{"id":3171,"date":"2011-02-02T07:47:05","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T11:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3171"},"modified":"2011-02-02T09:48:57","modified_gmt":"2011-02-02T13:48:57","slug":"groundhogcpalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3171","title":{"rendered":"Groundhogcalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am writing this Far Too Late in the Evening, but I've set it to appear on Groundhog's Day morning. At this point, it's clear that a good part of the Midwest and Northeast is either in the midst of or facing serious prospects of being slammed by a gobsmacker storm, so I strongly suspect Punxsutawney Phil<\/a> won't be doing anything remotely interesting for this year's Groundhog's Day. If you're stuck in the weather, stay warm and dry and safe. <\/p>\n

One of the oddities of being a faculty member in Florida is the absence of February Hell. The timing may vary somewhat based on geography, but a number of my friends in college generally had a miserable time throughout February. The weather varied between winter, sleet, and mud, the sky was gray, the coursework was constantly looming, and there was no break on the horizon. For a variety of reasons, that wasn't my experience (I always had a comfortable winter break in Southern California with my parents), but I could see the phenomenon. One year, a friend decided to banish February entirely and dated everything January 32-January 59 instead. <\/p>\n

In grad school, I generally felt mid-March to be the most oppressive time of the year. The fruit was generally frozen\/dessicated, I always had midterms or papers to grade while the undergraduates were on break, and I was sick of winter. Fortunately, Elizabeth and I discovered the Philadelphia Flower Show<\/a> my first or second year in grad school, and that did a great deal to lift our spirits for a few days, especially the year we tromped through several inches of snow to arrive at the old civic center, walk downstairs, and be greeted by moist, comfortable, fragrant air. (This year, it's March 6-13.) <\/p>\n

What I do not recall at any time is cancellation of classes that I either was enrolled in or was teaching (or TAing for). I've had that a few times since coming to USF, generally for hurricanes and tropical storms, but not to the extent that a number of K-12 school districts and colleges\/universities are facing this winter. When USF was planning for the swine-flu pandemic, there was considerable discussion about how to maintain some continuity if large proportions of students, faculty, or support staff were too sick to report to work. So there was a lot of discussion about support for online alternatives to face-to-face classes in an emergency.<\/p>\n

This week we're going to see whether my cautions on that front are also true in a blizzard and ice-storm aftermath: what happens when staffing of servers and other technical systems is skeletal or absent? I suspect the dreams of smooth continuity will fall by the wayside, but institutions that are lucky will have at least some service (if slowed or inconsistent). What will be missing for the most part will be the type of planning necessary to make an online course work. (Note: face-to-face classes also need planning, but they're not necessarily the same planning.) So there will be communications if not necessarily the smooth continuation of what a teacher intended. <\/p>\n

Big picture conclusion? Trying to conduct a class online in an emergency, without having planned it thoroughly, is much like making substitute's plans for K-12 schooling: if you're very, very lucky you have enough continuity to tide things over, but it's no substitute for doing what you intended to do if you were there in the room. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am writing this Far Too Late in the Evening, but I've set it to appear on Groundhog's Day morning. At this point, it's clear that a good part of the Midwest and Northeast is either in the midst of or facing serious prospects of being slammed by a gobsmacker storm, so I strongly suspect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,12,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-higher-education","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-P9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3171"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3174,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171\/revisions\/3174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}