Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
After more than a year at it, I think I’ve learned a few blogging lessons along the way. Maybe these will be useful to you, and maybe not. Thinking about starting your own blog? Or just interested in some of the process details? Perhaps both?
Whichever it is, here are four blogging lessons.
Kirsten Gillibrand isn’t going to win the Democratic nomination in 2020. And she probably won’t even win a single delegate. Even former staffers are calling her campaign ‘obnoxious and performative’ and asking her to quit the race. As a result, my own guidelines might suggest I shouldn’t write a post about her campaign. But I’m going to write about it anyway. I’m going to do it because I think she’s centering her campaign on an idea no one else has ever taken up for a major national campaign. That idea is gender-identitarianism.
Let’s explore this in more depth.
Learning outcomes are all the rage in the education industry. They’ve been so for some time on the accreditation and assessment side of things. But now they’re everywhere even among colleges and universities, especially among less prestigious institutions.
I’ve worked on both of these sides of the education industry. Sometimes even at the same time. What’s this ‘student learning outcomes’ stuff all about?
Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll start with a New York Times editorial. Molly Worthen paints a vivid picture of what learning outcomes look like from a faculty perspective. I’ll fill in some thoughts from the non-profit educational management and assessment side of things. That’s where I’m working these days, anyway.
As I wrote earlier, traffic declines during the summer? Why? I don’t know. Maybe everyone’s on vacation or just enjoying the sun. I hope you had a good time, but that’s not the point.
The point is you might be wondering what you missed? Well, I’m here to let you know. Here are some summer highlights.
The Democratic Socialists of America recently held its 2019 National Convention, and I wrote earlier about its preconvention event in Chicago. You probably know the DSA grew from maybe 6,000 members to about 55,000 members around and after the 2016 US presidential election. Over the course of that time, the group moved significantly to the left. I’ll say more about this later in a post on the DSA itself, but it transitioned from an organization of liberals and progressives to one of social democrats-to-socialists. It endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and BDS in 2017. You know, that kind of change. The DSA Caucuses make up much of the group’s politics.
Some of you might not know much about the DSA Caucuses, especially those of you who aren’t part of the largest chapters or social networks. Here in Iowa, our DSA Chapters build working class and tenant power via tenants unions. As well as other local and regional projects. By contrast, the DSA Caucuses mostly focus on national issues or national structure. They’re not obviously relevant to our work. As a result, many of us don’t know much about them.
In a similar boat? This post is for all of you.
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