SERENDIPITY35 - thoughts on learning & technology since 2006 - Careers Serendipity35 - at the crossroads of learning and technology since 2006 en Serendipity 2.1.4 - Mon, 11 Mar 2019 15:18:27 GMT RSS: SERENDIPITY35 - thoughts on learning & technology since 2006 - Careers - Serendipity35 - at the crossroads of learning and technology since 2006 100 21 Being a Gig Worker in the Sharing Economy Careers Trends 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p><a href=";qid=1552313373&amp;s=gateway&amp;sr=8-1&amp;linkCode=li3&amp;tag=poetsonline&amp;linkId=1c75dd42473bb96f999854475c20d082&amp;language=en_US" target="_blank"><img src="//;ASIN=0520300564&amp;Format=_SL250_&amp;ID=AsinImage&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;WS=1&amp;tag=poetsonline&amp;language=en_US" style="border-style:solid; border-width:0px; float:left; margin-left:15px; margin-right:15px" /></a>The Gig Economy (AKA the <a href="" target="_blank">Sharing Economy</a>) has its appeal: choose your hours, choose your work, be your own boss, control your own income.</p> <p>It is a unconnected collection of online platforms and apps that allow users to bypass some of the barriers to personal capitalism.</p> <p>Some of the players are well known: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Etsy, Airbnb, TaskRabbit. But there are <a href="" target="_blank">many more apps that allow entrance into gig work</a> that are not as well known.&#160; You are more likely to be a user of the sharing economy than being a worker in it.&#160;</p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Alexandrea J. Ravenelle</a>&#160;has been studying predominantly millennial workers who work in this new economy. She is&#160;an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mercy College and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. Her new book is&#160;<a href="" target="_blank"><em><strong>Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy</strong></em></a> (University of California Press) which comes out of her research.</p> <p>An earlier paper by her (see below) asked if these members of the gig economy were <a href="" target="_blank">microentrepreneurs</a>&#160;or working in the precariat class. The former is a positive label. The latter is not. The precariat social class is formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security. The term is a portmanteau obtained by merging precarious with proletariat.</p> <p>I have written about the gig economy, and I feel like in my <a href=";serendipity%5BsearchTerm%5D=unretirement&amp;serendipity%5BsearchButton%5D=Go%21" target="_blank">unretirement</a> I am a member of that economy, even though I don't use any of the gig apps.</p> <p>The optimism connected to the gig/shared economy is that it can help reverse economic inequality. It can enhance worker rights, and bring entrepreneurship to many more people.</p> <p>But it is precarious too. What is lost includes&#160;worker safety, workplace protections around discrimination and sexual harassment, reliable income.</p> <p>Ravenelle groups the stories of giggers into three types: Success Stories (they created the life they want), Strugglers (who can’t make ends meet) and Strivers (who have stable jobs and use the sharing economy for extra cash).</p> <p>I know that some of my college students are part-time members of the gig economy. It is their way to earn money and gain experiences and perhaps make contacts for more permanent future work. The flexibility it offers works well for students. For example, I have had several Uber and Lyft drivers who were students who drove between classes and on the days off. I suppose they are closest to being Strivers, though being a student is hardly a "stable job." In higher education, <a href="" target="_blank">adjunct instructors are also members of a kind of gig economy</a> as many of them put together a full time life via part time teaching assignments along with other work.&#160;</p> <p>&#160;</p> <p style="text-align:center">Ravenelle's earlier paper "Microentrepreneur or precariat? Exploring the sharing economy through the experiences of workers for Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Uber and Kitchensurfing" was presented at the <a href="" target="_blank">First International Workshop on the Sharing Economy</a> held at Utrecht University June 4-5, 2018.</p> <p style="text-align:center"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="" width="560"></iframe></p> <p style="text-align:center">You can also <a href="" target="_blank">watch the video with her slides</a>.</p> Fri, 05 Apr 2019 08:10:00 -0400 One Pathway for Future Engineers and Computer Scientists Careers Education 2.0 K-12 Learning Resources Tech 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p>Amazon is committing $50 million to computer science education in the United States with new programs supporting high school and early undergraduate students. Part of this includes financial aid to help schools bring AP computer science courses to their students. They have recently expanded this&#160;initiative into K-8.</p> <p>The program has begun offering free online lessons and funding summer camps to help students discover the "fun" of computer science. Amazon&#160;critics might say this a just a kind of farm system for training new employees. Their efforts may benefit&#160;the company, but those students are probably more likely to work for other companies. And yes, I would agree that&#160;$50 million dollars is a lot of money, but not a lot of money when spread across the country's schools.</p> <p>Students who start computer science early (and this seems to especially be true for females) are more likely to say they like computer science and have confidence in their computer science abilities.</p> <p>I'm sure many people would write about this as another STEM or STEAM effort, but their materials talk about how positive it is for everyone to&#160;understand how computers (and that word means so many things besides the traditional laptop or desktop computer we talked about just 20 years ago) work and how they are programed.</p> <p>Most students will not end up working as programmers or computer scientists, but that technology will touch the lives in and out of the workplace.</p> <p>The program promotes how programming will aid not only the understanding of computers, but other technology and also a student's understanding of logic, precision and creativity.</p> <p style="text-align:center"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="" width="560"></iframe></p> <p><a href="" target="_blank"><strong>Amazon Future Engineer Pathway</strong></a>&#160;is a partnership with organizations such as and Coding with Kids.</p> <p>The Amazon Future Engineer Pathway&#160;program aims to support 100,000 high schoolers in taking Advanced Placement courses in computer science. It also is set to&#160;award four-year scholarships and internships to a sizable group of students from under-represented populations who participate in those courses.</p> <p style="text-align:center">Amazon is accepting scholarship applications for the 2019 campus and classes.<br /> Schools and districts may also apply on behalf of families</p> <p style="text-align:center"><a href="" target="_blank"></a></p> <p style="text-align:center"><a href="" target="_blank"></a></p> <p style="text-align:center"><a href="" target="_blank"></a></p> <p style="text-align:center">&#160;</p> <p style="text-align:center">On Internships</p> <p style="text-align:center"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="" width="560"></iframe></p> Wed, 13 Feb 2019 11:11:00 -0500 Jumping Through the Dissertation Hoop Careers Learning Spaces Professional Learning Research 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <div class="serendipity_imageComment_center" style="width: 300px"> <div class="serendipity_imageComment_img"><!-- s9ymdb:6865 --><img alt="jumping through hoops" class="serendipity_image_center" src="" style="margin-bottom:5px; margin-top:5px; width:350px" /></div> <div class="serendipity_imageComment_txt"><span style="font-size:10px">"Jumping through hoops at Arabian Nights" by Experience Kissimmee, Florida is licensed under CC BY 2.0 <a href=""> CC BY 2.0 </a></span></div> </div> <p>Ah, the dissertation. That&#160;mammoth writing task that a student needs to complete in order to get that terminal degree. ("Terminal" - interesting term to use)</p> <p>If you work in higher education, then you have stories to tell about people trying to jump through that academic hoop. I have lots of tales of friends and colleagues who struggled to write, finish and make it through their defense. (Isn't "defense" an interesting word to use for that part of the process?)</p> <p>One friend of mine was being pushed to extend his writing for an additional semester because his supervising professor needed him to justify not teaching an additional class. The professor actually told him that. When he reacted negatively, the prof replied that "We had to jump through these hoops to get our doctorate, so now we get to make you jump."&#160; Wow. It's the academic equivalent of fraternity hazing.</p> <p>I could also write a post on "NOT Writing the Dissertation" since that was my own experience. I enrolled in a Ed.D program in "pedagogy" but lost interest when I was required to take courses on topics such as "school law." I continued to take classes - just not the right ones. Since at that time&#160;I was teaching in a public school, when I had amassed 32 credits beyond my MA degree, I "advanced" on the salary guide. Not as far as if I had the Ed.D, but pretty close.</p> <p>So, I was close to being ABD (All But Dissertation) but really closer to being ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).</p> <p>Through my LLC with my wife, we have done <a href="" target="_blank">editing</a>&#160;for academic writing, including some dissertations. When I saw an article by&#160;Leonard Cassuto in <em>The Chronicle of Higher Education</em>&#160;about the "<a href="" target="_blank">Value of Dissertation-Writing Groups</a>," it was a good reminder that although we seem to value the solitary work of writing a dissertation, it is - and should be - more of a collaborative writing task.</p> <p>Cassuto says,&#160;"The glorification of solitary labor permeates the imaginary ideal of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Your dissertation is your own work of expertise, your own plot in the great intellectual firmament. And you write it by yourself.&#160;Here’s the trouble: It just ain’t so."</p> <p>The dissertation is supposed to be part of the process of making a student into a scholar and getting research out into the world. Scholarly and academic writing outside of dissertations is especially collaborative. As the article says: "Academic writing done by those who already have the doctorate is very collaborative, as is obvious if you look at all those acknowledgements in scholarly books. There are other academics, librarians,&#160;archivists, proofreaders, but also — and crucially — the people who have been reading drafts all along, making suggestions, editing, shaping. The person whose name is on the spine does the largest part of the work, but others share in the labor."</p> <p>It seems to me that working with graduate students who are doing writing (dissertation or otherwise), you should certainly address the collaborative element. One way to do that is to have a dissertation group. The students we worked with on dissertations all had formed a group on their own with classmates, mostly ones who were on a similar path. That is a part of the process that should be formalized, encouraged and - perhaps most importantly - <em>accepted</em> by academia.&#160;</p> Tue, 22 Jan 2019 11:11:00 -0500 Designing Instruction Careers Instructional & Learning Design 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p>In my unretirement, I am back into the world of instructional design this semester. During my first phase working in this area, I was the manager of a department of instructional design, but as the years passed and I moved on I became a designer independently.</p> <p>For&#160;the next year, I will be designing the initial courses that will launch the Virtual campus at the <a href="" target="_blank">County College of Morris</a> in New Jersey. This is a virtual designer position. I will do almost all my work virtually.</p> <p>The Instructional Designer (ID) is a fairly new job title that existed in some form in corporate training setting before moving into education. Of course, teachers at all levels have been "designing" their instruction forever. But the instructional designer position really came to the forefront with technology-enhanced teaching and learning and the growth of distance and then online courses.</p> <p>I often point out that instructional technology is "the other IT" - an abbreviation that is generally meant to mean "information technology." In my world of IT, the "instructional" takes precedence over the "technology." Perhaps, it should abbreviated as It?</p> <p>If you look at any job postings for IDs, you will find a wide variety of responsibilities and desired skills. I compiled a list back when I was interviewing people for those positions and was surprised to find the number of items on it.</p> <ol> <li>Collaborates with faculty and other subject matter experts to apply current instructional design theories, practice, and methods to learning activities and course content in alignment with learning outcomes.</li> <li>Provides instructional design or curriculum development training and support to academic units and</li> <li>whose work is not limited to online and hybrid courses and programs</li> <li>Addresses accessibility concerns</li> <li>Develops course templates</li> <li>Structures learning activities</li> <li>Creates or assist other sin creating visual resources and interactive elements</li> <li>Works with faculty to assess and improve the quality of hybrid and online courses using standards such as&#160;Quality Matters.</li> <li>May write or edit&#160;copy, instructional text, and audio/video scripts for courses&#160;</li> <li>Identifies opportunities for adoption of open education resources OER</li> <li>Provides additional help to faculty with a learning management system (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard etc.)</li> <li>Develops and facilitates individual and cohort-based training and orientation programs</li> <li>Stays current with expertise in the field&#160;by reading appropriate professional journals and trade publications, and</li> <li>Attends and presents at professional conferences, workshops and meetings</li> <li>May serve on library, university, and regional or national committees and project teams</li> <li>Coordinates activities related to orientation and onboarding in-depth/comprehensive pedagogical and instructional technology support of new full and part time instructors.</li> <li>Consults with faculty on approaches to learning and instruction and helps them to develop materials such as assignment instructions, rubrics, etc.</li> <li>Provides models, templates, and frameworks that faculty can use to structure course related projects, assignments, and activities.</li> <li>Manages the design and development of curriculum and courses according to project timelines.</li> <li>Assists faculty to identify and evaluate instructional software</li> <li>Support relevant emergent initiatives (such as Digital Humanities, Makerspaces)</li> <li>Research and test new technologies that&#160;support teaching and learning and solve specific problems</li> </ol> <p>What kind of resume items would I expect to see for&#160;a good ID candidate? That varies a lot more than the above responsibilities list. I know lots of colleges that have one ID on staff, and larger schools with a department with six or more people. I also see some crossover at some schools with the position of Instructional Technologist. Personally, I see those two positions as very different, but not all schools agree - often it's an issue of available money and salary lines.</p> <p>I would like to see:</p> <ul> <li>A minimum of two years of experience in an instructional design, faculty development, or project management position related to teaching with technology in a college or university setting.</li> <li>Demonstrated&#160;experience (meaning you can show me samples for all the "experience" items here) designing templates for online courses in collaboration with department, program, and/or institutional faculty and staff</li> <li>A clear understanding of the learning theories, principles, and strategies that support best practices in online and technology-enhanced teaching, such as&#160;Universal Design for Learning.&#160;</li> <li>Experience with at least one learning management system - hopefully, the one being used at the school.</li> <li>Experience designing and facilitating workshops and trainings for instructors</li> <li>Clear understanding of policies concerning accessibility, privacy, information security, and academic integrity</li> <li>Excellent interpersonal and communication skills and the&#160;ability to work as a contributing and collegial member of a team, and to communicate proactively within the team environment.<br /> &#160;</li> </ul> <p>I would prefer&#160;to see some of these items on a resume.</p> <ul> <li>Project management skills</li> <li>An advanced degree in a discipline such as Instructional Design, Learning Technologies, Curriculum and Instruction, Adult Learning, or a related field</li> <li>Teaching experience in a college or university setting</li> <li>A record of professional or scholarly contributions to instructional design or faculty development, evidenced through either publications or participation in professional organizations</li> <li>Basic graphic design skills</li> <li>Experience with creating innovative assessments (e.g. performance based, game based, media based).</li> </ul> Tue, 02 Oct 2018 09:53:00 -0400 You Don't Need a College Degree: New Edition Careers Education 2.0 Issues K-12 Professional Learning Trends 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p><!-- s9ymdb:6833 --><img alt="graduate" class="serendipity_image_right" src="" style="width:187px" />The argument that a college degree is or isn't the path to a job surfaces regularly. Many studies show that having a degree ultimately leads to greater earnings in a lifetime, and colleges love to see that research out there. But in the past few decades, you find more stories in the news about people succeeding in the workplace without degrees.</p> <p>This year, I am seeing two trends: more vocational training in high schools, and companies not requiring degrees for some jobs that once did require a degree.</p> <p>An&#160;<a href="" target="_blank">article on</a>&#160;discusses the&#160;direct ties between some big companies and local high schools to prepare students for jobs. Volkswagen is working with schools in Tennessee to modernize their engineering programs. Tesla is partnering with Nevada schools on an advanced manufacturing curriculum. Fisheries in Louisiana have created courses for students to train for jobs in “sustainability.”</p> <p>There have long been&#160;high school career education programs, and the U.S.. has had specialized vocational schools for a century, but this is a shift. The idea that not all students need a degree (and especially not a&#160;liberal-arts degree) in order to get a good job is gaining strength through relationships and changes with employers.</p> <p>The outlier examples of the billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who never finished college are anomalies. Students - and parents - were not convinced that skipping college was the right path. When I was an undergrad back in the 1970s, we all knew that with good grades from a decent college in almost anything you could get some kind of job. I had art history friends who ended up in banking, education majors who went into publishing etc. It was an early enough time in computers that you could get in on the ground floor of that area without a degree. I knew people who got training in network administration at post-secondary vocational schools and did very well.</p> <p>But there was also a time a bit later when if you wanted a job at Google you had better have a degree, and really a doctorate&#160;from Stanford. That is less true today.</p> <p>The&#160;job-search site <a href="" target="_blank">Glassdoor compiled</a> a&#160;<a href="" target="_blank">list of 15 top employers that have said they no longer require applicants to have a college degree</a>&#160;that includes companies like Google, Apple and&#160;IBM.&#160;</p> <p>These companies are not saying they don't want any college graduates and this doesn't apply to all their positions, but it does apply to many more than before. Passing on&#160;college degree requirements for some positions is probably a reaction in part to the tight labor market and mounting concerns surrounding student debt.</p> <p>For example, Apple is considering and hiring people without degrees for positions such as&#160;Genius (in their stores), Design Verification Engineer, Engineering Project Manager, iPhone Buyer, Apple Technical Specialist, AppleCare at Home Team Manager, Apple TV Product Design Internship, Business Traveler Specialist, and Part Time Reseller Specialist.</p> <p>Google lists these positions as open to non-graduates:&#160;Product Manager, Recruiter, Software Engineer, Product Marketing Manager, Research Scientist, Mechanical Engineer, Developer Relations Intern, UX Engineer, SAP Cloud Consultant, Administrative Business Partner.</p> <p>Do these companies penalize someone with a computer science or marketing degree who applies? That would be foolish. But they do seriously consider people without degrees who would not have made the first round of interviews ten years ago.</p> <p>Threats to the college degree in the past 30 years have been many: tuition costs, online learning, MOOCs, and OER have all been viewed as things that would take down the traditional degree and perhaps the traditional college itself. We would have <a href="" target="_blank">Education 2.0</a> as we had Web 2.0.&#160;Still, students still apply, take courses, study, party, attend sporting events and graduate. But do they get jobs in their field of study? Sometimes. Do they discover when they get a job that much of those 120 credits seem to play no constructive role in their work? Sometimes.</p> Mon, 20 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0400 New Jobs in an AI Machine Learning World AI, Robots, VR/AR Careers 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p>You can argue about the good and bad of AI, but there is no argument that artifical intelligence is here and it is affecting jobs. Elon Musk says he fears where AI will ultimately lead, but he uses AI in his Tesla vehicles.&#160;</p> <p>I keep hearing that AI will free humans of boring drudgery jobs and give us more free time. Then, we can do human work rather than machine work. I also hear that for all the jobs lost to AI there will be at least half as many new ones created.</p> <p><a href=";qid=1533006371&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Human+++Machine:+Reimagining+Work+in+the+Age+of+AI&amp;linkCode=li3&amp;tag=paradelles-20&amp;linkId=309ed78d6e29ff9d0a5a7e932ef585d2&amp;language=en_US" target="_blank"><img alt="book" src="//;ASIN=B075FCVTRR&amp;Format=_SL250_&amp;ID=AsinImage&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;WS=1&amp;tag=paradelles-20&amp;language=en_US" style="border-style:solid; border-width:0px; float:right; margin-left:11px; margin-right:11px" /></a>The&#160;book <a href="" target="_blank"><em>Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI</em></a>, examines&#160;organizations that deploy AI systems — from machine learning to computer vision to deep learning.&#160;The authors found that&#160;AI systems are augmenting human capabilities and enabling people and machines to work collaboratively, changing the very nature of work and transforming businesses.&#160;&#160;</p> <p>A symbiosis between man and machine is not here now, but it is already being called the third wave of business transformation and it concerns using adaptive processes. (The first wave was standardized processes, and the second was&#160;automated processes.)</p> <p>Even when AI has advanced and humans and machines are symbiotic partners, humans will be needed.&#160;In this book, they&#160;identify&#160;three broad types of new jobs in the "missing middle" of the third wave.&#160;</p> <p><strong>Trainers</strong> will be needed to teach AI systems how they should perform, helping natural-language processors and language translators make fewer errors and teaching AI algorithms how to mimic human behaviors.</p> <p><strong>Explainers </strong>will be needed to&#160;bridge the gap between technologists and business leaders, explaining the inner workings of complex algorithms to nontechnical professionals.&#160;</p> <p>The third category of jobs will involve<strong> sustainers</strong>&#160;who will ensure that AI systems are operating as designed. They might be in roles such as context designers, AI safety engineers and ethics compliance managers. For example, a safety engineer will try to anticipate and address the unintended consequences of an AI system, and a ethics complaince manager acts&#160;as ombudsmen for upholding generally accepted human values and morals.</p> <p>And for education? These jobs will require new skills. The skills the authors describe all sound unfamiliar, as I suppose they should. Arewe ready to teach&#160;Rehumanizing Time,&#160;Responsible Normalizing,&#160;Judgment Integration,&#160;Intelligent Interrogation,&#160;Bot-Based Empowerment,&#160;Holistic Melding,&#160;Reciprocal Apprenticing, and Relentless Reimagining.</p> <p>Their labels may be unfamiliar, but the skills can also be seen as extensions or advancements of more familiar ones in a new contect.&#160;</p> <p>For example, "Judgment Integration" is needed when a machine is uncertain about what to do or lacks necessary business or ethical context in its reasoning model. A human ready to be smart about sensing where, how and when to step in means that human judgment will still be needed even in a reimagined process.&#160;</p> <p>Imagine that autonomus vehicle approaching at high speed a deer and a child in the road ahead. It needs to swerve, but it will also need to hit one of them in its avoidance maneuver. Which would it choose? The decision will not be based on how we feel about a child versus a wild animal - unless a human has been involved in the process earlier.</p> <hr /><span style="font-size:14px">Read more in <a href="" target="_blank">the book</a> and in "What Are The New Jobs In A Human + Machine World?" by&#160;Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson on&#160;<strong><a href="" target="_blank"></a></strong></span> Tue, 14 Aug 2018 08:51:00 -0400 Technical Writing Careers Classroom Professional Learning 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p>Technical Writers are often the link between engineers, marketing associates, developers and external users of a product or service.</p> <p>When I have taught undergraduate classes in technical writing, something I have to address with students right away is their definition of <em>technical</em> writing. In many people's minds, writing that is "technical" is complicated, full of jargon and difficult to read. But in fact, the goal of the technical writer is exactly the opposite. It is usually to make technical subject matter less complicated and easier to understand and use.</p> <p><a href="" rel="noopener" target="_blank">In my undergraduate technical writing classes</a>&#160;(which are considered advanced writing courses) we combines current theory with actual practice to prepare students as technical writers. They analyze complex communication situations and then design appropriate responses through tasks that involve problem solving, rhetorical theory, document design, oral presentations, writing teams, audience awareness, ethical considerations and ethical issues.</p> <p>When I teach at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), my students are engineers, computer scientists, architects and scientists who often dislike writing and are used to only&#160;academic writing. Unfortunately, much academic writing is students demonstrating their learning to a professor who already knows the subject. In most real technical communication, the writer is the expert and the readers are the learners. In professional life, you may be writing for supervisors, colleagues or customers. You might be explaining a problem, a product, an experiment, or a project, and the format may be a proposal, abstract, report, email or manual.</p> <p>When I teach technical writing at a more comprehensive university, such as Montclair State University, the students are more comfortable with writing, but less comfortable with the technical part.&#160; That is because they don't think of technical writing as being a part of every field. For education, biology, art, music, and other science and liberal arts students, they need to rethink the technical aspects of their studies. For example,&#160;I have had art history majors who wrote technical documentation on art restoration.</p> <p>My <a href="" rel="noopener" target="_blank">graduate students in professional technical communication</a> are often dealing with social media, documentation, video presentations and a variety of real world tasks. NJIT offers a <a href="" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Technical Communications Certificate</a> that attracts primarily professionals who intend to learn/expand their careers as technical writers, editors, trainers, website designers, and documentation specialists.</p> <p>I don't know that being <a href="" rel="noopener" target="_blank">a technical writer at Google</a> is typical of that job, but this video gives you a little taste of technical writing and <a href="" rel="noopener" target="_blank">life at Google</a>.</p> <br /> <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="" width="560">?</iframe> Wed, 08 Aug 2018 08:33:00 -0400 The Highest Paid Majors Demythified Careers Education 2.0 Trends 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p><!-- s9ymdb:6770 --><img alt="grads" class="serendipity_image_center" src="" style="width:600px" title="grads" />A newsletter from <a href="" target="_blank">Jeff Selingo</a> pointed to an upcoming&#160;piece for<em>The New York Times</em>&#160;that he wrote about the biggest myths surrounding the college major.</p> <p>How did you pick your major? You probably got guidance from school counselors but also less formally from family and friends,&#160; and from news articles and headlines in the media that talked&#160;about the "fastest-growing fields" and who gets paid what.</p> <p>Selingo cites a report that says all that <a href="" target="_blank">advice on what to study in college</a> perpetuates myths. This Gallup report details that the majority (55%) of U.S. adults with at least some college but no more than a bachelor's degree list their informal social network as providing advice about their college major. This is the most often-cited source of advice when choosing a major for the majority of U.S. adults.</p> <p>The past few decades have seen a push to STEM fields. That push last occurred in the 1950s in the U.S. when we were in a space race and seemed to be falling behind other countries. In the 1950s, we were lagging behind Russia and Japan, but today most of the talk is about China and India.&#160;<br /> &#160;<br /> Yes, STEM fields do generally pay well and are we still have fewer students prepared to work in those fields. But the newsletter points to an <a href="!/vizhome/LifetimeEarningsbyMajor/Sheet1" target="_blank">interactive graphic</a> from Doug Webber at Temple University that shows there is a lot of overlaps plenty of overlap between earnings in different fields. There also is a big difference in being an average or below-average engineering employee and at the top of earners with an English major.&#160;&#160;<br /> &#160;<br /> The most popular undergraduate major now is not in STEM but in&#160;business. The&#160;lifetime earnings of the typical business graduate is $2.85 million, but an English major is $2.76 million, and&#160;psychology is $2.57 million and even a history major totals up at&#160;$2.46 million.<br /> &#160;<br /> Perhaps the lesson for high school students is that you shouldn't pick a major based on projected earnings.</p> Fri, 06 Oct 2017 08:40:00 -0400 Education and the Gig Economy Careers Education 2.0 Professional Learning The Disconnected Trends 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p><!-- s9ymdb:6769 --><img alt="gig" class="serendipity_image_center" src="" style="border-style:solid; border-width:0px; width:600px" title="gig" />I mentioned the Gig Economy to a colleague at a college last week and he said he had never heard of the term. I said that&#160;"gig" is a term I associate&#160;with musicians who move&#160;from job to job, gig to gig. Now, it is being applied to a&#160;labor market characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs. "But it has nothing to do with education," he commented. That got me thinking. Is it affecting education?</p> <p>A <a href="" target="_blank">study by Intuit predicted</a> that by 2020, 40 percent of American workers will&#160;be independent contractors. Most discussions of the&#160;gig economy talk about job sharing apps like Uber, Instacart and TaskRabbit. There has long been short term, contract and freelance work being done in the labor market. But the type that is being done by college graduates is said to have grown by more than 50% over the last decade.</p> <p>Jeff Selingo referenced&#160;<a href="" target="_blank">studies</a>&#160;that contend that all the net job growth since the Great Recession has been in the gig or contract economy, and that 47% of college-age students did some sort of freelancing work last year, along with 43% of millennials.</p> <p>My first thought about gig work in higher education is adjuncts. With more and more adjuncts (and fewer full-time faculty) being used in colleges, many adjuncts put together gigs at several schools. If teaching is your only job, that means trying to get three or more classes per semester fall, spring and summer.</p> <a href=";linkCode=li3&amp;tag=paradelles-20&amp;linkId=a7fe5419672eeda55760c6fdf9317076" target="_blank"><img src="//;ASIN=0814437338&amp;Format=_SL250_&amp;ID=AsinImage&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;WS=1&amp;tag=paradelles-20" style="border-style:solid; border-width:0px; float:right; margin:8px 11px" /></a> <p>I pulled some books off the bookstore shelf this past weekend and looked at what is being written about <a href="" target="_blank"><em>The Future Workplace Experience</em></a>,&#160;<a href="" target="_blank"><em>The Gig Economy</em></a>&#160;and&#160;<a href="" target="_blank"><em>Thriving in the Gig Economy</em></a>&#160;are examples.&#160;</p> <p>They talk about dealing with disruption in recruiting and engaging employees A lot of the popular of the media focus is on the low end of the skill spectrum. Less attention is given to college grads and professionals who have chosen this independent employment route.</p> <p>I found so many different stats on the size of this gig workforce that I hesitate to link to a source. One book says more than&#160;a third of Americans are working in the gig economy. That seems high by my own circle of friends and colleagues, but this includes short-term jobs, contract work, and freelance assignments&#160;</p> <p>I am now officially in retirement - or unretirement&#160;as I prefer to say. <a href="" target="_blank">I have written elsewhere about unretirement and freelance work</a> which is part of the gig economy. I take on teaching, web and instructional design gigs on a very selective basis. I choose things that interest me and allow me the freedom to work when I want to work and from where I want to work. &#160;Sometimes the work comes from traditional places. I did a 6-month gig with a nearby community college that I had worked at full-time in the past. I have two new web clients for whom I am designing sites and e-commerce stores.</p> <p>But let's return to what this might have to do with education. Higher education as preparation for a job has always been a topic of debate. "It's not job training," is what many professors would say. Employers have always played a large role in the training and professional development of their workers whether they have degrees or not.</p> <p>In a gig economy, freelancers have to be self-directed in their&#160;learning. They need to decide what knowledge they’re missing, where to acquire it, how to fit it in to their day and how to pay for it. The free (as in MOOC and other online opportunities) is very appealing. Do schools that charge tuition and have traditional classes have any appeal to these people?</p> <p>Certainly, driving for Uber doesn't require a degree, though having some business training in order to be self-employed would be beneficial. But my interest is more with "professional" freelancers. Take as an example, someone who has some college, certification or preferably a degree, that makes them able to promote themselves as an instructional designer or social media manager. I choose those two because I have done both as a freelancer and I know&#160;that if I look right now on a jobs&#160;site such as <a href="" target="_blank">Glassdoor</a> I will find hundreds of opportunities for those two areas locally.</p> <p>Businesses and colleges save resources in terms of benefits, office space and training by employing these people.&#160;They also have the ability to contract with experts for specific projects who might be too high-priced to maintain on staff.</p> <p>For some freelancers I know, a gig economy appeals because it offers them more control over their work-life balance. In that case, they are selecting jobs that they're interested in, rather than entering the gig economy because they are unable to attain employment, and so pick up whatever temporary gigs they can land. The latter is often the case with adjunct faculty.&#160;</p> <p>To someone mixing together short-term jobs, contract work, and freelance assignments, where would they go to find additional professional development?</p> <p>Books like&#160;<a href="" target="_blank"><em>The Gig Economy</em></a>&#160;- with its appealing&#160;subtitle offer of being&#160;"The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want" - is more interested in&#160;real-world corporate examples (Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, Etsy, TaskRabbit, France's BlaBlaCar, China's Didi Kuaidi, and India's Ola) as crowd-based capitalism.</p> <p>The freelancer may not be much concerned with emerging blockchain technologies, but she is certainly part of the changing future of work.</p> <p>The future is always a land of questions:&#160;Will we live in a world of empowered entrepreneurs who enjoy professional flexibility and independence? Will these gig economy workers become disenfranchised,&#160;laborers jumping from gig to gig, always looking for work and paying heir own health benefits? How will this affect labor unions, self-regulatory organizations, labor law, and a new generation of retirees who have a more limited social safety net? Are&#160;long-term careers at one or two companies a thing of the past?</p> <p>Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, the world’s largest car sharing company, said, “My father had one job in his life, I’ve had six in mine. My kids will have six at the same time.”</p> <p>The one thing all observers seem to agree on is that the way we work is changing.</p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">Jennifer Lachs writes on</a>&#160;about that changing working world and the possible impact it may have on education.&#160;I hadn't thought of it as a gig economy job but of course substitute teachers in K-12 education have long been employed on a freelance basis. The education and training industry is among the top 5 highest demand industries for freelance workers due to the high level of specialization and rise of virtual education.</p> <p>I know of a dozen or so teachers who do online teaching and tutoring as a way to supplement their income. For decades,&#160;professors have done freelance writing and thesis editing and much of that has moved online. My wife and I are currently editing a dissertation via email and shared files along with the occasional phone conference.</p> <p>The writing center I helped build at a community college has relied on online tutoring for student writing as a way to supplement the face-to-face tutoring. Online appealed to students, but it also offered additional work for some of out part-time tutors and others who added it to the gig list.</p> <p>Are we preparing students for the gig economy once they graduate? No.&#160;</p> <p>A friend pointed me at "<a href="" target="_blank">It’s a Project-Based World</a>" which was&#160;a thought leadership campaign by Getting Smart to explore the economic realities of a project-based world.&#160;The purpose of the campaign: to promote equity and access to deeper learning outcomes for all students. There are blog posts, podcast interviews, publications, and infographics around the preparation of students, teachers and leaders for a project-based world.&#160;The focus there seems to be less on&#160;obtaining deeper knowledge, and more on teaching skills that students will need in the modern working world.</p> <p>Finally, I think that the gig economy will have a greater impact on traditional education than traditional education will have on the gig economy. It&#160;accounts for employment growth statistics, but secondary or post-secondary schools don't prepare students for this type of work.<br /> <br /> &#160;</p> Tue, 03 Oct 2017 12:11:00 -0400 Is Instructional Design Still Mysterious? Careers EdTech Instructional & Learning Design Online Learning 0 (Ken Ronkowitz) <p>According to an article at <a href="" target="_blank"></a>&#160; "The field has been around for 75 years, but many still wonder what instructional designers -&#160;who are gaining acceptance in higher ed -&#160;do." &#160;Having worked in the field for 17 years, I wonder why people (especially in higher ed) still wonder what instructional designers do.</p> <blockquote> <p><em>EXCERPT:</em><br /> "The practice of instructional design emerged during World War II, when the military assembled groups of psychologists and academics to create training and assessment materials for troops. In 1954, Harvard University psychology professor and author B. F. Skinner introduced the concept of programmed instructional materials through his article “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching.”</p> <p>Within a decade, noted academics -- including Robert Gagne, widely considered the father of the field of instructional design -- had embraced the importance of assessment and learning objectives in teaching and learning.<br /> <br /> Although higher education typically left course design up to the professors who would teach in traditional classrooms, the popularity of online courses created a need for input from professionals trained in the science of teaching, instructional methods and the technology that would make learning possible for remote students.</p> <p>And now, the field is growing. A 2016 report funded by the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation estimated that a minimum of 13,000 instructional designers work on college campuses. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last year counted 151,000 jobs -- across all school levels and industries -- for instructional designers and those with similar titles: instructional technologist and director of educational research and product strategy, for example. In 2012, CNN Money predicted the field would grow by 28.3 percent within 10 years...</p> <p>“We’re going to find a digital comparison [with the face-to-face classroom], but it will further encroach on the decisions faculty believe are their domain,” [Lance Eaton, an instructional designer at Brandeis University]&#160;said. “The institution might feel otherwise, and the institutional designer will be the person in the middle trying to balance that dynamic.”<br /> &#160;&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; <a href=""><em>read more&#160;</em></a></p> <p>&#160;</p> </blockquote> Mon, 07 Aug 2017 12:55:00 -0400