Techfoot

This is the point in the year when many of us in the academic community begin to think really seriously about time. When “the summer” began last May, there seemed to be plenty of time to complete our projects, however optimistic or unrealistic our expectations. Now with 5 days to go before our faculty orientation time doesn’t look the same. My project list is longer than it was when I started, and my conversations on the path with others suggest that I’m not alone.

This summer, these final reflections on my time and how I invested it have been inescapably colored by the death of Randy Pausch, a man I never met but who I feel I know somewhat through the miracle of the internet. Last night I watched parts the “nuts and bolts” presentation on time management he did at UVA and thought about what a gift it was to be reminded of the importance of the individual decisions we make every day about meetings, phone calls, email and the other things that shape our lives.

We’re doing an experiment in the next month to track how those of us in the Academic Information Services group spend actually spend invest our time. Just a few days into the project, it’s already clear how extraordinarily difficult it is to try to focus energy and time on things that are important. Over the years, we’ve filled our lives with actions and decisions and habits that probably need to change to deal with the realities of our work lives now. Change of this magnitude is always tough, but letting others determine the directions of our lives is tougher in the long term.

A colleague of mine recently likened the course planning process to what goes on inside a sausage factory:

Over a century ago, the German statesman Otto Von Bismarck supposedly said, “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” Same point can be made about the way I construct course syllabi…

While some folks may be shocked by realities of how faculty members plan their courses, I think there is real value to opening up the process. In that spirit, I’m planning to use this blog to reflect on my activities in preparing the Emerging Technologies in Education course that I’m planning for the fall. The planning model that I use looks something like this.

For me, course planning involves balancing three sets of interlocking goals: the learning goals of the individual students, the constraints (and affordances) of accomplishing those goals in a credit-bearing college course, and the “institutional press” of conducting the class within a specific institutional culture. When I plan a class, I try to structure our time together in a way that does justice to the complexity of these three sets of expectations. In a perfect world, the goals would be largely aligned, but in the real world of practice they seldom are.

As a course planner, I make decisions about structure, sequence, timing, grading and the myriad of other details based on my individual interpretation of the context of the class. There are at least four lenses that I use to focus on the particulars of a class.

• Educational Philosophy: Since the earliest scientific studies on curriculum, planners have noted that course design is a reflection of individual educational philosophy, and there is tremendous variation in the fundamental world views that shape teachers’ decisions. While my practice draws on a variety of perspectives–liberal education, progressivism, sometimes even behaviorism–my primary decision-making lenses are humanistic education and individualized instruction.
• Authentic Learning: As an intellectual and genetic descendent of John Dewey, I’m committed to building classes that advance authentic learning: learning that uses real-world problems and projects and that allow students to explore and discuss these problems in ways that are relevant to them.
• Authentic Teaching: One of the dangers of a scientific approach to teaching and learning is that it devalues the relationship between teacher and learner. In planning courses, I try to find topics, techniques and problems that connect to my genuine interests and concerns. In Parker Palmer’s terms: “Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will also find the joy that every human being seeks–we will also find our authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Fredrick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’”
• Communities of Practice:. I’ve come agree with John Seeley Brown that one of the major goals of education is to bring students into contact with divergent communities with distinct understanding of knowledge and distinct ways of judging what is interesting, valid and significant. The focus of a community of practice is “learning to be” rather than merely mastering a body of knowledge. A major question in my courses is what does it mean to be an effective learner, citizen, teacher or administrator in a time of unparalleled technological change.

Translating those broad principles into practice—a set of activities and interactions, bounded by time and constrained by the realities of “institutional press”—make the course planning process an enormously complex one, but one that constitutes the heart of effective teaching.

Some time ago I was responsible for a camp in the Ardirondacks with a big dam that controlled our lake. One summer we had some problems and had to bring in an engineering firm to do some work, and one of the engineers was explaining why building dams is so expensive. Generally about 90% of the work is invisible: rerouting stream beds, pouring footings and installing other infrastructure elements that, on the surface, have noting to do with stopping the flow of water. While that’s true, the entire project has no value unless you finish the job and do the last 10% that actually stops the water.

In some ways many academic IT projects are a little like that, but with the numbers reversed. Buying and installing hardware and software, configuring systems and running pilot tests all take time and technical expertise. But for many of our projects, the real work that produces gains in teaching, learning or productivity just begins when those initial projects are completed. Producing those gains may take years of communication, evaluation, training and re-engineering. I wonder how many of us really understand that and commit to finishing the job when we launch some new initiative. Would we focus our time differently if we were more realistic about what we were committing to?

Photo by Flickr User Farm3 under a Creative Commons Attribution License