precarious life & times: tools…using them

Sunday, April 20, 2014

tools…using them—not being one

…this might not be a post either: call it an extended meta blogging update…planning out loud. Feel free to contribute your 2¢ worth. Let the musing begin:

Tools

I've been exploring Diigo blogging and sharing tools. Using is the best (only) way to learn a new tool. These turn annotated bookmarks into blog posts. If truly useful and making blogging/online information sharing quicker, easier — more efficient, then they will become part of the repertoire. If not, then not — and will fade from regular use. Until then, expect more Diggo blogging and auto-blogging.

Special Projects

Keith Hoeller's links and commentary, a weekly annotated links post will include links to articles by and about Keith. I'm not the only one who has long thought he should have his own page or blog. Hardly believing he didn't, I started saving links on Delicious in 2008. The project starts with bookmarking and then blogging entries from Keith Hoeller's PT Faculty Links & Commentary on Diigo. Eventually, we'll find them a cyberspace home on the range of their own so they don't have to crash in random locations like a homeless adjunct. The Washington PartTime Faculty Association had a web page...but on a now defunct platform that disappeared from cyberspace taking all the WPFA pages with it...and there you thought nothing disappeared from cyberspace.

Academic Freedom: chalk this one up to the influence of Don Eron and Suzanne Hudson— and the increasing number of news stories on on the subject. Whether or not you agree with Don that academic freedom and its protections make organizing and campaigning for other rights possible, higher education cannot risk the consequences of losing academic freedom and due process. Today's academic freedom news round up was the opening salvo. Future format is uncertain, but there will be more.

News: Have you noticed the recent spate of adjunct/PT faculty news and aggregation/ curation? We're still reading higher ed media but not depending on it as completely. Look at the news feeds for Facebook groups (another story waiting on the spike) and all the news links and adjunct activity on Twitter. Counting just those in the Precarious Faculty Network: COCAL Updates, Precarity Dispatches, #mobilize4equity A is for Adjunct, Precarious Faculty Voices and Adjunct Stories.

Currently recommended or trending

NY Times puts its foot in it again, this time over adjunct faculty and community colleges. The adjuncts write back

Stephen Bell's "Expanding News Coverage of Higher Ed Is Good for Us." on the importance of getting higher ed news from multiple sources—my personal mantra (see News above)

National Mobilization for Equity: frequently updated website with Post (blog), Action, Legislation, Resources and more pages.

The Growing Reliance on Adjuncts, Diane Rehm Show (minus Rehm but with Storify, transcript, downloadable podcast).

Jim Hightower's latest adjunct-misery article

Coming Attractions

A special report by MMStrikesBackon the Contingent Faculty Special Interest Meeting at the recent Labor Notes Conference.

COCAL series: history, video clips, persona accounts of past conferences, a peek at this year's NYC event, XI

Revisiting email: lately, I've been giving more thought to the plight of the social media averse. Not letting them tumble off the information cabbage truck and finding ways to include them matters. Preferably these will fold into, re-use content from existing networks without stretch me too much thinner, and, ideally connect with the rest of the network.

The answer is obvious: email newsletters. Working on it. Until then, you can subscribe to email updates for this very blog; its WP sister, As the Adjunctiverse Turns; the Faculty Friday email edition of Josh Boldt's excellent Order of Education; Audrey Watters's Hack Education Weekly (on TinyLetter, what PFR and Roadrunners will be using); Joe Berry's COCAL Updates by email -- always a lot of news if rather a jumble; and surely more.