Category: Academia

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Mysterious “Thank You” package makes my day

I have a variety of things I want to blog about– some reading on competing networks of assessment, a bunch of links I need to put someplace– and I have a variety of other things I need to do/stop procrastinating from– I’m talking to you, Written Communication web site– but I had to post about the mystery package from yesterday first.

I always love mystery packages.  One of my favorite (still) unpublished stories (but not really a story because it does more or less recount something that happened) was about the time that Annette and I received a package addressed to us in our Richmond apartment but that was clearly meant for someone else.  So I was intrigued with yesterday’s package, one which was delivered to EMU and was addressed to me.

At first, I didn’t recognize the name on the outside.  Here’s what I found on the inside:

On the right is the package’s main contents, a copy of a journal called Readerly/Writerly Texts. I had an article published in a special issu of it back in 1999, an article titled “Teacher Learning (Not Teaching) HTML with Students:  An Experimental Lesson Plan for Introducing Web Authoring into Writing Classes,” an article I’m tempted to give to a couple of my colleagues even though it is really ancient history.

Here’s a close-up on the front of the card:

Very nice.  And the inside of the card:

After reading the note, I finally put it all together:  as the handwritten part of this very clever card from Archelaus Fine Cards explained, this is from my former MA student Sheri France (I directed her project many moons ago).  As she explains in the card, Sheri was moving offices from one place of employment to another and she thought it would be best to return her long ago borrowed copy of the journal I loaned her.

Ha!  And they say there are no rewards in academia!

On the off-chance you are reading this, Sheri:  you’re welcome, no worries about returning that journal so late, and if you get a chance to drop me an email to update me on your professional life to share on the writing program web site, let me know.

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#cccc11 recap

This is kind of scattered because I started it over a cup of coffee Monday morning and finished it Wednesday morning before meeting meeting meeting/grading grading grading.  I’m super DUPER busy with wrapping up the winter term.  The last day of classes was yesterday, and I’ve got at least four stacks of things I need to/want to assign grades to by the end of the day a week ago.  I know.

But before I get to more detail than you want to know, I thought I’d make four general comments:

  • Partly in response to Derek and Alex and Kyle and I am sure others:  I’m not particularly grumpy about the quality (or not) of the panels or anything else at this year’s conference.  Yeah, the hotel was too expensive, but that’s why I didn’t stay at the conference hotel.  Yeah, there was no decent wifi and I think that should indeed be addressed, but most major conference hotels have the same problem and I always plan ahead and assume I won’t have decent wifi anyway.  Yeah, I kept running into the same people, but I kind of like that and I always have the odd experience of running into the same people at a particular year of the CCCC and not others– for example, last year I ran into Brian McNely everywhere, but this year, I didn’t see him once.  Etc., etc. I think I preferred the Louisville location to Atlanta for a variety of reasons (though I had a lot of fun in Georgia), but Atlanta was a lot more reasonably priced than New York or San Francisco.  And I don’t want to be too critical because….
  • … I don’t want to get involved.  While I do have some complaints about how the CCCC and the NCTE do business in all sorts of ways (its conferences and a lack of willingness to offer alternative formatted presentations like poster sessions, its publications and its confusion about the paperless publishing world, its view of what an organization is and how it ought to fund itself, its dumb as a bag of rocks view of anything resembling the internets, etc., etc.), I feel like I more or less give up my right to complain too loudly when I am unwilling to do anything about it by getting involved in the organizations’ governance.  I’m not willing to run for the Executive Committee of the CCCC or anything else involving the NCTE.  I thought about it at one point, but it just isn’t the sort of administrative/service work that interests me– at least not now.  So if I’m not willing to pitch and and “make a difference,” so to speak, then I can’t complain too much about the people who are willing to do that.
  • I don’t know if the conference has changed that much or not, but I know I’ve changed.  The first CCCC I went to was (I think?) in 1995, and I attended and presented at the conference pretty consistently through about 2005 or so.  When I was a graduate student and first starting my career down the tenure-track, listening to what people had to say at the CCCC was part of my education and presenting at the conference was real scholarship.  But this year wasn’t my first rodeo, and I’m all tenured/promoted -out.  I still learn some things from panels; but mostly, it’s variations on things I’ve heard before, simply by virtue of the fact that I’ve been around long enough to have heard a lot of stuff before.  I still propose to the CCCC so I can get on the program (and thus some funding for the trip), but I need another CCCC presentation on my CV like another hole in the head.  So sure, the conference isn’t as “new” and as “exciting” as it once was; but neither am I.
  • Having said that, I do think there’s more that the CCCC could do to reorganize itself (more like– dare I say it?– MLA by having subject areas organize panels instead of assuming that we’re all there to talk about freshman comp in some variety; have a wider variety of presentation-types; have published proceedings; etc.); and, in an era in which I can communicate with like-minded scholars all over the world via email and the blogosphere and I can publish a media-rich version of my presentation for free, I think the fundamental purpose of the “academic conference” has to be questioned.  Why do we spend the time and resources to do this anymore?  The answer to me is not panels; it’s being in meet/meat -space with other scholars in the field.

The biggest thing I get out of the CCCC at this point is the incidental contact.  So, along with the actual and direct activities, here’s more or less the order of things as I remember it:

Continue reading “#cccc11 recap”

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CCCC 2011: The prelude

I’m getting ready for what is setting up to be a somewhat unusual CCCCs in Atlanta this year.  My connection to the conference this year is not through a regular presentation, but through a couple of what i guess I would call “group projects.”

One of the folks who organize the CCCC IP caucus contacted me after my presentation on RiP! a Remix Manifesto last year and asked me I’d like participate in the event for 2011.  How can I turn down an invitation?  I don’t completely know how this will go, but I’m on a roundtable on RiP! during this session.  Here’s a link to a web site I put together for it– it includes a little info on the movie and my notes.  It might ultimately include some links/information from my co-roundtable-ish folks, one of whom is a former MA student here at EMU.  So we’ll see how that goes.

The other thing I’m doing is a roundtable with some of my EMU colleagues, “A Department in Exile: The Challenges of Contested Spaces and Roles.” It’s an interesting story– at least to me– about how this all came about.  When the theme of the conference was announced– “contested spaces”– I immediately thought about the literal contested space that we’ve been put in here at EMU, being displaced out of our building while it is being remodeled.

Anyway, I put together a roundtable with a bunch of my EMU colleagues and we sent it in.  It ended up being rejected initially, which I found odd.  I mean, I realize that the theme of the conference is supposed to be metaphorical notion of “contested spaces,” but you’d think that there would be room on the program for a literal discussion of contested space.  So I appealed, and the good news was we were ultimately accepted into the program.  The bad news is we are near the very very end of the program, the last session on Saturday.  I am assuming we will be a group talking amongst ourselves.

So, in part to make the talk actually usable and to help my colleagues figure out what to do, I put together this video:

We’ll see how it goes. My assumption is that this will be a presentation like one I gave on a Saturday at the CCCCs in New York a few years ago, one where I put together a comic book of sorts, assuming (correctly!) that not a lot of people are willing to turn out for a Saturday presentation.

Part the “adventure” for this conference is Bill H-D and I are driving down on Monday and then coming back (with Derek M) on Sunday.  Part of the problem for me with this version of the CCCCs is the IP thing is on Wednesday and the roundtable thing is on Saturday.  It’s potentially not a good idea for all sorts of obvious reasons, but I didn’t like the idea of being in Atlanta the whole week without any transportation.  Once again, we’ll see how it works out.  The adventure starts Monday morning.

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Tim Feriss’ 4 hour workweek and “outsourcing” to get to the $10K college degree: what could go wrong?

This morning, I stumbled across a “guest blog” at University of Venus (part of Inside Higher Ed) by Terrance Bradford-Muhammad titled “Creating a Degree for 10K.” Apparently, Texas Governor Rick Perryhas issued the “challenge” to his states’ universities to create a $10K college degree, one that included tuition and books.  Right after that, Perry issued a “challenge” to Texas cattlemen to produce a steer with steaks that taste like unicorn and that poop cherry jelly beans.

I jest, of course.  A $10K degree is ridiculous.

But Bradford-Muhammad takes on the challenge and suggests that maybe the way to get to that $10K degree is by following the outsourcing techniques suggested by none other than Tim “The Four Hour Workweek” Feriss.  Here’s a long quote to give you an idea what I mean:

In Timothy Feriss’ 4 Hour Workweek, he discusses the idea of “Automation,” meaning building a sustainable and automatic stream of income. It includes several techniques like drop-shipping, Google Adwords and Adsense, and outsourcing, all techniques a university could use (Timothy Feriss: Outsourcing Life). In some cases it has already begun.

The private (for-profit) sector residence life program I worked for was outsourced to a third party housing provider that leased land from a university. The company built and maintained the buildings, operating the program with its own employees. This cost the state nothing and, instead, put money in the state’s pockets (if a state can have such things).

Still not a believer? Think of this. Drop shipping is a product delivery method where the seller accepts payment for an order, but the customer receives the product directly from the manufacturer. In these arrangements, the retailer is the middleman between the manufacturer and the customer (Wise Geek). Think of online universities and of the professors who teach part-time from their homes. The state could rid itself of “brick and mortar” classrooms and arrange a teaching contract between the professor and the students, allowing the professor to decide where, when and how learning would take place. Cost to the state? Nothing.

By the way, Bradford-Muhammad is a PhD student in “student affairs” at the California Institute of Integral Studies.  Not sure how that studying is going there, frankly.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Feriss’ system is foolproof and sound, so simple that all you have to do is describe it and it works.  It’s not that Feriss does not have any good points– I’ve written about some of them before— but I think it’s going to take a wee bit more than referencing a chapter in a pop self-help book to make it so.  But still.  Also, let’s just assume that a) the compensation for this kind of work was comparable to what professors earn now, and b) all of the other key trappings of the “real job” aspect of things– minor details like insurance and retirement plans– could be addressed.  Two more mondo-huge assumptions, but again, let’s just go with it.

On the one hand, this system would be pretty sweet:  “the university” then becomes more or less a broker matching up students to instructors, and the students/instructors work out the details.  In fact, in a broad sort of way, this is what is happening now in the realm of teaching part-time and online:  you pick up an online class here and an online class there, and through that, the instructor cobbles together some version of a paycheck.  Hypothetically, someone who either  negotiated a higher salary than the usual per-class rate or someone who was willing to take on a ridiculous number of classes could make some very good money.

But Bradford-Muhammad is forgetting one critical thing about the way universities operate.  At least two-thirds of my time as a tenured professor is spent on things other than teaching.  Besides teaching (and by “teaching,” I mean assigning things, leading discussions, creating assignments, and the tons of reading/grading I do associated with specific courses, all of which I am doing online currently), I have lots of responsibilities involving things like meetings that make the “business” of the department go ’round; I advise students about degree programs or particular classes; and I work with my colleagues on developing and changing curriculum.  And by the way, these other “not teaching” things today occupied more of my time than the teaching things yet again today.

Oh, and I didn’t mention any assessment or program review work, also stuff we need to do nowadays in part to satisfy people like Rick Perry who are demanding accountability in public educators.  That’s not an unreasonable demand, even if the the process of institutional assessment/program review is often pretty goofy.  But it is also not a cheap demand to satisfy.

Anyway, it’d be nice if drop-shipping and outsourcing could work in this setting.  If it weren’t for the fact that most of the cost of higher education has nothing to do with the teaching.

Incidentally, in my more grumpy academic moments, I’ve wondered about the finances of this kind of approach on a personal level: that is, how many courses would I have to teach in the shady world of proprietary and/or online universities to get to the break-even point relative to my current salary and benefits?  Twice as many courses a year?  Would the trade-off of not having to deal with any of the non-teaching stuff make it worth it?

And say, what if I followed Feriss’ advice and outsourced some of my own grading and other paperwork in the process?  Can a part-time instructor hire a subcontractor?  Hmmm… that’s just crazy enough to work….

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Das Gradeinator

I’ve been thinking about grading a lot lately– well, “lately” meaning the last year or so.  I had a few thoughts about grading in general here last year, and also here, where I reflected on a particularly unpleasant discussion with a student about a grade on a project.  At the end of last term, I had decided I was going to try an experiment in English 328, the “advanced writing” course of sorts I’ve taught at EMU dozens and dozens of times over the years.

Basically, what I did was this:

  • Each student would submit a draft without their name on it for peer review.  (I should mention a) I’m teaching online, so these students don’t necessarily know each other that well to begin with, and b) I combined two online classes into one big group, which I probably wouldn’t do again, but that’s a slightly different story).
  • For each student’s essay, I created google docs survey with rubric/peer review questions, some very structured, some open-ended.  That’s 28-30 or so surveys that are individual documents.
  • Then I figured out who would review who, striving to make it so that no one reviewed each other– that is, student 1 reviewed students 2, 3, and 4; student 2 reviewed 5, 6, and 7; and so forth.  This was a math problem for me that took a while to resolve.
  • Then I distributed the still anonymous essays along with corresponding google doc links  to each member of the class for them to fill out.
  • Then, I collected those responses from the surveys, dumped the results into FileMaker, and then distributed them back to students in a readable fashion.
  • After students received feedback from their reviewers, I then gave them the chance (via a SurveyMonkey survey) to review their reviewers on a simple number scale.
  • And then, I more or less repeated the whole thing, but for the second time around, students assigned 100 out of the 150 points for the project as a grade (the other 50 points were tied to the “review of reviewers” and my own assessment).
  • I reviewed the survey results for each student, read through each essay myself, assigned my portion of the grade, made any other adjustments I thought necessary (for example, when students clearly didn’t follow the assessment instructions), and then passed all of this back to students.

You got all that?

That was the “Gradeinator v.1,” or at least what I was calling it.  A better name will need to be in place eventually for marketing purposes, I’m sure.  Right now, I’m working with what I am calling “Gradeinator v.2,” where I attempted to use one very large SurveyMonkey survey (hundreds and hundreds of questions, with lots of skip logic) to handle all of the reviews.  My theory was that this would be easier than Google Docs/Survey, but as I am going through and tabulating things now, I’m not convinced that is the case.  That might be more about my lack of me knowing what I am doing more than anything else though; more on that in a bit.

Now, I suppose the first question any sensible person might have here is why in the heck would I do this in the first place?  It’s certainly something I’ve wondered about myself, believe me.

Basically, I was trying to do three things.  First– and I always knew this was a long-shot– I was trying to see if there was a way to save some time with grading.  Second, I wanted to make peer review a little more systematic, and, by adding the anonymous feature, I wanted to make it a little more “honest.”  My theory was that one of the reasons why students sometimes give kind of lame peer review was because they don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, and making things anonymous might make it more about the “writing” rather than the “writer.”

And third, I wanted to minimize my role as “the grader” and to empower the students as critics.  This is an advanced writing class after all, one where must about all of the students in the class are hoping to be secondary school teachers or professional writers of some sort, and it seems to me worthwhile trying a different way to highlight the critique process.  What I’m getting at is I wanted to find a way to emphasize my role of “facilitator,” while at the same time recognizing that the teacherly role of final decider really never goes away.

I’ve learned a lot already and I’m learning more; in no particular order:

  • On the whole, this process has a certain amount of “truthiness” for me.  I do think that the peer review is better through this more systematic “rubric” approach and also when its anonymous, though these peer reviews are far from perfect.  My students tend to cautiously agree:  they tend to see the advantages of anonymous peer review, but they also see problems with it, notably that it isn’t really possible to ask “follow-up” questions about particular points of critique.  Though I should also point out that a lot of my students are thrown off by the “weirdness” of all this, and I am sure that the reviews at the end of the class will demonstrate that not everyone was on-board with this.  I will also be taking a poll for the next big peer-reviewed assignment on the process that students want to follow, and the results of that poll might be telling.
  • I like the process of reading students’ assessments and then making my own assessment, because what happens most/much of the time is I am able to build constructively off of my students’ comments.  That makes me feel more “coach” and/or “team leader”-like, rather than the final judge/authority/teacher, if that makes sense.  I have many more opportunities to say “I agree with what your peers said about your essay” with this set-up.
  • But I have to emphasize most of the time and not all of the time, because even well-intentioned and earnest students have given some not excellent feedback.  Even with a rubric and guidelines and my coaching/instruction and all the rest, much of the feedback has still been– to be blunt about it–irrelevant.  I’m talking about critiques of font choices, how the pages are numbered (or not), really petty (and debatable) comments on grammar, etc.  And then there were also a number of student reviews and assessments that are just lazy, comments along the lines of “good!” and just giving “A”s without anything remotely helpful. The kind of reviews that are useless to students are also  impossible for me to build off of in any meaningful way.  Though I know this is all part of the learning process and it appears that the comments on the Gradeinator v.2 are better.
  • Anyway, the next time I do this (if there is a “next time”), I’ll be assigning points to students on the quality of their assessments, either instead of or in addition to the quality of their reviews.  That’s the teacherly part of things, I suppose, but I kind of feel like some folks need to be held accountable for their less than stellar reviews.
  • The technical part of the process– setting up the surveys, dumping the data into things like FileMaker, on and on and on– is an enormous pain in the ass, far far more time consuming and tedious than I had anticipated.  It was a little easier to do this the second time around, but just a little easier.  Of course, the thing is grading itself is kind of tedious, so I can’t really say if this is more or less tedious than the more traditional sitting down with a stack of essays with a pen.  More time-consuming, but that’s slightly different.
  • A lot went wrong, and went wrong in unanticipated ways.  Some students filled out the wrong surveys.  Some students supplied letters instead of numbers for grades, and it’s hard to average the letter “B” in with two other numbers.  And when students are late in handing in work or in getting the surveys done, well, that can mess up the works for others– that is, if a student doesn’t do the peer assessment they were supposed to do, then that means one of her or his peers doesn’t get the feedback/grade.

I think the most useful, interesting, and/or frustrating part of this for me is what I’ve learned a lot about things like Google Docs and Excel, and I know even more clearly now that there is much I do not know about these things and much I wish I could know about relational databases and programming.

I do not know if this is actually true, but it feels to me like this is a system that could be largely automated.  First, a student go to a web site and uploads her document for review.  Then, probably based on being informed about this or maybe based on some sort of due date, that student goes back to that web site, enters in some identifying information, and she is then taken to the documents she needs to review.  She completes them and submits them back to the system. Then, when her peers have completed their reviews of her project, the student receives an email alert and a link to review those reviews.  And as an instructor, the idea is you can watch, participate, or otherwise intervene in the process.

If all this were possible– if this could be set up with some kind of content management system or other database program, and if it were easy enough to customize the rubric/review questions based on an assignment and goals and such– then it might both save a teacher some time and make for a richer teaching experience.  Maybe that’s a big “if,” maybe not.

Anyone out there interested in a programming project?

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The kids today and the internets

This is mostly a reminder post for 516 for winter 2012 (I assume I’ll be teaching it then) and some reading(s) I might want to add about participatory culture and digital natives, and it’s in my mind now because I literally came across both of these things almost at the same time while looking for other things.

First, there’s the book Born Digital, which looks like a much smarter version of the whole “digital natives” argument than Pensky.  Along these lines is the web site/group Youth and Media.

Second, Clay Spinuzzi posted on his blog a useful review of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century By Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, useful not only for his comments but also for the link to the book.  Thanks Clay, and go read some more Jenkins– good stuff.

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On Cosgrove’s “What Our Graduates Write” and Gogan et al’s “Research Centers as Change Agents”

Man, it’s been a couple of crazy weeks around here.  It’s been a tsunami of teaching stuff (one experiment of which I might be blogging about soon), meetings up the ying-yang, reports/requests/documents/whatever to write, grad students interested in our MA program, program poli-ticks not worth explaining here, etc., etc.. And then there’s that pesky teaching thing, which I feel pretty far behind on too.

Anyway.

This is two-fer in my on-going reading and reviewing scholarship project, two pieces from the December 2010 College Composition and Communication.  First, there’s Cornelius Cosgrove’s “What Our Graduates Write:  Making Program Assessment Both Authentic and Persuasive.”  This is an essay that starts out kind of slow for me, describing what I see as a fairly routine assessment of what graduates from writing programs end up doing.  And I have to say that while I realize assessment work is important and a legitimate area of study and all that, I personally find it kind of boring.

But I like what Cosgrove does here, especially in his results.  First, he raises some interesting questions about what it is we should count as “writing” in the public sphere, more or less suggesting that we ought to be more open to considering a lot of different kinds of writing beyond traditional classroom settings.  I think it’s difficult for us within academia to often see what those other kinds of “real world” writing practices might be, so it’s useful to just ask our graduates and let them tell us.

Second, I really like what he has to say about the extent to which we ought to (or really, not) teach specific software, because that’s changing all the time.  Rather, “it’s just that the practice we provide our undergraduates should probably be driven more by the texts they are likely to produce than by the software applications that are extant that the moment when they are producing them (326).”  I agree 100%, and for me, it means that there isn’t really much point in teaching students how to use a specific piece of software in class like Writing for the World Wide Web or a computer documentation class.  Specific software choices shift way too fast, and besides, just because we teach students to use a specific software because it is the “industry standard” doesn’t automatically mean that particular employers will actually use that software, if that makes sense.

And I also agree that students today in writing programs need to think about is actually creating an audience for their writing via blogs and other social network sites.  That’s a point that might be coming up in my section of “Writing for the World Wide Web” this term.

As far as “Research Centers as Change Agents:  Reshaping Work in Rhetoric and Writing” by  Brian Gogan, Kelly Belanger, Ashley Patriarca, and Megan O’Neill goes:  I think it’s a reasonably good piece about the history of research centers and how they have contributed to the field.  For the most part, this seems to me a history of research centers and sort of a recap of some of the current ones that are in operation and that are tied to writing studies.  But I have to say I found my mind wondering in reading this one.

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My top 10 (ish) iPad apps

At The Unofficial Apple Blog today, I read “The best iOS apps I used in 2010.” It’s a nice enough list, but as an iPad expert (by virtue of the fact that I got one the first day they came out), I thought I’d offer my own thoughts on the top 10-ish apps that I have found myself using in my iPad this year.  Not counting the obvious things like Mail, Safari, iTunes, etc.

  • iAnnotate PDF. As far as my academic-life goes, this app probably ranks positions 1 through 8. Hands-down, this is the app I use for work the most, and it is by far the app that gives my iPad its most important “unique” functionality– that is, this is something that I can’t easily do with a desktop or laptop computer.  Basically, iAnnotate allows me to take PDFs of journal articles, book chapters, or whatever else of the sort I put together for course packs for classes I teach and to annotate them as if they were paper by using a stylus or my finger to highlight, take notes, etc.  So, for example, this last fall term, where I taught classes that involved in total about 40 or so readings from books and journals, I made no photocopies and took all of my reading notes right on iAnnotate.  In my mind, if the iPad did nothing beyond what this software does, it’d be worth it.

    If you are not an academic-type, you might be reading this and thinking “big deal,” but if you are someone who teaches college and who hates dealing with all of these paper copies of articles and such, you probably understand.  I was at a function recently and showing my iPad to a colleague who also teaches at EMU and also to her husband, who is a perfectly smart person who exited academia years ago and who now has a “real job.”  He didn’t see the advantage of iAnnotate, but my colleague who taught seemed to immediately to understand the value of this software.

  • Facebook.  I know it’s not an iPad app, but I use it a lot, probably more on my iPad than on my iPhone.  I wonder when the Face people are going to come out with an iPad version….
  • Reeder for iPad. There are a bunch of different RSS Feed readers for the iPhone and the iPad, but my favorite is Reeder for two basic reasons.  First, it works well with my Google Reader RSS feeds.  Second, it’s very straight-forward and doesn’t have all the unnecessary bells and whistles of readers like the over-hyped Flipboard.
  • WeatherBug. This is a link to the “Elite” version, but the free one works fine for me.  Reliable weather information in a nice to read format.
  • Twitter. I like the iPad app for this quite a bit, actually– I think much better than for the iPhone.
  • Dropbox.  I figured I needed to put this on the list some place, but I don’t actually use this for the iPad so much as iAnnotate uses it:  that is, I upload PDFs to my Dropbox account, and iAnnotate will synch with that to download and then upload again after I annotate the PDFs.  Have I mentioned the pros of iAnnotate yet?
  • IMDB. It’s a really slick interface for the ever-popular and useful Internet Movie Database, even if IMDB has gone kind of “commercial.”
  • (Tie) Kindle and iBooks.  Since I use my iPad mostly for reading stuff, including both of these apps probably isn’t much of a surprise.  I think that the future of electronic textbooks does not mean Kindle or iBook versions of textbooks, but it rather means free-standing apps presented as books.  Still, I like reading trade and/or “fun” books with both Kindle and iBooks.  In my view, the main advantage of iBooks is it is closer to open source with the epub format, and the main advantage of the Kindle is there are probably 10 times more books available.
  • Kayak HD. I don’t use it that much, but the interface for this travel web site is just really slick and user-friendly, more fun to use than it is on a “real computer” for sure.
  • (Tie) Pages and Keynote.  As I have noted previously on this blog someplace, both of these applications ought to be followed by the phrase “lite,” as in “not nearly as good as the ‘real’ app for the computer.”  But I have done some writing and presenting with them, so I’ll include them here.

You will notice that I don’t include any games or such things here, mainly because I don’t play a lot of games.  But okay, if I were to include one or two of those, I’d have to say that Angry Birds is pretty fun, and while PS Express isn’t a game but an image editing software, it has a lot of “game-like” features.  As my friend Chris W. once said, Photoshop is the most fun application on the Mac.

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Yet another collection of miscellaneous links

With all the news about delicious going belly-up (or not?), it seems more important than ever for me to park some links here that I want to keep track of:

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This blog post is worth 7 points

I had a conversation with a student the other day that continues to bother me.  I think for what are obvious reasons, I am not going to go into specific detail, but in summary, this person was unhappy with the earned grade on a project.  Very unhappy. So I of course scheduled a meeting with this person, assuming/hoping we were going to mostly discuss strategies for a revision.  Instead, this student essentially yelled at me.  I was told the assignment was not clear and that the student (in this person’s opinion, of course) had indeed fulfilled the assignment, regardless of my judgment and grade.

Furthermore, I as admonished for not being able to describe how many points certain portions of the assignment were worth and for not having (what this student had in mind as) a clear grading rubric.  How, this student wondered aloud and angrily, how could I possibly hope to teach anything absent a rubric that clearly describes what parts of the assignment are worth what points?

A few thoughts:

  • This student was not without a point– that is, this person did suggest valid ways in which the assignment description was lacking.  My main problem is that this assignment is relatively new and some of the problems I am experiencing this term– this is not the only student who missed part of the point of the project– were things I had not anticipated and which were not a problem previously.  I know, kind of vague.  Let’s just say I will have to add some language to the project that I thought was somewhat obvious, but you know what they say when you assume. Of course, there was a vigorous discussion on the class site (it’s an online class) about what exactly the assignment was about and I gave numerous examples of possibilities, and there was nothing to stop this student from asking for clarification or from running an idea past me.  Students– particularly college students, particularly college students who are juniors and seniors– have a certain obligation and responsibility to ask questions about assignments they are unclear about.  But that is perhaps beside the point.
  • Another point this student had that I think is valid and that I see all the time is a discrepancy between peer review comments and my comments– in other words, in the peer review process, students say the draft is great, but my comments and grade disagree with that.  This is because too often student comments are not detailed and not constructively critical (e.g. “Great job!  I learned a lot from your essay!  This is perfect in every way!”), and this is generally because students often don’t spend enough time in peer review, and/or also because students are way WAY too nice to each other, even in comparably anonymous online environments.  I think I need to do more to get students to question these overly rosy comments (Derek had some good points about this, btw), but I am completely convinced that the main reason students are not as constructively critical as they could be is because they don’t want to offend anyone or make anyone sad.  I think that if the peer review process was anonymous, then students would give more critical advice.  But that’s an experiment/change for next term.
  • Several years ago, a student who came into my office itchin’ for an argument from me would have gotten it.  Just a few years ago, a student coming into my office to bully me into changing a grade (and I am not accusing this student of that–not exactly– and I am quite sure this student has a very different interpretation of things) probably would have been successful simply because I would have decided it was not worth it.  Nowadays, when students come into my office and yell at me (not that this happens that often), I realize that the problem here is probably not mine.
  • What I object to most is the appeal to grading rubrics and points, a strategy I have quite frankly seen from a number of students who are studying to be K-12 teachers who have had just enough exposure to an undergraduate methods course to be vaguely familiar with the terms “rubric” and “assessment.”  As I told this student the other day, the use of rubrics is complex and debatable, the assignment and peer review process constitute a “rubric” of sorts,  and I would be happy to debate the use of rubrics in writing courses– particularly formal rubrics, and particularly in advanced writing courses– with any one of my colleagues in Education and/or assessment.  The same goes for points.  Assigning points (or percentages, of course) to projects or parts of projects in a class focused on something as leaky, fluid and non-discrete as the writing class is a convenient fiction at best.  Or at least they are convenient fictions when the points/rubrics are not forced upon educators from some sort of outside assessment force.  The kinds of institutional/external assessments that happen in higher education (accreditation, for example) and the sort of fetishized testing and rubrics and assessments forced upon folks in elementary and secondary education are  entirely different kind of convenient fictions.
  • On the other hand, it never ceases to amaze me how magically powerful assigned points and rubrics and the like are.  If I had only accompanied my grade and comments on the final project with a chart listing discreet elements worth a certain number of points, no matter how “made up” and dubious that chart might be, I am quite sure I would not have had the unpleasant conversation I had today.  After all, how could rubrics and points possibly lie?
  • I do have a simple point system that helps me keep track of grades and that helps students to see where they’re at in a course.  The class as a whole is worth 1000 points, participation is worth 200 points, each major project is worth 150 points, etc.  The number doesn’t matter, of course because fundamentally, it’s just a percentage system, and in my view, what really matters is the dialog I usually have with students about their grades, about revising, about improvement, etc..  I have literally taught courses in the past worth 1,000,000 points, and if I were better with numbers, I’d teach a course worth one point.  The points don’t matter because the process (and the percentages, for that matter) doesn’t change.
  • And yet, the power of the point in even my simplistic system is indisputable.  I have conversations with students who are seven points away from a “B” for the term, and when I say to a student in a conference “see, the problem is you are seven points short, so there’s really nothing I can do here, you’re going to get a ‘C+,'” that student inevitably nods and says “yeah, I see you’re point.”  Never once have I had a student stop to think a moment and speak the truth to me:  “Yeah, but you can pretty much give me whatever grade you think you can justify, right?”