Elouise and George have written a bit lately on the issue of students reading professorial blogs, and on professor/student relationships generally.
Like Chuck (who commented on Elouise's post), I find that I'm not entirely comfortable discussing this topic in a forum where I know that students are regular readers and participants. I think, however, that there's real value in a community of colleagues discussing these questions.
So, I thought I might set up a private forum somewhere (where? I don't know. I'd love an alternative to Yahoo! Groups for mailing list or forum capability, but I don't know of a good one off the top of my head) for this discussion. If you're interested, let me know (ell/at/mail/dot/rit/dot/edu), and I'll "include you in."
QuickTopic has a great set of tools for this
Interested. Actually started a long-drawn out response. Cut it back to "I'm in!"
Count me in, please.
i'd be happy to set up a mailman list for this on my listserver at the cddc.
I'd be interested in the participating in the private discussion, primarily because I am clueless as to what is potentiallly discomforting about discussing it this one. (And suspect I should get a clue pronto).
Actually, I'd be very interested in students' perceptions about the subject. Carlo speaks well for his peeps in the comment to my entry.
There may be professor/student topics which are not appropriate for a mixed discussion, since potentially there could be students participating without a maturity level to handle such discussion -- then again, I've met some students with a perceived maturity greater than some professors. After all, this is a higher learning environment.
Being a returning student to RIT after some years as a professional software engineer, I feel that there are some advantages, as well as some disadvantages, to the current state of professor/student relationships in the IT department and would very much like to participate in discussions of this nature. If such a future discussion warrants some student input, please feel free to solicit my feedback, for I may have some valuable perspectives to share from my experiences thus far.
Count me in, too.
Ironic juxtaposition of this post with the preceding one re. control freakage. College students have almost all reached the age of majority... draftable, marriageable, drinkable, thinkable... the issues of professional work product certainly affect them... the issues of managed communications certainly affect them... the complex issues of pedagogy and interpersonal relationships must affect them... why would one exclude them from the conversation in the 21st century? Perhaps the weight of collegial consensus and tradition is too much to bear in a search for light in this dark corner of university life? Would one risk tenure by speaking one's truth?
Frank Paynter
Liz,
Would love to see this evolve into a more general discussion of bounded speech communities, and the disruption caused by the two-way peer to peer conversation of blogging.
In management, each manager beneath a manager meets as a group to build lateral ties as a "management team," and to discuss subordinates behind closed doors. The manager of managers is himself or herself a subordinate, and so it goes, all the way up the hierarchy.
A level is defined by who talks to whom with full information, and who is kept relatively in the dark. Access and information is power. (I can read my subordinate personnel file, they can't read mine. I know their pay; they don't know mine.) To restrict access, to get our act together behind closed doors, to develop the party line and then all enforce it, to maintain subordination by restricting and mangaging information flows, all that is very corporate. And probably necessary.
If subordinates starting listening in on higher level staff meetings, the meetings would be moved off site.
"Come in -- and shut the door!" Music to the upwardly mobile flunky's ears. It means he or she has arrived at an inner sanctum where the good stuff will be discussed, as the subordinates go by and peek through the glass panes beside the door frames.
Social software needs doors, no? And glass panes to build the sense of comraderie among insiders and a sense of privation among outsiders?
To have power is good, to have your subordinates know you have it, and for them to be reminded of it constantly, that is very heaven.
Err -- even after HT’s intervention, I suppose I’d like to be counted in, too.
I rather expected I'd get some flak over this. I'm okay with that. Doesn't change the fact that I still want to have the discussion privately, at least to start with.
Yes, of course there are power issues. But that's part of the problem. Whether these discussions are public or private, the nature of the professor's job is to wield power. We sit in judgment. Is the work good enough? Have you earned the grade you desire?
Managers have that burden, as well, obviously. One of the reasons I have resisted management responsibilities--and will continue to do so--is that I believe that taking them on would create a boundary between me and my current peers. I don't want to be writing performance evaluations, or deciding salary increments, for people I now consider close friends. Once that power imbalance exists, no amount of shared beers or personal confidences will make the walls go away.
Frank, I'm already tenured, so that's not an issue for me. However, I probably wouldn't have posted the previous "control freak" entry, or this one, if I weren't tenured. Yes, I held my tongue and refused to speak many truths during the years between my mid-tenure and tenure reviews. But that's a different topic.
The boundaries I'm talking about here aren't imposed externally for me...they're definitely an internally generated artifact. Worth exploring, I think, and worth questioning. But I simply don't feel comfortable yet doing that publicly.
At any rate, that's all I have to say on the subject in this forum for the time being. Elouise and others may well continue the discussion on her blog.