As she says, the credential is one thing, but the Humanities speaks to an ability to solve problems. It kind of collapses down to "sopft skills" though. "Job readiness in the sense of jobs that haven't been created yet. ... How do you create jobs that don't even exist yet". -- this is profound.
Re, the classes students take because they have to (to check a box) -- students who see the class as a waste -- Prof. Farless says that it might be a class in 17th century history but it's really a class in how to connect to history, and how to live in a world that is unfolding in front of us. "The world is a lab for history."
There's also basic literacy, "You do have to understand that World War I came before World War II"
She's certainly right that online education serves an important purpose in people's lives. She mentions "having honest conversations" with students, though, and I feel like I'm not allowed to do that at UCF. I'd be really curious to see her interactive/game-like material that helps students see legal concepts that, being from a prior era, might seem like they're from an alien paradigm. I'm especially interested to look into the role-playing material.
The fact that she addresses them as "Knights" is really cool, I like that a lot. Being at UCF is such a pleasant contrast from being other places whose name escapes me, I do find it easy to have "school spirit" here.
I'd love to take that "Preparing Tomorrow's Faculty" course, but I don't think it counts toward any of my requirements, and ironically the heavy-handedness with which it insists on my physical attendance tells me that it won't be helpful in learning to teach online asynchronous courses, since its very structure all but sermonizes that online asynchronous classes are insufficient.
"You can still be student-centered and still have an expectation of excellence." -- No, we can't. Prof. Farless can, because she's been here long enough that she won't get in trouble for it. I would. This is a deathless and ubiquitous communication barrier between experienced faculty she and us... and is the reason there's not much point in shadowing experienced faculty. I say this with total, deferential respect to the wisdom of everything she's saying, it's just that so much of it isn't true for people starting as instructors now. I don't even want to think about the kind of negative consequences I'd face if I had expectations of the students. I do have a track record of changing lives, even as an instructor of online classes. No one cares. My orders are to stop changing lives for the better, because "students today don't have time." -- Okay, I got it :).
P. 373 - Literacy is “the baseline for participation in social life" - This is true, and it's part of why I feel so ... angsty? Mildly offended? when students don't do the readings. Because some people literally can't. But literacy, in this NEA context, means more than the ability to read, it also means something like respect for reading and implicitly, predisposition toward deference to those who've read what we haven't read.
p. 376 - Digital Humanities = Big Humanities = Generative Humanities - prescient, but this prior understanding of "generative humanities" is probably what's missing as things progress. It moves toward credentialing and _away from_ generating meaningful or useful work.
p. 120 - "The term 'digital pedagogy,'" Aaron Santesso contends, "has now achieved the same status as 'interdisciplinarity' or 'entrepreneurial scholarship.' We express enthusiasm about it publicly, while privately confessing that we don’t exactly know how to do it." -- This moment is, right now, passing into its evil twin. I used to sense, only a few years ago, the charming "oh golly, I'm such a Luddite" professorial-technophobia being described here. It has become "these classes don't work" and if the asynchronous modality wasn't so often combined with class sizes of 150, I'd probably be one of the optimists holding out for a new age of quality online learning. But... well, it's not working, and I'm not allowed to try and fix it. Let's see if the reading has any more qwisdom though.
Okay, there is some hope, on p. 124 - "And, in a unique collaboration centered on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Matthew Gold and Jim Groom participated in a four-university experiment in creating "loosely networking learning spaces." This approach, they found, reimagines possibilities for working on related projects in separate places through an "open and porous learning ecosystem" - That's a cool idea. In the paragraphs just before this one, the Klein reading talked about the phasing out of essays and term papers, and that's fair. Game design is being phased in -- also true, but I am deeply embarrassed on behalf of some of the people who think they are teaching game design and are actually making everything even worse than the much-feared "attempt to directly translate in-person classes to an online format" -- one of many ironies (it's ironies all the way down) is that most people have to work in game design for real before they can teach it, or understand how to use its principles to teach. This does not apply to everyone, some people are totally theoretical and can still pull it off (maybe by talking with actual game designers) but... well, I'm just ranting now, these reflections have become like dialysis.
The piece closes with a survey of self-congratulatory programs that make redundant "inroads" between people who already have jobs and who regard their professions as diverse but whose roles are indistinguishable outside of academia. I felt like I was watching a commercial for the Apple store, if I'm being honest.