I had a great time talking to the guys at the Vassar Talk Tech radio broadcast (WVKR 91.3) this week. Not only did I get to talk about eportfolios (always good), but was able to stay and discuss the iPad.

Thanks, guys!

 

 Talk Tech: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Coming this Saturday, and it should be a great day. I’ll be on the roundtable on the future of WordPress in Education, and presenting my own eportfolio spiel:

Eportfolios are (too often) seen as tools for assessment, for assignments, or for career placement. But thanks to Wordpress and BuddyPress, at Macaulay Honors College, we’ve been able to set up an entirely flexible and free tool, allowing students (and faculty, and instructional technology fellows) to redefine the term “Eportfolio” and to let them each create a “Cabinet of Curiosities” or a “Museum of Me,” which promotes reflection, interaction, and truly integrative learning. These eportfolios are student-driven and student-designed, and the flexibility of WordPress allows us to watch as students forge new paths, and create an eportfolio model which is new in higher education, and which has the potential to work for students beyond the classroom, beyond the college.

Even still it’s a sharp pain–it doesn’t really lose the edge.

R.I.P. Scott Daniel Ugoretz.

February 24, 1964-October 28, 1988.

This, lightly edited, is the email I sent to my family in other places on September 12, 2001.

I was in the subway when the first blast happened, and some people got on my train and started talking about a plane crash and brushing broken glass from their clothes and hair. I pretty much ignored them. Then I got out of the train and started walking across town. I heard a lot of sirens and a helicopter and at the next intersection I looked up and saw the flaming hole in the first WTC building. I looked back down and started walking quick to work to call Beth to tell her to stay home (cell phones were not working, pay phones had long lines, people were running up the street crying).

Then I heard an echoing explosion, like a series of 3 or 5 loud rippling bangs, and I looked up and saw the huge cloud of smoke and flame (and large pieces of debris–people next to me said they saw people falling in the air, but I don’t think I saw that–not clearly) coming out of the second building.

I ran to work and called Beth–I wanted to tell her to stay home, because the subways would be a mess. At that point I thought it was just something like a gas fire. Somebody told me that a plane had crashed into the WTC, but I didn’t really believe it.

Then they started evacuating the college.

I walked out the North Entrance (about eight blocks north of the WTC) and saw two of my students, one crying and both pretty freaked out. I started walking with them, telling them I would help them get to Brooklyn, and that we should get out of the area, but we would be OK.

We made our way East and South and when we got to Broadway, turned South to go to the Brooklyn Bridge. Then we heard a loud noise like a subway train or a jet plane was going right down the street. Everyone stopped and looked around.

Then people were running north, towards us, from the south (the WTC, about 6 blocks south and 3 blocks west) I saw some running police and firefighters, running away from the WTC, then more and more people, a big crowd. I lost track of my students. I looked south where the people were running from and saw a huge cloud of smoke and debris (many stories tall, taller than the surrounding buildings) billowing and rushing up Broadway behind the mob of running people. I turned and started running. I saw a pair of high-heeled shoes that a woman must have just abandoned to run faster. Then a lady next to me fell down and people started trampling her. I got behind her and picked her up and she ran away. I thought I might fall or get hit by broken glass so I hid in a doorway and covered my face. Then the leading edge of the cloud was past and the air was dusty but there weren’t people running anymore.

I looked south and I couldn’t see where the Brooklyn Bridge was. Just the cloud of dust. So I turned north. I wanted to get out of Manhattan.

I walked towards Canal Street. People in the crowd were saying that nobody was being let out of Manhattan, that all the bridges were closed by trucks and troops. I thought “I don’t care. They can’t keep me here. I am going home.” I got on the Manhattan Bridge. As I was walking across I looked back and saw only one tower of the WTC standing. Then I heard that subway sound again and I looked again and saw the second building coming down. People in the crowd were saying that more planes were coming, and that they were going to attack the bridges next. I kept looking over the edge of the bridge to check the distance to the ground in case I had to jump.

I walked all the way to Brooklyn, and kept trying to call Beth on my cell phone until the battery died. When I found a pay phone with not a long line, I tried that, but the call wouldn’t go through.

So I just walked the rest of the way home. I was covered with the dust and ashes, and when I walked in I had to keep telling Beth that I was OK. Then Beth went to get Julie at school. I am just so happy we are all OK. (alternating with incredible anger at the bastards who did this, and those who are celebrating our grief and fear)

I talked to a lot of people, and I saw a lot of New Yorkers comforting each other, even strangers. At one point I was having some trouble breathing (mostly anxiety, some asthma) and a guy came over and helped me. Then I was OK, and I said thanks, and he walked away.

I feel so bad for the many people who lost loved ones.

Just thought I’d write it all down.

Time Magazine lists 10 Newspapers that will either Fold or Go Under Next.

1. The Philadelphia Daily News
2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune
3. The Miami Herald
4. The Detroit News
5. The Boston Globe.
6. The San Francisco Chronicle.
7. The Chicago Sun Times
8. NY Daily News
9. The Fort Worth Star Telegram
10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer

They give their reasoning for each one in the linked article above. It could be they’re right, even about all of them.

But here’s something I notice…I read this list because of a link from one of my twitter community–somebody I don’t know in “real life” at all. He linked to this Time Magazine story. On Yahoo News (where that link above is going to). And Time is actually just taking it from 24/7wallst.com.

So if I’m counting right, this story reached me only after being re-purposed 4 times from its original source. And now it’s reaching anyone reading this after a 5th.

Content “producers” become content aggregators–and content “consumers” become content disseminators in the new media economy. And then those disseminators comment on the content, and re-purpose it, and make their own points. Like I’m doing here. So everybody’s role gets reshaped. Who’s the “real” producer?

Interesting times, that’s who.

(And by the way, I can’t think of a time in the past 10 years or more when I’ve actually bought a paper copy of Time Magazine–or even touched one except when stranded in a doctor’s office with nothing else available.)

R.I.P. Scott Daniel Ugoretz.

February 24, 1964-October 28, 1988.

Even with ongoing health issues, I still enjoy everyday absurdities, which is why I’m a big fan of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

It’s not a terribly mean grammar “gotcha” site. It’s really just for fun, and many of the finds are quite hilarious.

So I sent in a photo of my own–a sign that I noticed right here in Brooklyn. And today it was posted! This is a measure of fame that I can handle–first name only, and just plain silliness!

(I saw another classic–the “all you can eat” pancake breakfast, over the weekend, but didn’t snap a photo).

This just came up a week or so ago, and I’ve been working very hard to help make it happen. Now it’s on!

Tomorrow night ABC News Now (their online news service) will be showing live interviews with students from across the country…including four of ours!

Got the lighting and background and sound and video working today (at least in a test) and I think it will be very cool.

I’ll be there, hoping for no glitches, and fixing them as they occur, and making sure everything goes smoothly, so I won’t be able to watch it myself…but I hope many others (35 million?) will check it out.

Press release here.

(And adding later after the fact–direct link to the video here)

A few weeks ago, on November 11 (11/11, get it?), all the Macaulay freshmen took photos to represent their view of NYC. It’s a great range of images, some captured on camera phones at low resolution, some of neighborhoods and streets, animals, eyes, people and subways. Then they uploaded them to an online gallery we set up, so they could rate and comment on their classmates’ photos. Now (starting tonight), they’re having a brick and mortar gallery show in the Macaulay Center. Student curators assembled, grouped and hung the photos (with lots of technical and practical help and late hours from Macaulay staff), and now they get to walk among them, look at them, talk about them, and hear guest speakers and enjoy light refreshments.

I’m impressed by the event, and I love looking at the photos. And the students’ captions. And their comments! Each year we get new freshmen, and a new group of views of the city.

In the course I’m co-teaching in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Interactive Technology and Pedagogy program we’ve been talking about some of the skills and tools that students need to know and use in the media universe. We discussed (it was a digression, as I remember) how access to information sometimes can be a curse as well as a blessing, if students don’t have the appropriate questioning, critical, and researching skills.

And then serendipitously I was reading Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings (I read the first part long ago, when it was a Hugo-winning novella, and only recently discovered that Silverberg had added another whole section to expand it into a full novel.)

In Silverberg’s imagined post-lapsarian world, some kind of pickled human brains take the place of networked computers…but there’s still that same problem:

Any citizen has the right to go to a public thinking cap and requisition an information from the Rememberers on any given subject. Nothing is concealed. But the Rememberers volunteer no aid; you must know how to ask, which means you must know what to ask. Item by item you must seek your facts. It is useful for those who must know, say, the long-term patterns of climate in Agupt, or the symptoms of the crystallization disease, or the limitations in the charter of one of the guilds; but it is no help at all to the man who wishes knowledge of the larger questions. One would need to requisition a thousand informations merely to make a beginning. The expense would be great; few would bother.

For larger questions, neither the Rememberers nor the internet can be of much help…at least not without the real skills, almost enough to be a Rememberer, or more than a Rememberer, yourself.

A long pause in blogging lately, and one not entirely motivated by laziness or busy-ness, although both did play a role.

I’ve always kept this blog using my own real name, and with my own institutional affiliation and (some degree of) personal identification right out in front. It was something I thought hard about when I started the blog, and I felt pretty strongly that I wanted this to be public and not anonymous. There are some great anonymous blogs out there, and some blogs which are great because they’re anonymous. But one of the reasons I wanted to do the blog was to make contacts with people, and I wanted to contact those people as myself–with my real name. So the blog has always been my own, and it’s on a website that I own and pay for.

I’ve always been aware that my blogging was public, and always felt that what I said here should only be what I was willing to say publicly. And that worked well for me, for a long time. Sometimes some people didn’t like what I said, but they were always willing to address it with me head-on, in the comments or by email, and often (not always) we came to some better understanding because of it. We each learned from the experience.

This blog has never had a huge audience, and that’s been OK, but I’ve valued the audience I’ve had, and I’ve valued the fact that I was always real, always honest here.

Something happened, recently, though.

I wrote a post (no need to try to find it. It’s not here anymore–it’s private now and only I can see it. It may stay that way forever. I may make it public again sometime, and if I do I’ll edit out this little parenthetical comment). It was a post that I thought about a lot. It was personal. It was reflective. I worked on it and I posted it because it said things that I wanted to say and to say publicly.

I had mixed feelings when I wrote it–some sadness and nostalgia, some hope and ambition, and some anger and resentment. I think all of those feelings came through in the post, and I won’t deny any of them. They were all justified.

There were also some judgments about another person in that post, and while those judgments were negative, they weren’t nasty, they weren’t rude or offensive, and they were certainly (in my eyes) fair and well-deserved. The person wasn’t named–but anyone who knew the person and who knew me would know who the person was.

As it turned out, though, there is one reader of this blog who posted a comment on my post. That comment was rude, was nasty and offensive. And it was posted anonymously. But the cute pseudonym the commenter used was transparent, as was the IP address from which the comment came, as was the particular style of rudeness, so I do know who that commenter is. But I won’t name that commenter, either. I deleted that comment, as I’m sure the commenter expected. But the commenter went farther–the commenter printed out my post and passed it to the person about whom I had made the negative judgments. I know the motives of that commenter. I know the character of that commenter, and what that commenter was trying to accomplish.

There weren’t any real consequences, I didn’t suffer in any real way. But it was a cowardly and devious attempt to hurt me, to use the blog to hurt me, and although the attempt failed, it shook me. It made me think twice about blogging anymore. And it did make me move the post in question out of the public area of the blog.

But as I’ve thought more about it recently, I’ve decided that there’s no real reason for me to stop the blogging enterprise. For whatever small public voice and tiny audience this blog has, I like having that. I’ve got more things to say, and I’m going to continue to say them.

This has never been the most active of blogs. But it’s not going to be a silent blog, either. I don’t think it needs to be.

And it will continue to be in my real name, and with my real thoughts and honest reactions.

I haven’t been doing much blog posting lately at all–for a reason that I’ll probably explain in a later post. But today’s date is one that I never fail to acknowledge on this blog–or anywhere. After 19 years, it’s still a sad anniversary, still hurts. It’s different every year, but the hurt is no less deep.

R.I.P. Scott Daniel Ugoretz.

February 24, 1964-October 28, 1988.

I’ve been working for the same college since I was 22 years old. I started with a full head of hair (a ponytail, in fact) and an earring, as a tutor, and I’m now a bald (but in a strikingly handsome way) tenured full professor.

More than two decades in the same job–moving up through the ranks. I stayed there through a lot of life events–through marriage and parenthood. Through my brother’s death and through 9/11. Through a second MA and a PhD. Through the recent health crises. As little as five years ago I thought that tenure and promotion to full professor would be my ultimate goal–no need to ever ask for any more, I would be free to coast for the rest of my career–just relax until retirement.

Except it didn’t work out that way. I got involved in teaching with technology–using the web and new media to improve my teaching, and then training other faculty to do the same. It got me some recognition, both in the college and in the wider academic community, and about three years ago I proposed to the administration that the college really needed a dean of instructional technology. And I wanted to be that dean.

I put a lot of thought into that proposal, and I wrote it out very clearly. I realized that it would mean giving up teaching (which I loved and still love) for a career in administration. But I was interested in new challenges– having an effect on more than just my own students in my own classroom. I wanted to try to make changes and set policy on a bigger scale, to try to make a difference in the whole institution.

The VP of Academic Affairs (the person who really runs the college) agreed with my proposal–she did see that the position was necessary, and that it really needed to be a dean-level position (I actually thought it should be an AVP position, but I didn’t think that that would be politically possible). However, she said that the president “wasn’t ready” to create any new deans quite yet. So she assigned me to the job–almost exactly as I described it in my proposal–but as a director-level position. I was still a faculty member, but released from teaching to serve this administrative role. That meant that I had all the responsibility, but none of the authority. I got no extra money, no staff, no direct reports…but full responsibility for faculty development in technology, computer labs for students and classes, new projects and initiatives.

I had responsibility in the sense that anything that went wrong was my fault–but all my decisions had to be approved by her, and any recognition or credit for my accomplishments would belong to her. And even when I saw clear problems–issues that were affecting teaching and learning–I had no authority to tell any other directors, or any of the senior managers, what I thought should be done. I could only tell the VP and hope that she would agree or pass along my concerns.

I accepted this–mainly because the VP kept promising me that it would be temporary. That “soon” she would be able to create the dean’s position, and that it would be mine. So I was patient. I did my job–with a lot of success. I wrote a report each semester (sometimes twice a semester), explaining why (not just for me, but for the institution) the position required more authority, and the institutional structure needed to be altered to recognize the importance of technology–and the integration of technology into the teaching and learning operations of the college.

And each time she read those reports, the VP said, “you’re absolutely right. I agree 100%. I’m going to get to this as soon as I can.”

But it just didn’t happen.

Finally I realized that I was being exploited. She had no intention of ever making the dean position a reality. She knew that she could keep me doing a dean’s work, but without investing the political or financial capital that it would take to make a new dean at the college, and that she was willing to tolerate the fact that I was frustrated–and that I wasn’t able to even do the job as well as it needed to be done.

And worse than that, I began to see the real institutional and structural obstacles, which were entrenched and probably insurmountable, in this and many other areas at the college. Teaching with technology (and to some extent, teaching in general) just was not working as well at the college as it should. And it looked like it never would.

So I decided to start looking for something else.

It was a tough decision–it felt weird to think about leaving the only job I had had as an adult. It felt disloyal to think about abandoning the colleagues and the students who had meant so much to me over the years. And it felt very scary (and many people told me it was crazy) to think about giving up tenure.

But it’s done. I’ve been offered a new job–and as of June 1, I’m resigning from my current job. I’m giving up my tenure, giving up my rank of full professor, and taking the leap.

The new job looks fantastic–I’m very happy about it. I’ll be the Director of Technology and Learning at the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY–a special, very elite program. They take some of the most academically gifted students–students who might otherwise go to the Ivies, or other of the top private universities in the country, and give those students the very best that the City University has to offer–including free tuition, free laptops, interdisciplinary seminars, and study-abroad and internship programs.

It’s a small program, and a relatively new program, and my position will be a big one–even though the title is still “Director,” I’ll be pretty much the equivalent of a Chief Technology Officer for the college–certainly a dean-level, at least, in terms of the actual organizational structure. I’ll get to make some bigger decisions, I’ll have some real authority, and I’ll get to help build the program almost from the ground up the way I think it should go. And I’ll have some graduate students, instructional technology fellows, to work with–so I get to help shape future professors, too.

Sometimes (late at night, usually) I do think I’m crazy. “What am I doing?” I ask myself. I could forget all this ambition and just teach my classes, get my automatic raises every year, take my summers off to read and write and travel. Unless I commit some kind of serious crime, I could never be fired. I could keep the same job for another twenty years or so, and then retire, perfectly comfortable.

But I also think that while tenure is a security blanket, it’s also a trap. I’m excited about the new directions that higher education is going to take in the coming years–and I want to be part of that. I want to try new things, not just in my own classroom, but on that larger scale. And (maybe it sounds arrogant) I’m confident enough in my own abilities, my own intelligence, to think that I can do bigger things–and that I don’t need the assurance of a guaranteed job, I need the challenges and the rewards of a job where I can actually make things happen…on a scale bigger than my own classroom.

So as of June 4, Monday, I’m going to need to change some of the links on the main Mountebank page–the links that describe where I work and what I do. Those will be the most minor of the changes!

The big Nor’easter really had very little effect on us–it was a lot of rain, a little wind, not much more than that.

But what I like about it is the effect it had on at least one New York Times writer–bringing out his best poetic efforts!

Coming on a weekend, the storm had a relatively light impact on most residents. Many shops and restaurants that normally would have been open yesterday were shuttered, but without jobs or schools to attend, many people spent the day indoors with the Sunday papers, relaxing with music to go with the silken lash of rain hissing at the windows, dripping on a lazy afternoon.

The day was, in a way, like great theater: the drama of the approaching storm, the searching wind at the panes and rain dancing on the pavement, the smudged sky, the iron-gray day like a movie in black and white. The overcast was solid, great plates of corrugated iron fused from horizon to horizon, and the streets glistened in the rain: a metallic futureworld.

Thanks, Robert McFadden! “The silken lash of rain hissing at the windows.” I love it!

The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne,
Th’assay so sharp, so hard the conquerynge,
The dredful joye, alwey that slit so yerne,
Al this mene I be Loue, that myn felynge
Astonyith with his wondyrful werkynge
So sore iwis, that whan I on hym thynke,
Nat wot I wel wher that I flete or synke.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!