Athletic Directors’ Pay Is on the Rise, With 6 Breaking $1-Million Mark

What, except rather neutrally presented data (OK, it selectively left out all the impoverished ADs who aren’t making a mil per annum), is “just trying, trying to get us irritated”?

I’ll take the bait: The top AD salaries are just the cherry on the icing (the salaries of college “revenue sports” coaches–including assistant coaches) on the cake of corruption (both specific events, e.g., Ohio State, Miami, Tennessee, and inherent, e.g., academically unqualified “student-athletes,” gut courses and majors, jock conduct and sexual servicing of recruits, etc.) that is the whole multibillion-dollar sports-entertainment business of college athletics.

Prof. Lopez has a bit of point though: It’s probably as pointless for academics to get “irritated” about college “revenue sports” as it is for, say, a resident of Sicily to get irritated about government officials taking bribes.
  

Come on, these people are Saints.  They provide oversight to the nations biggest circus.  P. T. Barnum would be proud of all of them. 

It’s a sad commentary on national values but it’s entertainment and in the end, the biggest revenue for any top athletic university are basketball and football. We don’t cry about Mariah Carey getting millionaires to howl into a microphone. The biggest travesty is the pretense of “amateur” and the selected enforcement of the rules. Bottom line is that people want to see sports and pay for them and for this reason television pays too. The people (we) are the bottom of the food chain funding the coaches, the AD directors, and often the players.

I too have had difficulty incorporating things like blogs into course curriculum in a meaningful way. For me, the problem has been 1) should I require replies to posts? 2) shouldn’t part of the grade for blog writing be focused on how the post creates interest and a conversation in the replies? and 3) how do I engage all of these issues in an organic way? I don’t really have any answers to these questions, but I do feel that digital work requires rethinking some basic assumptions about grading and assessment. 

I, too, am amazed at the lack of tech skills some of my students display.  I teach graduate courses.  At the doctoral level, almost all students have laptops, or other devices (one student is a 3 or 4 media individual, depending on her mood) and bring them to class – I have to limit their use sometimes so they don’t get ahead of an inquiry or discovery lesson.  On the other hand, in a masters level course, I have only one or two students who bring their Ipads/computers to class and several attempts to techify the class activities have failed miserably – todays meeting, blogs, posting of optional materials on-line for reading, etc.. Their response is they can use their technology (primarily smart phones and desk or at-home computers) but don’t see them as learning tools to carry with them to school.
  I find many ugrads very good at receiving technology but pretty poor at using technology for generation of academic knowledge or seeking academic knowledge.  I fully understand mrsalander’s dilemma/problem of having to introduce and teach new skills/knowledge to do basic academic skills.

For my online introductory course, I switched from the use of a Blackboard discussion board to having each student create a course blog. At minimum, each week they are required to respond to an assignment for each chapter and compose one additional post re the material for that week. So far, I’m pleased. The clear downside is less exchange between students. The upside is better writing and what feels like a greater sense of ownership on the part of the student. I think that it gives me a much better sense of what they’re thinking, if they’re ‘getting it,’ and it allows them greater creativity – which I think furthers engagement. I am not incorporated comments into grading, unless someone is ‘on the bubble.’ This is partly because we had some technical issues re students being able to comment on others’ blogs. I don’t know that the students prefer it because it is more work and it’s more difficult to ‘stay under the radar’ a bit. But, in terms of evaluation, I give it a thumbs-up.

I face students who are shocked that I expect them to use these devices in classes. They’ve been told for so long (even on a campus that *requires* a laptop) not to use them in class–due to blanket bans by so many instructors–that they don’t understand HOW to use them effectively in class.

I am teaching a graduate seminar this semester that examines the ways various forms of representation mediate our knowledge/understanding of cities. Half the students are Master’s of Architecture degree students; half are PhD students from a range of humanities disciplines. Instead of term papers, I’ve asked the students to create rich, in-depth, analytical, multi-media online exhibits using the free content management system, OMEKA. Students can create an OMEKA.net account for free, which gives them 500 MB of storage, and a limited number of themes and plug-ins with which they can create their exhibits. As with a traditional term paper, I asked them to begin by formulating a research question, but instead of relying solely on text, they will “answer” their question by using a wide variety of media to conduct research and discovery and to help members of the public who might access their site also learn something about their topic. Fortunately, I teach at a University (the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) where we have librarians and library computer lab spaces where the students spent a class session working with a librarian to learn to use OMEKA. I’ve provided them with examples of online exhibits to study; we talked a lot about where to find content and what content they are allowed to use (copyright issues, etc); we discussed organizational issues; I gave them a schedule to help pace them through the project. So far, no one is struggling with OMEKA. So far, so good. 

I was super-inspired by your earlier post as I was planning on implementing a digital project in my ENGL 529 class (Literary History Becoming Digital).  I took a lot of what you (and Jeff) had to say about the learning curve, the tools, and the tricky kind of planning needed to make the course run but also keep it fluid enough so that the creative part of the project tracks with the labor needed to build with technology that’s new and often changing. 

Our project is called “Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive” and we’ve had a GREAT time. We’ve chosen OMEKA as our platform and have partnered with our library.

One thing I found necessary–as mrsalander notes below–is how important it has been to plan release time from class so that we could work together in a lab environment.   We have also formed a series of design teams that perform rotating critiques–making sure that everyone plays every role–and also keeping our project plan clear and self-conscious.  Hugely helpful for setting standards was Shannon Christine Mattern’s ” Evaluating Multimodal Student Work.”  We spent almost a whole class session working through the basic standards she discusses and bringing them into contact with how our site is developing.

We’ve also spent a lot of time in the beginning of the semester reading and talking about various theories about web design, publishing, materiality, ranging from starting points like Benjamin and Baudrillard to Hayles, Gitelman, Grosz, and Massumi.  Having Ralph Waldo Emerson as our archive also help since he was an early proponent of a Read/Write philosophy so characteristic of the web 2.0 world.  He insisted that “each generation must write its own books” through a practice he called “creative reading”; the very thing we think of as Read/Write.