Academic freedom endangered again

(Cross-posted at BlogHer)

Members of the University of California, Davis Academic Senate (mostly tenured and tenure-track faculty) recently received an e-mail that contained this warning:

According to recent court rulings, your speech and behavior in job-related duties as a public employee rather than a private citizen have no First Amendment protection. This means that disciplinary action may be taken against you (including dismissal) for statements you make in the course of your employment. Any activity performed on the job falls within this purview. [... W]e recommend that you expect that your speech and behavior outside of your field of scholarship is absolutely not protected by the First Amendment.

Further, university policies on academic freedom only protect speech and behavior in your area of demonstrated academic scholarship. Do not expect that university policies give you a right to speak and act freely in your job duties on campus outside of your scholarship. [...] Our employment culture at UC Davis has been supportive of transparency and freedom, but it may not be a right.

Full disclosure: I'm a (staff, not faculty) employee of UC Davis, but I would be writing about this issue even if I weren't. In addition, let me make clear to any UC or UC Davis administrators out there: I'm not writing this as part of my duties as an employee at UC Davis--an important caveat in the context of this article.

For fascinating background on the court cases that led to the UC Davis memo, definitely check out Michael Bérubé's post at Crooked Timber and UC Davis Professor Eric Rauchway's post at The Edge of the American West, as well as the large number of comments at each post. Both posts offer a legal history memo, tracing its contents back to two cases: Garcetti v. Ceballos and Hong v.Grant. You can read a quick round-up of the issues from Marc Bousquet, but I highly recommend the Bérubé and Rauchway posts. Really, they're required reading on the subject.

Here's my question as an occasional lecturer at UC Davis and an adjunct professor elsewhere: If faculty have neither First Amendment nor academic freedom protections outside their areas of "demonstrated academic scholarship," how do we draw the borders of that scholarship? For example, I consider myself a scholar within the very broad (inter)disciplines of American studies and museum studies. But my peer-reviewed publishing has been limited to the history of women in American institutions of natural history, as well as a couple of academic book reviews. If dissertating or publishing are to be used as demonstrations of scholarship--and those traditionally are the ways academia has defined someone's areas of research--then my teaching largely falls outside my areas of demonstrated scholarship. Which means I have neither First Amendment rights nor academic freedom in my classroom--even though American universities are supposed to be preserves of intellectual thought, and even though I live in one of the more left-leaning states in the country. How does one teach undergraduate and graduate students if expressing evenly mildly controversial opinions becomes a threat to employment?

As is too often the case, I found it difficult to locate women bloggers commenting on this issue of academic freedom in the university context, and particularly as it relates to Hong or Garcetti. That said, the women who are writing about it are saying really interesting and important things.

Helen Norton at First Amendment Law Prof Blog points us to an article (PDF) by Judith Areen on "the interests that justify constitutional protection for academic speech, addressing faculty speech on governance issues as well as speech related to research and teaching." Areen argues that the scope of academic freedom should extend beyond a faculty member's narrow band of scholarly production. Here's an excerpt from her article:

[C]ontrary to common understanding, academic
freedom is about much more than faculty speech—more than simply the university professor’s analog to the citizen’s right of free speech. Rather, academic freedom is central to the functioning and governance of colleges and universities. Louis Menand recognized this broader role when he called academic freedom a “key legitimating
concept” of academic life, one that explains a wide array of issues from why departments have the authority to hire and fire their own members to why the football coach is not allowed to influence the quarterback’s grade in a course. Academic freedom, properly understood, has what I will call a “governance dimension.” It is not only about faculty research and teaching; it is also about the freedom of faculties to govern their institutions in a way that accords with academic values whether they are approving the curriculum, hiring faculty, or establishing graduation requirements for students.

Katharine Mangan writes at The Chronicle of Higher Education about how one administrator losing her court case as a whistleblower "could have a chilling effect on free speech and make it harder for university lawyers and officials to do their jobs."

Back in 2006, LizardBreath of Unfogged provided a dissection of Garcetti. Looking at the Supreme Court decision, she concludes,

Souter contemplates that speech by government employees in the course of their duties should only be protected only insofar as it meets a high standard of responsibility and consists of "comment on official dishonesty, deliberately unconstitutional action, other serious wrongdoing, or threats to health and safety"; Breyer believes that even that standard would unworkably deprive state employers of control over their employees, and suggests that the First Amendment should protect such speech only where "professional and special constitutional obligations are both present". Either of those standards, still, either: (1) ends up protecting employees whose duties consist of speech from management action even where they are wrong or incompetent in what they have said, which seems absurd, or (2) ends up extending First Amendment protection to speech only when a court considers the speech correct or valuable, substituting the court's opinion on how to perform the employee's duties for the employer's, which seems, likewise, absurd.

I'd love to be talked out of this position -- I'm uncomfortable with the company I'm keeping.

Be sure to check out the comments on her post for some interesting opinions.

At Socialist Worker, Dana Cloud considers several cases of faculty whose academic freedom was challenged by conservative activists. She explains the activists' motivations:

From the 1964 free speech movement to today's anti-occupation organizations, campuses have always been places where struggles for justice break out. This potential might explain why, losing ground in politics and the economy, the right seeks to maintain its grip on outspoken faculty and students.

For breaking news on constraints placed on academic freedom, check out the blog of the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB. For a more in-depth examination of the issues, view the videos or listen to the audio from the In Defense of Academic Freedom conference held at the University of Chicago in 2007.

What are your thoughts?

Liveblogging another New Media Conference session: Five Minutes of Fame

Again, I'm liveblogging. What follows are summaries of rapid-fire, 5-minute-long presentations on projects. Reflection to follow.

Note: The featured bloggers have a giant podium blocking the screen, so these are going to be harder to evaluate/comment on.

Browyn Stuckey, Building a Community Out of Online Professional Development

Quest Atlantis. Mashup for Quest Atlantis Teacher Community. It's a virtual world environment with a game structure for curriculum delivery. Built on the ActiveWorlds platform. It's now approaching 600 quests and 100 different missions that children accomplish as part of the game structure. (Note: I'm not a gamer, so I'm not sure what that means. . .) A socially responsible game: emphasizes learning, playing, and helping. Involves face-to-face and online teacher training and professional development. Emphasizes ideas of embodied cognition. Teacher professional development occurs both through facilitated sessions and through missions in the virtual world. A mashup of events, activities, and sources across many platforms to meet teachers where they already live online--e.g. Facebook, Slideshare, YouTube.

Jackie Gerstein, Creative Web Tools For and By Kids

Creative Web Tools wikis. Students take on the role of stewardship of their own experiences. Students created animated introductions with their own voices to preview their own projects. Students pick their topics and get a wiki page. They use Doppel Me, Moblyng slide shows, Wordle. Students set their own learning goals, evaluate the tools' utility for other students. Free tools: Image Chef, Tux Paint and Doink, Wordle, Newspaper Generator, Animoto, PicLits, Tikatok Books, Dipity Timeline. Students like to create polls and tests using MyStudiyo.

Virginia Kuhn, Documentary is the New Black: Filmic Textbooks in the 21st Century Classroom

Students who are not cinema students even though they are located in the school of cinematic arts. Students take four years of classes with them, culminates in a multimedia thesis product in any discipline. The inaugural cohort finished their thesis projects last year. Students needed some facility with the tools, but also in creating a large-scale research project. She created IML340: The Praxis of New Media. Very lucky to have a lot of production staff. So there was a project ongoing: Iraqi Doctors on the Front Lines of Medicine, and they combined it with IML340 to create the Iraqi Doctors Project. Web site. Implications for large-scale public literacy. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television -- Jerry Mander, 1978 -- argued for books over television. With emergent technologies these days, we have time to go back and look and stop--which we couldn't in 1978. New collab with Brave New Films.

Marie Carianna and Derek Toten, Good! Bien! Ütz! Maya Language Learning from Guatemala to Tulane

Since the 1980s: six-week Kaqchikel Maya language and culture immersion course. Toten is speaking like an auctioneer--I can't keep up. Application is in a CD-ROM and online form. Have finished two units thus far. Within each topic, students initially see just the dialogue part of each lesson, and then they see the activities. Text captioning in Kaqchikel can be turned on or off. Lesson text available in Spanish or English. Online only: student can record their own utterances and compare with speakers'. The production happened over five trips to Guatemala during the summers. Post-production and application design in spring and fall. They hope to have the whole thing online by 2011. Two pedagogy specalists, two production folks. Use high-def cameras, lots of lights, microphones. A whole big production. Very careful with audio because it's for language learning.

Li Zhu and Michael Beahan, Dartmouth College, Jones Media Center: How do I. . .?

A multimedia center in the library. Beahan is director; Li Zhu ("Julie") is a year-long intern and graduate student. Many faculty were unaware that the media center offers more than DVDs and free scanning. So Julie put together a multimedia promo video to market their services to faculty, as well as an instructional video, tutorials, and even recorded their workshops for future use. The instructional video camera helps keep media center staff from getting burned out on answering the questions again and again. Instructional videos are no longer than 90 seconds. Videos are on the Jones Media Center website, on YouTube, and on the library's Facebook page.

Kate Borowske, Hamline University, Library on a Stick and On the Air

Borowske is a librarian and works with a low-residency MFA program in writing (?) for children and young adults. Three-pronged approach: toolbar, online workshops, recorded workshops. Toolbar allows them to search the resources they most frequently use--e.g. university or state databases, ebooks, literary criticism, journal literature. Conduit: Makes it easy to create toolbars. Series of four online workshops via Elluminate Live. Designed content around the toolbar. She wanted to show them all the resources, but have them anchored in the toolbar so they were easier to remember. Then she recorded the Elluminate sessions.

Larry Johnson, The NMC's Hakone (TM) Project: New Life for Second Life

Hakone, Japan is where NMC was born at an Apple forum in 1992. People would fly to Japan, write up their experiences on the way home, and send them out a couple weeks later. Johnson read from one such story which predicted the convergence of telecommunications and computing, and predicted that multimedia productions would once be available on compact disc. At the meeting, Apple announced it would launch the Newton. NMC has built a virtual forum that is a reflection of Hakone.

Paul Iwancio, Aaron Weidele, and William Shewbridge, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Taking Digital Stories on the Road

Wanted to commemorate the Meyerhoff Scholars program's 20th anniversary. Program promotes the participation of underrepresented people in science. Captured 60 stories during the two-day anniversary symposium by using a story booth they created. Black backdrop, chair, lights, video. Scouted locations ahead of time--a classroom, a coat closet, etc. Tried to negotiate the quietest locations possible. Bought a backdrop from a theatrical supply company. Scheduled the interviews--had a sign-up sheet. Had undergraduates currently in the Meyerhoff program conduct the interviews with alumni. When students weren't available, they had interviewees interview each other in pairs or groups of three. Distribution: Meyerhoff website, DVD (have distributed thousands of copies), YouTube. Future projects: homecoming, campus retreat, UMBC heritage project, department oral histories.

Morgan Reid, University of British Columbia, Talking to Our Computers? Transcribing Interview at 2:!!

Needed to transcribe data to text for qualitative analysis. Transcription services were too expensive for the amount of data he had. Check out "Voice Wreckognition" demo on Youtube--existing software was bad. Get high quality recording. Don't work from a live feed. 99% accuracy or better--no spelling mistakes, just an occasional incorrect word. Software: MacSpeech Dictate. Necessary: Express Scribe, any text editor, Dictate 1.2.1, good audio quality in data file, good quality microphone, really good audio isolation for listening. Nice demo!

Jared Bendis, Case Western Reserve University, Teaching the Elephant to Walk Itself: Self-Generating Pachyderm

Another rapid-fire speaker. Digital Case is an initiative of The Kelvin Smith Library. Digital library is an archive of collections, research, historical library materials, any intellectual output of the institution. Also meant to do dissemination, but almost no user interface--a common problem with digital archives. Decided to try to make a user interface with Pachyderm. 1. Log into your account. 2. Upload your assets. 3. Author your screens. 4. Publish your Pachyderm. More Advanced: integrate existing database assets into Pachyderm--museums can do this. Decided to use Pachyderm as an output standard instead of an authoring platform. Query a database, and the results are jpg, xml, and Pachyderm files. Authorship is in the curation of the collection--making a good database makes a good thing. Demo uses beta Pachyderm 2.1. No uploading to Pachyderm--generated from a database. What's next? Design new rule systems to be able to play with the database.

Liveblog: Marco Torres at the New Media Consortium conference

This morning I'm live blogging a talk by Marco Torres called "It's Not about Clicking and Dragging! It's Not about Blogging, Podcasting, Web 2.0'in." Again, as with the Kathy Sierra talk (see previous post), I'll be taking notes and reporting during the talk, and I'll be adding notes later.

Torres starts with a demo. Rule 1: Randomly hit black keys and you can't mess up, as long as you stay with a rhythm. He does this using a small keyboard in GarageBand.

The area of media we talk least about is music. He said he was in Australia recently, and 80 percent of the (independent?) films he saw had copyright violations with their music.

(He plays some notes.)

Torres takes a very mathematical approach to teaching, meaning he prefers the GarageBand keyboard view instead of the musical staff view.

Torres uses an oscilloscope on his iPhone to see the waves of notes to demonstrate dissonance. He plays a perfect fourth ("That's Free Willy!) and then the half-step interval of Jaws. One says "Climb aboard, I'll take you there." The other says "Swim away NOW!"

Torres created a really nice demo on Garageband, mixing grand piano, orchestral strings, and Mexican guitarron, then switching these out with with some Chinese zither and Chinese erhu violin. He then adds some beats, copies the earlier grand piano track, moves it up an octave and switches it to Chinese guitar and adds some hip-hop beats. It sounds pretty awesome as the opening soundtrack for a movie. Impressive! I'll definitely have to play around with GarageBand later.

Torres's mother was an accomplished photographer. He talks about how difficult photography, especially large-format photography, used to be, and yet how cool it felt to actually create something. Photography became very important to Torres.

Another important part of his past is two uncles who creates some of the worst movies every to come out of Mexico--movies about Mexican wrestlers solving the world's problems, incuding vampires and drug cartels.

In movie making, the people involved often have no idea what the other people working on the film are doing. He began to think about the value of a story, especially in education. Stories make stuff have a purpose, rather than making stuff the purpose.

Visuals are powerful. People tend to remember powerful events in images--the Kennedy assassination, Rodney King beating, Challenger explosion, etc. In talking with teachers, he's never had anyone remember something powerful in terms of something they read--it was always in terms of sensory data--what they saw, what they heard.

Torres asked students (age 14-16) what they need to receive, create, produce, and broadcast information. Principals are influential in what students can receive, create, produce, and broadcast in schools. But when the average principal (average age late 40s to early 50s) was in school, there were far fewer ways to receive, create, produce, and broadcast information. Are we limiting our students to pen and paper when there are so many more rich channels?

Torres cites times in his life when he knew the content and context of the subject he was presenting really well, but he was nervous or uncomfortable with their delivery.

We let IT people write policy in education. They often determine which technologies teachers will use and to which technologies students will have access.

The learner is more than a recipient of information.

A student's preferred receptive and productive modalities may not be the same. You can be an auditory learner/receiver and a visual or kinesthetic producer.

We have easy access to information that it used to be difficult to access (he cites the iPhone app CongressPlus).

Torres asked the social studies teachers at a school what makes them an expert. After listening to each of them speak in turn, he asked if he could learn all the information they knew by using Google.

Story: Torres was listening to people debate whether Jeremiah Wright hated white people. Torres downloaded Wright's talk, hooked up a splitter to his earbuds, gave each women a pair of earbuds, and let them listen to the talk. One of the women later turned around and said, "Remind me never to debate anyone with an iPhone."

Ask 9th to 12th graders what they think of school, and the overwhelming answer is "boring."

Torres cites Alton Brown (of Good Eats) as someone who does a really good job at reaching this group. The develops the math, science, and history behind something, and he delivers it with emotional impact. Torres asked Brown's people how they develop a show, and they said, "Oh, we do it just like you educators do." And Torres sighed and said uneasily, "Yeah, sure we do."

(Graph coming soon. (Note to self--red, blue, and yellow))

Mythbusters is also about watching people learn. They're not teaching; they're learning. That makes a huge difference. Ninth graders want to see the process, not just the results.

The learning part is easy. The thing that gets in the way is schooling.

The demand for skills has changed. Schooling gets in the way of developing the higher cognitive skills. Schooling is linear; learning is networked.

Games today, like Call of Duty, can take a kid 30 minutes to explain. Torres: "It didn't take me 20 minutes to explain Frogger.

Fans have changed how Lost has been written. With DVR technology, online forums, wikis, interactive maps, blogs, etc., the viewers are able to analyze the show very carefully. People are debating each other in their native--and different--languages (e.g. Dutch vs. Spanish). Lost is really difficult to explain to a nonviewer. Fans are participants and learners.

Can we get this same kind of learning environment in the classroom and at schools? Lost's writers aren't having curriculum meetings.

When today's principals and educators were growing up, Gilligan's Island was a pretty typical show, and the kind of testing is similar: "Was there a scientist on board?" "True or False: Maryanne and Ginger were best friends." Lost viewers don't care about these kinds of questions.

Torres tells a story of one of his students, David, who was pulled out of school at age 11 by his father to play in cantinas in Mexico for additional income. David is back in school and can play five instruments and sing. Torres: "David, you're your own mariachi band." Torres called on David to provide soundtracks for documentaries and films he was making. David remade the Star Wars songs--after watching the movies for the first time--as mariachi songs. Torres played some clips--they're awesome. (Just imagine the Star Wars march, the Cantina song, or the Imperial March as played by a mariachi band--it's terrific.)

Torres: If I had given David just the option of text or numbers--that wasn't his medium. That's not how he produced information. In fact, David wasn't even allowed to play in the high school orchestra because he didn't play the music the music director. John Williams send the hand score from the original Star Wars film to David, saying he liked David's version the best. After hearing him play, George Lucas even hired David.

Torres's links:
Challenge-Based Learning
Flick School
student films

Live blogging: Kathy Sierra, Cognitive Seduction

I'm here at the New Media Consortium Conference in Monterey, CA, and I've been tapped to be a featured blogger--which means I get the big room's only access to power and Ethernet, as well as a seat at a table in front of the front row. My fellow featured bloggers are Gardner Campbell and Chris Lott, so be sure to check out their blogs, too.

I'll be live blogging this session initially, and then going back to add some reflection and notes, so if you're reading this Thursday morning, please check back in the afternoon or evening for updates.

Pop Quiz: Which is better: (A) "This company kicks ass" or (B) "This product kicks ass." For example, is a better predictor of success someone raving about an author or a book?

We're having an argument here at the table as to which is correct. We're thinking she may go for (C) a cult of personality or voice.

Ah! I'm correct! Secret answer (C) is correct: "I kick ass!"

This definitely makes sense in the context of courses and professors and universities. When debating whether or not to take a course, students seem to talk most about who is teaching the class.

How can companies elicit first-person language, and create experiences that cause first-person language to happen? It's all about the USER kicking ass.

Next question: What did (do) you want to be really, really good at?

For me: hoo boy, that's a tough one. Maybe being a novelist? Following through on playing the French horn? The consensus at this table is: music. I'm apparently sitting between two aspiring electric guitarists. (Men!)

Question: how can you help people be their best at whatever it is they want to be or do? Sierra calls this "The High-Res User Experience." She throws out the idea of tossing out the marketing department in favor of educators. (Hear, hear!)

Half Dome: she sees a big rock. Her husband, a rock climber, sees handholds. Sierra sees death.

Jazz: Experienced listeners hear more notes.

In programming language, Sierra's wine expertise is one bit: red or white.

Being better is better.

No one is passionate about things they suck at.

The point of software development is to move people from inability to ability relatively quickly. Need to move users to a steeper learning curve--but not necessarily with making it feel harder. (Great graph--photo (hopefully) coming later this evening.)

But it's not about the tools we build. It's about what our tools let them do. Not understanding that is reflected in things like technical manuals. Markting materials before people buy a camera are slick, glossy, beautiful, communicative. The manuals (after they buy the camera) is plain, dull, black and white, confusing. Marketing materials: Taking killer photos. Manual: About the camera.

People want to take awesome photos, not learn to use the camera. So, let's help them get really good at something.

I'm thinking about what this means not just for students, but to museum visitors. Museum visitors want to have an enjoyable experience and maybe learning something. Museum exhibits have learning objectives. Where do the two meet?

Mind and brain are in epic battle. Mind is civilized, brain is primal.

Brain is filtering everything that comes at it, trying to decide what gets through. Answer: not much. Brain is devoted to not writing things to long-term memory. We need to work against that.

Example: Students studying, cramming--they don't retain much, even when they're motivated to learn.

So what does the brain pay attention to? Chemistry--that which it feels. So if we can evoke a feeling, the brain thinks it must be important. Reading textbooks is an emotional flatline.

The brain pays attention to weird things. (Example: fortune cookie that says "You will die a horrible death.") We look at faces, at bodies in a moment of thrill or excitement (e.g. watching extreme sports), cute animals (no one in this room awwww'd at the photo of the baby, but at least half the room awwww'd at the photo of a puppy).

Our brains are tuned to look at things and say, "Look, that's not resolved." There are so many cheap tricks to get people to pay attention to say what's the story.

There are lots of things the brain doesn't care about. The smiley, happy, computer-using person holding a tablet PC: "Yeah, not so much," says the brain. Same thing with photos of teachers standing in front of a screen.

Brain doesn't care about code. So it's important to visualize. So put a face with a code. Wake up the brain, increase attention and memory, but then you risk it being about the wrong thing: e.g., that face looks exactly like my ex-girlfriend.

So. . . Provoke with designs, including ones that might be painful and nauseating (Sierra uses an example of a UML diagram for programmers).

Conversation beats formal lecture and tone. Collaborative learning is far more effective in problem-solving.

Important: Talk to the brain, not the mind.

Example: Trick the brain: code is like a tiger.

10 ways to help users kick ass.

1. Focus on what the USER does, not what YOU do. (Technical writers write a book focusing on the quality of the book. To make the great technical book, however, might mean putting in a lot of topics that aren't serving the user. Focus instead on the user experience rather than on every little thing the product does. Someone needs to kick ass as a result of this. Don't build a better [x], build a better [user of x]. Not how do we build a better camera--how do we build a better photographer,

Again, thinking about the museum visitor. Here, it would be "Don't build a better museum. Build a better visitor." But that isn't specific enough. I know how to improve museum experiences, offline and on, but I'm not sure how to make a better visitor. It's similar, I suppose, to helping students learn to ask good questions.

2. Give then superpowers, quickly. The company Electric Rain's mission: The "user must do something cool within 30 minutes."

3. Make them smarter. What makes you feel smarter? Technical field folks say brain training, brain games, puzzles--but they only help a little. Aerobic exercise actually improves the brain's exercise more. Stand up and stand on one leg: You just got smarter.

We tried this: academics and technologists are an unbalanced bunch. Time to market balance boards to these users?

Improving your balance helps you get smarter because your brain is using extra cycles trying to keep you balanced. Your brain lets other things get by its filter as a result. Any kind of learning materials and experience should focus on patching cognitive leaks.

4. Don't focus on [X], rather ask what [X] is a subset of. What is the cooler thing that your product helps your user do--meaning cooler than what your competition does?

In an age of university budget cuts, I've been thinking about which departments and units will survive. Unfortunately, there's now not just the usual competition for campus funds between, for a hypothetical example, technocultural studies programs and sustainable ag programs. Which young program will (should) survive, if budget priorities are such that small programs must be cut? It may come down to how much cooler your products or services to students are than other departments or units.

Our teaching center, for example, is under the same vice provost as the internship and career center, two honors programs, summer sessions, and more. When budget cuts get deep enough that units need to be eliminated, what evidence can we provide that the teaching center's programs are cooler? Yes, we have stats on users, but documenting cultural change on campus is harder--how have we enriched undergraduate and faculty life in different (and better) ways than our (usually sister, now competitor) units?

5. Shrink the 10,000 hours it takes to really master something. There are ways to shrink that. Two ways: learn the patterns and shorten the duration. Help your users figure out the patterns. Help users do their 10,000 hours in a shorter period of time. Learn do do knowledge acquisition and representation. Bruce Wilcox is a really substantial player in the artificial intelligence world. He didn't know how to play the game of Go. No computers can beat even a marginally good Go player. But Bruce Wilcox decided to make a software program for Go. So he went out to interview Go players. In the process of doing so, he became a master Go player in record time--because he was looking for rules he could represent in software. So how can we extract those bit of knowledge?

Always be practicing. Sierra wants to practice without wearing out her horses. So she took a dressage saddle and now uses it as her office chair. She had to build a custom desk to match its height. . .

(BTW, I heart dressage. Haven't done it for years--too busy with a 3-year-old--but it's a really excellent form of exercise.)

So: create a culture of practice. We expect musicians and dancers and athletes to practice. In certain domains, we expect that of course they'll practice--doing something that is meant for nothing other than practice. But software developers don't have a culture of just practicing. (Do college faculty?)

After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise. (10 years vs. 1 year repeated 10 times) Tiger Woods pop quiz: ow much practice time on his strengths versus weaknesses: 80% practicing his strengths. Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the Right Things.

For example, with the horses, if you want to improve one of their gaits, you don't simply canter a lot--because you build in bad muscle memory. So you change gaits frequently, and it's a miracle--the change that needs to happens, happens.

6. Make your product (or docs) reflect their feelings

If we want people to have a better RTFM, we need to give them a better FM. Help and FAQs are not helpful because they are written for the intellectually curious, who would like to know a little more. Users are actually really frustrated.

"Letting them off the hook" is the killer app. Don't let them feel like idiots.

How you make them feel about themselves drives how they feel about YOU. (Think: students.)

7. Create a culture of support.

Hero's journey: Needs helpful sidekicks and mentor.

Look at user community. Look at terms of service from Javaranch: "be nice." Militarily enforced.

Biggest problem for communities: How do you get them to answer and ask questions? Sierra will always think about communities as groups where people get together for learning and support, not as places where people just hang out for fun.

First rule: No dumb questions. People have to feel comfortable asking questions. It's too easy to say "Duh, search the archives of this forum." Same thing in classroom: The prof already covered that, do the reading, etc.

More important rule: No dumb answers. It could just mean having a couple of documents very visible: here's how to answer a question. Get people to consider what it means to really answer a question. In a community, the faster you convert people from askers to answerers, the faster that community is going to grow. (Same thing in classroom--but getting students to learn to ask questions can be tough.)

8. Do not insist on "inclusivity." Because passionate users talk differently--they have jargon and shorthand. It's nice not to have to explain everything--conversations get richer faster.

Measuring community success. Success = more users thinking fast.

9. Make the right thing easy, wrong thing difficult. Horse trainer's advice. Not always easy to implement. For example, for getting fit: treadmill gathering cobwebs. It's not in the corner because you don't use it; you don't use it because it's in the corner. Make it so that you'll literally trip over it if you don't use it.

10. Total immersion jams. 16 hours over two days vs. 16 hours over two months. Frequency matters. Especially important for creativity breakthroughts. Example: Ad Lib from the Game Development Society. So they get together and write entire games over the weekend instead of going through the typical extended development process. The games must be finished over the weekend--even if it's crappy. An add-on: the developers must share the CDs they listened to as they were designing the game.

Quote from 48-hour film jam site: "The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it."

Closing thought: Be brave.

Update: A day later, I'm still thinking about Sierra's talk, and I'm stuck on one piece: In what ways are college students "users"? Part of me is uncomfortable with the idea of students as users--after all, if we're not careful, "users" = "consumers," and it seems that in much of Sierra's talk the two merged. I prefer not to think of students as consumers, but rather as participants. In that sense, Sierra's consideration of growing user participation and expertise on online forums like JavaRanch is closer to what I want to accomplish in the classroom.

Age 34

I turned 34 a week ago, and passing into the second 2/3 of (very optimistically) 100 years has made me more reflective than usual. I used to be a deeply introspective person, but then I entered a Ph.D. program, got married, and had a child. Now I work 150% time during the school year, 100% during the summer. Which means: Lots of distractions.

I also used to think of myself as a writer, whereas now I think of myself as a blogger. There are bloggers who elevate blogging to an art, to writing. I'd like to be a writer again, someone who's thoughtful and more in touch with--more aware of--her authentic self, whomever she may be.

As regular readers know, I've been casting about for a different situation. (In a nutshell: I love my job, not sure of how well its future and mine intersect.) Later this month, I have a job interview to be director of a new, large, and relatively well-funded nonprofit learning institute, and the more I prepare for the marathon, 1.5-day interview, the more I realize I would probably be quite good at that job and would really enjoy the challenge. But is it right for me? Am I right for the folks down there? Only time, and a damn good interview, will tell.

At the same time, I'm increasingly being asked to take leadership responsibilities on the campus where I work in the teaching center. There's the "accessibility czar" position I've been all but offered that would actually allow me to move into even more of a leadership--but not necessarily bureaucratic--role on campus. And today someone told me she'd like to nominate me to be chair of the campus committee on the status of women at the university. I doubt I'll get that position--after all, I've missed most of the meetings (and will miss this month's) because I've been off conferencing--but it's nice to be thought of as a candidate.

Still, while I'm always looking for opportunities, I'm already feeling too busy. I love spending time with Lucas and Fang, but I need more time to reflect, to read, to think, to write, to be whomever I am when I'm not always writing reports or reading master's theses.

Summer is a good time to recommit to these pursuits, and so I will. . .as soon as I get these last two master's theses read. I have several dozen books on deck, and have already finished a couple of novels I'd recommend--the fascinating The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie and the quiet The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (trans. Alison Anderson). Next up: The BLDG BLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh of the fabulous BLDGBLOG. (What? You don't read BLDGBLOG? Come on--you like cool pictures, don't you? And urban futurism?)

Expect more posts of substance soon--especially since I've been asked (and am honored) to be a featured blogger at the upcoming New Media Consortium summer conference. Interested in reading more about the conference? Check out the also-featured blogs of the esteemed company I'll be keeping: Gardner Campbell, director of the Baylor Academy for Teaching and Learning and Chris Lott, a "disruptive technologist" (I kid you not--that's his title) at the University of Alaska. Also attending the conference--and as usual my partners in crime for an un-presentation on [insert whatever it is we end up talking about here]--are Barbara Sawhill from Oberlin's language lab and Laura Blankenship, formerly of Bryn Mawr and now the founder of Emerging Technologies Consulting. I'm looking forward to a couple days spent in the company of a few hundred people who really care about teaching and learning with technology.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Employment, Part A. I very much like my job. I really do. But the possibility of getting to build a teaching center at Awesome University was very exciting. Since it fell through, I've been open to other opportunities that would allow me to build a new organization or initiative--you know, an opportunity to be a bit entrepreneurial.

When I saw the Latest Awesome Directorship (LAD) advertised on a museum industry website, I knew I had to apply. In short: LAD will be responsible for establishing professional development opportunities for thousands of staff and volunteers working for 24 cultural institutions (including many museums, one symphony, and a major zoological society). And it's in a city with excellent beaches, and much nearer to my family than I am now--a 2-hour drive instead of a 6- or 7-hour drive.

So I applied. And I had a 1.5-hour phone interview. By the end of the interview, the top-of-her-field consultant (whom I want to be when I grow up, if I can't be Barbara Ganley) hired by the new professional development organization told me she was advancing me to the final slate of 10 candidates for LAD.

The next step was to write three one-page essays. I did. And I made it to the final four (because I can write my way into just about any opportunity). Next month I fly down for a day and a half of interviews of various sorts. I'll also be required to give a 10-minute presentation of the PowerPoint variety. I'm not a fan of slide presentations, so I'm going to have to work extra hard to force my thinking into a linear sequence.

I've heard through the grapevine that they're looking for someone "entrepreneurial." I hope that means in spirit and practice rather than in dress. :)

The LAD salary should be better than my current one (a low bar: I'm an employee of a state on the verge of financial collapse, and we're staring down furloughs), but living down there is considerably more expensive, so in the end our standard of living might be a wash. (Except: Beaches!)

Anyway, I'm very excited about this opportunity.

Employment, Part B. Today I was in a meeting to discuss the section of a report I'm writing for the campus's steering committee on electronic accessibility. (I chair the subcommittee on teaching and learning.) In the middle of the meeting, the two major co-conspirators (one faculty, one staff) told me that during a meeting they had with the vice provost of IT (who is a big champion of e-access), they decided the campus needs someone to shepherd the campus through the transition to electronic accessibility. At this earlier meeting, the three of them strategized about what kind of work this person would do, and then the VP asked if they had anyone in mind. At once they all blurted out my name.

An immediate caveat: the position would be funded at first by "soft money," meaning the position wouldn't at first be classified as a permanent one, but the hope is that the position would become permanent. And the last thing I want to do in a recession is trade in a reasonably secure job I like for an exciting new opportunity that is unstable.

I said I'd need more information about the position, and they pretty much told me I could write the position description myself. Awesome. (I also told them I'd need a door.)

(An aside: This is the first time I've heard a potential employer say to me, "The big challenge is that you're not disabled. We'll have to address that eventually." By which she meant address it politically--not that I need to acquire a disability.)

Because we're in a tight budget year, there's the possibility that the teaching center where I work now would be open to a part-time buyout of my time--especially during the slow summer months--by another department.

But: If I were willing to assume more risk and accept a part- or full-time position instead of a buyout, I might be able to ask for a larger salary (from the new job), even in a recession year.

So there are possibilities, and I feel the longer I'm a staff member at this university, the savvier I'm becoming at conniving thinking through all the permutations.

Employment, Part C. Awesome University will likely reopen their teaching center job next year, albeit as a staff position. I saw the plans for the new building, and it looks like the teaching center director will have a windowed office at the curve of the building on the fourth floor. Beats the heck out of my current basement office or my impending move to the windowless cube farm in a tin shed. But: There's no guarantee I'd once again be a finalist for the job in a new search. And I'm impatient. . .

Your thoughts?

P.S. In my phone interview for LAD, when I was asked what my greatest flaw is, I said I tended to lean too much in the direction of transparency in all things. This blog entry is good evidence of that, n'est-ce pas?

Is it time to end the university as we know it?

(Herein I offer a round-up of responses to Mark Taylor's recent Op-Ed in the NYT. I'm still processing his opinions and will have more to say soon. This post also appears over at BlogHer.)

This past weekend, I considered a critique of universities as abusive employers and suggested that American universities are, in some ways, profoundly broken. Mark Taylor, chair of the religious studies department at Columbia University, takes this critique to its (il)logical conclusion, calling for us to "End the University as We Know It." He begins with this analogy:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Taylor is a fan of interdisciplinarity. He calls for universities to

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Among his other recommendations:

• Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs.


• Increase collaboration among institutions.


• Transform the traditional dissertation.


• Expand the range of professional options for graduate students.


• Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure.

Click through to the article to read the reasons behind his recommendations, which attracted 437 comments before the editors closed the comment thread. Some comments were appreciative, while others--not so much. Quipped one reader, "Go abolish your own department."

A discussion broke out among readers as to the extent universities should be responsive to market forces, and particularly those of industries that want undergraduates prepared with the skills necessary to join their particular workforces. In my view, universities are where undergraduates develop their critical and creative thinking skills. Undergraduates may enter college thinking they're training for a particular industry, but universities must prepare them instead for work in any industry. Universities should be treating graduate students much the same way; all too often, graduate students, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are trained to be faculty. They hone their skills for a job market that is beyond competitive--it is brutal, with hundreds of applicants sometimes jockeying for the same position.

Bloggers of course have had plenty to say. (As do I, but I'm going to let a round-up stand in for my own still-garbled thinking on Taylor's suggestions.)

Marc Bousquet offers perhaps the most searing critique of the op-ed:

The piece is hilariously out of touch — noting the rise of adjunct labor, the Columbia philosopher of religion and author of 20 books wrings his hands that per-course pay is “as low as” $5,000 dollars a class.

BWAAA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

Reality? Annual income for many adjuncts is about $5,000 dollars a year. On pay that can be lower than a grand per class.

They’re on food stamps.

But sure, you’re right. The problem is that we need to end tenure. When we end tenure, the market will insure that these folks are paid fairly, that persons with Ph.D.’s will be able to work for those wages.

Oh, crap, wait. As anyone actually paying attention has observed, we’ve ALREADY ended tenure. With the overwhelming majority of faculty off the tenure track, and most of teaching work being done by them, by students, and professional staff, tenured appointments are basically the privilege of a) a retiring generation b) grant-getters and c) the candidate pool for administration.

Dean Dad brings an administrator's perspective to the article:

Yes, the existing structures are clunky and overtaxed and frequently asinine. They survive because they address certain problems. The way around them is not to wish those problems away or to postulate a world in which every college is modeled on a graduate seminar at Columbia. It's to come up with alternatives that solve those problems better. Prof. Taylor's model could be a lot of fun on a very small scale, like a think tank. But as a blueprint for higher ed across America, it's a farce.

The reality of higher ed in America is mobility. People move from one institution to another all the time. We've developed an admittedly frustrating common language to make that kind of movement possible. Replacing that common language with a babel of tongues is not a serious answer, and replacing what little common knowledge that clusters of scholars share – canons or classics or traditions – with whatever seems convenient at the time would only make matters worse. Disciplines are arbitrary and flawed, but random fads are even worse. And incompatible random fads at different institutions would be disastrous.

Laura Blankenship (AKA Geeky Mom) of Emerging Technologies Consulting sees some possibility in Taylor's vision of interdisciplinary undergraduate collaborations:

I also see what a fabulous learning experience this was for students. I could envision parallel systems here, where students are required to take courses that are interdisciplinary, but still have majors. And these courses could be centered around a common theme, so that there’s a common language for the students, but it would be good to have the math majors talking to the English majors.

Cathy Davidson of he Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) sees Taylor's piece as short-sighted, but only in that he lacks a sense of recent history:

My one regret is that it is a bit Rip Van Winklish in not recognizing that HASTAC and many other organizations dedicated to changing institutions of learning have been working on this for decades. Change is happening everywhere around him--although, sadly, not so much in the elite humanities departments that he is familiar with.

Michael Campana points out other collaborations envisioned by Taylor that are already taking place within water resources programs at universities around the U.S.

Joseph Shahadi takes issue with Taylor's call to abolish tenure and impose mandatory retirement:

While impossible-to-fire tenured Professors are easy targets, the cost to students incurred by forcing their most experienced professors into retirement would be incalculable. Perhaps my judgment is colored by my arguably atypical experience, but rather than withdrawing into their academic dotage the tenured professors I studied with were dynamically involved with their students and passionate about teaching.

After reading the Taylor article and others of its ilk, Historiann wonders if members of any other industry as regularly ridicule their profession in the pages of the New York Times. She comments,

Taylor sure sounds like a department chair bucking for dean: most of his suggestions will cost universities almost nothing because they depend mostly on–wait for it!–volunteer faculty labor. Who else is going to “restructure the curriculum,” “increase collaboration among institutions,” “transform the traditional dissertation,” and “expand the range of professional options for graduate students?” Good luck getting faculty to do that after you abolish tenure–most of us are going to be sure to look out for Number One when that happens, so you can kiss all of our committee work good-bye! (Won’t you miss all of those senior faculty then? “Old farts” with tenure sure are useful for lots and lots of committee work.) But, whoever does the work, Taylor’s suggestions are just collections of fashionable buzzwords about “the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches,” and preparing students “to adapt to a constantly changing world.”

I heart Historiann.

After reading her comments, I suspect Oona Eisenstadt will also become a new favorite of mine:

An enormously successful academic, aged 64, Taylor wants to abolish the academy at exactly the point where he’s got from it everything he can get. He is, like, sooo over the university; therefore the university is, like, sooo over. Ego anyone? But there’s more. Because in one instance only might Taylor not quite be finished with the academy, namely if it falls. If the called for apocalypse does take place, Taylor will be one of its high priests. He’s setting himself up for real power here. Already vastly famous within the power structure that exists, he can spring to further fame only on its ruins.

[...]

If Taylor had told the university to go to hell when he was a rising academic of 35, I might have given him some respect.

Bobba Lynx of Cranky in Academe takes issue with both Taylor and Erin O'Connor's praise of his article:

I give higher ed more credit: it is a smart animal and can transform itself without the pseudo-radical provocation from the likes of Prof. Taylor. It is here that institutions themselves must be more flexible, and open to the scholarship and kinds of classes they make possible; this may be generational, and seems to already be happening. Shi[f]t happens, and before Profs. O'Connor and Taylor and their ilk go scrambling in peri-apocalyptic survival mode, offering human sacrifices in hopes of appeasing forces over which they sense only minimal ---if any--- control, let's really get at that thought experiment: the larger questions that are diminished by the defensive mentality exhibited in Taylor's piece. The idea that only some radical reconfiguring will save us still has academia stranded on its on island, trying to build its own boat in order to land on the same shore. The larger and more compelling issues are the ones that become demonic forces in O&T species' mind (think of their initials as standing for "zero tenure"): in what kind of a society do we want to live ? If the academy becomes merely reactive instead of constructive, it will ---or has--- lost a great deal of its function in society.

Michael Bérubé uses the Taylor article as an excuse to write, very thoughtfully I think, about the difference between disciplines and departments:

[T]he next time someone complains about the constraints imposed by disciplines, ask yourself (or them!) whether they’re not really complaining about the constraints of departments. And the next time someone claims to be post-disciplinary or anti-disciplinary, ask yourself (but probably not them!) what it would sound like to be “post-intellectual traditions” or “anti-intellectual traditions.”

Natalia Cicere takes this critique a step further, saying bluntly that Taylor "confuses interdisciplinarity with adisciplinarity."

Your thoughts? Which of Taylor's suggestions, if any, speak to you? Which are the crackpot divagations of, to borrow Historiann's term, an old fart?

A book review and giveaway in which I confess I'm ready to move on to (what may seem to you to be) weirder things

Many months ago, I volunteered, via an invitation on Pamela Slim's blog, to serve on an informal advisory board while she drafted her book (due in stores on April 30) Escape from Cubicle Nation. Periodically she would send out e-mails with insightful questions asking for anecdotes about a time when something in our lives as corporate drones went off the rails, or how we made our own escapes from cubicle nation. I never felt quite ready to give Pam an answer to any of these questions because I hadn't really worked for a big corporation, though I certainly have spent time in cubicles and their equivalents. I escaped, for many years, from cubicle nation by going to graduate school, which I thought would forever secure my release from office dronedom.

As the months passed, it became clear that much of what Pam was writing was geared at people who already had experienced some success and garnered some respect in their corners of corporate America and were wondering if they were crazy for thinking it was time to jump ship to, in one of Pam's examples, a doggy daycare business. I began to suspect I might not be in her target audience.

So I remained silent, and thus I felt a bit guilty when Pam sent a signed hardback copy of the book to me, as she did to all members of the book's advisory board. But as soon as I cracked open the book, I knew, finally, that I am--as are many of you, I suspect--the implied readership of Escape from Cubicle Nation.

Those of us in higher ed have known for a long time that the research university is in bed with corporate interests. (For an excellent overview of this phenomenon, see "The Kept University" in the March 2000 Atlantic Monthly.) And those of us who have worked as faculty or staff (but oh, especially as staff) at universities, or who have read Dean Dad's blog for any length of time, know that the university itself is increasingly organized along corporate lines. We know what it's like to be managed, to not be listened to, to be hired on one pretense and then asked to do something else entirely, thanks to that "and other duties as assigned" clause in our job descriptions. Increasingly, as universities slash their budgets, we're learning what really matters to them. (Hint: it isn't teaching, and it isn't the arts, humanities, and cultural studies.)

I'm fortunate to have a position among truly excellent peers in a teaching center whose (retiring!) director shields us, I suspect, from some of the mandates from above. As his time with our center wanes, I'm growing increasingly nervous about what will happen to our center's mission--and with good reason, as no one has invited anyone from our center to participate in the search for a new director (each director is a Senate faculty member and serves a three-year term). Some directors are very laissez-faire, letting the staff develop programs as we see fit, while others are more interventionist. In the case of our current brilliant director, the intervention has been much appreciated, but I fear I will not enjoy the intervention so much when it becomes managerial. Currently, I have a good deal of freedom to design and implement programs and communications for the center, as long as the programs don't cost us anything beyond my salary and perhaps a few hours' time from our administrative staff.

But, as I've said before: In December, we're literally moving from our lovely windowless basement offices to cubes in a 50-year-old "temporary" building/tin shed. We'll be sharing two big cube farms with staff from related units (synergy!), and in each room there will be about 15 people, with one "hotelling" office we can reserve for when we need to have a private conversation. You can imagine how well this plan is going to work. . .

Add to this disappointment my experience of the job falling through at Awesome University. From what I can suss out, there was a difference of opinion between the faculty and staff on the search committee and the administration, with the administration winning, as administrations tend to do. So even at Awesome University, things can suck. Yay.

Anyway, back to Pam's book. I knew from the moment I saw such chapter titles and section headings as "If It Is So Bad, Then Why Am I Afraid to Leave?" and "I Am 35, Divorced, and Live in a Van Down by the River" that Pam was speaking to my fears. After all, I worked damn hard for my Ph.D., and I desperately wanted that tenure-track faculty job. When I didn't get it, and I had to settle for the consolation prize of adjuncting or a staff position, when I accepted my first staff position (as an instructional technologist) I felt that at least I was applying my knowledge and skills in the arena where they were most respected and perhaps needed. I also felt grateful for being able to stay at the university where I had already cultivated a broad network of contacts among faculty and staff.

Why the hell would I want to move on to something else? (Aside from the fact that my therapist pointed out I might be making twice as much money if I were working in private industry.) I have health insurance, decent (by university staff standards) pay, and I believe, to some extent, in the mission of higher education--insofar as it advances liberal arts thinking and enriches community life.

I'm not crazy

Pam's book tells me I'm not crazy. Which--although I appreciate my friends' moral support when I express my dissatisfaction--is such a relief to hear from an objective outsider.

My therapist cautioned me today that I may be still mourning the loss of the opportunity at Awesome University and therefore in peril of investing too much hope into Pam's book.

Still, I keep telling myself: I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy.

I like my job, but I don't belong at this university any more.

I'm not sure if there is an organization where I belong.

This frightens the bejeebus out of me.

It's really hard to admit to academics and to my family of educators that I have an entrepreneurial streak. I believe in Creative Commons, I believe in open source, I believe in open educational resources--I believe, in short, in all that great stuff that so often gets set up as the opposite of the marketplace and of the dreaded "monetization."

But at the same time I desperately want to find a way to "monetize" what I know in the form of services and, yes, products I might provide. I feel I could have an impact on far greater numbers of people by working outside of the academy than I do as a staff member inside of it. (Note: by staff, I mean "not tenure-track faculty.")

Options

I also know that I'm in no position, financially speaking, to quit my current job.

My options, as I see them, are these, each of which is mutually exclusive from the other because of time constraints:

- Buck up and deal, and continue to adjunct elsewhere so that I can (a) keep my teaching skills sharp and (b) make some extra cash.

- Cut down pretty dramatically on my living expenses so that I can cut back on my working hours a little bit. Rededicate myself to research, try to get a book contract from my dissertation, and throw myself back on the (incredibly depressing) academic job market in the next year or two in the hopes of getting a tenure-track job at a small liberal arts college.

- Again, cut down on my living expenses so that I can cut back on my working hours. Experiment with creating products and services on the side, related (and I don't want to disclose too much here, both out of an embarrassment I'm still trying to overcome--and I think Pam's book will help more with that--and out of a desire not to reveal my idea to potential competitors) to K-16 education and/or museums.

All of this is tempered, of course, by Mr. Trillwing's employment in the increasingly perilous newspaper industry and his desire to move over to life coaching and writing, both of which he's very, very good at.

Back to the book

I haven't read all the way through Escape from Cubicle Nation yet, but I will tell you that I'm looking forward to chapter 11, "Test Often and Fail Fast: The Art of Prototypes and Samples." The chapter title appeals to me as a teacher, as isn't teaching often about prototyping and testing and, often, failing and learning from our mistakes? But it also addresses some fears that are, I'm sure, familiar to academics:

• What if it doesn't turn out the way you had imagined?
• What if no one likes it?
• What if no one buys it?
• What if someone else does it better?
• What if you have been wasting your time and should have done something else?

Pam's book talks us through these fears and hesitations--and once we've convinced ourselves that what we want to pursue is worthwhile, she offers a chapter titled "Dealing with Your Friends and Family."

Book Giveaway

The book is definitely worth checking out. And, as it happens, I have a second signed copy because Pam offered a "buy one, get a second signed copy free" deal, and my second signed copy arrived the same day as my free advisory board copy.

I want to give this second copy away to an academic or (recently) former academic who, like me, feels he or she is at (or approaching) a transition point or (let's call it what it is) a crisis of conscience.

To get this second signed copy of the book, you need to do the following:

Share with me your own thinking on this topic of moving to a new place within or away from academia, and why you think Pam's book might help you. Address in particular why you think a book that is pro-entrepreneurialism would be a worthwhile resource.

You can share your story in one of three ways:

1. Blog it, then leave a link to your post in the comments of this one.

2. Leave your story in a comment on this post.

3. Send me your story in an e-mail to trillwing -at- gmail -dot- com. I understand some of you aren't as eager as I am to come out of the entrepreneurial closet, so I won't reveal your name or identifying details if you contact me in this manner.

I'll be picking the winner on Friday, May 8 and either announcing the winner on my blog or contacting the person privately, as appropriate.

Please blog and tweet about this giveaway as the spirit moves you. I'd love to hear from fellow academics (and former academics) what you're thinking about where you are and where you're going.

Obi likes to help

Mr. Trillwing and our "new" (as of last July) dog Obi have a tenuous relationship at best, in that Obi really wants Mr. T to like him, and yet Obi keeps misbehaving in ways that keep Mr. T from wholeheartedly embracing the dog as his own.

Obi tries hard. Here he is trying to help Mr. T with his physical therapy exercises:

Assorted weirdnesses

Weirdness the first: Lucas has scarlet fever. No, I am not making that up. Yes, he will be OK. But WTF. (Thank goodness we live in an age of antibiotics.)

Weirdness the second: Mr. Trillwing v. the kite:



And yes, that is me cackling wildly in the background near the end of the video.

Feel free to go comment about the incident on his blog.

Weirdness the third: Today my therapist referred to me as her "Leonardo da Vinci patient." I'm trying to figure out if that's a promotion or demotion from "Renaissance woman." (I'm thinking there need to be therapists who specialize in overachievers because seriously, my therapists always seem to become fans as much as elucidators, and I assure you I'm not inflating my deeds during the sessions.) Also, she tells me she is forever in my debt because I introduced her to the TV show Life. I'm here to help.