The phrase “empowering educators” is a cliché that usually doesn’t mean much. We could use the language of business—as I have—to describe educators as knowledge workers and think about optimizing their workflows to reduce the amount of time they spend on low-value tasks and increase their opportunities to apply their expert judgment to high-value tasks. That formulation provides a more specific, testable, and potentially impactful description at the risk of turning off a lot of educators with the language. Having been both a classroom educator and a corporate knowledge worker myself, I believe these are two sides of the same coin. In my most recent post on the Argos blog (following my post that introduces what will be a four-post arc), I explore this topic with some concrete examples.
If I weren’t co-founder of Argos, I would be publishing these posts here on e-Literate. Argos, for me, is an effort to actually bring into the world some of the ideas that I’ve advocated for here on this blog for the better part of two decades. It’s an attempt to apply everything that my co-founder and I have learned about the barriers to change to make a real and lasting impact on education. Which is all I’ve ever wanted, professionally. I never had any inherent desire to run—or even work in—a start-up. It just turned out to be the best vehicle we could find for accomplishing something as important as it is hard to pull off. That said, because I am the co-founder of Argos, a commercial venture, I will maintain some separation between e-Literate, EEP, and Argos even as I try to keep all the plates spinning and bring these efforts together when doing so will further the mission.
Relatedly, I won’t be announcing Argos posts here on e-Literate for much longer. I want to get back to writing posts here while maintaining an appropriate level of separation. My current plan is to stop announcing my Argos posts here at the end of July. So if you like what you’re reading over there, please subscribe to that blog.
Read “Engagement and Faculty Workflows.”