A few years ago at a conference, I had the opportunity to hear Eric Larson speak about faculty use of technology and support. Since then, my colleagues have heard me refer to Maslow’s hierarchy of faculty support, so I thought that it was time that I wrote a blog post about this.

Larson’s premise was basically that faculty use of technology loosely follows the framework of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. In a nutshell, the higher needs on Maslow’s scale cannot be met if the lower needs have not been taken care of first. In Maslow’s hierarchy, the levels are as follows: Biological and Physical, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, Cognitive, Aesthetic, Self-actualization, and Transcendence.

I have a confession to make. I design multimedia for online courses. I extol the virtues of online learning to anyone who’ll listen. Yet I’m taking a course on-ground. And next quarter, when given the choice between the on-ground and online sections of a programming course, I’ll lean towards the on-ground.

Why? That’s certainly a question I’ve been asking myself. My stock answer is that I’m not disciplined enough for an online course. My wife’s amused by this rationale; she often tells me I’m the most disciplined person she knows. She has a point. I was raised by Scotch-Irish and German Protestant farmers and railroad men whose idea of taking it easy was waiting until after church to chop weeds. So discipline shouldn’t be a problem for me when taking an online course. What gives?

In the December 10th, 2007, issue of the New Yorker (it takes me a few months to catch up these days), Atul Gawande wrote an eye-opening piece, “The Checklist.” The article describes how the implementation of a simple medical checklist, developed by Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins Medical Center, slashed the rate of oftentimes-lethal intravenous catheter infections for patients in intensive care units in the state of Michigan. How? By including simple, no-brainer steps like “Step One: Doctors must wash their hands with soap” that doctors and hospital staff were skipping, thus causing easily preventable deaths and infections in their intensive care units.

The great thing about illiteracy is it’s pretty easy to spot. Sure, we’ve all heard stories about some 65-year-old grandpa who shocks his closest friends by revealing he never learned to read. Yet, for the most part, people who can’t read and write don’t sneak into American universities undetected and they don’t successfully hold down white-collar jobs. I know it’s tempting to argue with me here. This is the part where you want to derail my entire opening argument by telling me all about a student who graduated from University X and couldn’t even sign his own name. Or you might want to rain on my parade with the tale of the Fortune 500 CEO who had his son write all his memos. While I’m sure such things have happened on rare occasion, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s easy to determine if someone can read and write, assuming you truly want to know.