Category: Teaching

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Online secondary school in Michigan; African-Americans and Internet access

It’s the mad mad MAD dash at the end of the semester (note to self: next time you’re going to be out of town for two weekends in a row and you’re trying to put together a couple of presentations for said out of town trips, AND you need to then turn one of said presentations into some kind of longer piece, make sure you plan ahead), and I’m not sure I’m going to make it. Though given that it is one way or the other soon just going to “end,” I suppose I will.

Anyway, two articles of note here via the NCTE Inbox:

First, there’s this, “Online courses aren’t just for homeschoolers anymore,” which is in The Christian Science Monitor. Talk about learning something new every day– see these three opening paragraphs:

If high school student Kelsey Speaks had taken all of her classes at her bricks-and-mortar school, she wouldn’t now be three years into her Latin studies. Since junior high, Kelsey has enrolled in eight courses in a virtual classroom through Colorado Online Learning, a state-funded program. The junior at tiny La Veta High School in southern Colorado says taking courses online is a great choice. “It’s allowed me to do things I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do,” she says.

In addition to letting her take courses (for free) that her school doesn’t offer, online learning has made her schedule flexible enough that she can captain the debate team, edit the yearbook, and do volunteer work as well. She also gets to study independently, which she enjoys.

Once considered the domain of home-schooled students, K-12 online learning is a fast-growing option for public school students in rural, urban, and suburban areas. Michigan lawmakers are likely to pass legislation soon that will require high school students to take one course online before they graduate.

The second article is “Digital Divide Closing as Blacks Turn to Internet” and in the New York Times. For the most part, it does exactly what the headline suggests: it reports on the closing of the gap between different groups (particularly African-Americans, but other minorities too) as it relates to Internet access, which I have certainly seen in my own teaching. But it also reports that this “closing of the gap” is somewhat debatable, which I have also seen in my own teaching.

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Scott McCloud Rocks!

This is a belated post about the Scott McCloud presentation on campus on Monday night, late because I left for Chicago and the CCCCs first thing Tuesday. But in any event, McCloud’s spiel was great. I was hoping to link to some sort of news story about it, but I can’t find one at the Eastern Echo or the Ann Arbor paper; it might be too early for the Echo…

It was a huge crowd, pretty much a full house in the union ballroom, an interesting mix between typical EMU students/faculty and area comic geek/enthusiasts. And the crowd was part of the show, at least for me. One of my grad students (this was our “class” for the week) told me that a young person in front of him “would shoot his arms high in the air with the double devils-head ‘rock-n-roll’ hand sign every time he saw or heard something he liked.” Another grad student said something like “With all these people here, I bet it’d be tough to get a game of Dungeons and Dragons going in Ann Arbor tonight.”

McCloud’s presentation, which (of course!) involved hundreds of PowerPoint slides, was basically divided into three parts. The first was about a new book he has coming out in September, a book he’s clearly excited about, and one that sounds pretty interesting, too.

Then he talked about I guess what I would describe as his “philosophy� of comics, which is too complicated to try to explain here, but which involved (evolved out of?) a lot of his own background, which is quite interesting. McCloud’s father, who was literally a rocket scientist, was (is?) legally blind. And weirdly, McCloud lived in a neighborhood that seemed to be weirdly populated with kids who would group up to end up working as comic book artists, graphic novel writers, and children’s book illustrators.

Then he talked about his concept of the “infinite canvas� and comics, particularly about comics on the web. Essentially, McCloud talked about how the technology of print is responsible for the way that we have traditionally read comics and thought about things like panels. The cool thing with the web (not to mention high-speed access and software like flash) is that a lot of those rules can either go out the window entirely or at least be questioned in some interesting ways. And he had some super-cool examples to show too.

All in all, a great show and in interesting talk.

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Even more MySpace stuff (and this will probably be it for a while on that….)

I don’t want to obsess or dwell on the whole MySpace thing, but we were talking about blog issues in my grad class Monday, so it seems like a good time to post about some of the things we talked about in class.

MySpace controversies have become local, as is evident in this and this Detroit Free Press articles. To quote from the first one:

A presentation by two Lakeview High School students trying to warn classmates about the dangers of putting personal information on the Internet led to their teacher being escorted from the St. Clair Shores building because administrators thought pictures used in the project were too risque.

The segment, roughly eight minutes, that was broadcast to the entire school Tuesday on its in-house TV network featured pictures students in the district had posted on MySpace.com. They showed students drinking, posing provocatively or partially nude, and in one case kissing a vodka bottle.

I don’t know exactly what the deal is here (though if someone can hunt down this video that these kids put together for their school, I’d love to see it), but as far as I can tell from these two articles, while the student report was accurate and probably useful, it also featured stuff that really shows up on MySpace that school officials would rather not know about.

Anyway, my graduate course this semester features about five or so high school teachers, and without a doubt, the rules are different there than they are in (so-called) higher ed. For me, it’s one thing for me to see pictures of students (even mine) drinking or wearing swimwear or whatever; it’s another thing entirely when you’ve got high school kids– minors– doing these things.

On the other hand, this is what “the kids” are doing, as they say. One of my students, who is a high school teacher around here, brought up some MySpace pages from kids in his classes, and these pages featured pictures of scantily clad young people, lots of drinking, etc., etc. Now, this puts my student, these other students’ teacher, into a kind of problematic place because since these kids are, well, kids, my student/their teacher does have at least some (potentially) responsibility here.

The other thing that makes it tough for these high school teacher-types is the broad spectrum of reactions from stake-holders. On the one side, you’ve got parents and teachers who are outraged (outraged, I tell you!) that teenagers are getting together and drinking and doing sexually risque things, and the absolute last thing these people want to do is talk about these things (or sex education or drug use or whatever) with kids in school– it’ll put the wrong idea in their mushy heads. On the complete other side of the spectrum though, you’ve got parents (at least according to my students who are high school teachers) who are so out of touch with their kids or so overly tolerant of the behavior of their children that they’ve become enablers, the kinds of parents who buy the kids the kegs on the theory that “at least they’re drinking where I can see them.” These parents probably don’t care if their fifteen year-old daughter is posing on her MySpace pages in a skimpy bikini with a bottle of vodka in one hand a cup of beer in the other. And in a sense, these parents are as big of a problem for high school teachers since these are the people that are driving the first group of parents over the edge.

Me? Hey, my students are adults whether they want to admit that or not. I think it’s ill-advised for them to post pictures of themselves doing drunk and stupid things, but it’s their problem. I’m not going to call their parents. And my son is 8, so for at least a few years, I don’t think we’re going to have to worry too much about this.

One of the things we did in class Monday night was actually sign up for a MySpace account, and anyone who is curious about this space ought to do the same thing. For one thing, MySpace’s “age of consent” for participating in its forums is 14, which strikes me as a bit young, at least too young without some kind of parental consent. As I understand it (I can’t remember where I read this), MySpace started as a space for 18 and above, and then they lowered the age to 16, and then 14. That seems a pretty crass way to get more users.

The other significant thing (I think) is when you sign up for a MySpace account, you see almost immediately how this is really a social networking software about “hooking up” in all the meanings of that term and it is not a writerly space. And actually, it seems to be kind of a swarmy social space. The first thing you do with MySpace is you set up your “background and profile;” the first point there is “Marital status;” and the first button option is “swinger.” The second thing you fill out is your sexual orientation. Click on over to “networking,” and there’s a “field” option, which seems like a good idea at first– I could maybe “network” with fellow teachers or writers or students or what-have-you. But those aren’t the fields they have in mind. Instead, the fields listed don’t include education and they do include dance, fashion, film, gaming, television, and nightlife. Oh, and each one of these has a sub-field and a role; so, for example, if you select “dance,” you can then easily select “performer” and then select “exotic dancer.”

And as far as blogging goes: it’s easy to upload and display pictures on MySpace, but the blogging function seems buried to me, and most of the MySpace pages I’ve seen just don’t include one.

So I don’t know. On the one hand, I still think that there are many mountains made out of MySpace mole hills in the press. I don’t think MySpace is to blame for getting kids killed at a party (we don’t blame the phone company for these kinds of things either), I think that MySpace is merely making activities that teenagers have done forever visible to a large audience, and an audience that clearly is much larger than most of these kids realize. I’m not in favor of school districts closing MySpace access down, and I am in favor of using MySpace as a “teaching moment.”

On the other hand, MySpace really is pretty stupid.

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Saturday Morning (Now Afternoon) Blog Round-up

In an effort to catch up on blog reading and procrastinate from the things I ought to really be doing, I offer this long list of useful (to me) links to readings/entries from blogs in my RSS feed published in the last week or so:

I think that’s it– heck, isn’t that enough?

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See? Blogs in secondary schools aren't all bad…. Oh, but don't forget about Facebook

One of my catch-up/work activities is sorting through email, and another is preparing for the “TBA” reading sections in my two on-campus classes, both of which are examining blogging issues. Which is why I’m linking these two articles:

  • “Reading, Writing, and Blogging,” from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which is about a Richmond, VA area school district where all the teachers are required to keep blogs. The idea is for teachers using blogs to keep in touch with students/parents/etc., and some of these teachers have used their blog spaces to publish some student writing, too. One thing that’s impressive from looking at these web spaces/blogs in this school district: these people appear to have their techno-stuff a lot more together than most school districts around here.
  • “Blogs are a ‘voice out to the world for teens,” which was in the Sunday Ann Arbor News. It’s a “Q&A” with Paul Mobbs, Dexter’s (a suburb just up the road) school liaison police officer about blog stuff. Basically, Mobb writes about how he gives workshops for students about what they ought to be careful about with blogging. Here’s a good quote:

    I’ll pull up a student’s blog and say, “Is this too much information?” And most people will say no.

    Well, then I get on their buddy list and within five minutes, I have the ability to figure out from other messages what school they go to, what grade they’re in, what activities they’re involved in. Some people put phone numbers. Within a few minutes, without even trying, I could do a MapQuest to their house. Someone could use that information to create a profile and attempt to start a relationship with that person.

    The students don’t really think of it along those lines, but if you put the pieces of the puzzle together, you can get a lot of information.

    In other words, Mobbs is teaching some basic writing and rhetoric skills regarding audience awareness and computer technology. What I want to know is how come this stuff isn’t being taught in a Dexter high school English class? Or maybe it is?

  • But it’s not all hunky-dory. The EMU Echo has a two article series on the Facebook at EMU. The first article, “Face-ing the Truth,” takes the angle of faculty and staff and others using Facebook to keep tabs on students. To be honest, I don’t think this article has much to say. I mean, “student conduct” isn’t my job, but I have to think that most of the faculty and staff who have Facebook pages are kind of like me (I set up a page after this article): we’re just curious to see what this thing is all about.

    The second article is both kind of obvious but also the sort of thing that our students probably should remember: “Facebook Could Hurt Job Chances.” Here’s a quote:

    It is strikingly common for students to post revealing information about themselves in their Facebook photos. Many students younger than 21 post photos of themselves drinking or playing beer pong, for example.

    David Stollman, a co-founder of Campuspeak.com who has delivered speeches to college students about the dangers of posting dicey information online, said employers are watching.

    “I have talked with employers who have told me that the Facebook entry of an applicant has ruled them out of an interview process,” Stollman said in an e-mail interview. “Basically they said they get lots of resumes and when the person doing the research on the applicants finds ridiculous pictures, stories, etc., [the applicants] were told not to waste their time anymore.

    Now, the article also points out that there aren’t any statistics about how common this scenario actually is; if anything, the article suggests, the number of people being denied jobs because of Facebook things is probably pretty low. Still, students (and everyone else, of course) ought to be aware that whatever you put up on the web has a chance to come back and haunt you, even if you think you’re anonymous. And all I know about Facebook (at least at EMU) is it seems to be a web space most students use to post pictures of themselves and their friends, generally “partying” in some sense. It seems fairly harmless and fairly useless to me.

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Recommended listening: Cut and Paste Plagiarism on NPR

I caught most of the “cut and paste plagiarism” episode on the NPR talk show “Talk of the Nation” this afternoon, and I must say that on the whole, it was a pretty good piece. While you had just enough “alarmists” to keep it interesting (and, sorry to say this, it seemed that most of the alarmist were high school teachers), most of the discussion was, I thought, surprisingly reasonable. Of course, this wasn’t a Rush Limbaugh talks about plagiarism show….

Check out the link, if you’re interested; I’m likely to assign this as at least “recommended listening” for my grad class.

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My Increasing Lack of Grading Speed

I am super-duper behind in all sorts of things having to do with school, largely because I think I’ve taken on just a bit too much work this term. There’s a fine line between being just busy enough to be productive and being busy to the point of being overwhelmed and thus swamped and not so productive. I keep crossing back and forth over this line.

And one of the things that’s complicated this lately is that when it comes to facing student essays/assignments I need to read, comment on, and grade, I seem to be getting slower. I mean a “stack of papers,” but I don’t mean a stack of papers too, because (and this I think is at the heart of the problem for me) I am thinking right now of grading assignments from my online writing class. I am collecting, reading, commenting on, grading, and returning MS Word documents which I never print out.

Two (or one of two) things seem to be happening to me. First, because I am reading these essays on my laptop in MS Word and because that allows me to insert comments with relative ease, I end up inserting a lot (probably too many) comments. Second, I might just be getting old(er), and either built-up grading experiences or the burdens of age and wisdom just slow me down. I think the problem is mostly a technological one, but I don’t dismiss the age factor either. It seems to me that 10 or 12 years ago, when I was a younger grading pup, I could crank through a stack of 20 essays in about two and a half hours. This weekend, it took me more like six or eight hours to read and comment on 20.

For my sanity’s sake, I think I’m going to have to be a bit more “precise” in my time spent with the next batch of essays for my online class. I am just going to have to be less comment-happy, and I will probably return to some of the tricks of the trade from years past. Years and years ago, I was an assistant for a burned-out lit prof in a lecture hall section, and his tip for reading student essays was to make sure you could read and grade 10 of them per hour, five minutes apiece (with a 10 minute break built in at the end). I don’t think I can read these essays at that kind of clip (after all, the things students in this online class are writing are longer and more complicated than in that intro to lit class), but I can try.

Of course, I can’t get any younger.

In any event, have others who read and comment on student work electronically noticed the same thing? Does it seem to take you longer? Or is it just me? And if it is just me, what do you do to be efficient with your grading?

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Yet ANOTHER article on penmanship

Via the NCTE In-Box comes this LA Times article, “Remember Penmanship?” In many ways, this is an article a bit different from the usual lament about handwriting in some interesting ways. Among other things, here’s what I learned:

  • This article quotes a guy who identifies himself as the past president of “The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting.” What he says isn’t that interesting– you can guess. But the fact that there is such a group and these people are even holding a convention is pretty fascinating to me. There’s not much information about this convention; only that it is going to be this summer in Chicago (roadtrip?).
  • “[A] soon-to-be-published nationwide survey of primary school teachers found about 90% had received little or no formal training in how to teach penmanship.” ‘They didn’t feel they were prepared, or they had little training and it wasn’t something they particularly liked to teach,’ said Steve Graham, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who has studied handwriting since 1979 and who conducted the survey.
  • There is some talk about the new SAT writing test and the ways in which handwriting skills (or lack thereof) figure into that. That’s a concern, but a) I think most students print (which is not what these handwriting people are talking about), and b) I suspect that very soon– in the next couple years or so– the students taking the writing portion of the SAT are going to be able to do it with a computer.
  • The article does a pretty good job of countering the handwriting “alarmists” by noting that there simply isn’t time. Having said that, I do think that students– especially younger students– are learning handwriting skills. As I type this, my third grade son is working on his homework, and a lot of that includes practicing handwriting and newly-learned cursive skills. He just finished one sheet of homework where he carefully wrote out the answers in pretty neat handwriting (I don’t think he’ll have my issues). But now he’s on to another project, and this time he’s printing the answers. When I asked him why, he told me he printed the answers with this project because he could. So, I ask, you like printing better than cursive? “Oh, yeah, of course!”