Intro to my blogging semester
The idea of blogging seemed very fitting for this topic. Technology in higher education was a perennial issue for our class as we try to make sense of how to best use appropriate tools to reach and impact students. I have blogged for a couple years and Wordpress informs me that although I’ve written about once a week for two years, the blog that is consistently read the most is about a current issue I decided to write about in May.
I came into this idea excited to learn from my peers and the “community of scholars” that every good higher education degree should be founded upon. Our first class made it clear that we came from many different backgrounds and perspectives and the conversation was likely to be rich. Blogging also provides a certain degree of anonymity. I don’t sit in any other class with this group and although I’m the new guy, I felt that I could be honest, ask hard questions, and feel free to disagree through the safety of the internet. This is somewhat ironic as in my own personal blog I write anonymously to protect myself from supervisors or students reading my interpretations of issues and events.
I began the semester with a list of topics I hoped to blog about: pregnant students on campus, gun control, religion and the freedom of speech, etc. Through the weeks, however, I found myself drawn to other topics as we learned about them in class or I found them in the news. I was very proud of my first blog in which I re-worked AA’s 12 steps as suggestions for how higher education can get out of its deficit. I had 8 hyperlinks and 5 comments, and thought my ideas were pretty clever and written in an interesting way. Though it was clever, I'm not sure I really got to the heart of the issue and recognized the depth and brevity of this topic.
A few noteworthy blogs
As I continued to write, I began to recognize the depth of the issues at hand. Nearly everything we wrote about seemed to be connected to politics. I found myself asking if I would be judged by my readers based on my perspective. Though it seemed easy to critique Bob Stoops salary (I actually am in favor of coaches being well paid), many issues were incredibly complex. As issues became more and more real, that is, I began to see how they affected real people, it became more difficult to feel like I was looking at these issues through an objective lens.
Student loans was a topic that came up several times in our blogs. There w
ere a multitude of opinions about whether they should be forgiven, how they affect students, etc. I choose to write about how for profit institutions use student loans , often unethically, to make a profit. We got a good discussion going, and I think the issue is still complex .Whose responsibility is it to make sure people make good decision? Ours? The students? The governments?
I liked to bring in new topics that weren’t necessarily being discussed elsewhere. One such topic was homeless students, in which I challenged readers to think about other populations and their access to education. This is another population that will cost a significant amount of money to try to recruit, retain, and support – with a very high risk that they will succeed, graduate, and give back to society. How should we respond – should we only give scholarships to those students who will make us a profit in the future, or should it be the responsibility of higher education to give opportunity to people no matter their current circumstance or background?
Another topic I brought up (ironically through a blog posting) was college student addiction to the internet. In it, I discussed how internet addiction has some of the same chemical and physical affects that drug and alcohol addiction have. What is our responsibility as administrators to monitor and respond to this? How does this affect our fascination with technology on our campuses?
I enjoyed blogging and liked most of the topics that I was able to blog about.
A few lessons learned from blogging
One of the additional challenges to blogging is trying to summarize multiple perspectives in a short amount of words. On my personal blog, I try to keep my writing to around 400 words. I’ve found that I start to lose interest after around 350 words, and that if I can spark a discussion in 100 words it is likely better than to do so in 1000. As I read blogs I often felt like the authors had missed some key point, whether from space restraints or because they didn’t see something from a given perspective. I would then scroll down, excited to share my new insights, only to find someone else had beaten me to the same idea. I’m not sure if this was intentional, but it was a great lesson in the benefit of the marketplace of ideas. Although I may have some pretty insightful ideas for the areas under my leadership, people from totally different backgrounds with totally different jobs can offer a great perspective.
In every class, there are folks who speak up pretty easily (I am one) and folks who do not speak up as much. The blogging really allowed me to get to know my peers in ways that the in-class discussion couldn’t. I really enjoyed reading blogs from individuals who may not speak up in class, and who have totally different backgrounds than I do. I would like to find a way to implement this idea, sharing ideas in an open forum, in my work. We often have discussions in staff meetings, but we are held by certain restraints. For internal processors, it’s incredibly difficult to come up with an idea on the spot. For more introverted people, speaking in front of a group of 30 is intimidating. Furthermore, our meetings are right before lunch and most folks (myself included) often think, “my comment isn’t that important, and I’m starving!” We can do a better job in our work environments to make sure all voices can be heard.
I think this is especially true if we are working with people for whom English isn’t their first language. One of the students I teach is an ESL student. He rarely speaks up in class, but his papers are incredible. I wish every student could read what he has to say, because he has great insights, he just doesn’t feel comfortable speaking them in front of his peers.
This class has taught me quite a bit about current issues, not just from the blogging but also from the reading and the general setup of the class. Our most recent reading was from 2005, almost 7 years old. Part of the reality of published work is that it can’t be all that recent. If I only rely on reading published books of the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, I’m likely to be a few years behind. Even Inside Higher Ed was significantly slower than other media sources. When Joe Paterno was asked to step down, Inside Higher Ed was almost a week behind ESPN and other news sources. In this particular case, the vast disparity of opinions were really made manifest as I read opinions and perspectives from multiple very different sources. Whether the issue is undocumented students, gun control, or rising tuition costs, I’ve found great benefit to read a multitude of different sources and ask different people.
There’s an old Jewish proverb that says, “there is nothing new under the sun.” I feel like a lot of what I learned in this course can be summed up in those words. The issues we see today have likely been dealt with before. It would be silly to try to solve the issue of the legal issue of religion on campus without looking through a historical lens at what worked in the past.
Probably the most important lesson from this class is that nothing is simple, very little is binary, and simple solutions are often very shallow. In the last few months, as I’ve heard things on the radio or in meetings or read them online that offer “all we need to do is ______” solutions, I’m a lot more hesitant than I used to be. In my pre-marriage counseling, my mentor suggested that when my wife starts to discuss a problem that the first question I ask is, “honey, is this a problem solving or a listening conversation?” Sometimes we need to buckle in and try to solve issues. Sometimes we just need to listen and see what comes up. I appreciate that this course was offered in longer time chunks. I really felt like we were able to “marinate” longer on the topics and allow the issues to develop, and for the rich complexity of these issues to matriculate and show themselves.
As I write, both for this class and my personal blog, I really try to unpack and ask questions about things that really matter. I don’t check stats on my personal blog too often, but I’m pleased when I see that 50 people have read what I have to write in a day. Then, this summer, I had a child, and 1,800 people looked at her blog (all pictures) in one week. It was a good lesson. Maybe I should post cute pictures of my daughter to get people to read about stuff I think matters. Maybe the lesson is that not everyone is interested in having a real discussion about what is really important. Just because something makes a lot of noise, doesn't mean it's the most pertinent issue or opinion today. But, for the record, my daughter is pretty cute.
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