Month: June 2005

Thoughts on "Blogs as a Tool for Teaching"

I’m guessing that at least some people coming to this blog for the first time are here because of an article I have in the June 24 Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Information Technology Supplement.” It kind of shows up in the back of that section, so I don’t know how many people have (or ever will) read it. But if you’re here because you did read it, thanks.

This was an interesting writing experience for me in a couple of different ways, so I thought I’d mention a few things about it here:

  • This came about because I was contacted by an editor at the CHE who either read or had heard of an article I had in the online academic journal Kairos called “When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction” and asked me if I wanted to write a piece about teaching with blogs. Considering the fact that the CHE has quite a broad reach and they were going to pay me, I of course agreed.
  • I thought the CHE folks were nice to work with, actually.
  • If I ever teach an undergraduate class at EMU about the “publishing process” as it really happens, I’ll show them the various drafts and the give-and-take with the editors. It’s interesting because where I started this essay months ago is not the same where I ended up. For the most part, that’s a good thing.
  • Regrets? A few, maybe. I (of course!) did not have a lot of space to work with, and there were a few places where the editor was asking me “to explain that more” and I really just couldn’t explain enough. I mean, these things are complicated. As a result, there are a few places where I think the piece reads a bit stiff to me.
  • I have no idea what the deal is with the “drummer boys” graphic on page B34.
  • I still basically agree with the points I think I am trying to make, though one thing I wish I had talked about more in this essay (and in the Kairos piece, for that matter) is the extent to which improving blogging tools make certain aspects of blogging, such as interaction, better than they were. Well, maybe that can be the next essay.

Oh yeah: there’s other essays in this issue, too.

I don’t have any use for it in a small writing class (at least I don’t think I do…), but these “clickers” that are surfacing in lecture hall classes are really interesting. It’s kind of a gimmick, sure, but I bet it really does keep students interested. Interestingly though, some of the other articles are talking about using technologies (video, for example) as a “hook” to keep students (the proverbial “MTV generation?”) interested.

There’s a piece called “Hold a Socratic Chair” that I thought was pretty interesting because I’m going to be teaching an all online class for the first time in the fall. It’s about a guy who teaches at Concord University School of Law, which offers a completely online degree. And then there’s a bunch of stuff I’ll need to read later, a piece by Janet Murray, an interestingly titled essay called “Why Many Faculty Members Aren’t Excited About Technology,” an article about course management tools that might come in handy for a different project, and some other things I’m not going to mention now.

Anyway, go buy it now. Good reading.

Update:
Jeff’s question in his comment prompted me to ask the folks at the CHE if I could reprint/repost my essay here. They said I could republish it anywhere I wanted as long as I acknowledged that it first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. So there ya go.

My scan of the article (saved as a PDF file) is pretty bad, so if anyone has an electronic version of this from the CHE web site, I’d appreciate it if you could send it to me. Thanks in advance.

"Hole in the wall" in India Frontline story

In the process of surfing around tonight, I came aross this site, “The Hole in the Wall,” a Frontline story from 1999 or so. I think I had heard about this before, but basically, this computer company set up a computer monitor in a wall in a slum in India. Very quickly, slum kids started teaching themselves how to work the machine. Kinda cool stuff, and maybe a site I can use in my graduate computers and writing course.

Oprah, Bill Faulkner, and Me: As I Lay Dying

I’m pretty far behind on my Oprah Book Club homework for reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I have a variety of excuses, not the least of which is I have to wrap up my teaching by tomorrow. So I’ll just mention a few things about my reading for now:

  • I have memories (not necessarily vivid, but memories) of reading As I Lay Dying as a freshman in college. I think I had read a Faulkner short story or two when I was in high school, but I’m pretty sure that this was the first Faulkner novel I had read. What I remember about reading it 20 years ago now was that I liked it, but there was a lot that I just flat-out didn’t get. This time around, I feel like I am understanding quite a bit more of it, which makes sense since I’m a much more experienced and better trained reader than I was way back when. Better still, this book really holds up for me. Faulkner is one bad-ass writer, that’s for sure.
  • Oprah’s web site has all kinds of stuff about Faulkner and approaching the book, much of which is useful and much of which isn’t. I think I’m particularly put off by the “Faulkner expert,” Robert W. Hamblin. His bio indicates that he’s certainly qualified, but in his video lectures (which don’t really work well on my broadband connection), he looks and sounds and acts to me like someone from the Oprah show called central casting and said “get me an English professor, stat!” Plus I find his critical approach problematic: he’s all about the biography of Faulkner, he’s about saying things like “this is what this novel is about,” and some of the questions he decides to answer strike me as nit-picky to the extreme. For example, one of the questions was “How old are the Bunden children?” Hamblin goes on and ON and on answering this, when it seems to me the real answer should be something like “Well, it goes from oldest to youngest Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman, and Vardaman is either a lot younger than the other kids in the family or he has some kind of mental retardation or something. That’s all you really need to know.”
  • Actually, the best piece of advice I saw on the web site for reading the book came from a fellow club member. He wrote (in part) “I think all this talk about the genious Faulner is (sic) may be intimidating. The best thing I can think of to say is take each chapter simply for what it says at face value. If Vardaman says his mother is a fish, just go along with it, and say “okay….” When things start to get confusing, rather than stop, just keep on going until you find something that really does seem to make sense, really does grab your attention. Then take that point and start to think about why it is interesting, just what made you notice it.

School is (almost) out…

Today was the last day of my section of English 121; Wednesday is when we would have a final, but since we won’t really have a “final” in the class, it’s when the portfolio and any revisions are due.

Spring classes are tough because you are trying to accomplish in 7 1/2 weeks what is hard enough to do in 15 during the regular school year. It’s hard on the students, many of whom are taking the class now because they had “challenges” with it before. It’s hard on me because everything moves twice as fast and because, after the regular school year is over, I too am ready for a break.

Anyway, I’m about to take one. I will read through final projects and figure out final grades for students between now and Wednesday afternoon, and then we leave town for parts west of here first thing Thursday morning. It’s going to be a sorta/kinda “working vacation” in the sense that I am going to bring my computer and some work that I should have finished weeks ago is, er, “pressing.” But to tell the truth, I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have and I don’t know how much time I’ll have, either. I guess I’ll find out in the next week or so.

The jump to WordPress, a semi-rocky one

Just as the Piston-San Antonio game is getting interesting, I finally FINALLY get my WordPress version of this blog to function. I’ve got a few other tweeks I want to make before I go to bed, but I had thought this transition was going to be a bit easier than it was. More later….

Update #1:
As you might be able to tell, I’ve started to mess with the template a bit. The picture in the masthead is one I took on campus a while back. It’s walking away from Pray-Harrold toward Welch Hall. But you can’t really see that; the big thing in the middle of the page is the infamous “Water Tower” of Ypsilanti.

Why the move to WordPress? Well, I’ve been using it for my unofficial blog for a month or so now with no problems. With this CHE article coming out, I decided to spiffy things up a bit around here. And I wanted something to do while watching the Pistons play, though importing my blogger blog into this proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated.

There will probably be a lot more updates in the not-so-distant future, but this will due for now. After all, I still have a class to teach, things to grade, a textbook to write, a trip to prepare for, etc., etc….

Was C&W that quiet?

I dunno, but I haven’t been able to learn a whole lot about what happened at the 2005 Computers and Writing Conference at Stanford.

I am sure I am missing something here, but this version of C&W seems awfully quiet to me. A lot of the bloggers that I regularly read aren’t there or aren’t reporting on the events. The electronic mailing list that is kind of the unofficial link to computers and writing folk, tech-rhet, has been silent. I think I’ll post an inquiry there in just a second….

So, what happened out there? Anything?

Update#1:
Okay, there’s a bunch of stuff on Bradley Bleck’s Blog (say that three times fast…)

Father’s Day!




Willtongue

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

Actually, neither father’s day nor mother’s day are really that big of a deal around here. Annette was kind enough though to take my hint about our need for new cell phones, and she was persuaded by the numerous Verizon Wireless ads for two camera phones for the price of one. Or something like that. With the hassle of dealing with the rebate paperwork, it really is a pretty good gift to me.

Here’s one of the first pictures I took with this thing; I took it yesterday and I managed to figure out how to send it to my email account this morning. A bit of resizing with PhotoShop, and ta-da, picture of Will sticking his tongue out at me. Not too bad of quality, if you ask me.

Not much else on the agenda in terms of fatherly activities. We’re getting ready for a major roadtrip out west, so we have a ton of stuff to do around the house before we go. I have some large work projects, too. No steak dinner for me (I don’t want one anyway); just veggie burgers….

Part of the job, not part of the job

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a kind of interesting piece called “What’s in it for me?” by Chris “not his real name” Barnett. It’s the story of how Barnett had a meeting with his dean, who was frustrated by the faculty not being willing to propose new or different classes without “getting” something out of it, like additional money. The dean complains about the poor faculty attitude, though Barnett has a different perspective:

At our college, at least, there is no pay for directing independent studies or developing new courses (though, of course, teaching those courses is compensated) or giving up part of our weekends to attend an alumni event. The dean is right in that such things are our job and help sustain the life of the college, and since we are hired by the college, we ought to willingly take on such opportunities to help the college and its students.

I understand why the dean feels we’re being selfish. And we are, indeed, being selfish. But for me and many of my colleagues with family obligations, our responses are fundamentally different from our students’ responses. For when we say, “What’s in it for me?” we really mean, “What’s in it for my family?”

Time spent at the college is time not spent at home. It is time not spent with visiting grandparents or cousins. It is time not spent with spouses. It is time not spent with children who grow up faster with each passing semester.

Now, I agree with part of what Barnett is talking about, but it seems to me that he’s talking about two different things. Showing up at “extra things” on weekends (recruiting functions, alumni events, award ceremonies, etc.) are things I think of as “above and beyond” the normal functions of the job. When I attend these things, I usually get a letter or something that becomes part of my tenure and promotion file. It counts as “service;” not a lot of service, but some service at least.

In any event, I don’t think faculty ought to be required to do these things. I think faculty should have to attend graduation once in a while (I’ve been once in the time I’ve been here), but that’s about it. I do a couple extra sort of events like this every year when they fit into my schedule and when I’m interested in the event in question.

But I think that developing new classes and directing independent studies is clearly smack-dab in the middle of an academic job. This just doesn’t seem “beyond the call of duty” to me at all, and I don’t understand why Barnett is trying to collapse these two different kinds of things into one.

I do think there are some ways in which developing new classes can be not quite in the job description. Take online classes, for example: I think creating a new online class is a bit different, and at EMU at least, faculty get compensated for doing this extra work. In my department, directing MA projects earns faculty some compensation for teaching. But for the most part, of course faculty create new classes, update old ones, direct independent studies, etc. Showing up on weekends is extra; showing up during the week isn’t.