Dinosaur_U an Introduction

From Video Description:

Dinosaur_U as a concept is a sequel to ideas in this blog post:
https://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2021/06/becoming-fossil.html 

The video is captioned. Apart from making the video accessible to those who are hard of hearing, the captioning serves quite a different purpose. It may seem that I'm winging it in the video. I do generally prefer to talk without notes. A viewer might not be able to tell how much forethought went into making this video and if the estimate is not much at all, then discount the value of the video accordingly. But captioning is labor intensive. That there are well edited captions gives evidence of some effort in post video production. The creator has paid a "time price" in making the video. The viewer can readily observe the captioning. In this way it functions like a performance bond posted by the video creator. 

Audio only version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I97Qj9ReeMDmYgoRWYp_BOfxZMIMlskt/view?usp=sharing

Transcript of Video:

Welcome to Dinosaur_U an Introduction. I am Lanny Arvan, your host, and I will explain the title Dinosaur_U and what this is about.

This video and this concept are actually a sequel to a blog post I wrote, not too long ago, called Becoming a Fossil. And it was about ageism in society, specifically in academia, and also whether senior citizens who are retired currently might somehow re-enter the labor market in some way, because of chronic labor shortages because of the aging of society.

So, this is not the immediate short run labor shortages we're seeing under the pandemic. This is a longer-term issue of labor shortage because our society is getting older and fewer people are of working age.

And so, the question is, can we do anything about it? So, one of the ideas in that piece was that retired people who are of reasonable means might enter the labor market as volunteers. And they're likely to have substantial human capital that is still of some value, even if they've been retired for a while. And that human capital can be put to good use, if deployed in an interesting way.

So, Dinosaur_U is doing that in academia. I'm a dinosaur. I've been retired for quite a while. I’m a former faculty member in economics and administrator in online learning/educational technology. And maybe some things that I possess skill-wise and knowledge-wise could be put to use as a volunteer.

So, the idea of Dinosaur_U is to collect others like me who would volunteer because it's socially beneficial to do so. Hopefully we do something that's useful and create a little marketplace where those people who might want the volunteer service, and I'm going to try to illustrate that in the rest of this video, will come and look at these little bio videos to see: Do I want to hire this guy as a volunteer? Do I want to match this person into teaching my class? Or, if in an administrative capacity, do I want a mentor of this sort? Etc.

The thought is we've learned we can do lots of work online. So, Dinosaur_U will be an online service only not a face-to-face. Coincidentally, the people who hire might be in the same geographic area as the ones who are offering their services. But that's not really necessary.

So, I now want to explain why I use the word Dinosaur for U rather than some other maybe more somber term that's equally descriptive. And I'm trying to be a little tongue-in-cheek, a little self-deprecation, and a sense of humor. Because even though ageism is a rather serious issue, making a market that works is - seems to me like a long-shot possibility and we should have a sense of humor uh at the outset.

We should know that people like me, maybe especially me, but people want to have a nap once or twice a day when other people think work should be done. and may have other priorities because of health reasons or whatnot. And the people who are hiring, who are likely to be much junior to them, may feel well this is a little bit awkward because of the age difference. So, how do we get past that?

And I’m going to make a little bit of a setup that I hope creates a general set of rules for getting past it. And then I’ll try to illustrate in my particular case.

So, there are basically two rules. We seniors or we retirees who are the dinosaurs will always be the supporting actor in any relationship. The people who are hiring will be the leading actors. So, the relationship is we’re the support; they're the lead. They, and you can also think of them as the director, they get to set the way things will go, what the usage is, etc. We might offer suggestions, but they're the ones who are making the ultimate decisions. We understand that already. We're doing it under those terms.

Why does that work for me? It works for me because I had my career already. I don't need to have a career to define, in retirement, a career in retirement to define who I am. I’ve done that already. So, I could be support and let the people who are hiring be the ones who figure out how that support might work.

So, I'm going to talk about this in the teaching context and then maybe in future videos perhaps explore other contexts.

But in the teaching context, I teach microeconomics. I have been teaching advanced courses since I’ve retired. But I used to teach intermediate micro quite regularly. I have a website, ProfArvan, which has videos for intermediate micro.

So, an instructor at another university who may be beset by having too many students, or not enough respect because they're a grad student teaching, or they're an adjunct teaching and nobody gives them resources to do the job decently, is looking for some help and they happen to be doing it in microeconomics. They watch this video, and they say, hey maybe partnering with Arvan wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

So, I’m going to list a variety of different things that might happen during the partnership.

We might have video chats, if you will dialogue, conversation about topics which normally would be presented by lecture. But online, you know if you do listen to podcasts, podcasts are almost all conversation. Nobody listens to lecture online unless it's for courses. And so, maybe if the topic is very technical lecture is better. But in a lot of cases if there are issues to extract or there are different points of view that might inform of the subject, then conversation is the better approach. So maybe we would do conversation, record that like I’m recording this, and give that to the students outside of class. And then inside the class in the live class session they can do active learning activities based on that video.

Another possibility is the instructor wants to vent. Life is tough. Nobody is being friendly to them. So, vent. Vent to somebody not on your own campus and to somebody who's okay hearing that. You can call that being a mentor. But venting is a good thing and if you want somebody for that purpose that's fine.

If you want to talk about particular teaching techniques or trying little experiments in the classroom, that can be coaching about that sort of thing. Whatever the instructor, the direction where the instructor wants to go, that would be fine.

I want to say one thing that won't be done. The arrangement has to be willing on both sides. I like teaching, but I hate grading. I will not volunteer to have anything to do with grading. Furthermore, student privacy dictates somebody who's not actually officially in the course doesn't get to see student grades. So grading is out.

However, offering office hours to students before they've turned in the work, that might be a possibility. Or helping students on a group project, that might be a possibility as well. So, there's just lots of different things that might come out of this.

Now let me say one other idea I’ve had. If a few different instructors at different campuses want to hire me and they're teaching the same course, and I get to be friendly with them, and we're comfortable with each other, after a while I might introduce them. And they might partner with each other in the future. And I can be out of the picture, so maybe help somebody else.

So, another possibility, down the road, is bringing instructors together at different campuses who are teaching the same stuff, where a collaboration between them might be useful.

So, there are just a handful of ideas off the top of my head that can be explored and tried. And Dinosaur_U will have each dinosaur, each potential instructor helper, present their own ideas about how this might help and also their own background.

I’m going to stop now so this video doesn't get keep going forever and let's perhaps resume in a sequel.