Now, do you think this ‘tells’ you something that a list of remedies wouldn’t? It certainly does highlight the fact that most remedies were an acidic solution that was mean to be gargled by the patient. But what else does it tell you (other than that I am a geek)?
(Note: a larger image can be found by clicking the image above or on this text)
This morning I received a message from my university’s career center informing me that they now subscribe to a pay-for service called “The Versatile PhD” which has:
* Examples of successful resumes and cover letters that real PhDs and ABDs used to get their first post-academic positions
* A collection of first-person narratives written by successful non-academic PhDs and ABDs, describing how their careers have developed after grad school until now
* Archived panel discussions where PhDs and ABDs working in specific non-academic fields describe their jobs and answer questions. Past topics include Federal Government, Policy Analysis, Freelance Writing and Editing, Higher Education Consulting, Management Consulting, and University Administration.
In an effort to understand this service (after I determined that my university login was not working to get me access to the site), I went to their website and learned that it’s geared especially towards the Humanities and Social Sciences, “to help humanities and social science PhDs identify and prepare for possible non-academic careers. We want them to be informed about employment realities, educated about nonacademic career options, and supported in preparing for a range of possible careers, so that in the end, they have choices.” It’s a laudable goal, and I commend the Versatile PhD service and my uni’s Career Center for providing options for all of us unemployable PhD-types. But it seems to me, that such stories are available in many places online, such as in Bethany Nowviskie’s open-source (i.e. free) book “#alt-ac: Alternate Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars.”
Call me cynical, but it seems to me that the Career Center could better serve its Humanities constituents by giving them the skills to search the web and become digitally literate in open-source offerings rather than offering canned content about possible careers from a proprietary service.
Do you agree?
Photo taken at THATCamp–a crowd-sourced open-access alt-ac unconference for the Humanities.
This post is written in reply to Boone Gorges’ post about Blackboard (although I agree with his distaste for the platform, I support it at my university and this is why) :
One of the biggest parts of my job is to support faculty in their use of Blackboard, a proprietary “course-management” software that instructors use for their classes at Chapman University. Let me lead by saying that I don’t like Blackboard. It’s unwieldy, uncustomizable, ugly, and is an unecessarily-siloed space. Very few faculty like Blackboard, although most use it. And most faculty find it daunting–I hold numerous workshops, office hours, and schedule one-on-one consulting sessions for faculty who need help figuring out the software. This is not because of Bb’s complexity, this is because most faculty simply aren’t technologically adept.
I consider my support of Bb to be work that appeals to the “lowest common denominator” (LCD) instructors–these are folks who can’t tell what operating system they’re using and don’t know how to type an URL into a web browser. But they need to use Bb because the students demand to have their course documents on the web, and the instructors need to give information to the students via email. This is how most faculty use Bb–for posting docs and for email. Many also use it for calculating grades. An even smaller percentage use it for students to turn in assignments electronically. Very few use any of the advanced features such as embedding media rich content, holding virtual office hours, or doing file sharing between class members. For those instructors who are using the advanced features, I typically try to lead them out of Bb and into open-source platforms that do this work much better. For example, I don’t encourage faculty to use the Bb blog tool–I urge them onto wordpress.com or to a hosted-install of wordpress.org.
Since I’ve been at Chapman we’ve peeled off many of the extraneous (and costly) Bb features that simply weren’t necessary and weren’t being used. We no longer have Outcomes, Content Collection, or the dozens of random Building Blocks that faculty never use (and why on earth would they use an astrology tool, anyways?). I consider it my job to offer them a simple way to upload and share content with their students. I consider it my job to assess their tech-savviness before I encourage them to make tech-leaps off of Blackboard that will leave them frustrated or unsupported.
In the long-term future I would love to see more of our campus move off the Blackboard platform. But I also know that any move in that direction would add an incredible burden to my shoulders and would probably be asking too much of the LCD faculty members who wouldn’t know how to do collaborative work with web-based tools like the googlesuite products, or use skype for their online office hours, or use dropbox.com for posting course docs. And I’m also not sure that any of those options are necessarily better than Bb, either–because even they might function better and might work better to teach students transportable digital skills, they also require more up-front setup work for the faculty. At Chapman, like many other universities, our faculty are already stretched to the breaking point. I don’t want to add more to their load–I want to find ways to make their work easier with technology.
UPDATE: for those looking to get off of Bb, here’s a post that you might find helpful about alternative free tools.
Those of you who know me well, know that I enjoy camping. But lately I haven’t done much of the sleeping-in-a-tent-and-sleeping-bag variety of camping. Instead, I’ve been attending a variety of “camp” style conferences. There was THATCamp SoCal, then WhereCampSF, and just this weekend I attended OC WordCamp (oh, and in two weeks I’ll be camping yet again–this time at the mothership THATCamp in Fairfax, Virginia). What I remember nearly every time I attend one of these events, is just how s
timulating it is to be an environment with similarly-geeky tech-curious people. The energy and the ideas associated with the camp movement are far more enlivening than traditional-style conferences (although, I love those too!).
Being a tech-minded historian can be lonely business. It’s also hard work to stay abreast of the latest trends in the field and to teach myself new skills. Meeting up with campers a few times a year inspires me to stretch myself in new directions and to keep focused on my digital endeavors. Learning about others’ development projects makes me a better administrator, blogger, podcaster, organizer, and researcher, as I apply their work to my own (WP plugins galore!). I came away from this past weekend with loads of ideas to apply at Chapman University and to the Past Tense lecture series and to my efforts with the Making History Podcast.
There are so many problems with the ossified structures of traditional academic conferences, and it seems to me that planning committees could do well to look to the Camp movement for keeping their events relevant in a post-web 2.0 world (pssst….I even learned of a groovy event-planning WP plugin that they could use).