the feeling of seminaring in an asynchronous setting? How do we help every student that walks into the open door at a community college?

Shirky brings a lot of useful  research to his post, and I’ve already read much of what he linked. Let’s face it, he has a Wikipedia page and I don’t. A list of publications. Credentials. A Ted Talk. A boatload of credibility. And, well, I don’t.

He writes about online education:

You wouldn’t know this from public conversation, where online courses are discussed as something that might be a big deal some day, rather than as ordinary reality for one student in four. The dramatic expansion of online classes has been largely ignored because it’s been driven by non-traditional students, which is to say students who are older and have more responsibilities than the well-off adolescents college has always stood ready to serve.

If you’re reading this, you were probably a smart kid who did well at a good school, and that description extends to almost everyone you know. The gap between the conversation about college and its reality exists because the people who drive that conversation — you and me and our friends — mostly talk about elite schools.

Perhaps I’ve been living too long in the “ordinary reality” of working at community colleges. I wasn’t a smart kid who went to a good school and I rarely get to talk about elite schools. His best point and the idea that thrills me is what he says about online education: it’s been driven by non-traditional students. 

Like Audrey Watters. Like Andrew Wahl. Like me. Like the students I’m working to try to help.

The conversation about these students isn’t as public because the people who support these programs are too busy doing the work. Too busy to blog about it. Too busy to research and substantiate it. Too busy to have a conversation. Too busy serving the needs of the students in their local communities. Too underemployed. Too busy applying for unemployment to make it through the summer.

It’s (some) university folks, honestly, who miss an opportunity to talk about online education with community college folks.

It’s (some) university folks, honestly, who think they own the only version of higher education worth talking about.

It’s (some) university folks, honestly, who make claims about the “public conversation” when really, there are a ton of people already talking about this issue say, going 15 years back.

There is a research center devoted to community colleges.

There are state agencies such as Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges and Virginia Community Colleges leading the way for open education. The focus, to some, may be too centered on the price of textbooks, but for every fire there is a spark. One can only be so radical in austere times. Open pedagogy matters little to a student who can’t afford tuition, books, and rent without getting into substantial debt.

From time to time, articles in appear in newspapers about community colleges. Here’s the kind of quote that’s helpful for the public. For The People. For the teachers. For the students:

Community colleges have the students with the greatest problems — yet they get the least resources, said Thomas Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. It’s unrealistic to think we can have a better outcome without investing more money.

Better outcomes are sorely needed. That is, if education is to recover its role as a motor of opportunity for those who need it most.

The conversation is very public. Very local. Very political. Very personal.

The people doing the work, however are just too busy to publish. Too busy to blog. Too busy to present. Too restricted by budgets to attend regional much less national conferences. Too busy to engage in a public conversation.

Worse still, their institutions do not see the value in engaging in such a scholarly conversation because they see themselves as entrenched in the community. As institutions who have no competition in either the face-to-face, hybrid, or online setting. They are, to be frank, quite cozy being an institution.

It’s been deeply troubling to me meeting many of my OL scholar heroes IRL over the last two years only to discover they are under-appreciated, under-funded, and under-utilized at their local institutions. Audrey Watters, without an institutional affiliation, for example, may not have access to academic databases to do her work.

These are realizations I wish I could unlearn.

But really, university folks, keep focusing on the failures of community college. The gaps in data. The limits of what we don’t know. Our focus on open textbooks rather than open pedagogy (as if you can separate the two, but I digress). When really, you need to be looking at what community colleges have done well to support a variety of learners during very austere times. How they try to respond to the needs of their communities without knowing if they have the right answers.

Watters, as usual, honed in on this exact reality in her keynote from NW eLearn about the Pacific Northwest:

Austerity looms over so much of what is happening right now in education. Between 1987 and 2012, the share of revenue that Washington State University received from Washington state, for example, fell from 52.8% to 32.3%. Boise State University saw its state support fall from 64.7% of its revenue to 30.3%. The University of Oregon, from 35.8% to 9.3%.

This austerity at the university level has trickled down to our community colleges. We need to look at what community colleges have done to meet the needs of their communities. Look at what community colleges have tried to do to help their students. On a shoe string. On a dime.

I’m heading into TL;DR territory, so let me return to a favorite passage of mine from Rebecca Solnit’s “By the Way, Your Home Is On Fire:”

Sometimes the right thing to do in ordinary times is exactly the wrong thing to do in extraordinary times. That’s easy to understand when something dramatic has happened. It’s less easy to grasp when the change is incremental and even understanding it requires paying attention to a great deal of scientific data…

The problem is: How do you convince someone who is stubbornly avoiding looking at the flames that the house is on fire? (Never mind those who deny the very existence of fire.) How do you convince someone that what constitutes prudent behavior in ordinary times is now dangerous and that what might be considered reckless in other circumstances is now prudent?

Change is incremental. My community college teachers taught me that.

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Gatekeeper Courses

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Alyson Indrunas

It’s an endless rotation of conversation. About open education.

I get paid to talk about and to advocate for open education. Mostly I get to share open educational resources. Can I tell you how awesome that is?

My favorite conversations are the ones with faculty where they learn how open works for the very first time. Their eyes either squint with skepticism or they gaze up to the ceiling pensive in thought.

I just swam in the waters of mathy conversations for almost two days at a regional conference. I did a lot of listening. I did a lot of talking. At a certain point, I changed the conversation back to teaching in some way the best that I could. Otherwise I had very little to say to mathematicians. Though I truly love their brand of dorkery; I just don’t get their jokes.

I got to see one of my former colleagues who I worked with on my very first project with the OER. It was so nice to chat with her, and reflect on very little I knew then about leadership. How very little I understood about making open education part of the conversation for community college educators and administrators. How much I failed. How that work led to the job I have today. How I still love working with/for community college teachers.

And let me tell you. The lone faculty member who is thinking about going rogue is a beautiful thing to witness.

When my colleague and I came arrived at the vendor hall at this small regional mathy conference, it was like an icy wind had blew through the room. I tried to make eye contact and smile at a few folks. I mean, we’re all there working, I thought. My mom taught me to say good morning to strangers. It was my first time not feeling a sense of hospitality arriving some place to chat about open education. Talking about open education and courseware in a crowded room of hard-bound textbook vendors is weird. Let’s just leave it at that.

Our vendor table, however, was constantly surrounded by faculty. They chatted with us, and we loved talking plans with them. Teachers had specific questions. They wanted to get down to it. How does it work? My department isn’t ready for this but I am. My department is ready for this but not my administration. My institution is ready but not the system.

We don’t have the resources to support an effort from scratch. How do we start?

Can you help me?

Hot damn. You bet.

Here’s the thing, I learned how an initiative can create a legitimacy for changing the way we teach. Not just for innovation’s sake. But you know, for the sake of helping students. What a concept! The Completion Agenda from 2010 has generated data that legitimizes some radical curriculum revisions here in 2016. Math and, wait for it–the cost of textbooks–are barriers for community college students realizing their goals. Their dreams.

The guided pathways movement is creating some real momentum for new courses. Interesting courses. Smartly designed courses. For certain pathways.

Community college leadership is looking at programs from a different angle. Curriculum change–at this scale–is made easier through open education. The 5Rs, adapting, and adopting makes a much easier path. The best work of your peers–that is licensed–makes the paths easier to create, design, and sustain.

Administrators and faculty are looking for help and guidance, if you will, and I’m delighted by what I learned from these math teachers. I can’t wait to work with some of them, and I have a stack of emails to write. Follow-up data linking together our great conversations. Plans to write. Before I do that, I need to parse out my doubts and concerns.

What really happens in those guided pathways? Will certain courses be eliminated? Will this redesign be forced on adjuncts who have no say with departmental decisions? I worry for vocational/professional technical programs. Will they lose all access to the humanities? To social science? Is this initiative another way to track poor people? Will the joy and discovery of a liberal arts education only happen for those born with a financial safety net?

As I read more about this policy, my internal Alyson-splainer takes over.

This all seems too much about employment and not education. This all seems too centered on the goals of capitalism. This all seems too aligned with creating good workers not educated citizens. This all seems too good to be true.

Yes. And no. It’s not a binary of right and wrong–as I learned in my humanities courses.

So let me pull out a couple of quotes from “Redesigning Community Colleges for Student Success Overview of the Guided Pathways Approach” by Davis Jenkins. The bolding is mine:

Developmental dead-end. Even before they can proceed with college-level courses, the majority of degree-seeking students in both academic and occupational programs are referred to developmental education. However, research suggests that, as it is typically designed, developmental education serves more to divert students into a remedial track than to build skills for college and help them choose and prepare to successfully enter a college-level program of study in a particular field. The most promising approaches to reforming developmental education involve mainstreaming students in college-level courses with support or providing alternative pathways, especially in math. But improving the success of students in passing college-level math and English is not sufficient to improve completion rates. These efforts need to be tied to efforts to strengthen supports for students to take and pass the key gatekeeper courses for their programs of study, and not only Math and English 101 (p. 3).

Lost in the maze. With so many choices and without a clear roadmap or anyone monitoring their progress, it is not surprising that many community college students indicate that they are confused and often frustrated in trying to find their way through college (p. 3).

Start with the end in mind: map student pathways to end goals. The first step in creating guided pathways is to engage the faculty, with input from advisors, in mapping out programs (p. 10).

Colleges might consider redirecting at least some resources currently spent on conventional forms of professional development toward collaborative efforts, such as providing training, facilitation, and other support as needed by teams of faculty and staff working together to create guided pathways. Doing so would reframe professional development as a strategic activity that supports the collective involvement of faculty and staff in organizational improvement as well as one that supports the professional growth of individual faculty and staff (p.11).

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As I read this report and bookmark other sources, I’m reminded of a book chapter that I used to teach in my research courses.

Circa 2006-2008, we read “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Janny Scott and David Leonhardt from the compilation Class Matters. 

Scott and Leonhardt explain:

One way to think of a person’s position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation, and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class (p.9).

 

The open door policy of a community college welcomes students who have none of those cards. Their day-to-day is a roulette of just having enough of the basics. They walk through the community college open door without credentials, a job, or any financial safety net. Generational poverty is the phrase we use to describe their most complex barrier.

My lens, for better or for worse, is concerned with the poor at community colleges. My ideas only get so radical as they intersect with the reality of being poor.

One teacher said to me, “I’m tired of the way my department does things, and I’ve got a grant to write a course. This could change my entire department and be so good for my students. Do you think it’s possible to go that rogue?”

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Magic In The Machine

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Alyson Indrunas

I really enjoy asking people about their dreams as it relates to teaching and technology. I encourage them to speak their minds about what they’d like to see and how it can help them in their contexts. When I was an administrator at a community college near a very large city, this was a safe question. A conversation starter. An ice-breaker.

I knew the context. The complications. The population. The capabilities. The network.

It was a safe question for me to ask because I could connect those dreams to our collective reality in a positive way. I could predict the answers because I was very interested in the history of the questions.

Now when I ask this question, it’s a lot more complicated. I’m in a position to help. Or I’m perceived that way. Now when I ask this question, I see many perspectives at once at all levels of the organization. The same dreams. The same concerns. The same realities. The same dreams for students and teachers. The same complications and joys of teaching and learning.

My dreams have slowly progressed from those of a teacher, to a committee member, to an administrator, to a council member, to a system advocate, and to part of growing team. I’m shocked at how my dreams are now so very different yet so very much the same.

What are the barriers to actualizing those dreams?

Sometimes it’s time and money.

Mostly lack thereof.

Sometimes it’s knowledge about technology. Its flaws. Its capabilities. Its potential. Its connection to humans. Its limitations. Its inconsistency. Its unreliability. Its abilities.

Sometimes when I hear what people want for their dreams of technology, I have to politely tell them that we aren’t there yet. It’s just not possible, I’ll say. Someday. We’ll get there. I cite research. Quotes and statistics. I tell anecdotes. I loop back to what’s possible now. What’s impossible now.

In the meantime, what’s the workaround? What’s the best way we can co-create what will solve problems for people in different contexts? What are the best connections to maximize the time and energy of people looking better solutions?

Here’s the thing. Let me tell you a story that keeps spinning in my mind.

I’m old enough to remember record players. My dad used to call me from my room to flip over the record he was listening to while he stayed on the couch reading the newspaper. He’d yell for me when the needle hit the paper on the record. I’d have to leave my kingdom of barbie dolls to flip the damn record.

Before the creation of the remote control, I’d stomp down the damn stairs to change the channel on the television for my dad.

I used to dream of record players that didn’t need a human to flip the album over. TVs that didn’t have dials. I’m sure I prayed to all gods I no longer believe in to make that happen for me. It would be magic, I thought.

One can now talk to remote controls to change the channel or bring up catalogs of movies on the television.

One can plug in a small device that holds 10,000 songs.

Somebody had my same dreams and created the machines to make it happen.

Somebody co-created the magic brain in the machine.

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Robot Tasks & Creative Brains

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Alyson Indrunas

When I first started teaching online, I kept an on-going document of my most common responses to students. At the time, I felt like the worst teacher ever. My inner writer wanted to personalize every single message to students to prove that I cared. Your audience, I’d teach my students, means everything to writers.

Yet. There I was plagiarizing myself over and over again to maximize my professional and personal time. To maximize my time to learn new ways of teaching. To maximize my time in the woods with friends. To maximize my time with a young student trying to sort out her life. To maximize my time helping a new colleague learn the ropes of teaching at a community college. To maximize my time.

My guilt spirals were laced with the velvety feeling of finally making enough money to pay my bills without my credit card. All the while, my course evaluations were sprinkled with criticisms from students who either loved or hated my class–which by extension meant they either loved or hated me. Sometimes I didn’t open my course evaluations for months because I couldn’t stand the hot and cold of student responses. How I would have loved a simple, “Meh. Your class was okay.”

Back then, I thought, if only there was a way to organize my interactions with students better. The Command+C and V keys were worn on my laptop from overuse. Copy. Paste. Name. Individual comment. Copy. Paste. Individual comment. Rinse. Repeat.

As an online teacher, I began to feel like robot. Less than perfect. Worse than effective. Truth be told, I got really bored. That feeling along with the dead end reality of being an adjunct forced my interests to roam elsewhere.

Finding instructional design and educational technology by way of open education saved me. My bored brain started building synapses again. My self-inflicted feelings of mediocrity started to create something new. Something interesting. Something open to possibilities.

Lately people I care about send me articles to read because they know I’m “into technology.” Sometimes it’s people in the field asking, “have you read_______?” Sometimes it’s friends who really don’t know what I do for a living but they think I might be interested. At the same time, I might see that very same article rolling by on the Twitter machine with reactions or favorites. Sometimes, especially lately, it takes me longer to read said articles than I’d like to admit. It takes me even longer to blog about it.

Learn Different: Silicon Valley Disrupts Education by Rebecca Mead is one of those articles. Ho hum, I thought. Sigh. Disrupts. Ick. Okay. Welp. Bookmark. Save for later. Then I read it, and I have to admit that I can’t stop thinking about this article.

Here are few quotes in italics (copy, paste) and my reactions below. Nothing’s in stone. Thinking out loud. Copy, paste. Copy. Paste.

Tuition is about thirty thousand dollars a year.

Well, must be nice. Not my people. I almost stopped reading there.

If the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now—well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps, [Max Ventilla] said.

Kinda like how everyone has access to the Internet and democracy is actualized! Hooray, Silicon Valley. Wait. What smells like crap? I almost stopped reading there.

Most of the people who end up doing well in Silicon Valley did very well academically, but they often have a very strong viewpoint about how it could have been better.

Hmmm. I bet you are really really male. Bravo. I’d rather watch ice form then hear more about this we’re-so-successful-now-let’s-do-better-now-that-we’re-rich. I almost stopped reading there.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured billions of dollars into education grants, including for research on digital tools and personalized learning.

Well, yes. And I know that’s problematic for some. Acceptable for others. Worrisome. But here’s what I know for sure. Some of those dollars are allowing me to work really hard with a group of very smart people that I’m growing to love. We’re helping create real change for students and teachers at community colleges. That investment is tied to the work I’m doing and it is helping redefine the narrative of the really poor at community colleges. Just you wait and see.

If you know anything about me, then you know I believe in the open door policy of community colleges. Digital tools and personalized learning are part of the puzzle. I can’t let the mystery be. There are many problems to solve for this demographic. I read on.

Educators are stakeholders in AltSchool’s eventual success: equity has been offered to all full-time teachers.

Huh. Wait. What? You mean to tell me that a teacher who is being recorded by videotape in her classroom feels like a stakeholder in the school?! Wow. I have some snake oil to sell you. Still I read on.

The point of the hackathon was to sketch out in code potential solutions to “robot tasks”—routine aspects of a teacher’s job that don’t require teaching skills. Kimberly Johnson, the head of product success and training, addressed the team. “Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it,” Johnson said.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my “creative teacher brain” of the past as a result of this article. Perhaps I’m making a bigger deal out of these claims than it’s worth. In a world of the quick moving stream of information, this article made me pause. Think.

“Robot tasks” are part of teaching sometimes, and we can build effective tools to make better use of teachers’ time. What’s the potential of the creative teacher brain with effective courseware? What’s the potential of having students understand their own learning with effective courseware?

The article goes on describe creative spaces for learning, and well, that’s nothing new either, yet it’s oh so so Silicon Valley to claim it’s something new and innovative. Dare I say it? Disruptive! (Buzzword Bingo. Drink!)

In fact, if you read up on the Open Classroom  you’ll find an interesting story about learning spaces. Perhaps iPads have replaced the aluminum book turnstiles of the 1970s and the bean bags are now Disney-themed BB8s and not corduroy. Unlike this new fangled 30k a year model, the open classroom had legs, so to speak, in public education.

Mead’s observations leave me thinking that some “new” classrooms solve the problems of a very select few. The privileged. The wealthy. The Oh-So-Silicon-Valley. The mostly white folk. The anecdotes about surveillance made me cringe. You need to read this article yourself.

To a computer measuring keystrokes, a student zoning out because he’s bored is indistinguishable from one who is moved by her book to imagine a world of her own.

Yes. I don’t think watching a video of a student having a private moment of dreaming is something to assess. Or record. It’s a private moment. Those children in the 70s open classrooms were just left the hell alone. Their private play narratives were magical kingdoms in their minds not some keen insight to their future levels of “persistence” or “grit.” Hey teachers, leave those kids alone (attribution needed).

Technologists have been trying to transform the classroom for decades. In the late seventies, Seymour Papert, a pioneer of artificial intelligence at M.I.T., contended that children’s minds might be profoundly enriched by coding. A child who learns to program “both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building,” Papert wrote in his book, “Mindstorms,” which was published in 1980.

How Audrey Watters is not cited in this article is beyond me. She’s one the best journalists on this topic and it’s a damn shame for us when she’s not brought into the conversation. Watters has been citing/celebrating Papert for quite some time. She makes us all ask hard questions about these turn-key solutions.

From the back of the room, a woman spoke up: “Did you test it with a female?”

Many participants laughed. “I’m serious,” the questioner went on. “A lot of our teachers are females, and they carry phones in different places.”

The members of the bookmark team, all of whom were male, looked deflated. In coming up with their apparently elegant solution, they had not visualized a female teacher slapping her bottom to activate a phone tucked into her back pocket.

At this point, I spent quite a bit of time gazing out the window thanks to this article.

I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge.

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Sharing The Road Ahead

Posted on March 12, 2016 by Alyson Indrunas

I am pleased to report that I’ve become a bike commuter. Record rainfall has fallen in Portland, Oregon since I’ve moved to this city, and I embrace my chicken-shitedness as a cyclist. I was not going to start bike commuting when the rain was falling by the inches. No way. For weeks I looked out of the steamy bus window as the seasoned Portlandia pedaled by in their scuba-like bike clothes.  Instead of investing in bike fenders, I bought myself fancy wellies and a petite umbrella while I marked days off the calendar. I admit I was inspired by the city commuters, but I waited for the clouds to lift and the mercury to rise before I committed.

The bike citizens of Portland have fully committed to this lifestyle. It rains, yet still you ride. Left coast Portlanders value policies that foster infrastructure for its people who embrace a car-free or car-light lifestyle. There is even a bridge devoted specifically to public transit, pedestrians, and people on bikes. It’s the stuff of fiction in most urban environments. No cars, if you will, can go.

Here’s the thing: I feel guilty because I’m learning to love the sharrow.

If you are unfamiliar with the sharrow, allow me to give you the quick definition. It’s a painted bike symbol on the road alerting drivers that they will be sharing the road with cyclists. For years, I’ve favorited more than my share of tweets hating on the sharrow. I’ve poked fun about the shortcomings policies involving the sharrow. Up until recently, I would have claimed the anti-sharrow corner.

It’s just paint on the road without policy, I’d say. Without education for citizens. Without infrastructure. Without any viable alternatives or ideas for substantive change in the way we connect bikes as a solution to the problem of our dependency on fossil fuels. The sharrow is not the radical change I’d like to see to see in the world.

It’s just paint on the streets, I’d say.

In order for the sharrow to work; there must be a social construction of its meaning. Policy dedicated to the education of a community of people is something I believe in.

The sharrow works when there is a community who understands its role.

Cars and bikes shar(row) the road.

The sharrow is a start. Maybe. Sometimes.

Roads–if you look historically–were built to make the transportation by wheel more efficient. Paved roads pre-date cars.

Roads, nowadays, are owned by drivers of cars rather than riders of bicycles. Bike transportation, however, makes a lot of sense for The People. It doesn’t work everywhere for everyone. I get that.

I’m a bit of a dreamer; I wish we were all a bit more Dutch in our neighborhoods.

In PDX as a cyclist, I feel (somewhat) safe and part of the traffic. Heading into the city, there are so many bikes! People (usually) obey the laws and the system (sort of) works. It’s not perfect; I’ve seen drivers exhibit palpable rage at anyone on a bike. Every city and town I’ve pedaled through in America is no different.

For almost half of my 4.8 mile commute to my office, I’m mostly on a Neighborhood Greenway with sharrows. Lucky ducky me.

Having Open Education Week fall at the same time of the National Bike Summit in Washington DC have many ideas–forgive the pun–spinning in my mind.

Maybe painting the streets with the sharrow teaches people that there may be cyclists. Maybe. 

Maybe I love seeing so many bike symbols on the road while I pedal to my sweet little job. For now, let me share a few wonderful thoughts I’ve had during my first month of off-and-on again bike commuting.

10 Observations While Pedaling: A Memoir

  1. A huge flock–a gander?–of geese flew under The Broadway Bridge on a day I struggled to pedal home. I was so tired from learning all day (woe is me, I know) and the wind was so harsh on the bridge. It made sense to stop and rest to look down the span of the river. I watched the geese extend their wings to glide over the river. It was so lovely.
  2. The PNW winter is a major drag; you have to change clothes four times a day as a bike commuter. Once in the morning then at the office and again in the afternoon and in evening. I’m really excited for the weather to improve.
  3. Green boxes on the street are–by design– to teach drivers to see cyclists. Bikes line up in the green box and the people in cars watch cyclists gather. It’s a genius idea for bike visibility. One day while standing in a green box in Portland, and I counted fifteen people. Thirteen of them were women. Badass, y’all. I wish I could shrink and pink that feeling for everyone who identifies as a feminist.
  4. I’m shocked by the women who wear full-on business clothes during their commute. I put on make-up in the morning mirror, but I wear bike clothes on the way to work. Battles with saddle sores (TMI, alert!) keep me from looking city-cute on the bike. There are women in panty-hose and fancy shoes, and it’s so charming. Maybe they don’t have far to go. Rock on, all you lovely ladies.
  5. Pink sparkles and reflectors are fun! I bought a pink coat. Seriously. It’s bright and easy to see me. That’s the point. Switching from thinking about muddy clothes as a mountain biker to being a city commuter is both depressing and exciting. I’m still processing this change in life. I have fancy-pants lights and reflector tape for my bike frame thanks to my concerned bike geek husband. He set up my bike, and it’s so dorky to interpret newly wrapped handle-bar tape as an expression of love, I know, but it’s so sweet.
  6. The color of the Broadway Bridge reminds of the Golden Gate Bridge. This construction project makes bike commuting problematic, but damn y’all, the bridge was built in 1911. We need to take care of our bridges.
  7. Sometimes when I come to an intersection, I love the person who has slowed down in his or her car. Shoulders behind the wheel relax. I wave. We smile at one another and carry on.
  8. Usually the people I have encountered with mobile technology that plays music annoy the hell out of me. They almost always have really crappy taste in music. One day a very normal-looking workaday man rode by me playing Johnny by the Violent Femmes quite loud. It made me happy for the rest of the day.
  9. When I have lofty thoughts about the future of open education, I can see that we are very much in the sharrow stage policy-wise. That’s frustrating to people who have been in the movement, I suppose, for a long time. It’s also kinda awesome if you’re new to learning about open education. It’s like driving down the street and seeing a bicycle symbol on the road for the first time. More on this idea later.
  10. If I can be there to witness a gaze into the horizon of what it is possible–either by bike or by the Internet–then I’m very happy.

Open education and bike advocacy during the other 51 weeks of the year? Yes. Each passing day. On your left.

This much I know.

 

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Workshop As A Verb

Posted on February 3, 2016 by Alyson Indrunas

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. ~Cormac McCarthy

One of my most vivid childhood memories is the day I learned how to ride a bike without training wheels. I remember my dad running behind me with one hand on the back of my yellow banana seat telling me I could do it. At the point where I thought I was doing really well, I looked behind me to get his approval, and I saw that he wasn’t there. The next thing I knew my front tire was stuck underneath a bumper of a car and I crashed hard into the trunk, and then flipped over onto the street. Blood flowed from both elbows.

By the time my dad got to me, I was crying. Tears of humiliation. Tears of failure. “You looked great, kid, until you took your eyes off the prize. Always look where you want to go.”

When I finally found my love of the bike again in my late 20s after the hiatus of my teen years, that “look where you want to go” was the advice I got about mountain biking, skiing, and snowboarding. Where your eyes go, your body, bike, skis, and board will follow as well. Every time I crashed, I accepted failure as part of getting better. If you are crashing, then you are improving so I was told.

That’s advice that is easy to forget. I said this exact quote to a teacher this week who expressed frustration about the current practices of her colleagues. Change, it seems, is so very hard. I said, “You just have to keep your eyes on where you want to go. Look where you want to go. Find people on the Internet who share your ideas. You’ll feel less alone. You may feel isolated here, but there are others just like you on other campuses. I promise.”

That’s advice that is hard to remember.

Screen Shot 2016-02-03 at 8.38.04 PM

Banana Seat Beauty, My First Bike (source)

This past week, I did my first workshop as a Lumen Learning employee, and I LOVED it. (All caps there, so it’s sincere, y’all). I love teaching teachers to do their best work with technology. And I realize that makes me sound ridiculously cheesy, but let me tell you a quick story.

I travelled to Cerritos College in southern California, and I had such a great time talking to really lovely people. Really smart people who care about their students. Really smart people who love the work of the Lumen Learning. Really smart people excited about what we are doing as a company. What we do. 

I felt very proud to now be a part of this story–what we do. 

While I was rushing on my way to another meeting after an online meeting ended, a student stopped me to ask me a question. He said, “Hey, you work here. Can you help me? I’m lost.”

Sure. I don’t work here, I thought, but he looked frantic. “What can help you with?”

He said, “I can’t find the Liberal Arts building. Anywhere.”

I had no idea where I was going much less where that building was, but I had a link to the campus map on my calendar agenda. I pulled it up on my phone, and we looked at it trying to read the screen in the glare of the bright southern California sun. “I’m walking that way too, so we need to go this way, I think. It’s east of where we standing.”

“Awesome. Thanks for helping me. I have to pick up my daughter in hour, but I need to talk to my English professor. I can’t finish my essay until I ask a couple of questions. That class is so hard.”

In that moment, I felt more at home than I have felt in months. I miss students. I miss community college campuses. I miss community college teachers. My friends. Don’t get me wrong, I am really in love my new life in Portland, but it’s a been a really big change. Being back on a community college campus just made me feel at home.

It also felt very familiar to teach teachers new to OER. I’ve done too many workshops about technology to count at this point, and it’s fun for me. Before any presentation, I always think about teaching my very first “workshop” versus teaching a class. Teaching to your colleagues is a different game than teaching students. Teaching teachers is harder. A lot harder. No training wheels. I just hopped right on and starting pedaling.

Back then, I was terrified to present to my peers. Terrified. My husband, thank my lucky stars, made me laugh by sending me quotes from Cormac McCarthy novels via email. He has now upgraded to clever text messages and emojis, and I feel incredibly lucky to have his friendship. Because, let me be honest, what I advocate for is a big change for a lot of faculty, and it can be exhausting. They sometimes feel threatened. They sometimes feel pressured. They sometimes feel intimidated. In short, I see on their faces what I felt the very first time I did a workshop on technology.

The fear of failure.

What I learned—and this is the thing—there were always one or two people in the room who didn’t say a word. They didn’t smile. Didn’t react. Didn’t show any signs of support, and I felt that I failed them. I’d feel like a failure because I didn’t win over every single person in the room. Truth be told, when I did presentations and focused on those one or two folks I had “failed,” I’d put on a happy confident face, shake their hands, and then I’d fall apart with self-loathing in my car on the way home. Or I’d drink heavily with my non-academic friends. You know, healthy reactions to leadership issues.

Then two days later–sometimes a month later–my inbox would light up with emails. Voicemails would appear will invitations to come to department meetings. Questions would come from people quoting those who were somewhat silent in the audience.

Invitations would start with the words, “I have more questions than answers now that I’ve seen your presentation. You gave me a lot to think about, but I needed time to process it all. Can we talk? I’d love to workshop an idea with you.”

Using the word, “workshop” as a verb–I love it. It’s like riding a bike on familiar trails. It was nice to pedaling that way again. We can look where we want to go together.

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Learning As A Community

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Alyson Indrunas

 

When I started graduate school again in 2010 as an education major, I was pretty unsure of what the future would hold for me and higher education. Learning communities were all the rage from about 2004-2009 at the community colleges where I worked, so I thought I’d focus my research on how this style of teaching could adapted to the online or hybrid curriculum. For the record, I never got to teach a learning community course because they were either the exclusively scheduled for full-time faculty or I couldn’t justify the extra (unpaid) prep time it would take to collaborate with another teacher.

Three of my favorite colleagues taught a biology, chemistry, and English composition learning community that I thought was the bees’ knees for pre-nursing students. This was before the hullabaloo about STEM, and I thought they were onto something big. When the English teacher started talking about retiring, she asked me if I’d be interested in taking her place. I was so honored, but I had to turn it down because my teaching load of six composition courses and my freelance work were just too overwhelming. And I’ll be honest and admit that the science teachers intimidated the hell out of me even though they were incredibly nice.

Then The Recession hit.

Funding for learning communities dried up. Courses were unbundled (surprise! that word is back). Faculty stopped pitching ideas. There are dead links to learning community course materials in the dusty corners of the Internet.

I’d like to think that the learning community is an idea with legs in 2016.

In 2008, Matthew Zeidenberg published “Community Colleges Under Stress” through the Community College Research Center.

Read the following quote as a Venn Diagram with open education, effective courseware, and supported professional learning for teachers. Add more circles focused on recent conversations about competency-based education, the unbundling of the curriculum, and guided pathways for students.

See these Venn Diagrams swirling around the conversation about free community college.

From Zeidenberg in 2008:

Another promising strategy that could potentially improve the efficacy of remediation is the “learning community,” in which groups of students take a number of courses together, with faculty coordinating the teaching. In this arrangement, a remedial course can be coupled with a college-level subject course. A student might take a remedial English course in combination with college-level history and sociology courses. The reading and writing in the remedial course would use materials from the college-level course. Learning as a group can create a sense of teamwork and connectedness that can improve student motivation and success. In addition, if students see a connection between remedial courses and college-level success, it may motivate them to work harder in the remedial courses. An experimental evaluation by Susan Scrivener and colleagues of learning communities at a community college in Brooklyn, New York, found some positive impacts of the program. Students in the learning community had better outcomes during the semester in which the learning community was implemented and completed the college’s remedial English requirements faster.

Note the bolded sentences. That’s the thing.

At the time of this publication in 2008, most of the people I worked with did not know about open education, open educational resources, or that there was a movement of people working to build on this idea. It’s still not a mainstream idea for many faculty members. That’s changing, and it’s very interesting to see it unfold.

The challenges our students and teachers face, however, remain very much the same.

We now have powers to build and blend courses in ways that could support learning communities. Now that I work for Lumen Learning, I see how courseware gets created, how it’s used to generate meaningful data about student performance, and how it can change everything for teaching and learning online. And I believe that, by the way, or I wouldn’t have accepted this job.

Honestly I made a joke about learning communities, and I remembered this research I did for an adult education class titled “A Foot In the Door” where I interviewed three adult returning students about their educations. All three of them faced external pressures such as health problems, jobs, transportation, and child-rearing that made it difficult for them to get to campus. They all admitted that they sometimes struggled to get to campus because of their personal lives. I was curious why they didn’t take online classes where they could have more flexibility with their schedules.

To my surprise, all three students who were very different, expressed how the lack of community they felt as online students drove them away from online courses. In a face-to-face class, they told me, they felt part of community and they liked the personal attention of the teacher. They liked feeling like they were a part of a community learning together.

Here’s what I wrote in 2010 as my reflection about this research paper and presentation (feel free to laugh at my mention of specific products. I did):

I am left with larger questions regarding my future role as an educator. How can we, as online teachers, help enrich the adult returning student’s perspective of online learning? Do adult returning students prefer face-to-face classes to online classes? If so, why? Will communication technologies like Elluminate, Skype, and teleconferencing alienate or entice this demographic? Will technologies that allow more “virtual” face-to-face interaction online, help adult returning students who have only limited access to traditional learning spaces? As more of my own teaching takes place online or in hybrid classes, I wonder if I am losing opportunities for teaching students like my interviewees, a demographic I care a great deal about at EvCC. Despite my seeing them all as ideal candidates for online classes, they see themselves as poor fits for this style of learning.

All three students are emphatic about needing direct human interaction in their learning process, yet some of the practical challenges they cite in being students could perhaps be remedied with the benefits of asynchronous learning.

That bolded sentence–that’s the thing. Still. In 2016.

Direct human interaction. Personalized learning. Personalization. Connection. Personal connection. Community. Learning as a person in a community.

It can be done with technology, and I’m very excited about this learning community that I now call my day job. It’s an idea with legs, as they say.

Let me close with another quote from Zeidenberg in 2008:

Limited finances are hobbling the ability of community colleges to fulfill their multiple missions. Although more money is not the solution to all problems, it is clear that it is better, all things being equal, to be less reliant on part-time faculty and to allocate money to support strategies such as tutoring and mentoring, supplemental instruction, individualized student counseling, and programs to assist students to succeed in college.

That’s the thing. In 2016. Still.

 

 

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Files & Files: A Memoir

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Alyson Indrunas

It’s funny. I think I was a better blogger when I was an unhappy grump about my job. What to do when I spend a lot of time reading and writing at work? And I dig it! In my free time I’m checking out local bars and restaurants, watching movies, binging on television shows, reading books, knitting–anything else it seems these last eight days–but writing.

My 100 day commitment is on hiatus, but I can file what I did create during that time as a somewhat successful writerly feeling. I’m rejoicing, right? I have finally found satisfying work with people I really like–in a city where I can see living long-term. Holy hot damn, I have stumbled upon the tri-fecta happiness with the jobby job.

You see, there have been many times in my life when I have loved The People, but not The Work. The Work, but not The Place. The Place, but not The Work. Two out three, I can tolerate it for a time. One of the three; I get bored and/or slowly slip into depression and self-loathing. Zero out of three? Well, that usually ends badly.

When I don’t write, I organize. I’m on a mission to get my files of memorabilia, research, writing, and artifacts from the past together in some usable and searchable form. Or I’m throwing it away (recycling when I can). In my last post, I wrote about eliminating piles and piles of paper before my migration to Portland. There were three piles I didn’t tackle a month ago because I wasn’t ready to face them.

1] My files from my years as eLearning Director–a short era, now that it’s in the rear view mirror. 2] The files from my M.Ed. degree–an era I survived yet remember little of anything significant. And 3] My files from when I pretend I’m a writer–a long era now as I’m now reminded every time I look in the mirror these days.

Here’s the thing.

Everything has somehow shaken down to this grouping of files. This list of interests. Four drawers of a metal cabinet are now one tidy wooden wine crate. Labeled. Organized. Easy to find. Mighty damn tidy-like.

OER-related. From my very first notes when I discovered that the acronym meant open education resources to my latest very long to-do list at work.

Status: Useful, relevant, and meaningful. Big smooch, I love this file.

Adult education. This is an on-going file that I’ve been keeping since I taught my first community college class in 2003. Sometimes I call them non-traditional students. Sometimes I call them adult-returning students. Sometimes I call them adult learners. Sometimes I call them life-long learners. They’re a motley bunch that I like to think about since I’m kind of juvenile at heart.

Status: Potentially useful as I learn more about community college policy. Potentially useful for others planning online programs. Or not.

Grad-school research and papers. These are mostly disposable assignments that feel like a waste of time since none of them are publishable nor are they usable for others. I mostly hate this file. The writing was sort of applicable to my career, but not to my thinking. Most of the assignments were very rigid. Hot tip: If you teach grad students in education, then you need to rethink your assignments. Have your students write a philosophy of educational technology and pedagogy based on the readings you select. Make them blog about their thought process daily for weeks. Help them write an outline for a journal article using a wiki that they build with like-minded peers. Model how to be a scholar in the field of educational technology. Show them how to create a portfolio of artifacts from all of the above summarizing their pedagogy. Everything else is a giant waste of their time as future teachers.

Status: Unclear why I’m keeping all of this other than it is a symbol of a hard batch of years. Publishable works unknown. Prolly not. Potentially useful as kindling for a bonfire.

iClicker/SRS research. In 2015, this file actually became a book chapter.Yay! I’m hoping to present more on this idea. What I once thought was becoming a kind of dated and obsolete “tech tool” is always new someplace to somebody.

Status: This research shows cell phone polls make teachers and students happy when the stars align with meaningful questions about coursework. Cell phone polls may be the best technology we have in the classroom to date, yet it’s the least understood by teachers. The ubiquity of the cell phone allows for interactive use of technology that is easy to use. Why not keep writing about it?

Teaching teachers to teach online. This research dates back to 2009 when I started think about how most training seriously lacked any conviction about how to forget about the face-to-face. How to think about teaching without referring to the face-to-face. How to think of teaching in a whole new way. This file connects to everything above. I’m just not sure what to do with it anymore, but I’m still training/teaching people at my new gig.

Status: Keep adding to it. There’s got to be something useful for somebody; I just haven’t figured it out yet, but I will. 

Presentations. All of the notes, proposals, and blurbs for presentations from the last five years.

Status: One more year, then recycle it. It’s A Mess, Like Me: A Memoir.

Le Livre Maintenant. This is the file that haunts me as the novel(s) I’ll most likely never write.

Status: Hair Shirt. The one thing I can’t seem to make happen when all of the above takes most of my time. Sometimes all of the above feel like pretty successful endeavors.  

My best failures. This damn file makes me laugh at myself.

Status: Ongoing, high-maintenance, biggest file of them all. Tune in for more details. More to come in 2016.

This will be my last post of 2015 because I’m heading to the mountains on Tuesday to do some snow-shoeing during the day and some wood fired hot tubbing at night. Happy New Year, readers.

Status: Happy. Very happy. Mountains, here I come. 

 

 

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A Path Of Recent Thought

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Alyson Indrunas

I think of this as my main blog, and I want to keep it that way for now since some people actually tune in. I don’t know who you all are, but thanks for placing your needle on the record of my thoughts from time to time.

I want to explain– and record what I’ve been up to with writing. You know, just in case you care how I’m getting bloggy with it these days.

If you follow this blog, you know that I sometimes write about the way I classify life.

1] There’s the jobby job–the activity which results in a paycheck.

2] The hobby job–the activity which results in no paycheck, but makes me very happy.

3] Then there are my beloved Adventures. The part of life that doesn’t connect to money, the material, or intentional mindfulness about being happy. It just happens.

I’ve been searching for all three to come together and that’s the moment I want to record right now.  The jobby job feels like a hobby job and it’s a total adventure. A Memoir.

This is where it gets really interesting: I’m writing everyday. I’m reading everyday. Intentionally. Mindfully. Adventurously. And it all kind of connects in interesting ways.

Here’s the path of my recent thought.

Sometime in October, I committed to writing one short article a day for the latest iteration of the federated wiki. I now have written 55 posts since October 27, 2015. That’s pretty incredible for me given how much my life has changed during this time. I’ve also written elsewhere in paper journals, on debit card receipts, and on bar napkins, but I haven’t written here to explain what I’m up to and how to follow.

But for what it’s worth, as they say, dear readers. Here’s the thing.

Sometimes I’m writing here on this blog you are reading, obviously.

Since October, I have for many days written here.

Then all my posts got magically moved to the wikity.cc which connects to other people writing together to my own site. Heretofore, I will continue my 100 day project there.

I just glanced through the pages featuring forkable content for the massess and my work–the entire record of my days–is all there. I shared my entire thought process as I wrote an outline for a book that I’d like to write. A book I’d like to write.

Wait. Hear that? It’s the broken record I keep playing in my mind.

I’ve now spent a year writing with the federated wiki. It’s changed my way of thinking about time and learning.

Time as it relates to teaching and learning.

Time as it relates to teacher collaboration.

Time as it relates to open educational pedagogy.

Time as it relates to sharing my learning in a community.

Time as it relates to publishing one’s ideas to share with others.

During this time, I’ve taken up yoga again and I’ve been looking up words that my teachers use as they explain the poses that are now so hard. Dammit. Three years ago, they were so easy for me. Learning poses again has made me both frustrated and sad. Thrilled and motivated.

Each day, my teacher said, connects to the Samvatsara. I had no clue what she meant because I was focusing on not passing out from pain. I’ll look that up later and write about it, I thought.

Samvatsara, turns out is a Sanskit word meaning year. Each day connects to the year. Intentionally. Mindfully. Adventurously.

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