Technology – Page 11 – Steven D. Krause

July 24, 2009

What makes you think I’m not teaching naked?

A colleague of mine at EMU from another department sent me a link to this article in the CHE, “‘Teach Naked:’ Effort Strips Computers From Classrooms.” My first response was to send them to Alex Reid’s blog entry on this; as Alex points out, it isn’t a question about PowerPoint or any other technology per se. Rather, it’s about the problem of using technology to continue to the same old teaching methods, and it’s about using the technology in new and logical ways– e.g., podcasts and the like instead of lecture hall classes.

But I’ll point out two other things.

First, I suspect this colleague sent me this article because we’re both on this committee about remodeling/redesigning Pray-Harrold Hall, and I think there is a general fear (or maybe it’s just me) that the powers that be are going to throw good money toward a technology that will become quite useless in just a few years. When they built Halle Library (which is generally a very nice facility), they spent a ton of money stringing Ethernet cable all over the place. Just a few years later, they turned that all off because now the building is wireless. So, what I’m afraid of is we’re going to spend all this money in Pray-Harrold with whatever– computers in every classroom with lots of controlers and gizmos to more or less project PowerPoint slides– when that is both bad teaching (see above) and likely to be obsolete sooner than later. To quote from the article:

(José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University advocating the “naked” teaching) says most of those classrooms had two computers (a Mac and a PC), a DVD player, a VCR, and a tape deck, along with “one of those complicated control panels where you need a Ph.D. to figure it out.”

Last summer Mr. Bowen had most of that gear removed—though he left in projectors so that professors could plug in their laptops and do PowerPoint presentations, if they must. He also took out the old desks and replaced them with tables and chairs that professors could move around to allow students to work in groups more easily.

One reason for the changes was financial. The classroom computers were old and needed an upgrade when Mr. Bowen arrived, so ditching them instead saved money. Plus, the move cut support costs—the school was able to eliminate one staff position for a technician who responded to calls from professors about the classroom systems.

To encourage the kind of technology use Mr. Bowen did want, the school gave every professor a laptop and set up support so they could create their own podcasts and videos.

Some professors have complained about lugging their laptops to class, but others have jumped in with both feet.

This makes complete sense to me, and if you follow the trend in computer sales (desktops way down, laptops/netbooks way up), it just seems logical that more and more faculty will start doing this. Heck, most faculty bring laptops to classes as it is.

Second, the article oddly makes no reference to the truly naked (well, casually clothed and/or pajamas) form of teaching: online classes. I found that odd. Maybe they just don’t do this sort of thing at SMU, or maybe what Bowen means by naked teaching is more about the face-to-face experience, I don’t know. But I can say without a doubt that teaching online has done more to change my approaches, in both good and bad ways.

July 12, 2009

“Tools and our brain”

I have somewhat spotty internet access this week, so this is the kind of thing I probably won’t be able to read for a while, but this is the kind of thing I can easily imagine being useful for 516 next time around: Via George Siemens’ blog, tools and our brain.

July 1, 2009

“Giving up my iPod for a Walkman”

Pretty amusing article: “Giving up my iPod for a Walkman” is about a 13 year-old’s experience with the old skool music player, the Sony Walkman, which came out 30 years ago. My favorite quote:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured.

What’s funny to me about this, of course, is how quickly these technologies fade from memory. I’m sure my 11 year-old son would have a similar “what’s that?” reaction. The LPs we have in the basement are pretty much a mystery to him.

July 1, 2009

A couple of thoughts on “Aurality and Multimodal Composing”

I read/skimmed Cynthia Selfe’s CCC article “Aurality and Multimodal Composing” essay while on the bike at the gym the other day. It’s a good read and something I’ll probably assign the next time I teach English 516 in winter 2010. It made me think about two other things that are kind of/kind of not related to the point she was trying to make:

A lot of the piece is historical in that Selfe is discussing how writing pedagogy evolves and emerges out of an 18th/19th century tradition of education where being able to speak well and present one’s self with good elocution skills was frankly more important to college graduates than writing skills. This reminds me of a project I did as a PhD student oh so many years ago about elocution, especially as it evolved as a popular “home learning” and primary/secondary school activity in the mid to late 19th century in the U.S. Basically, as elocution lessons became passe in higher ed, it became popular in the homes, and presumably the homes of people of a certain class who would never go to college. It’s one of those projects that I keep thinking about coming back to, and this article might help me do that.
The lingering thought I have with this article and most others in comp/rhet publications (not to mention many/most presentations at conferences like Computers and Writing) is about university departments and divisions. We “do” writing in composition and rhetoric and we “do” reading, writing, and literature in English departments because that’s our slice of the discipline pie. When we then try to do stuff like web design/usability, we’re kind of crossing over into (taking pie from?) computer science; when we incorporate graphics and graphic design in writing classes, we’re kind of taking pie from art; and when we have students do stuff like make movies and podcasts and give speeches, we’re kind of taking pie from communications.
So, for me, there are two problems with this. First (and this is perhaps an institutional problem that is more acute at EMU than it is at other places), there is a lot of guarding of turf in academia. Two brief examples: we’ve had various challenges over the years in my department proposing courses with the words “communication” or “film” in them because my colleagues in the Communications department basically claim those terms as theirs. We have similar turf claims about terms like “literature” and “writing,” too. Second, as a student I had years ago reminded me, just because you give someone a video camera or a tape recorder doesn’t mean they are going to be able to make a movie or a radio show.

Don’t get me wrong– I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing these things, and I don’t disagree with Selfe at all. We’ve been doing these multimodal and aural compositions for a long time, probably forever. I have my students in a wide variety of classes make little videos, web sites, recordings, etc., etc. In a theoretical and ideal world, these things are all a form of “writing” and the borders we’ve built between text, images, movement, and sound are all fictions. But in a practical and materialistic world, these borders are what defines institutions, academic departments, and individual courses. And in a time of tight budgets and assessing things like who should get what tenure-track lines and on-going funding, those theoretical fictions have a material value of real dollars and cents.

June 25, 2009

And other Computers and Writing highlights

I was going to wrap this all up in my previous post on Twitter, but since that got kind of long and very Twitter-centric, I thought I’d post one last time about C&W09 here. Some of the other highlights:

Before the Ganley keynote, Nick Carbone and I worked on incorporating some video from Matt Barton (who was originally going to come to C&W this year but then he didn’t, I think because of travel fund issues) into my part of our talk about textbook publishing, “Textbook 2.0: Open Source Textbooks and Multimodal Composition Programs.” There is a podcast recording of it on the C&W 09 web site– one of these days, I’ll connect that audio with my slides and post them here. Anyway, it was a pretty well-attended session in my estimation, and I enjoyed presenting with Nick.
I was “back to back” presentation boy at this year’s conference as I followed the textbook presentation with my contribution to “Sustainable Blogging: Problems and Promises for School, Work, and Play.” I set up a new web site/blog, “Blogs as Writerly Spaces,” to host stuff about this research, and I have a link to my presentation script here. It was a smaller crowd than the textbook talk (which says to me that I’m a lot more interested in my research in blogging at this stage than most other people), but some really good presentations from my Indiana University of Pennsylvania colleague and friend Gian Pagnucci, along with some IUP grad students, Sabatino Mangini and Jessica Schreyer.
Friday night was the banquet, which was fine but not that exciting one way or the other, and then it was out to the Davis nightlife with various C&W folks.
Slept in Saturday morning (well, sort of slept in– I never did get my time issues straight out there) and managed to walk through the Davis farmer’s market on the way to the conference. I debated getting some beautiful looking morel mushrooms, but I wasn’t sure I could get them back on the plane in my carry-on luggage. Probably, but I didn’t want to chance it.
Then to the conference and I went to see “Researching Fully Online Instruction: Assessment, Pedagogy, and a Sustainable Theory of Hybrid Online Learning,” which was a panel by some fine folks at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Given the discussions we’ve had here in my program about teaching online, I guess there are two things I found striking. One speaker, Christopher Dean, presented about how the research suggests there is “no significant difference” in what students learn in online classes versus similar face to face classes. There are some big problems with these kinds of claims, including a kind of fuzzy sense of what exactly it is we are measuring when we describe “learning.” But I will say that in my own experiences his claims seem accurate to the extent that the writing projects and other graded “artifacts” students produce in online classes are pretty much the same as those students produce in face to face classes, and that even includes things like the collaborative video projects and such. More important to me though was that two of these folks, Randi Browning and Kathy Patterson, spoke about their experiences teaching online for the first time. I wish these folks would come and talk to some of my EMU colleagues because I think they would be a lot more persuasive than me in speaking about what it’s “like” to make the leap of faith to teach online.
Went to Bill Cope’s keynote, which was fantastic, in my mind: very solid theoretically, well-put together and polished, pushing the edges of what counts as technology, etc. Interestingly, I think he was making the same basic point as Ganley; but besides the delivery, I think the differences had to do with tools than it had to do with concepts.
Then I took a conference break to go grade– I was and remain woefully behind– and I had a solo lunch and grading session at Crepeville. Very nice, and I got a fair amount of work done, too.
I attended another panel after my grading lunch (a pretty good one– G1, “Hybrid Writing Classes: Literacy, Dialogues, and Intellectual Property”), I went to Town Hall III, where I was on the panel. This was an odd experience. First off, I was pretty unprepared compared to the other people on the panel, I guess because what I thought I was supposed to do mostly was react to the stuff I had seen at the conference. I wasn’t expecting to have a little speech written up. And second, as I was sitting there next to Cindy Selfe and Kathy Yancey (not to mention some other heavy-hitters), I most distinctly had the feeling of being a little like Kathy Griffin on “the D list.” But it was a good conversation and a good opportunity for me. I tried to get Cindy to sign onto Twitter with no luck though.
Then it was an art exhibit that actually was kinda cool (I have some video to upload sooner than later) and then bowling. I took lots of pictures that are here, but my favorite is the one video I took:

And this was followed by a comparatively quiet night on the town.
And just to prove that the conference isn’t over until you’re long LONG gone: I ended up riding back on the plane with a fellow conference goer and right behind this group of drunk women. It’s a long story, and it was a long plane flight, and I’m still running behind….

All in all, a fantastic C&W this year. I thought Davis was great, I think I actually went to more panels than I’ve gone to in a long time, and I have to say I enjoyed thoroughly having my own room (though it cost too much). Carl Whithaus and friends did a fantastic job, and I’m looking forward to next year’s conference at Purdue.

June 19, 2009June 21, 2009

C&W 09, in the midst of it

I’m actually attending a session right now about “Hacking Spaces” by Douglass Walls, Scott Schopieray, and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, but thought I’d post a few miscellaneous notes/observations:

I went to wine country on Thursday, which was actually more conference/technology related than you might think. For one, I went with my colleague Doug Baker (and his father and a friend of his, both of whom were very able guides) and we chatted about the conference a fair amount. For another, when we were at Francis Ford Coppola’s winery, I wandered into an exhibit that had some “Magic Lanterns” and this video that is slightly risque:

It figures. I go to wine country and the coolest things to me are these old media technologies.
I was going to go to the reception for C&W last night, but I found out there was no wine/beer/etc., which kind of for me defeats the purpose of a “reception.” So I connected with Gian Pagnucci and some Indiana U of Pennsylvania folks for dinner. Lots of fun, and one of those moments that you do get from actually going to a place instead of just doing stuff online: we met a local woman who was having dinner alone and talked with her quite a bit about teaching, learning, Davis, books, reading, writing. And in the course of it, we found out she was out by herself because her husband had died a few months earlier. She had a picture of him with her and talked about how they both loved food and trains, and she liked to come here with him and listen to the trains go by.
Got up this morning after finally getting some sleep, and I combined a “run” with a trip to the grocery store (needed toothpaste), and leisurely got ready for the day. I’m not sharing a room at this conference, and I must say as much as I like traveling with Steve B. and/or Bill HD, I could get used to the luxury of my own room for future conferences. The one bad thing about the Hallmark Inn here in Davis– and it is a significant bad thing for me– is the wifi service is just awful. It means I’ll be even further behind when I get home. Swell.
Worked on one of the presentations I’m giving here with Nick Carbone for a while, and then went to the keynote. In the interest of both time and decorum, all I will say for now is I thought that Barbara Ganley’s talk was problematic, and certainly not addressed to the right audience. Had she given the spiel that she gave about “re-imaging how we can teach with technology” at NCTE or some kind of National Writing Project meeting, people would have been on their feet. Here, the reaction seemed to be a) yeah, we do that, and/or b) you’re not really engaging with the issues. But what was most fascinating was the twitter feed on this stuff. It’s ongoing and here; I suppose if you scroll down far enough, you can get the whole gist of it all.

I’m sure there will be more later. Davis, by the way, is a lovely place. It sort of seems a kind of California-ish version of Ann Arbor, that college town kind of thing with groovy restaurants and stores and stuff, only in a much more pleasant climate.

June 17, 2009

C&W 09 prewriting/preparing post

I’m off to what is generally my favorite conference of the year, Computers and Writing, which this year is in Davis, California. It’s not one of the “big ones,” like the CCCCs or something, and it can be kind of inconsistent in terms of who attends and the overall “quality” of the experience because it is a conference that is more or less hosted by folks who are willing to host it. But it is still my favorite or one of my favorites, mainly because these are my people, so to speak.

Anyway, a few random, preparatory thoughts:

When I have mentioned to people “in the know” about California that this conference is going to be in Davis, the general reaction has been “oh, that’s too bad.” Well, all I know is I’m planning a trip to Napa Thursday, the weather is likely to be pretty nice (sunny, dry, low 90s during the day, 50s-60s at night), and I’ll be busy doing conference stuff most of the time anyway.
My usual trave ling companions are not going this year, I suppose because they already had their trip to California with the CCCCs. I suspect that is true with lots of people, actually. In any event, since this is my only conference this year, I am kind of “livin’ large” with my own room and such.
My “main presentation” from my point of view is “Endings: The Problem of Sustained Blogging,” which is part of my ongoing blog research. I’m in the process of setting up a web site for that project, http://baws.stevendkrause.com, which is going to host some of the stuff I’ve done and will continue to do, including responses to the survey I conducted.
My “not main presentation” is “Fast, Free, and On the ‘Net: The Story of a Self-Published Textbook,” which is a round-table discussion called “Textbook 2.0: Open Source Textbooks in the Land of Sustainable Computing.” The table promises not to be that “round” though because Joanna bowed out and Matt had his funding cut– he’s going to maybe make a video. I’ll post stuff here when I’m done getting something together that is, well, postable. Interestingly enough, someone from a Cal-Irvine PR office called me to ask some questions about my presentation to drum up some interest locally in the conference. I guess I’d better be ready for people showing up to this one….
And I’m on a panel/a respondent at the “Town Hall III: @ School, Work, and Play in Freeborn.” There’s some really cool people in that group, but since it’s the last thing of the day before “dinner on your own” and bowling, I’m not exactly expecting a huge crowd. Well, maybe I’ll at least have some good people to go eat dinner with after that…
I’m kind of annoyed with my air travel plans because I don’t get there today until almost midnight and I won’t get home on Sunday until about 10 pm. Grrr.