Flipping teaching in a flipped classroom

Flipping teaching is suggestive of expletives not too dissimilar to flipping the bird, and i am aware that i am writing this having become angry about the 'latest solution' to an under-resourced teaching and learning environment in higher ed.
I want to start by saying i am not adverse to many of the concepts integral to an authentic flipped classroom approach, but what i need to say first is that i am hugely averse to having smoke blown in my face.

I currently teach in higher ed where quality teaching is not sufficient for promotion but multiple journal article production is. Chasing the research dollar has become some form of a holy grail....even though the substantive part of university funding comes from student enrolment and the likelihood of gaining funding for research is very small (like chasing 1% of government funding that comes to universities for humanities research in Aus)
This shapes the pedagogy of learning and teaching that is/isn't supported and can be distilled to teach less and research more; publish or perish.
I do not deny research importance; my problem is when it erodes teaching and learning.
Back to the flipped classroom.
What i have had blown in my face: If the teaching from this semester is filmed in front of a 'live' audience, this can then be shown to classes later in the day, and becomes the resource for using for all venues in 2014 where there is not a 'live' performance.
See the problem? This is not a flipped classroom.
This is education being delivered like pizzas.
And as for the live class or the live lecturer, it actually makes no difference, dead or alive the 'performance' will go on.
Blow the smoke away. Take it out of my face. I am not convinced.
I am flipping angry.

If it is going to be flipped, it needs resourcing, it's not the panacea for having no live bodies for students to engage with.
If we havent got 5 lecturers for 5 venues for a total of 1000 students, each timetabled to a max of 2hrs a week and 6 tutorials a semester, in what universe can we have a model of 1 hr live filmed, watch it here or wherever at your own time and place, and have classes that are engaging with twice as many tutorials instead... where are the smaller class tutorials being resourced from?
Dont waste your smoke filled breath telling me i need a lesson in flipped classrooms. I know how.
See here http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/education-3-0-and-the-pedagogy-andragogy-heutagogy-of-mobile-learning/ and here http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture/ I am already enamored of authentic student centred learning. I'm not resistant. I'm just not convinced. And telling me to be quiet on education just gets me riled.
So
Repeat
after
me:

Pizzas get delivered; babies get born, and education is about engagement.

I am not ready to play dead on this, so dont tell me to be quiet. Talking louder or talking over me will not make this go away. The smoke and mirrors are not working. Take your obfuscation and shove it somewhere else. When you are ready to engage realistically on this, I am more than happy to flip the learning and teaching, meantime i do not want to further enable an already suspect curriculum where students learn from the hidden agenda that faculty staff do not want to engage. Given that 'we' make our realities, 'we' do not have to accept the dark side of flipping classrooms, anymore than the dark side of moocs. There is so much more to aspire to.

A convenient blindness; sessional contracts in higher ed

http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/departments/Strategy%20and%20Human%20Resource%20Management/airaanz/proceedings/melbourne2008/nonref/papers/R.%20May,%20L.%20Gale,%20I.%20Campbell.pdf

May,R., Gale, M., and Campbell, I.(2008). Casually appointed, permanently exploited: How is NTEU responding to the casualisation of academia in the current climate? Paper presented at AIRAANZ. Melbourne.

Many in the university community take comfort in the idea that sessional academic employment is a privilege and an opportunity – a kind of apprenticeship that leads to tenure. It may once have been so. However the data and the qualitative experience of sessional staff demonstrates that this is not the case in Australia in 2007, and has not been the case for many years. The illusion of the sessional apprenticeship, like the illusion that young people prefer casual employment, contributes to a convenient blindness that allows extreme exploitation to continue. That exploitation is not accidental or self-imposed. It is the necessary outcome of
decisions taken by governments, university administrations and staff in supervisory positions throughout a devolved budgetary structure.

This is an excellent article, that needs wider discussion.

It is so easy to attribute blame, but there are a myriad of factors that have resulted in the current situation.
An ANT analysis, without using the language of ANT comes through.
Revisiting the relational aspects in improving the current scenario would also be useful. For things can always be otherwise.
If you work with sessional staff, start with valuing them :)
The stories pointed to here are of unpleasant experiences; offensive and devaluing, largely invisible, but always personal.

Issues identified:
Not being provided the necessary conditions of work.
Being seen as being part of the problem.
A misleading terminology of flexibility and choice-

Most people do not like being seen as a disposable section of the workforce. Citing a large survey of general and academic casual staff by Junor (2004:284) found that over 80 percent of the casual academic staff who responded wanted ongoing employment.

The article cites Evans (2007)

As one casual academic noted: ‘It used to be that tutoring was a kind of indenture, a poorly paid but pleasant part of post graduate study, valuable experience on the path to an academic career... (now it) leads to nothing’.

Taking a 'relational turn' (Kenneth Gergen, 2009) is worth further consideration;
to approach human beings exclusively as seperate or bounded units- whether individual selves, communities...-is to threaten our future well-being ... It is through relational process that whatever we come to view as independent beings are given birth. ...whatever we think, remember, create and feel, we participate in relationship ...We carry with us traces of myriad relationships, past and present, existing or imagined. These traces equip us with multiple and often conflicting potentials for action. (p,397)

It is in relating, rather than avoiding or in pointing elsewhere a finger of blame, that there is potential for movement.

meantime, leading nowhere sounds like a potential paper...
Must finish the phd...

A cunning plan, or a culling plan? Education on the edge of reason

Just when you think it cant get any worse, it can.
Today i am seriously asked to consider outsourcing marking to the other side of the planet.
Seriously.
The latest 'cunning plan' is argued in terms of better consistency and saving us from re-training markers each year. And here's a paper for discussion at Mondays meeting:
Some papers are uploaded to Bangalore to be graded
alongside its serious brochure from VTA.
This surely is a solution in search of problems.
Where i work has made 110 people redundant over the last 4 years, presumably this was due to lack of work...or at least lack of work that might make use of these people's expertise... what I cant fathom is expertise from the other side of the planet is apparently better?
And its all sold with a cost-benefit ratio that's "completely in our favour".

A slippery slope?
mmmm just maybe
If they can do online PE classses, sneakers optional you can also do weight training online...

Hoping it was all a bad joke I responded to this latest innovative technological holy grail and ask:
Please tell me its got to be tongue in cheek
Maybe we outsource our work like we have students who outsource their work ...
Except buying someone to do your work when your a student is called cheating...
When its the institution its called efficiency.

The response back: Not being funny - we already out source the marking to Teaching Assistants, many of whom are not New Zealanders - so there is little difference.

Time for a joke?
What's worse than a full glass of digital hemlock?
A half a glass of digital hemlock
... ROFL ...

Love to know your views,
1. Should taxpayer money be spent on paying for tertiary students assignments to be regraded from the other side of the planet.
2. Should content be so homogenized that its not a problem for people in Bangladore or any other place, to mark it?

Provocative education

Having listened to a telling tail on slideshare, I'm provoked.
The potential for opening up learning is to exploit the longtail effect.

Recently I gave a talk to my colleagues on my phd, and its associated behaviour of blogging my way through one, it crossed my mind, again, that readership through journals is important, but limited. I am convinced that even my small blog at 14395 hits since i started it, is a damn sight more hits than any of my very few academic publications.
When (most) people search for information, google is their friend. The access limitations thrown up by publishing companies is not. The outcome is that knowledge that is freely disseminated gets cited more (formally as well as informally), and knowledge that has barriers to it is less likely to be.

In a health promotion understanding, it would be termed making the healthy choice the easy choice. This involves the 4 A's: being available,accessible,affordable and acceptable.

At present we seem entrenched in making it acceptable as assessed by peer review, but if it is not available we might as well have been *pissing in the wind*, to use the crude vernacular.
Its got to be available and that means making it accessible for free.

What an ANT analysis might say of this: it is less about what is 'true' in any understandings of that word, than about how connections to particular knowledge is made easier or harder.
Situating knowledge matters: where you put your hard penned words as an academic matters. Feel free to be peer reviewed and also make it freely available.
Getting it sighted is how a world of difference gets made.
To be cited, you need to be accessible.
Sited, sighted, and cited.

Some ways to increase accessibility:
blogging, tweeting, use http://www.academia.edu/
and consider using slideshare- just a thought, writing a report on the funding that one obtains from one's institution to get to a conference, gets read by how many? What if instead the slides and a podcast are shared instead...

This provocation to my thinking was in response to an excellent slideshow on academic outputs as collateral damage by Martin Weller, Professor of education at the open Uni in the UK.
Some great visual metaphors in this slideshare, to watch out for:
Painting the dinosaur
And embracing unpredictability

Thanks to Heather for the tweet, twent mins of a sunday morning well spent.

Its not what I had planned

What might I have learned if i had listened to students (or their music) instead of to managerial directives in higher education?

The living end has caught up with me, and its not pretty.
I've been buried in the sand
I've come down with no place to land
I (don't) need you to understand
It's not what I had planned....

Suicidal education
It got sold to our generation
Wake up to the manipulation
Wake up to the situation
...
(ref Aussie grunge band, The living end circa 2006)

So Ive downloaded the ringtone for my mobile phone, it might help me stay grounded in reality.

Pink Floyd's 'Teacher leave them kids alone' seems to have been taken literally. Beaming content from one venue to four others is a fiscal driven curriculum rather than an educational philosophically driven one. Let us not delude ourselves.

In working with new technologies these can be integrated for better or for worse. Measuring worse is of course difficult. As is measuring better no doubt. Both requires one first of all to think better or worse for whom. The second part of the question can then be considered, what is the measure of better? And is doing as much as possible with as little as possible a valid measure? Is efficiency valid when it is also accompanied by accidental learning that could include:
Your lecturer does not want to 'see' you.
Class time is engaging only if one considers engagement in the same way one might watch a film.
Enculturation into university studies means a lack of presence...

If your an educator with doubts you might like to take up the ringtone option as a way of at least reminding yourself that there was, and is, another way. Ghandi's approach of civil disobedience at least keeps me saner in the insane places of academic practice. Meantime i am directed(!!!) to teach to a formuleic template, x mins of ppt no less, followed by x mins of expert videos...followed by x mins of breakout time. Heavens.

I'm writing this on a table made from the floor of a chapel where Mary McKillop once walked, so i figure in hope and faith, that given things changed once they can change again. And being a devotee of actor-network theory, i know things can always be otherwise... enrolling a saint's help amongst one's allies will surely help in the restoration...