Interviewing is a delicate, difficult thing. If it were easy, everyone would be an expert, no one would make a bad hire, and we’d have comfortable, relaxed exchanges all the time.It’s not just interviewing, though – the principles that make up a good interviewer are the same elements found in successful communication of nearly all sorts.
In “Another Question for Interviews,” Warlick talks about questions that school administrators could ask prospective staff to assess their “21st century literacy skills.”
Warlick presents a scenario in which a student – he uses his daughter as an example – can assess a professor’s familiarity with blogs:
At this point, might [sic] daughter starts classes next week, a number of which are education methods courses. During the first day, the instructor will introduce the course, its goals, a syllabus, and her formula for grading. She or he will then ask if the class has any questions. I would suggest that someone ask,
“What blogs do you read?â€
If the instructor stammers or in any other way answers in the unknowing or the untrusting, then there’s opportunity for everyone in this class to learn.
He continues:
Of course, you do not want to be the one who asked the question that the instructor couldn’t answer — especially if it might seem, in any way, loaded. So immediately ask what journals he or she reads. Save face!
There are two issues here – I’ll address in this article the insignificance of the blog medium given this context and in Part II the reasons why asking this question in this way is inappropriate.
Warlick’s question rests on the assumption that education blogs are a necessary and irreplaceable part of education curricula. Simply put, they aren’t.
I want to know about a professor’s areas of expertise, with whom they’ve studied/collaborated and what they’ve produced. If a professor answers, “I read journals that are peer-reviewed and based on solid scholarship,” I find that a credit to them.
Would I really be thrilled if they answered, “I read the unfiltered ramblings of e-pundits almost wholly bereft of checks, editing and evidence until they’re called out by an interested party?”
There’s value in the blogosphere, but to suggest that one must be familiar with education blogs to have a handle on developments in the discipline is folly. If you think that the majority of blogs listed in Scott McLeod’s edu-roundup are worth reading, you have lower standards than a production engineer in a Chinese toy factory.
Unless, of course, the majority of our web presences are blogging out of Lake Wobegon. Then I might be wrong.
Warlick might as well say, “Why would I want an educator who knows how to buy a paper-based journal, open it with his hands and read it when I could have one who knows how to click a Firefox icon, type in a URL and read that?”
One of the five greatest educators with whom I have experience had us in a room with no windows, bare walls and a table for 3 hours per session. He didn’t blog, he didn’t use Twitter and he didn’t have a wiki. The material was introduced effectively and everyone – all of whom were social science/humanities majors taking a high-level class in physics – attained mastery. I imagine that he earned his Nobel Prize the old-fashioned way, too.
The blogosphere – including leading figures like Warlick – is still developing. It’s a terribly immature medium and that’s ok. We’re figuring it out. As I’ve said before, I think that administrators should blog and there’s value in the exchanges, but in no way should anyone in education overemphasize its importance. If we want the medium to mature, if we want to optimize its value in education, we need to be realistic and honest about what it is and particularly what it is not.
Though blogging allows for conceptual review and exchange – a bastardized form of pseudo-democratic peer review – the quality isn’t yet there. There’s too much noise and too much waste. At best, it’s a relativist-structured solution for a sector that is theoretically closer to absolutist. Remember, education and scholarship is concerned with truth, not mash-up after consensus-based mash-up. Can blogging help expedite this process? I think it can eventually.
Warlick will no doubt place me in the same category as “consummate skeptics” like Gary Stager. But not giving hard, honest analysis of a medium – and yes, sometimes that means we conclude things that we wish weren’t true – does a disservice to everyone. Optimism and energy are great assets; not putting that optimism in realistic context is a hindrance.
Give me a competent educator. I don’t care whether he reads Warlick, matthewktabor.com or Boing Boing. There are more important things to consider.
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David Warlick 08.19.07 at 5:02 am
Matthew, I suspect that you are not in the same skeptic’s league as Gary, but you are serving the same purpose. You demonstrate, through your disagreement with my article, the value of an immature publishing scheme. It’s principal weakness, for me, is that in a blog article, I am not able, through a need to be efficient with space, to present a complete scenario for my position. I make assumptions.
But this too is the value, because that weakness is part of what generates conversations like this where fuller understanding and even new and valuable ideas can be grown.
In my first year of college, I took a class which was essentially about going to college, and one of the things that I learned was strategies for getting to know your professor on the first day of class. One of the questions that you ask is, “What journals do you read?”
My assumption in my blog entry was that someone has asked that question. My assumption is that any college professor is reading journals of their field. My assumption is that at least some of those journals are referenced in the syllabus.
Again, I think that the value of blogs is the conversation. Hands-down, journals are essential to developing, preserving, and evolving the profession. But…
in a time when the world is changing at an accelerating pace,
when we find ourselves with children in our classrooms whose information experiences at home far exceed the depth and richness of their classrooms, and
where our information environment has shifted in ways that alter our notions of what it means to be literate;
I think that conversation is a critical element of any and every part of the education profession.
So I appreciate the opportunity to continue this conversation and look forward to any additions to this argument you would like to add.
Scott McLeod 08.19.07 at 10:31 am
Matthew, this is a great post! As a professor, I agree with both you and David that profs still should be reading scholarly journals. That said, they also would benefit from greater exposure to discipline-specific blogs. There’s a wealth of good info and conversation out there for academics.
I also wish that much of this peer-reviewed scholarship was more accessible. I think educational researchers, and the general public, would be better served if scholarly research were more transparent and more available to the general public. Several initiatives are under way to bring research out in the open, to maybe enable commentary on such research (much like blog comments), and to even enable review by the world at large rather than just other academics (think Digg for physics articles, for example!). The next few decades will be interesting and exciting as this shakes out. As CASTLE director, I’m glad to be at the forefront of all of this.
One final thought: in the world of scholarly research, there’s also “too much noise and too much waste!”
Robert Talbert 08.19.07 at 9:26 pm
There is an assumption in Warlick’s quoted article that students know about blogs to the point that they’d even ask the “What blogs do you read?” question in the first place, and care enough about them that they’d notice the prof’s answer. The assumption is clear in the bit from Warlick’s comment about “children in our classrooms whose information experiences at home far exceed the depth and richness of their classrooms”.
Matt, or David Warlick if you’re still following the thread, or anybody else — Could you say something about the statistical validity of that hypothesis? Is this assumption true in any sort of measurable, scientific sense (not just anecdotally)?
Because if it’s not, then not only is the scenario in Warlick’s article a non-issue, a lot of Web 2.0/School 2.0 projects are on very thin ice.
Matthew 08.20.07 at 3:24 am
David,
Thanks for the comment. I agree – this is a good issue to talk about. We’ve got to analyze the state of things if we’re going to define further this budding project we call blogging and make the most of it.
Scott,
I wish that journals were free and accessible but I understand the economics behind why they aren’t. There are plenty of benefits as well as serious problems with opening up research findings for mass, popular review. I’m going to think about this for a while – it’s very intriguing.
Robert,
Asking for hard evidence? The only sound you’re likely to hear is crickets chirping.
In all seriousness, I’ll work some of that into Part III tomorrow.
Matthew 08.20.07 at 1:04 pm
I got out of bed this morning and realized that I’d suffered a serious memory lapse that warrants a correction.
The classroom in which that masterful educator taught us had individual desks, not a table. That was a different class.
David Mackey 08.21.07 at 10:37 pm
I can see your point, that because a professor doesn’t read blogs doesn’t make them an inadequate educator. I’ve studied under numerous professors who would have been unfamiliar with the term blog, but were still of the highest quality. At the same time, to be aware of a blog and able to assimiliate the technology is important as it indicates a flexibility in intelligence which can sometimes pass away with lack of use.