It’s Memorial Day weekend in the US, the unofficial beginning of summer when I was growing up. Lots of people went down the shore. My friends and I usually spent the afternoon in one of the local parks, listening to music and soaking up the sunshine.
Here in Cascadia Memorial Day weekend is usually the start of Junuary, where we have a few weeks’ reprise of our winter clouds and rain. It makes the pictures of US East Coast beaches look even more surreal. If you can’t see the sun and it’s too cold to wear shorts, is summer happening?
(art by Al Williamson, 1949)
Movement
I used to train for triathlons. I'm not a natural athlete by anyone's standard, so I never had any hope of being competitive. I just liked being outside and in decent shape.
Boredom plus minor nagging injuries put my triathlon career into storage several years ago. These days I'm happy with an occasional at-my-pace bike ride or 5K. Even that fell by the wayside while I was traveling all the time. My exercise was mostly walking everywhere.
I spent the first six weeks or so of the COVID-19 closures barely leaving my condo. Partly that was social distancing, mostly sheer lack of time. With the demands of the initial remote learning response, my team spent most days and nights glued to our laptops. It's only been in the last month or so we've had our nights and weekends back, and I'm still spending much of my free time playing video games.
That sedentary life didn't do my waistline any favors, but it also wrecked me physically in ways I didn't expect. I found myself gulping down ibuprofen all day. It felt like I'd been sitting in an airplane seat for weeks. In a way, I had. I've since acquired a sit-stand desk converter, which helps a lot. Highly recommended.
Lately I've been going for long walks in the nearby neighborhoods. There's an eerie, quiet one about fifteen minutes away filled with enormous mansions, many of them unoccupied. Terrible use of urban space, but it's the perfect place to wander and be socially distant at the same time. I think this will be one of my pandemic memories: tree-lined boulevards, empty save for the landscaping crews.
Microsoft Teams Improvements
People using Teams should now have the Brady Bunch 3x3 view available for their video conferences. Also, everybody can now Raise Hand in the meeting to get the attention of the speaker.
Late Friday I got word that another long-awaited fix is rolling out this week: if you're organizing a meeting, you can choose to have all the attendees wait in a lobby before the organizer joins. Meaning: if you're starting a class, your students can't join before you do. Our K-12 customers especially have been pleading for this as many teachers can't leave their students unsupervised.
I am so pleased and proud of our engineers for listening to feedback and getting these fixes done. It hasn't been an easy road for anyone involved.
Fall Is Coming
67% of US colleges still think they're going to be open for in-person classes in the fall, according to the Chronicle, but several observers think they're fooling themselves. Notable naysayers include the outspoken president of an HBCU, a professor at Seton Hall (n.b. that last link is behind a paywall), and Canadian consultant Alex Usher.
Consensus opinion of those I've talked to seems to be that we're heading for a "hybrid" model that includes both in-person and online learning. Students might be in class one day and not the next. Student classes might be smaller (though there's evidence to suggest the benefits of reducing class size are marginal.)
The other big change: a number of American universities have announced they're going to start fall term early in August and end by US Thanksgiving. Under ordinary circumstances that would screw up summer programs and internship schedules, but both are often getting canceled in any case (paywalled again).
I'm still trying to get my arms around what's happening outside the US, where COVID-19 hasn't yet hit as badly. We are seeing schools like University of Cambridge and University of Manchester (both UK), McGill and Universite de Montreal (Canada), pivoting to an online learning model. Others, like Western Australia and University of Toronto, are looking at a hybrid model. Still more are in the wait-and-see mode. It's hard to gauge how many are in which category.
There's now an Instructional Design Emergency Response Network that advertises "helping you teach through natural disasters and epidemics," which is both reassuring and a bit depressing -- it feels more like the emergency response of March than the revised pedagogy we'll need for the fall. But it's a start. Another wealth of resources: the university-specific guides listed in this spreadsheet.
Things I'm Reading
Loved this Teen Vogue story on the current state of play in higher education coronavirus response.
We have for a hundred years relied on the same model of higher education, and in the past few decades have implemented what is an unsustainable financial model, where we continue to raise tuition and have burgeoning loan burdens, which result in growing economic and therefore racial segregation in higher education. So I think this crisis will force us to look at new ways to deliver a curriculum at a time when we’re recognizing an education will be more important than ever.
The jury is still out on whether female professors are disproportionately distracted by working-from-home responsibilities, but there's no doubt there's been an impact:
Samuels guessed that the gender dynamic won’t matter much in the end, in terms of productivity as measured as successful publications -- at least in his journal. That's because it has too few willing reviewers right now.
“The reason we're seeing less from U.S.-based scholars is pretty clear,” he said via email. “Anyone with kids or family needing care is just not getting any research/writing done, and it's just a stressful time for everybody.”
Colleges and universities aren't just campuses in their own right, but part of larger communities:
The golden age of American college towns may be ending. The highly successful model of using tax and tuition dollars to subsidize and plant the seeds for thriving local economies is getting hit from all directions at once. The economic activity that once clustered there will begin migrating out -- to big cities, to distributed networks of remote workers, to other countries or simply to nowhere at all. The federal government could partially offset the situation if it chose to by giving big bailouts to states, by reversing restrictions on international students and by taking action to quickly suppress the pandemic. But absent such a rescue, college towns are in for a long period of pain.
CBC Vancouver reporter Justin McElroy (not to be confused with the Other Justin McElroy) launched a Twitter thread about songs in Disney animated movies, including notes and a color-coded infographic
Inspiration
Caught a tree in a lot of bloom:
Onward
British Columbia is starting to open back up, but after several weeks of being mostly at home I’m finding it hard to get outside again for more than a neighborhood walk. Habits. My inside voice is too used to staying inside. That said I was genuinely excited to buy an americano and sandwich from our local coffee shop.
Be safe. Enjoy the weekend.