Riley On Teaching As Scholarship and the Commons
Continuing a conversation started by “Open Source and Academia,” an article co-authored by Laurie Taylor and Brendan Riley, Brendan responds to a blog post written by ruffin, that in itself is, in part, a response to the Taylor and Riley article. Among the smart things Brendan writes is this:
But as the MIT OpenCourseWare program suggests, the course materials do not make the course. We learned from Good Will Hunting that all we need for a college education is a library card, right? Maybe if you’re a Southie. Instead, as Alex Reid suggested a while ago on Digital Digs, what students are paying for in higher ed is time: time with an expert, time to discuss and ponder, time with someone trained in both the depth of the discipline and a set of tools to help groups of people think through ideas in a productive way. This is the reason online education has not become the boon administrators thought it would be: you have to staff online courses with people who know what they’re doing, and they need time to do it. Wikipedia makes not only high school research projects nearly worthless (”write a report on dolphins and fishing”), but endangers lecture classes in the same way.
Thus, the concern that someone might sell my syllabus is a limited one, to me–particularly since every syllabus I’ve written is online and CCd, but that’s beside the point. I could see feeling a little chagrined if someone started making bucketloads of money from them, but ultimately my teaching materials are another form of my scholarship–they’re what I’m contributing back to the commons. And our culture is so wedded to the idea that we own our ideas that the idea of losing control of those ideas makes us revolt. [Read more.]
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i know LOTS of Comp teachers who “created”* online versions of FYC that are, for them, Seriously Revenue-Generating (and yes, it pisses me off for reasons both pedagogical and financial). and i also know Comp teachers (who are not primarily r/c people) who have written textbooks and guides and whatnot. and i worry about the extent to which “our” time is or is *not* (seen as) valuable to many other non r/c (most often, English Dept) faculty. that is to say, i argee w/ Alex and Brendan, but i have seen resentment from faculty who teach Comp and are not r/c specialists; they are *offended* that we claim expertise-type status because “darn it!” they teach Comp too, and they know good writing when they see it.
so i worry about the status of r/c, especially w/r/t FYC. maybe it’s just where i am, but what i’ve seen here worries me. then again, here, it’s . . . “special.”
* these scare quotes are worth a much longer and more detailed discussion.