CSUMB tribe wiseman

Partificating the chairs meeting. All other chairs are rather new and I have been doing this for a lot of years. I've become the tribe's wisesman. There is a certain comfort in this since almost all issues discussed, I have some anecdots, success or horror stories to tell. But I also felt old, it maybe time to move on.

The educational effectiveness is become so much of an emphasis on many campuses, including CSUMB, there is a clear and present danger that we take faculty's time off their primary focus: study, evaluate, generate, document and deseminate knowledge and compel them to spend too much effort on education and assessment. We might have a lot of professors that are very good at measuring student leanring, but not as good as their core function. That would be sad for higher-ed.

The missing items in many of the discussions are "excellent" and "motivation". Which are crucial in any educational process and prominantly missing in public K-12, and now in some colleges and universities, also.

Priority, choices and consequences

When I was a bit younger, like all other naive beginning professors, I believed I am do everything: getting million dollar grants, teach five courses, public 6 papers, supervise 20 students on their capstones or thesises, play tennis three times a week, swim two hours a week, practice my cello everyday, run a department, design new degrees, mentor new faculties, participate 10 committees and still can put my feet on the coffee table every night watching Sinfield re-runs.

Then the reality hits me hard. Covering everything made my involvement superficial, quality of work is out of the window, little time to spend on individual students, and hundred of emails left unanswered every week.  I have to return my phone calls during commute, writing proposals till 2-3 AM. 

Selecting what are important is challenging yet has to be done, I replaced swimming with more time efficient running, two papers a year only, ask other faculty to step in for advising.  Over the summer, I need to review what I been doing over the last few years and have to make the difficult decisions: what valuable activites I will NOT do.

Unfortunate incidents and actions

Hopefully some lessens are learned from this.

MIST faculty has met and reviewed the Feb 4th incident of one student’s proposal (Proposal C) copied “structure, design and format” of a proposal (Proposal O) by another students without permission in XYZ. MIST faculty has decided the following actions and comment:

1. Ethics and integrity are essential in education, especially in School of ITCD. Any plagiarism is not tolerated and will result in failing the assignment at the minimum, expelling from the program AND the university likely.

2. The faculty concluded the offense of coping “structure, design and format” without permission is unprofessional and should be discouraged. However, the faculty does not categorize the offense as plagiarism since most of the content of the proposals are distinct.

3. The student who copied the structure, design and format should complete the following actions within a week from today. Otherwise more severe measures will be taken by the MIST program.

a. Send an email to the original author, apologize for the action, and ask for permission to use the “structure, design and format” or Proposal O.

b. If the permission is granted in three days, acknowledgment should be included in the new version of Proposal C. If the permission is denied or not received within three days, Proposal C should be reformatted and revised so no components of Proposal O are used.

Please email me if you have any questions.

Eric Tao, on behalf of MIST Faculty

Working on email after mid night

There is a workshop that I will attend tomorrow morning on time management. What a timely subject. I think I should control my workload in a much more rigorous way. Reading and answering 100 emails a day is not the best use of my time. It takes me about two hours per day to do it and often I found the only time I can finish all the emails is after midnight. Something need to be changed. Maybe I should not take on the 80 hours of work per week !!!! I am no longer working as CEO of an Internet start-up!!! So don't work like one!!!

Sigh...

Email# 75 will be next item...

MIST meeting 2009 2 5

MIST is an sucessful, most popular gradaute program on campus.
In today's meeting, I have reported the following issues:
- Monterey County Community Foundation - LeadershipTraining
- Academic integraty issues
- current status of CST 630 and IST 630
We should build a standard operating procedure for MIST including
- recruitment activities and schedule
- on campus seminar preparation and agenda
- capstone preparation and advising

Graduates coming back to teach for us

Observing some of our best graduates coming back to teach for us made me felt we have done well. At least for those. They know the outcome-based model, the information system, the lingo and what are important and what not. They can communicate well, they have goals in mind and they are flexible. They all remember their capstone projects and how much pain they had to endure in order to finish it. That means our capstone model is effective.

Although I had lots of doubts when I first started with the MB campus decades ago, once the whole campus, including students, faculty and staff all buy in to the education model, MB is a very effective campus to educate the unique type of students.

For my students and colleagues

Blogging becomes an indispensable learning tools. Especially in an e-learning environment that communication between faculty and students, among students are crucial.

This blog is designed for me to log my thoughts, opinions and reflections as a professor, hence the title. I hope my students and other students in the programs that I am engaged can benefit from this by knowing what is going on in side my aging brain.