{"id":2686,"date":"2013-10-25T18:36:32","date_gmt":"2013-10-26T02:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=2686"},"modified":"2013-10-25T18:36:32","modified_gmt":"2013-10-26T02:36:32","slug":"to-not-speak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2013\/10\/to-not-speak\/","title":{"rendered":"To Not Speak"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, an interesting conversation has been going on about educators being tongue-tied and blogging less, feeling they’ve lost their voice. Bonnie Stewart wrote of this<\/a> after reading a post by Paul Prinsloo<\/a>, then Jenny Mackness<\/a> mentioned Bonnie’s post while talking about “conscious incompetence”. I detect a crisis of confidence<\/em>, but this may be only because I’m experiencing one.<\/p>\n

I read much of Jenny’s work – it’s wonderful. I read Bonnie’s posts – they’re wonderful. And yet, I understand the tongue-tied feeling, and the way in which it’s related to the rise of MOOCs. I’ve tried not to blog about MOOCs, but I end up doing it anyway in an effort to make some sense of the role of the original pedagogies, the publicity, and the commercialization. The evolution of the MOOC discussion parallels, not coincidentally, the movement in higher education toward the abandonment of traditional pedagogies, the publicity about college costs and purpose, and the commercialization of educational goals. I’m hopelessly old fashioned – I think the reason for a college education is to become a more educated person.<\/p>\n

Whatever silences I may have experienced are the result of disillusionment<\/em>. Like the others, I used to post more. As my posts became increasingly cranky, I didn’t enjoy writing them as much. I also became frustrated when I began caring whether people read and responded. But I couldn’t not care about it on Twitter, although I tried. Along with the evolution of MOOCs and Higher Ed, Twitter has evolved too among those I follow: it is now primarily a link-sharing network. 140-character commentary on ones own work has given way to, in some cases, only<\/em> sharing links to other people’s content. So for me, it’s been less interesting to read, although those info-tweets are still a good resource. When I tweet, and do it in the old style (my own commentary, sans link), there is now little response. More than my blog, Twitter seemed like a conversation. Now it’s more like Diigo than meeting friends at a coffee shop.<\/p>\n

The disillusionment is now creeping into how I think about teaching. I am at a stage in my career where I have tried many pedagogical approaches, with varying degress of success. And this success has been distributed unevenly among students with varying skills and goals. Although I would not consider myself, I hope, to be at the complacent stage of “conscious competence<\/a>” \u00a0noted by Jenny, I may have passed it and come back to “conscious incompetence”. Unlike Jenny, however, I do not feel that I do not know enough, but that perhaps I know too much. Unlike Bonnie, I never went for a doctoral degree, though I have experienced the frustrations of academic writing (or, often, feeling I must read articles so I cite something<\/em> to back up what I already have experienced in the classroom). There are times when this year feels like my first year of teaching.<\/p>\n

While I have not abandoned blogging during all this, and I still feel that I can help others, it’s clear that I need inspiration for a completely different kind of analysis of what I do, or even examining something completely different (poetry? literature? all that history I was going to write about once upon a time?).<\/p>\n

For me, I’ll write more when I have begun to think differently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, an interesting conversation has been going on about educators being tongue-tied and blogging less, feeling they’ve lost their voice. Bonnie Stewart wrote of this after reading a post by Paul Prinsloo, then Jenny Mackness mentioned Bonnie’s post while talking about “conscious incompetence”. I detect a crisis of confidence, but this may be only because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}