Surviving Campus Politics

Here is something that they do not teach you in grad school. What do you do when you are at a campus that is in turmoil? I have not completely lived up to these verses, but they are certainly a goal and my better days are informed by them.

The Eight Verses of Thought Transformation
By His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala, India 1981Published in 2005 in the LYWA publication Teachings From Tibet.
1. Determined to obtain the greatest possible benefit for all sentient beings, who are more precious than a wish-fulfilling jewel, I shall hold them most dear at all times.
The first thing we need to do is to remember our purpose. Think about why you got involved in education in the first place. There was some moment in your life when you got why all of this is important. Remember that and let it be the center of your day.

2. When in the company of others, I shall always consider myself the lowest of all, and from the depths of my heart hold others dear and supreme.

Graduate school does not teach humility. Remember that you are coming from a position of privilege. St. Luke wrote "and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." Teaching is a vocation of service; you are here for others.

3. Vigilant, the moment a delusion appears in my mind, endangering myself and others, I shall confront and avert it without delay.

There are many delusions that arise on a college campus. Some might be: my program is the most important thing going; things will never change; if things do change, all change is bad; this president is the worse one (or the last one and certainly the one after), my feelings, dignity, salary, benefits (insert attachment here) matter more than teaching.

4. Whenever I see beings that are wicked in nature and overwhelmed by violent negative actions and suffering, I shall hold such rare ones dear, as if I had found a precious treasure.

No matter what someone says to you, no matter how personally hateful - they speak from a place of suffering; the same suffering you feel or have known.

5. When, out of envy, others mistreat me with abuse, insults or the like, I shall accept defeat and offer the victory to others.
I am still learning from this one. The turn the other cheek bit is hard and if you ever doubt the existence of your own ego wait for someone else to take credit for your work or to slander you behind your back. You will find out just how attached you are to your ego. I find myself returning to #4 an awful lot.

6. When somebody whom I have benefited and in whom I have great hopes gives me terrible harm, I shall regard that person as my holy guru.

Isn't that wonderful? You didn't know there were so many gurus around did you?

7. In short, both directly and indirectly, I offer every happiness and benefit to all my mothers. I shall secretly take upon myself all their harmful actions and suffering.

So if we are aware of the sufferings of others we can act from compassion and make a difference. It is one thing to be aware and another to act - if you are going to complain, ask yourself "how will complaining make a difference?" Maybe you feel like you need to raise other's awareness of a problem, but how will you ease the sufferings of others? As Ghandi said "be the change you want to see in the world."

8. Undefiled by the stains of the superstitions of the eight worldly concerns, may I, by perceiving all phenomena as illusory, be released from the bondage of attachment.

The important thing here is the "all phenomena as illusory" bit. Kissinger once said that "university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." Things do change - politics, budgets, and programs, and each day is an opportunity to participate in ways that will make a positive difference in the lives of others. Nothing in the college is more important than teaching and serving the students.

Why Bloom's Taxonomy?

Image via Wikipedia

I read a comment on an education blog about "Bloom's Taxonomy": "Why should we use that old thing?" was the basic tone. Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, simply put, classifies knowledge from lower to higher order of objectives from knowledge (memorization), comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. I wanted to put up a brief note on this because speaking as an instructional designer and erstwhile teacher, there is no better tool for organizing content for in-depth learning and reflection. Is it an accurate description of the "cognitive domain"? Is there really such a thing as the "cognitive domain"? Speaking as a Buddhist, maybe, but you can't get there from here. Seriously though, Bloom's taxonomy recognizes that there are different ways of knowing and understanding. If it is not an accurate description of the mind, it is because it never claimed to be the Master Key to All Human Cognition. NASA scientists know that Einstien's description of gravity and time are more accurate than Newton, but they still use Newtonian principles and math to orbit satellites or to send something to the moon. Bloom's Taxonomy is like this. It is not a Unified Field Theory, but a tool that does specific things. What Bloom's Taxonomy will do very well is fix a test or an assignment.

Every once in a while, I will get a faculty member who will ask me to look at a test. Sometimes the test is too difficult or too easy or the students seem not to be able to demonstrate what they have learned. Invariably, it is because the questions that they are asking rely too much on one particular section of Bloom's Taxonomy. In other words, the instructor will write a test that he or she thinks will demonstrate a student's ability to apply knowledge and what the test really relies on is memorization or comprehension. There is a whole list of verbs applied to each domain that can help in re-writing or creating tests. I can demonstrate quantitatively that this method works. I have seen it work in grades, retention, longitudinal studies, etc. I have not seen anything coming close to that coming from any other school of thought on education, constructivist, connectivist or what have you. There are a lot of new ideas about how Bloom's Taxonomy can work in social media and I think that these should definitely be tested, explored and used.

There are many great explorations of these ideas on the web and I want to encourage you to look at some of them. A summary of the work is at Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, but there is a lot of interesting things being done with these ideas elsewhere too.

Everything REALLY Old is New Again

Image via WikipediaIf we are going to make claims about how people think and learn, I think we also need to show that it is not really a new idea. In other words, you can't just say that people think differently because technology has changed us. The human mind can only think the way that it does. The internet is not going to change millions of years of evolution. What we really have to show is that we have thought this way all along and that currently technology is possible only because of the way that we think. Technology is changing the way that we teach, learn, and communicate but we created the technology because we are hard-wired to do it. Current technology (and scientific research) is only a pale metaphor for the actual processes of the human mind. As westerners though, that is not good enough. We have to make truth statements that reflect the facts. Never mind that those facts will change, and one of the reasons why Connectivism is so important is that the facts are changing so fast. No one person, group, or institution will be able to manage all of it. But this is not a new situation, throughout history people have been attempting to manage information that was beyond the limits of our comprehension while enjoying the advantages of collective intelligence through technology. This technology has included art, oral transmission, writing, printing presses, telegraph, radio, television, and computers. The metaphor of knowledge networks has existed even within the earliest stages of technology.

The Tibetan cosmos mandala, for instance, shows a network of jeweled nodes that is probably an image from the Avatamsaka Sutra:

"Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infintely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring."

This is an oft quoted section of the sutra. What is more interesting to me is the effect of the net. Later in the sutra it says: "Clouds of radient jewels reflected one another...they expounded the vast perspective of the enlightened ones, their subtle tones extending afar, their being no place they did not reach." In other words, there is a synergistic experience in the collective intelligence. We experience the sum of the parts as greater than the whole. This is certainly true in the most recent iteration of knowledge networks and connective knowledge.