UNH Writing Academy at the Mountain View Grand Hotel

I'm sitting in that boxy single level room on the right side of this picture as I write this entry. I'm taking a break from writing to make a couple of quick posts. This post is just to say where I've been the last few days.

The University of New Hampshire has a number of faculty development programs, the UNH Writing Academy is one of them. I've been squirreled away in the beautiful Mountain View Grand Hotel for four days this week with a cohort of about 25 colleagues, mostly assistant professors like me, trying to work toward tenure. We're from all the different disciplines. I was sitting up after a long day of writing last night talking over a glass of bourbon with a professor in chemical engineering and another professor in linguistics. This is a bit of what I imagined academia would be like. Unfortunately it's much more isolated, so it's really cool to actually get a chance to spend some time with my colleagues and talk about our work and learn about what they do.

Bourbon aside, we've mostly sat quietly in exquisitely appointed rooms, tapping away on our keyboards this week. I've written about 25 pages on two articles. I hate to admit it, but more than I wrote all last spring semester. 

It's been a great experience. We head home this afternoon, but I feel lucky to have been a part of this.

an ending to the Open Ped experiment

So the semester is finally over - what an adventure it was trying to implement Open Ped, to be an unteacher. I feel like it's not quite right to say I taught the course. I'm coining this concept of unteaching right now, in the spirit of an unconference (according to Wikipedia, an uncofnerence is "a participant-driven meeting").

Nothing is perfect, and no plan is ever executed exactly as conceived. There were some parts that definitely need work, and some parts where I might need to have a heavier hand than I did this year. But overall, what a great experience.

Here is a link to the class's final project, The Primer:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1htA3wCSMs4Q0aruXykFhKEoNsb7IWDizC49jvH6YFNM/edit?usp=sharing

I was so impressed with the overall quality of this document, particularly the effort they made to standardize across the whole document - not an easy feat.

I am really looking forward to sharing it with next year's class and seeing it grow and mature.

For those of you who followed the progress of my class this past semester, I think The Primer is all the proof I need of how well my students performed. Is it perfect? Is it ready for publication by a major publisher? That's not really a fair standard. Keep in mind the authors of this document had never had an organizational behavior class before this one. And yet this is what they were able to do. I'm very proud of what they did.