... catch-up & preview touching on sundry topics from activism (#JunctTour & #AdjunctProject) to #CFHE's recent "gathering," blogging, links, Digital Identities & professional development. Briefly, I hope... 
#JunctTour (follow the hashtag) through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan (Detroit) tops my personal list even if highered media has not seen fit to give it due notice. I take that omission as a sign of their information deficit about the adjunctiverse, not mine. Filming partner and cinematographer, Chris LaBree (from the wilds of New Jersey), is video blogging the road trip, regular posts on 2255 Films. The Homeless Adjunct's road trip is and will be the ongoing lead on New Fac @ Facebook through May 26. 'Junct Rebellion's adjunct road trip has a Facebook Event page. The #AdjunctProject has made web site changes, is aggregating media references to the Project and also added a job board and forums to its site. Go check them out for yourself. I'd write more but am already having a hard time with "brief." Josh is going distributed networks: this deserves a post of its own... and will get one.
Both Project and Tour are examples of adjuncts speaking out for themselves and strike me as saying more for and about what contingent faculty are up to than anything in highered media. I check both before either the Chronicle on Inside HigherEd.
#CFHE met in Ypsilanti, 3rd National Gathering. I asked about blogging the agenda (in the interest of transparency and tearing down the IvorySilo™ but never heard back. A recent post reflects on being there before the gathering started. The agenda, in brief, promised reports on national and local challenges and successes, and from the Think Tank, but indicated that planning and funding higher education would be the central focus. More coverage from Alan/Ethan has been promised: I'll blog more when I know more.
... speaking of blogging, the latest edition of Joe Berry's COCAL Updates is almost ready to go, needing just a bit more editing, mostly images and formatting to display better online. Also in drafts are Omnivore's latest link collection on highered and a reflective repost that got more complex when a somewhat related piece hit the feed reader. Blogging also means links, curating them, my own and other digital identities. No time here but I am working on a post on Digital Identities for/about a MOOC/s that I've been following and will cross-post since one of DI's is oh so very NFM. That brings me to ....
Highered PD has been an NFM mission since early on but tends to fall to the bottom of the list. Eat first: sheet survival comes before "professional development." I've been thinking we should take matters into our own hands and curate information on resources even adjuncts can afford (e.g. free):
- Lisa Lane's free, open certificate course, Program for Online Teaching aka #POTcert11 (Mira Costa CC) wrapped recently but will return in September. In the mean time, all the resources and presentations are accessible online. That's open for you.
- #fslt12 MOOC Week 1 ~ First Steps to Learning and Teaching (in higher ed), UK, Oxford Centre. Starts today, 21-05-12
- If committing to a whole course (oxymoron with moocs, a topic for another post) overwhelms, try Twitter: #edchat or another on twitter. Many chats, many disciplines.
I think, possibly, in regard to CFHE news, folks may be waiting for awhile, to absorb what was, in fact, and in spite of no hugely dramatic resolutions, a very contingent-focused event: more so than usual, I believe, and possibly more so than many people are used to. But that's a very big part of all this—the we're here, we're your peers, get used to it and by the way we're the natural spearhead for real HE reform.
ReplyDeleteNot too long I hope, less vague too. In the meantime, I'll try not to get too itchy and succumb to the urge to editorialize. No may even notice though. The CFHE footprint is smaller than Cinderella's
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