'tis the season ~ of annual meetings

How to "attend" them (sort of) on the cheap? One answer is social media, especially Twitter. Although both get blogged and covered by "academic media," e.g. Chronicle and Inside HigherEd, Twitter does it better.  Plus you can follow simultaneous sessions as well as both Seattle and Chicago, impossible IRL ~ even if we could afford it.

Strategies:

• Search hashtags: #mla12 and #aha2012
• Narrow focus by adding session hashtags
• Use a social media search tool such as Topsy 
• Set a Google alert
• Identify a blogger or active tweeter who is covering the meeting, especially sessions you are most interested in. Brian Croxall is always a good bet. "Active" would be an understatement.

Storified by Lee Skallerup:

• The Fight for Public Higher Education #s167 #mla12 
• Jobs for Historians: Approaching the Crisis #aha2012

Of course, CHE and IHE accounts and post mortems will still be pored over and commented, but they are no longer the whole story for those not in attendance. Add the reflections of academic bloggers. Real time coverage fleshes it out.

Forget about the "cachet" of "being there ... only matters if you let it. Not being left out of the conversation, invisible and silenced when so many communication tools are at hand counts for more.

Consider too the cachet of being greener...

we're feisty

NFM and contingent academic labor issues cited in Australian academic blog, Music for Deckchairs. Love the blog title and being called feisty:

Miserably, the concession we make to flexibility is by casualising academic labour, so that we can manage fluctuations in demand with last minute hiring practices that pass on to the most precariously employed our own lack of ability to make plans in this churning market. The harm this is doing to the education profession is rightly the stuff of despair (see for example the excellent short documentary Degrees of Shame, being promoted by the feisty New Faculty Majority as part of Campus Equity Week this week.) ... from Trust Wipeout 

Read the read of the post too. It goes to budget, ed tech, ed biz incursions, governance, Campaign for the Future of Higher Education issues and more... a thoughtful "WhitherU" post that addresses a question, Can someone in universities please start thinking about cultures of trust and what creates them??, posed in yet another blog. 

Other NFM mission relevant points include the lack resources for professional development and increased weight placed on student evaluations

First, in an era of contracting budgets there’s an acute lack of resourcing for teacher development, experimentation or change management, particularly in relation to emerging technologies. Secondly, the rise and rise of student evaluation as a proxy for professional peer review means that we’re constantly beta testing in front of hostile judges. It’s not so much MasterChef as Dancing with the Stars, blindfold and on stilts.  In fact, it’s Wipeout, and about as much fun.

Posted via email from Academentia

conferences, surveys and videos

I've been thinking about conferences, even though NOT thinking about conferences may be the best part of being OUT of the game. So why was I? They are professional forums. Many conferences offer sessions relevant to adjunct/ contingent faculty issues ~ employment, workplace conditions, pedagogy, professional development, etc. It's a different medium than mainstream media, local and college press or even academic press. It's where we connect with like minded and present our case to tenured colleagues. Continuing presence is an expensive strategy so track and coordinat for maximum effectiveness.

• MLA 2009, past
• AHA 2010, past
• CCCC 2010 - recently past
• AAC&U, "Faculty Roles in High-Impact Practices" - this weekend, Philadelphia
• AFT-NEA - this weekend, San Jose
• CEA 2010: Voices - this weekend, San Antonio
• TESOL 2010 - ongoing, Boston
• Working Class Studies, "How Class Works" - upcoming, Stony Brook
• COCAL IX, upcoming, Montréal
• CBW, 2010 - upcoming, Atlanta