Category: Teaching

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Misc. Post

I’ve been meaning to post about a variety of different things lately, but I’ve gotten a bit behind with school things (though I am about to come ’round the corner, too– I can sense it). So what I’m doing to do instead is post a few quick comments and links and such and let the chips where they may.

  • On the way home yesterday, I thought about what would happen if (for next year) I abandoned the eCollege software for teaching online and tried to do the whole thing myself with Moodle or Drupal or something. What would be lost? What would be gained? Would the powers-that-be at EMU be annoyed with me? Hmmm….
  • My routine has been thrown off by fund-raising time at public radio. Don’t get me wrong– I understand why they need to do it, and I am indeed a member of my favorite public radio station, WEMU. But I just find it annoying. So please, if you listen, give what you can so they can get back on with it.
  • Johndan observes that Apple computer controls are for lefties. He blames this on the mac, but aren’t the common short-cut commands for the PC (alt-x, alt-v, alt-c) all on the left too? Having this, I must say he might have a point. The touchpad on my laptop has been a problem for a while now, so I’ve been using a mouse, and the USB port is… on the left. But since I’m left-handed, this is totally okay with me.
  • Via Weblogg-ed cmes this article, “Web logs go to school” on C|Net News. com. It’d be interesting to share this piece side-by-side with the bad press that things like Xanga have been getting in high schools lately.
  • Speaking of which, via an email that Rich Rice sent to Tech-Rhet, I’ve learned that at least one school, Santa Clara University, is using the student blog angle in order to help market itself. Granted, Santa Clara U is a tad different from, say, EMU (SCU bills itself as “The Jesuit University of Silicon Valley”), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
  • Jenny Edbauer wrote about two interesting and free applications. First, there is a blog software called Blogsome, which gives users Word Press-like features. It’s worth thinking about instead of Blogger, that’s for sure (btw, now even Blogger is having spam problems! Is Word Press the last blogging software that seems to not have significant issues with this stuff?). Second, there’s Jot, which is another free wiki software. I’d like to compare it with PBwiki before using it, but I suspect that Wikis will play a role in my Writing for the World Wide Web class next time around.

Okay, enough catch-up with the blog. Time to catch up with the other things in life.

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Visual Rhetoric(s) and connections to McCloud (or, duh, use Google)

It’s funny how I have managed to do a lot of stuff different in my teaching from the way I’ve done then in the past, and I’m just now realizing it mid-way through the semester. For example, while I’m not completely sold on what seems to me to be the current/recent emphasis on so-called “Visual Rhetoric,” I decided to have students in my English 328 class do a project on it. Among other reasons, I decided to include this in the class because Scott McCloud is going to be on campus in the Winter as the EMU McAndless Professor. We’re reading/discussing Understanding Comics of course, but I’m trying to find one or two other readings to supplement this. Oh, and I need to come up with a writing assignment, too.

Can you see how carefully this is all planned? Jeesh.

Anyway, a colleague of mine recommended the first chapter of Claude Gandelman’s Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, but I don’t think that’s going to be right. Gandelman is coming at the issue as an art critic, and while this chapter is really interesting (it’s about the connection between “touch” and “vision,” and argues that the eye physically does not take all of an image at once), I don’t think my students will get the connection with McCloud. Derek’s comments on Bolter’s essay in the collection Elloquent Images makes me want to take a look at that book, but the EMU library doesn’t have it and someone has it checked out of the U of Michigan library. I think Richard Lanham’s essay “The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge” will work well as a sort of “bridge” text between this unit and the next ones, but it is slightly dated, originally published in 1994.

Of course, when all else fails, I do what my students do: I just Google something obvious, like “Visual Rhetoric.” Among many other things, this turned up The Visual Rhetoric Portal, a handy bibliography of materials on visual rhetoric, these resources at the University of Iowa, this David Blakesley course, etc., etc.

Sometimes the obvious yeilds surprising results.

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Laptops in every, ah, lap

Via BBC News comes this story, “US school swaps books for bytes.” I think I had a link/discussion about this same Arizona school a few months ago, but it would appear that now things are actually happening at this school.

A couple of interesting quotes; the first one answers the “either computers or books” issue, at least from the point of view of a start-up budget for a high school:

Providing all the pupils with Apple iBooks did not dent the school’s budget as much as might be expected. But part of that is down to the school having been newly built.

The money that was budgeted to buy text books, which was about $500 a student, was spent instead on the laptops.

“Our laptops cost is about $800 per pupil. Our net cost is probably $100 to $200 more than if we had used text books,” he [Calvin Baker, chief superintendent of the Vail School district] says.

By giving all the students a laptop computer, the school has done away with computer laboratories too.

Baker is also quoted in this article as saying that the school is not “book free”– there’s a library, for example– but most of the content students work with in classes are delivered via these laptops.

Putting aside the sort of Sophie’s Choice method of financing these laptops, that last line, that a laptop on every student’s desk (and, since it’s mobile, in every student’s backpack and in every student’s house) has replaced computer labs, is really something that appeals to me. We’ve been experiencing some, ah, “technical challenges” with the support people as of late, which just underscores the ongoing problem an underfunded university like EMU has with technology. I’m not saying that a laptop program would solve everything; in fact, I think you could make a pretty good argument that all a laptop program at the college-level does is shift the burden of who has to pay for and maintain the hardware. But if we went this route, students wouldn’t be in a situation where they were learning how to do something on a computer they aren’t likely to use much, we could have computer labs which had higher-end hardware and software (for example, a multimedia lab), and the tech support people could focus on the keeping these smaller labs and the network running. And I think it would do a lot to help “technlogical literacy” on the whole at EMU.

In a way though, I think the idea that every student will have a laptop is kind of inevitable, plan or no plan, since more and more students are showing up with laptops all on their own. It’s easy to imagine a time four or five years from now where my students ignore the computers in the lab in favor of their own laptops, and that would be fine with me.

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Turnitin Turn-Ons?

Rebecca Moore “Schenectady Synecdoche” Howard, who has published quite a bit on issues having to do with plagiarism, tells the story of using Turnitin.com for the first time. As she explains, it turns out that she largely plagiarized herself.

We have a site license for Turnitin.com at EMU, and there has been some controversy about its use– the usual issues having to do with the “policing” function, ownership of the text, etc. I have used Turnitin.com a grand total of one time, and I used it to help me vet a couple of student essays I am (hopefully) including in my textbook as examples. These were already good essays and these students were long done with my class, so it wasn’t me trying to play policeman. I just needed to go through both essays to make sure everything was fine.

Now, maybe it was because I was working with some strong examples, but I found Turnitin pretty useless. I mean, all it did was highlight parts of the essays where the students include quotes. Sorta. Big deal.

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Be careful with the Facebook, folks

Sorting through a bunch of old email, I came across this article that Nick Carbone posted to WPA-L Mailing List: “When students open up– a little too much” from The Boston Globe. The Facebook, of course, is an online directory/social exchange forum for college students. But to be honest, I don’t know a whole lot more than that, mainly because I’m not a college student any longer and I don’t know if it’d be a good idea for me to set up an account where I’m pretending to be a student. Though that might be kind of a fun thing to do.

Anyway, back to the point here: this article is just another example of how students need to be careful about what they say about themselves on the ‘net because what you say might get back to the wrong audience. Here are the opening paragraphs of this article:

Last school year, Brandeis University junior Emily Aronoff tapped this sentiment into a computer: ”I enjoy the festive greens.”

The reference to marijuana became part of her profile on facebook.com, the online student catalogue that allows Aronoff and tens of thousands of collegians to share photos and idiosyncratic odds and ends of their lives, intended for viewing by other students.

But others were reading as well — including ”an individual in the community,” she said, who shared the reference with her parents in Marietta, Ga. Eventually, word reached her grandmother.

”My bubbe,” she said, using the Yiddish word for grandmother, ”told me her seniors home was abuzz with the news, and I was like: ‘I hate the Facebook.’

The article also has a nice quote from a communications professor named Steve Jones: “I would put money on a political candidate — probably 20 years from now — getting in hot water on account of something posted on Facebook.” I think Jones is right, and I would extend this to the kinds of things that students put up on web sites, too. In one of my classes the other day, a student asked if he could put anything he wanted on the web site he (and all the other students) are creating for the class. I said that he could, but I also pointed out that it could come back to haunt him later on. I think I might post a link to this article to my class blog….

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"How to email a professor"

Via Dr. B’s blog, I found this post on Orange Crate Art: “How to e-mail a professor.” SOLID solid advice; in the near future, I’m either going to point out this entry to my students or I’m going to write up my own version of this advice (referencing Michael Leddy’s post, of course) and pass this out.

I for one like to communicate with my students via email (though I have colleagues who either would rather not have their students email or who even go so far as to say that their students cannot email them), but I do think it can be a problem. I get a lot of email– at least 100 messages a day– of various levels of importance. I get a lot of spam and junk of course, and while my “junk filter” works relatively well (I’m using the Mail software that comes standard on the Mac nowadays), I also get a lot of junk and spam in my inbox, all mixed in with some mailing list mail, important school mail, student mail, advertisements, mail from friends, etc. And the “student mail,” too often with a subject line like “hey,” can disappear into the mix in the inbox, or, far worse, be determined by my software to be “junk.”

Anyway, the advice offered by Leddy is pretty darn good, the sort of “common sense” that sometimes needs to be directly taught in order to be realized.

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Handwriting not being taught + students cheat with cell phones = technology is bad for education

The current issue of NCTE’s InBox has two articles (and slightly recycled) from different newspapers that are both presented (more or less) as examples of how technology is bad for schooling. First, there’s “The Handwriting Is On The Wane” from the Hartford Courant. I don’t exactly know what they mean by “THE Handwriting” (shouldn’t that just be “Handwriting is On the Wane”?), but given that the byline is “By ROBERT A. FRAHM, Courant Staff Write” (as opposed to “Writer“), perhaps the folks in Hartford have some sort of “master handwriting” in mind. Anyway, here’s a typical quote:

Relying more and more on e-mail, blogs, websites, instant messaging and other electronic forms of communication, students at all levels are forgetting the fine art of handwriting, educators say. Cursive script, the graceful looping style that connects one letter to another, might be going the way of the inkwell and the fountain pen.

When students do write by hand, many resort to printing, educators say.

“It’s true. Unfortunately, a lot of schools are not spending enough time on handwriting,” said Priscilla Mullins of Zaner-Bloser Educational Publishers, an Ohio-based firm that produces classroom materials for handwriting, spelling, grammar and related subjects.

Of course, this is old news, and, interestingly enough, it’s old news where Zaner-Bloser has commented. She was making the same kind of argument in South Carolina back in January.

The second “sky is falling” piece is “High-Tech Cheating Comes to High Schools,” which appeared in the Detroit News but which was a reprint of an article from the Sacramento Bee. Basically, it’s about using cell phones to cheat:

“Some people text you during tests and ask if you know the answer to No. 3,” said Amy Pederson, a 17-year-old senior at Sacramento’s Folsom High School.

The number of high school students who admit cheating has steadily increased, said Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and one of the nation’s top researchers of high school and college cheating. His most recent survey, published in June, found that 70 percent of students at public and private high schools admit to some form of cheating on tests.

Lance Chih has seen it.

“Last year in one of my classes we had a sub,” said the 18-year-old senior at Folsom, “and students were distracting the sub while they took pictures of the test.”

Once again, we have an article where the usual suspects– McCabe in this case– provide a reporter with a dramatic and dire warning about cheating. I don’t know how “recent” his survey his and I don’t know how he defines “cheating” exactly, but I blogged about McCabe a bit back in August 2003.

I will say this though: at least the reporter for this story was careful enough to follow-through and ask the teachers about what they “do” about these things:

“A lot of this stuff is just a matter of monitoring the classroom,” said Shannon Morgan, a math teacher at Folsom High School.

“You can tell just by their body language if they’ve got (a cell phone) out,” said Sean Rivera, who’s also a math teacher at Folsom. “You grow a third eye. … We can just tell. Those of us who’ve been in the business long enough can tell when they have a phone out.”

Some educators believe the problem is changing too rapidly to be quelled by conventional methods, and it’s time that teaching methods evolved with technology.

“The days of teachers just getting up and lecturing … those days are kind of over,” said Mark Hyatt, president of the Center for Academic Integrity. “Especially the younger generation — they want to be part of the action.”

See? Maybe the kids today aren’t going to hell in a handbasket….

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Cool use of Screencasting (and my own Teaching Online adventures continue)

Via Collin’s blog comes this link to Will at Weblogg-ed about giving student feedback via a screencast. For the time-being, I really just want to link to this so I can come back to it later when I start working more earnestly on my CCCCs presentation. But I guess I’ve got two thoughts for now:

  • I’m not sure I like the idea of screencasting for each student’s essay, but it’s an interesting demonstration.
  • Personally, I’m having enough problems/”challenges” just keeping up on the “basics” for my online class. I’ve whined about this before, so I’m not going to whine about it now, but I guess what I’m getting at/wondering about is the tradeoff between doing things like screencasting or podcasting versus the time it takes to make screencasts and podcasts, not to mention the learning curve.
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Dark sitters

The Little Professor observes/wonders why it is that it is common for teachers to come into a class of students who are sitting in the dark. Judging by the comments here and the fact that Inside Higher Ed linked to it in their “Around the Web” section, I am guessing that this is a common phenomenon in colleges in the English speaking world.

A few thoughts:

  • I haven’t experienced this for a while because I tend to teach in the late afternoons and evenings, and, in my experience at least, the lights tend to be on later in the day. I also tend to not teach classes populated with first year students, the most likely group to remain patiently in the dark, especially at the beginning of their college experiences. And to tell the truth, I suspect that some of these students come from high schools where they were told to not touch the light switches, that those switches were in the domain of the teacher. That’s just a guess though.
  • Having said that, I have indeed come into classrooms of students sitting silently in the dark and have always thought it kinda weird.
  • Despite some of the theories advanced on the Little Professor’s site, I suspect the reason for dark sitting is a simple group psychology phenomenon. I remember seeing a little movie about this in high school psychology/sociology class. The movie was (supposedly) footage from an experiment. The first scene showed a single person sitting in a waiting room. Smoke started to come in from one of the vents. It didn’t take more than about 2 minutes for this person to get up to inform someone about the smoke situation. The second scene showed a waiting room with about 10 people sitting around in it. Smoke started to come in from one of the vents. No one moved, and if I am recalling this right, the reason given by participants was something like they thought someone else would do something.

Anyway, if there are any students reading this: go ahead and turn on the lights. Or, if you really want to mess with people, turn them off.

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U of M dentists beat me to my podcasting idea (but not really)

The Ann Arbor News ran a story today in the business section (of all places) titled “iPods help drill U-M students dentists: Lecture ‘podcasts’ now available.” Drill students– get it? get it? Ah, that dental humor….

Actually, this isn’t really what I’m trying to attempt with including audio in my online class, at least not exactly. I’m not even completely sure I’m doing what would be called “podcasting” because I haven’t quite figured out that part of the technology out yet, particularly the RSS stuff. I mean, I know that blogger has an audioblogging feature that is stupid easy to use: just record a message with them with a phone. The sound quality isn’t fantastic, but it is passable and I think I can set that up with RSS, but I want to do something more sophisticated than that.

Of course, the concern/worry I have is that if I build some sort of podcast outside of the class shell, I’m not convinced that my students will use it. And furthermore, I don’t know if I really need to build it outside fo the class eCollege software. As I think I mentioned earlier, I can record sound files with my iPod and a Belkin microphone, save these things as mp3s, and then simply upload them to the eCollege site. They aren’t “podcasts” in the purest sense, but hey, who cares? If they help…

… which brings me back ot the dentists. Basically, they are doing some podcasting of lectures at the U of M dental school, and you can even get them through iTunes (no, I’m not going to try to find a link to them….) The dean of the college is behind it– he says in the article that he’s on his fifth iPod.

But the thing that I thought was interesting for my purposes was this:

[Jared Van Ittersum, who was credited with heading the podcasting concept at U-M] said podcasting lectures evolved from a similar effort at the U-M Medical School, which provides low-resolution video of professors’ lectures for students to download from the Web.

But given the prevalence of the music players among students, podcasting emerged as a more mobile medium, said Trek Glowacki, an employee at the dental school’s informatics department and a student at U-M’s School of Information. Glowacki led the pilot study into whether students preferred podcasting to video. He found most picked the pod, which also involved far fewer university staff hours to deliver.

This interests me for a variety of different reasons, but besides the idea that the technology of the podcast is easier and more mobile for students, I think it is also considerably easier and more mobile for instructors as well. I could record and broadcast video of myself with eCollege, but even with the support I would get from Continuing Education at EMU to do this, it would still be an enormous pain in the ass. I mean, I’d have to go to a studio someplace, they’d have to cut the video together (or I’d have to do it, and that’d be a totally different learning curve), it would take a long time for students to download, etc., etc. Making and delievering a 10 minute mp3 file (albeit a not great sounding one) takes me a total of 20 minutes: 10 for the recording and 10 with the futzing. Not counting-retakes, of course.