It’s still morning – 11:51 so this counts. I am very grateful or trying to be so today. I have an interview for a fulltime job at Lehman. I have my doubts, but I also have my hopes. Perhaps this time I actually will make a living wage!! The area of this position is online education,which is something I’ve become quite familiar with these past 8 years. I started back in 2003 I think by using Blackboard as a supplement to my English courses. As online became more and more used by CUNY, I was fortunate to be one of the few adjuncts who was allowed to participate in a Sloan Consortium seminar for training CUNY faculty in online. These two seminars helped very much, but the hands-on help I got from a particular colleague, Susan Quarrell, has helped me even more. I call on her when I have a question or a problem, and she’s at least 2 to 3 steps ahead of me in this “brave new world.”
So, the job is academic program manager for online education – a new position at Lehman. I would be working for the Director of online ed in various ways – mainly I think taking some of the burden of details from his plate. Some days, I think I know very little and other days I realize that I know quite a bit. Is it enough? I’ll let you know – if anyone is out there reading this morning musing. I have four more minutes. Okay. Here are my feelings about online education.
It’s an amazing new world. I can think of nothing as revolutionary as the invention of the printing press. It’s a controversial world. Many see it as the end of civilization as we know it. I believe they’re misinformed or ignorant of the big view. We have to view all of this new world as a profound sea change. Right now, it’s the wild west – a free-for-all where idiots can publish anything they want to with impunity. That’s what the naysayers latch onto – the idiots. What we need to disseminate is this idea that we have used in our human history to our great advantage. We choose. We select. We filter.
In order to do those three things though, we have to become knowledgeable. There is a certain amount of work involved, to be sure. I have learned what I have learned mostly through my own stumbling toward the light learning of different platforms and applications. It’s taken an enormous amount of my time. Which leads me to another criticism. We do not connect with each other anymore – except through the web. And there are many kinds of webs out there. We don’t see each other to schmooze, argue, make love even! in the real world (although I’m not sure how virtual lovemaking works, I’m sure that there are people doing it).
I however know that I continue to see the people I want to see as much as I have in the past. I am a New Yorker and I live in the Bronx. For Manhattanites, that may mean once every 5 years, as they are loathe to go above 96th or even 14th Street. I feel more connected to the people in my life now than I ever did in the past. The intensity of connectedness is amazing on the Web. What’s to argue with that? Eh?
My students love taking online courses. Even the older students (as I teach in the Adult Degree program at Lehman every semester) learn the tech very quickly. The greatest advantage for them is the level and amount and quality of writing that they must do. In an asynchronous environment their only means of communication (thus far) is through their writing. Even with the use of Wimba (which through various strata, allows for real time comunication including video), the primary delivery of learning is through the written word. How powerful this is. In this environment, students must write in order to succeed in the course. In the process, many of them become more thoughtful, more reflective learners, and their writing reflects this advantage that online offers.
Well, it’s now 12:08. No more morning musings for now. Wish me luck today.
