Maybe students would prefer me tweeting my course syllabus?

This is a post with two objectives:

• to discuss one of the madness in higher education, which is about the course syllabus, especially because I am trying hard to get them done (yeah, right!)
• to convince some of you readers about how we put Twitter to wonderful use, and we don't merely tweet about what we ate 

Speaking of what I ate, should I tell you about the awesome beet-salad that I made for myself the other day?  Why not; it is my blog, after all!

Sliced boiled beet in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, finely chopped garlic, and fresh ground pepper
topped with shredded cheese

Anyway, back to the objectives.  As always, Rebecca Schuman had a wonderful column at Slate.  It is all about the "Syllabus bloat" at American colleges and universities.  Excerpting from there will not do any justice. Read it in full.

I tweeted about it

Why are college #syllabi longer than the end-user license agreement? tl;dr @pankisseskafka ;) JK! Awesome http://t.co/9kxVByXbpj via @slate
— sriram khe (@congoboy) August 27, 2014

Within minutes, there was a response from Schuman; I guess some of us academics never go to sleep! ;)

@congoboy @Slate Hahahaha! I'm stealing that.
— Rebecca Schuman (@pankisseskafka) August 27, 2014

And then quite a few other responses.  More than that, the retweets:

A simple addition means that my tweet about Schuman's article was retweeted to 10,561 Twitter users thus far.   Of course, some might be in more than one of these loops.  Let us assume that it was 9,000 separate individuals whom the retweets pinged.   From there, it would have been retweeted more.  Just like that, with the click of a mouse button Rebecca Schuman's article gets distributed!

I cannot even begin to imagine the logistical hassles of sharing ideas and news in the old days, even twenty years ago!  For people like me who love to live in the world of ideas, there has never been a better time in history than now.

It is such an awesomely different world that the youth are beginning to explore.  Which is why the Mindset folks at Beloit College include in their latest compilation of "reminder to faculty to be wary of dated references"

"Press pound" on the phone is now translated as "hit hashtag."

Should I add that to the course syllabi and tweet about it?

Wait, I already did--about the Mindset ;)

#Beloit College Mindset List for the class of 2018: "They have probably never used Netscape as their web browser" http://t.co/IyUkQyZVqF
— sriram khe (@congoboy) August 26, 2014

PS: A note to the reader who thinks he is funny--don't even dream of "tl;dr" as your comment ;)

"History" and the class of 2012

With every passing year, the distance between freshmen and faculty like me widens even more. I used to joke about how we don't manufacture VCRs anymore; that joke ended a few years ago. Then I moved on to DVD players, which was even more short-lived as a joke. It helps, therefore, to be reminded of how different the context is for incoming freshman students. And that is what the Beloit College Mindset List does:

This month, almost 2 million first-year students will head off to college campuses around the country. Most of them will be about 18 years old, born in 1990 when headlines sounded oddly familiar to those of today: Rising fuel costs were causing airlines to cut staff and flight schedules; Big Three car companies were facing declining sales and profits; and a president named Bush was increasing the number of troops in the Middle East in the hopes of securing peace. However, the mindset of this new generation of college students is quite different from that of the faculty about to prepare them to become the leaders of tomorrow.
....The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.
It is a multicultural, politically correct and “green” generation that has hardly noticed the threats to their privacy and has never feared the Russians and the Warsaw Pact.

There is a chance that most of the items on the list will sound bizarre and ancient to students--almost a historical time capsule--while to us faculty it was, well, our life :-)