Crowdsourcing: Taylorism, tech, online temp work, #adjunct labor

Not all of the many email newsletters hitting my inbox are about education, ed-tech, higher ed, academic casuals or activism. This week, Baffler featured a salvo against the scams and schemes of the tech world, Jacob Silverman's essay "The Crowdsourcing Scam." (with more excellent illustrations by ©Lisa Haney, example below). 

The article refers to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Uber and Yelp ~ among others, not adjuncts, but could apply just as well to the employment and workplace management practices in adjunct-dependent for-profit and non-profit institutions. The editors refer to the article as "another fiery salvo." I want to read the others too.  In a similar vein, read Deb Baker's ❝On being 'discontinued'❞ (via +George Station on G+, also re-blogged on As the Adjunctiverse Turns)

In today's fractured economy, where tasks are increasingly farmed out to low-wage and temp workers, "the result is an extreme form of Taylorism: in boom conditions, workers have more tiny tasks than they can say yes to, but they acquire no skills...they have no contact with other workers, and they have no chance to advance or unionize," Silverman writes. "Imagine a factory in which each employee wears blinders and can see only the thing in front of him on the conveyor belt."

Caveat: as someone who tries to keep up with and uses ed-tech and information technology, I'd qualify the article's network criticism as applying to disconnected networks (an oxymoron in Social Network Analysis, aka SNA) that isolate users, further divided into content/service providers and consumers, instead of connecting them.

break is over—back to the #edblog beat & #adjunct blogging

…with something no matter how short or recycled. Not that it was a 100% break what with the persistent ubiquity of social media and email. The combined effect of information/project overload and sandwiching a holiday into a grim news news cycle had me dropping out wherever I could...

The time it allowed reading ed blogs and getting up to speed with my new colleagues on the Education Bloggers Network was well spent. There are 200 now. Just today I posted to the EBN Basecamp area explaining my ideas on configuring personal or open blog/social media networks. Most of the bloggers there are in K12 education. Some currently teach in both K12 and education courses in higher ed, most likely as adjuncts in the latter. I've been bookmarking their blogs on Diigo as I come across them. 

Anyway, when one of the members teaching in higher ed asked me about my field, I made my reply more of an introduction since I hadn't really posted one yet. Here it is, somewhat edited and with the obligatory apologies for tiresome redundancies:

My field is now "retired" with digital ankle biting and online community media as "retirement hobbies." I notice I am not the only ed blogging retiree here. [Aside: Is blogging the educator version of "old soldier" fading? Or just the persistence of longstanding habit?]

I started in English (UL Lafayette) and then Comparative Literature (ABDammit, UC Davis, representations of city space in literature). My move from multi-language lit to social media/web curation traversed teaching Spanish, developmental writing/study skills and 1st composition, ESL, GED, local Family Literacy and after school programs while doing web pages, email newsletters and groups and then onto blogging and social media. That's just the last 25 years...and leaves out non-academic teaching and other workplace byways,

Short version: precarious faculty is my home base / hub blog for what I consider an independent information network that takes in other blogs, aggregation platforms and social media.

Back online & connected again…blogging, courses, sundry WriMo's, etc

It wasn't easy resisting the Arne/Terminator and Jack/TheShining memes.

I've been off-line (no internet, no telephone, no radio or TV) from mid-morning Thursday until 7 am this morning. Not the usual procrastination or blogging block. Today has been mostly e-mail triage and quick social media check ins with more ahead.

Even so, I expect to resume regular blogging tomorrow. There is no shortage of topics. Posts in progress and on the spike include:

• follow up on the DoE Call for Comments on PAYE Rulemaking Committee, 
• Next steps for PSLF Farness project, including Consumer Finance Protection Bureau pledge
• Network for Public Education, ed blogging and Public School Shakedown
• NAWD-y thoughts and reflections
• color coordinating Walkout online and IRL tees, hats, badges, avatars, twibbons
• emerging regional news ~ Union County NJ, Texas, Nassau County NY, Colorado
• not to mention whatever turns up on the feeds

I haven't had time to read let alone reply to everything but will get to what I can as best I can. In the meantime, there's new content here on the feeds, the news ticker and in the Reading Room

Movie break w/ HT to #Adjunct Walkout Day: Road to #NAWD

…Rio actually. I'm collecting "road" and "walking" themed material to blog as part The Crosby/Hope Road pictures came to mind. Our "adjunct road" series starts with Road to Rio (1947). A wicked Vail played by Gale Sondergard (also associated with Salt of the Earth) is the arch-villain. There will be more "Road to..." movies between now and February 25, 2015. As far as I can tell, there's no hidden adjunct allegory, cautionary tale or subtext. Just a road, as in "the road is made by walking."

Road/walking poetry and other literature is another area I want to collect and post material for National Walkout Day: Kerouac, Frost, Machado, Rousseau, Benjamin (and his flâneur) I don't know about you, but from now to late February is a long, long time for me to live (and blog) on movement rhetoric, exhortations to organize, calls to build community and bridges, etc. Those roads are made by walking and connecting with other walkers, in my case, digitally. 

November…month of #writing—#edblogs…#digiwrimo…#nanowrimo & more

…which includes joining the Education Bloggers Network as well as adding a blog challenge to #nanowrimo and #digiwrimo (already a #wrimo surfeit). Still, since I already write at least one blog post a day, just not all on the same blog, #nablopomo seemed a trifle. The rub is that all +BlogHer daily posts have to be on one blog to qualify for the challenge. So I registered Computers, Language, Writing and will post a daily blogging recap ~ so very meta but something I'd been thinking about doing anyway. I most assuredly am not doing #AcWriMo. 

But back to the Education Bloggers Network, which has made a huge difference for K-12 advocacy against privatization, testing excesses and Common Core.  It could be a really big deal for us as well. I'd already added a number of  these K-12 bloggers to our blogroll and here are more for you to check out. I'm in. Are you? PS I'm making a list of adjunct and other higher ed bloggers who ought to be too. Email Jonathan Pelto at jonpelto@gmail.com. Let's do this. Now.

Jonathon Pelto replied to my request to join the network (blogged about earlier here and here):

What does #NetNeutrality have to do with #adjunct & other precarious worker activists?

…yes, today is the day…a good day to take on corporate interests, stand up for open, connected learning and keep the internet open and affordable for activism and the activist networks using it to connect activists, build grassroots networks, coordinate actions and inform/educate the public. I hope that answers the why question

As adapted from Fight for the Future's September 4, 2014, Battle for the Internet letter:

The Internet Slowdown, the net neutrality protest planned for today September 10th is taking off. As of September 4, a dozen of the world’s largest websites announced that they’re joining in a big way. Sites you know and use like Etsy, Kickstarter, Wordpress, Vimeo, Mozilla, Namecheap, Foursquare, imgur, and reddit (and surely more by now). Will you join too?

Everyone has a role in the Internet Slowdown. Click here to find out what YOU can do

Evan Greer at Fight for the Future wrote