Wrappin It Up - Darcy's Final Blog

Introduction
I’ve had two exposures to blogging prior to this course; there is a lady who lives in Kansas (or maybe Oklahoma) who blogs about living on a ranch and my mom loves to forward stories from her (amazingly, I just saw a commercial on tv the other day and this lady is getting her own tv show now), and my sister set up a blog as she was completing a multi-day cycling event a couple of summers ago. Both left me not terribly impressed with the world of blogging, so it was with some apprehension that the semester began and I learned how much of the course would be spent utilizing this method of communication.

I’ve never taken a college course that had an online component before, but I have taken a couple of online trainings / seminars through AACRAO, and those trainings utilized Blackboard, which I found slightly frustrating. I understand UNC uses Blackboard, so while I was a bit anxious about blogging for this course, it was certainly a more appealing option than using Blackboard.
The overall blogging experience, from a technical perspective, was fairly easy. Minor bumps included the fact that at first I couldn’t post a comment because I didn’t have a Gmail account, I did something in the beginning to “hide” one of the blogs (and couldn’t figure out how to “undo” it) so I kept having to click on an extra link to get them all to appear, and a couple of my blogs seemed to disappear after I posted them. After posting my first blog, I began the practice of typing them in Word, then copying and pasting them into the new blog post, so they were easily recoverable. I have learned though that saving these documents in a place I can access from anywhere on any computer is very important (learned that the hard way).

Blogger is the only blogging site (program?) that I’ve used, so I have nothing to really compare it to, but it would be nice if you could have easy access to all of the posts and comments that you’ve made. While you can search a little and find all of your blog posts, you have to click on each blog individually to do so (which is a little time consuming when there are nine blog topics), I wasn’t ever able to find a place where I could see the articles on which I had commented.

Postings


My two blog posts that resonate the are my favorites are:
- Money, Money, Money, Money…Money
- How Lucky We Are

I chose these three blogs without looking at how many comments they generated, but based on what I was feeling as I wrote them, how easily the blog flowed, and some of the questions that I had as reading the article and crafting the blog.

Money, Money, Money, Money…Money
The article regarding Presidential compensation really struck me as a more broad social justice issue. How do we have people leading institutions of higher education (in particular, those leading public institutions) and taking home close to $1 million per year? Part of what I love about working in higher education is helping students who come in with limited opportunities, leave with more opportunities than they had imagined possible. It is frustrating when some of those students struggle so much to try and stay in school and pursue their educational / career dreams and when they decide they cannot continue attending, it is frequently because of finances…how they will pay their rent, afford transportation to / from school, afford the books for each class, etc. and seeing some of the salaries on the chart in The Chronicle only highlighted the issue for me; I work with students who just need a little extra help to push them up onto a more level playing field and the people on the list from The Chronicle article would certainly seem to have a little extra to give. Admittedly, I don’t know how philanthropic the Presidents on the list are or what their personal stories and struggles to obtain their success have been…but really, over $1.3 million in total compensation for the President of Ohio State is beyond excessive to me.

Even as I’m typing this summary, I find myself again getting very passionate about the issue, and that is another reason why I believe this was one of my better blogs…anytime you can touch on a topic that truly stirs your passion and gets your blood pumping…it’s a good thing! Part of my hope in posting the blog was to see how others felt; did someone think I just had some chip on my shoulder toward people who were financially successful, could there be some justification for paying the salaries that are being paid to these people, was there something that I was just missing?

How Lucky We Are
As a general rule, I am a “root for the underdog” kind of person and the article about the student from Afghanistan who had attended college in the U.S. with the help of a Fulbright scholarship and had returned to his home country to make some positive changes there, I was inspired. As with the blog about Presidential compensation, this blog is also one that brought a variety of emotions to the surface as I was crafting it…namely gratitude. Part of my desire in posting the blog about this article was to get people to pause and think about how lucky we are to have the educational opportunities we have in the U.S. , even when our day-to-day lives may be spent on mundane things that make us believe higher ed is cracked if not seriously broken, as flawed and imperfect as it is, it is still something that people in other countries save and sacrifice just to have a chance at.

Blog Process / Class Discussion
The blogging process was one that admittedly, I struggled with a bit. In my first few blogs, I was a little uncertain about now much content should be spent on summarizing the article I read, and how much should be spent on my reaction to the article, questions that came up, etc. Also, I am someone who likes to really delve into a topic if it’s of interest to me, so I found myself reading the initial article, then doing a search for more information on the topic and reading that, only to find myself down a completely different rabbit hole about and four or more hours ticked off the clock.

I felt most comfortable when I crafted my middle three or four blogs because the articles I selected indeed were truly passionate ones for me and I felt the blog composition flow much more easily than it had in the first two or three. The last two or three blogs were slightly more challenging to craft as professional and personal responsibilities increased and culminated into a trip out of town for work that required almost being sequestered for three days.

I found the format for the class discussions overall worked well. Allowing us to select the topics of greatest interest to us allowed me to have some choice in my educational experience. And, while there were times when I struggled with that choice because there were two or more topics that I was interested in discussing in more detail, I never really felt like I missed out on anything by having to make just one choice.

Since we had so few in-person meetings, I don’t feel that the group dynamic changed much over the course of time, which is contrary to what I might have expected to see. As people get more comfortable voicing their own opinion, posing questions to other members, etc., in my experience, there tends to be a shift in the dynamic between the start of a course and the end of the course 15 or so weeks later. I know there were people in the class who knew each other better than I did, as they were in the Tuesday class together as well and I’m not in that class. Having said that, everyone still seemed very open, and the small group discussions were overall really good.

The large group discussions were lively and generally had numerous people wanting to contribute to the dialogue. It was always interesting to see how similarly or divergently they went compared to the small group discussions. Sometimes the small group discussions stayed very close to the same ideas because the people in those groups all had somewhat similar thinking regarding the issue…this could be very different when that topic came to the larger group to discuss.

I may have thought that I had decent time management skills going into this course, but I certainly have realized that crafting effective blogs and being an active participant in the in-person meetings, required another level of organization.

Summary
I will confess that I still don’t quite get the overall appeal of blogging out in the everyday world; however, for this course, it seemed like an effective choice. Having the various categories of blog topics allowed people to spend more time reading and researching articles in areas of interest to them, which certainly made the experience more interesting.

Additionally, having a class where the overwhelming majority of people were directly working in the field, made the conversations rich, particularly in the small group discussions. Having colleagues from other institutions in the course was also very beneficial and it was nice to see them in a different environment than in the regular ways we interact in our professional lives.
Finally, in large part participating in this course helped me accomplish one very big goal that I had at the start of the semester, and that was to spend more time actively staying informed about what was going on in the world of higher ed outside of my institution and position. It is so very easy to get tunnel vision about higher ed and have everything revolve around what’s happening with your position, your institution, in your state, etc. and lose sight of the larger picture. Seeking out news and information about higher ed in various contexts was extremely valuable, and a practice I plan to continue.