I find Poe interesting to read because many of his stories inhabit the world found between the psychological and the drug-induced supernatural. The mind plays such a key role. And Poe taps in very well to the sources of this interaction - our deepest aspirations, our fears, our partially forgotten memories, and our physical limitations.
Poe's writing also appeals to me because it fits into my own biography, where I have spent much of my life devoted to a kind of seeing, the one done with the mind when the eyes are closed or with them staring at the ceiling or perhaps looking at pen and paper or a computer screen, contemplating some equations or a graphic that represents the math. I wrote about this in a post called The Professor Mind. But in that post, I wanted to go back to childhood if that were possible, to identify when that way of thinking initially manifest in me. I didn't concern myself with going in the opposite direction in time. I'll do a bit of that now.
For about fifteen years as an economics professor, my research was a kind of theoretical math modeling. The math gave the work both a rigor and a way to identify when the results actually could be identified in the theory. But then, in the mid 1990s, I had a career switch to Ed Tech, both as an instructor who explored effective uses of online technology in teaching, and as an administrator who supported other instructors in doing likewise.
This career switch was a happy accident. Only in retrospect did I realize that it was a good fit for me, matching my collegial interests and where I was in the life-cycle to a field in its infancy, which of necessity entailed much in the way of open-ended exploration and, in particular, a pathway for engaging conversations with colleagues around campus. I felt horribly under-prepared in this at first. But I found those I met were willing to attribute expertise to me because of the title I held and I did not try to dissuade them from their views on this point. Eventually, via a lot of background reading and sufficient job experience, I began to feel comfortable in the new role. I dare say, however, that I was never a very good manager and supervising the staff under me was not where my interests lay. Since I didn't "come up through the ranks" I lacked common experiences with my staff. That made it harder for me to manage them. I enjoyed much more the ambassadorial function, interacting with other faculty and administrators around campus, as well as support providers in different units on campus.
My administrative appointment started at 50% time, with the other half of the appointment as a faculty member in the Economics Department. That was soon bumped up to 75% time administrator and eventually to 100% time administrator. When that happened I stopped teaching the large intermediate microeconomics class that had been the source of my experiments with ed tech. I did teach once in a while after that, but as an overload and then only very small classes, once a Discovery course for first-year students and then three different times for the Campus Honors Program.
Three months into my initial administrator job, I took over running SCALE, a soft-money and quite small organization. It supported faculty in what we then referred to as ALN (Asynchronous Learning Networks). There was an all-everything staff person who managed the office and the other staff. We would go for coffee late in the afternoon to review the goings on of the day. For me this made managing the staff just like the ambassadorial function and I enjoyed that. A few years later, as the SCALE renewal grant was winding down an underfunded hard-money organization was formed to succeed SCALE. It was called CET (Center for Educational Technologies).
Initially CET included SCALE staff, some staff who migrated over from the campus teaching organization, and a couple of new hires. After about a month or so I was feeling overwhelmed by the managerial issues. I needed an Assistant Director who would assume many of these burdens, but at the time there wasn't money in the budget to do a search for such a position. So, I half-assed it, informally creating the position of office manager from among the existing staff. It created some internal issues, but it worked well enough that I could devote much of my time doing what I wanted to do. A couple of years later, a real search for an Assistant Director was held as the CET budget had grown after the campus got a permanent CIO.
A year after that, CET merged with the campus IT organization (CCSO) to form a new organization called CITES and CET was renamed CITES EdTech. CITES also absorbed the classrooms technology unit, which previously had been housed in the campus teaching organization. I became the Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies and I had both CITES EdTech and CITES ClassTech in my portfolio. Also, the mission changed, in a not so subtle way. Where before the focus was on effective uses of the technology for teaching, subsequently the aim became finding a way to have a scalable solution to support instructional technology. Initially, this was concentrated on finding a suitable enterprise Learning Management System (alternatively referred to as a Course Management System) for the campus, one that eventually became known as Illinois Compass.
Let me give one more paragraph about this history and then move on. In the language of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, I conceived of CET primarily as connectors. The innovators were the handful of instructors around campus who made novel and effective use of the technology in their classes. The best way to make other instructors aware of these innovations was via workshops, with multi-day summer workshops, combined with some incentive for the attendees to implement in their own classes based on what they learned at the workshops. This was quite effective and further established a collegial relationships between the attendees and EdTech staff. But it didn't scale very well. Many instructors were adopting the technology without having attended the workshops. Further, CET was underfunded. So the CIO suggested that the workshop funding get reallocated to the CET base budget. Now CET funding was more solid, but it had lost its lever to engage faculty on effective uses of the technology in teaching and began its move to simply being a support organization for learning technology. Perhaps that was inevitable, but my heart wasn't in this alternative mission.
Now let me get to what I mean by the word delusion in the title of this post. And in doing so, I will consider only my own delusions. It has two pieces to it. First, it is becoming so enamored with an idea that other related matters move to the background and then may very well be ignored entirely. Second, it is based on an assumption about scaling - if it can work for me then it will work for everyone else who is like me. I will illustrate with some posts from this blog.
I began this blog in spring 2005, partly intrigued by blogging as a release for me, but mainly because I had many work-related issues on my mind and not enough knowledgeable yet disinterested friends to have good discussions about those issues. So, after a bit of experimentation to see if I could generate the requisite prose, I announced the blog to a few friends. Then, a couple of months later, I got discovered by a well-connected blogger, Scott Leslie. Soon after that, I had regular readers for my posts. The first set of posts to consider came a couple of months later.
They are about using undergraduate students in the role of peer-mentors, course content creators, big brothers and sisters, and any other way they might genuinely assist other students who aren't quite as far along. Further, it is about the campus as a whole embracing this at scale. I called the overall idea Inward Looking Service Learning (INSL). There are 7 posts in total under this label. They all appeared in August 2005. I had used undergrads in my teaching the large intermediate microeconomics class, where the feature was having online office hours during the evening, and where the course design was constructed to encourage the students to make use of those office hours. While my course design was somewhat novel, the use of undergrad peer-mentors I got from seeing the practice in some undergrad engineering classes. I did this starting in summer 1996 and continued in the spring semester each year until spring 2001, after which I no longer taught that class. So in making the INSL posts, I was writing about an idea that I was no longer directly involved with, but the idea was a take away that stuck with me thereafter. Note that it only has the technology play a support role, which has been my general view right along.
In writing these INSL posts I had the right qualifiers - pie in the sky, going over the deep end - to convey that I was making a speculative argument. But why do that unless there is some belief that others will embrace the argument and give it a try themselves? To my knowledge, that didn't happen. Might that have happened if the ideas were marketed a good deal more? The delusion rests in ignoring that question, hoping that the posts themselves would suffice, and otherwise contenting myself with providing a description of how it might work. One probably should ask whether there is some benefit to the posts apart from encouraging the embrace of the ideas necessary in attempting implementation. It is conceivable that others might generate their own ideas, distinct from INSL but where INSL served as a stimulus in generating these alternatives. Would that that then justify writing the INSL posts? If so, isn't it delusion then not to verify that some other alternatives have been generated? It's been quite a while since those INSL posts were written, so my recollection is not perfect on this. Yet I'm not aware of anyone letting me know of their alternative that had my INSL posts as at least part of their basis. So, I'm guessing there weren't any alternatives of this sort.
A different thought is that these posts are simply throwing ideas against the wall to see if anything sticks. A small probability of success means that not sticking is the likely outcome. Does past failure mean that the next idea shouldn't even be tried? Perhaps the answer to that question depends on how to consider the cost of writing up the post. Is the time engaging or burdensome? I don't have a definitive answer on that one, but I can say that in drafting this post, I seem to have gone back and forth with the answer. If it is recognized in advance that some of the time spent will be burdensome, then there is a need to be able to get through those periods, having the procrastination come to a close and getting down to brass tacks. Delusion seems to be the answer there.
My other example comes from a recent post, offering up my "solution" for our national politics, where members of the professional class take the lead by signaling that they are willing to pay substantially more in income taxes so as to enable higher taxes on the uber rich as well, with the proceeds going mainly to people of ordinary means. and without that having negative political consequences. The post is entitled, Might Members of the Professional Class Embrace Democratic Socialism? In this case I enlisted a friend from grad school who is still a practicing economist to give it a read and offer her reactions to the piece. That took quite a while to happen and then her reaction was less than enthusiastic. I had hoped for a more uplifting response. There is still a fair amount of work to tighten up the argument in the piece and assemble all the relevant recent data to be included. For the time being, this is one where the procrastination is still ongoing.
With regard to college teaching and learning, in the mid to late 2000s, given my position on campus I could claim some expertise as to the underlying issues and possible solutions. I also had a reasonably strong reputation at the national level among others engaged with learning technology for higher education. So the blog posts such as the INSL series may have served a purpose about informing the profession, even if implementation of the ideas wasn't in the cards. Regarding our national politics, however, I cannot claim any such expertise and I am well behind the times as a practicing economist. This itself doesn't stop me from noodling about the ideas. But then writing up my tentative conclusions, I'm really not sure as to how I will proceed in the future. The writing activity itself is therapy for me. Perhaps I should content myself with writing without feeling a need to espouse that I alone have the answer. Not only would that be less delusional, but would be less egotistical as well.
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