This slight interruption/diversion from a couple of crazy weeks around here brought to you by Comcast:
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Tiltshift fun
This was a good way for me to kill some time today: Tiltshiftmaker.com, which is a very simple web site for creating “tilt-shift” photos, which is a technique to make real-life images look like photographs of miniatures.
I think it depends a bit on some imagination and a good photo that looks like a model of something to begin with, but it’s fun to play with.
Kaplan’s ads (or fantasy island meets back to the future)
While hanging out and watching a little television the other night, I saw an ad for Kaplan University, part of their “talent” campaign. The ad depicts a professor and college classroom straight out of central casting. The professor wears a sweater vest and a bow tie, he’s bald, in his fifties, and he is African American (that throws a bit of a wrench into the stereotype). He stands at lectern on a small stage in an anciently old lecture hall, a chalk board behind him–the word “talent” is scrawled on it– and a group of college-aged students in front of him. The classic “sage on the stage” scene. He’s giving a speech about how we are wasting talent and time in an educational system “steeped in tradition and old ideas.” Our professor says it’s “time for a new tradition, that talent isn’t just in schools, it’s everywhere.”
And suddenly, we’re transported to the magic of the “online classroom:” a woman laying on the couch and watching a laptop with her cat, a young man watching the professor on an iPhone while waiting for a subway, a mom sitting at a kitchen table watching the professor with a couple kids running about, a male model propped up in bed with coffee and a laptop, a business woman watching the professor on some sort of hand-held device, and a young woman sitting on an apartment roof with her laptop, perhaps the only place where the wifi signal is strong. And I swear I am not making any of this up– watch the ad. Through this montage, the music swells and the professor tells us again and again “it is time for a different kind of university– it’s your time.”
According to this Business Wire/Yahoo snippet about the campaign, “‘The new campaign makes a statement that the U.S. traditional higher education system doesn’t always meet the needs of today’s adult learners, mainly working adults struggling to balance jobs, families and education,’ said Andrew S. Rosen, Chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc. ‘At Kaplan University, we are rewriting the rules of higher education by offering students the opportunity to customize their education to meet their needs, and by providing resources and support to help them succeed.'”
Well, I see the point they are trying to make. But this is so wrong in so many ways.
First there is the fantasy of the kind of instruction being provided (potentially) by these online classes, of the “great minds” teaching to the masses. Long-story short, that’s not what has historically happened. David Noble (who I largely disagree with) made this point a decade ago: correspondence courses promised this sort of experience 120 or so years ago, but ultimately, what ended up happening was the “great minds” wrote up a few lessons and unknown and frequently inexperienced part-timers actually did the teaching. That is a danger at all institutions, but I guarantee you that you will never take a class from a “distinguished professor” at Kaplan simply because about 90% of their faculty are part-timers.
Second, there is the fantasy of the kind of students and the student experience. Basically, the ad depicts two kinds of students: those who are literally laying around and those who are doing something else while “learning.” I think the not so subtle implication here is that you can take classes online while simultaneously working a real job or something, or taking an online class is as easy as laying around on the couch with your cat. The one student the ad does depict that is somewhat realistic in my experience is the woman (perhaps a single mom?) sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop while a couple kids are running around. Lots of my online students have been single women with young kids, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a male model who laid around in bed all day.
And then there is the “back to the future” aspect. Kaplan is accusing traditional institutions as being “behind the times,” so what do they do to depict online learning? Why, they show a bunch of people watching a lecture! Splendid!
I appreciate that they can only do so much in a 30 second spot, but the fact is the point of online learning/teaching is not to replicate the face to face experience. Rather, the point of online learning/teaching is to take advantage of medium that fosters a lot of interaction between students and instructors. Speaking of which: I need to stop my rant here so I can actually go and do some online teaching this morning….
“I’d buy anything bright and shiny made by Apple”
This spoof by the folks at The Onion is so dead-on I kind of do want a Macbook Wheel:
Some cool links for the iTouch, BAWS, and teaching (maybe)
More or less in the order of the subject here:
- A look at some of the best iPhone Apps of 2008. Most will work for the iTouch of course; I might check out a couple before bed tonight.
- Also from TechCrunch: Top Social Media Sites of 2008. The title is a little misleading since it lumps together a bunch of different things under the term “social media,” but it’s interesting nonetheless. Potentially useful for BAWS and for teaching.
- The NYTimes Visualization Lab. It looks like it might be kind of cool for teaching, but frankly, it makes my browser crash so far…..
Wikis in Education from Wetpaint
Just to prove that I am actually getting at least some work done: while looking for something else, I stumbled across Wetpaint’s Wikis in Education page. Sure, it’s kind of an advertisement for Wetpaint, but it also explains in there somewhere how you can set up an educational Wetpaint wiki free of ads, and it has lots of links to other Wetpaint wikis, and that will come in handy for 516 this winter.
As the end draws near, as the next term begins, why not watch a movie?
We’re in the final count-down phase of the semester around here: final grad student projects, revisions in 328, nominal “finals” of sorts in both classes. This has been a term of a fair amount of experimentation in my teaching, and while I kind of feel bad for my guinea pig students who have had to endure experienced my first try at the movie making exercise in 328 and pretty much everything in 505, I think things went well for most of them and for the most part. It’s interesting, but when you have real and honest questions for students about teaching– as in “seriously, what do you think I should do differently the next time I give this assignment?”– you actually get some honest answers. Go figure.
In any event, the biggest (but far from only) experiment this last term in English 328 was the Collaborative Video/Individual Essay Assignment. The collaborative videos themselves are at a YouTube channel I set up specifically for the project, http://youtube.com/english328 The quality of the videos varies considerably of course, but for very amateurish productions that weren’t supposed to be that good, some of them aren’t bad.
There’s a lot more I could say/think about with this, but since I have a lot of other irons in the fire today, I’ll limit myself to three observations for now:
- The essay part of things, where I ask students to reflect on how the “writing process” compares to the “video process” and to draw connections to current and past reading assignments, worked well. In fact, as video/visual savvy as many of my students are nowadays, I think it worked in a way where it might almost make sense to do things in the other order– that is, start with the video project, and then get them to write words in a row things, and then get them to reflect on how the “video process” compares to the “writing process.” Maybe later.
- Students almost universally endorsed the collaborative aspect of the assignment, and when I had a “debriefing” class discussion with them about this the other day, most of them said I should try to make it a collaborative project for the online version of the course, even though that might present some unique challenges. Given that students generally hate “group work” like this, that was kind of surprising.
- One student commented that one of the differences between making a movie and writing an essay was that in this class, we were expected to write good essays and not expected to make good movies. This was true since I really wanted students to think more about how multimedia projects informs/broadens other literacy skills. But it did get me to wonder a bit about how long that will remain the case. When I first started assigning web site projects long ago (like 14 years ago now!), all I was trying to get students to do was to make really simple pages. I did not care if they were “bad” or not. While I have given up on the web site part of the project in English 328 (at least for now), I did get to a point where I was clear that they had to create “good” web sites based on discussions we had in class about what constituted “good web style.” So my guess is that we’ll get to a point in this project where a “bad” movie won’t be enough….
Anyway, enjoy the goofiness of the movies and leave a comment or something if you get a chance.
“Metal Heart”
I agree with Johndan: there are few things cooler than tilt video, and this one was a nice way to start my office day:
Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Publishing and/or perishing once again
This is another one of those posts for 516, a kind of two-fer: Clay Shirky has a very smart post on boing-boing about a recent NYTimes piece by James Gleick, “How to Publish Without Perishing.” As Shirky puts it, “until recently, book lovers have been the most passionate readers. Now they are mostly just the oldest readers.” In brief, it isn’t so much the container (the book, the bottle) but the stuff being contained (the words/text, the wine) that is really the issue.
Shirky and Gleick are correct of course, but they aren’t really that original. This is kind of an old argument, one that I first recall being academically articulated by Richard Lanham in a 1989 essay, “The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution” and collected in his excellent book The Electronic Word. In any event, I did a unit on books/publishing last year in 516, so maybe I will include these new things with the now “old” things.
Incidentally, my on-again/off-again kindle desires are currently on hold, this time thanks to both Amazon and to various rumors I have heard. I just about ordered one a couple weeks ago, but when Amazon told me that it was 3-4 weeks for delivery, I decided I needed to hold off until I knew I was going to be here and not traveling over the holidays. Then, when I checked the amazon site on this the other day, I was told that all I could do is order a “place in line.” I don’t know what the deal is with this, but when I combine this news with rumors about Kindle 2.0 (not to mention the crappy economy encouraging everyone to save their pennies), it would appear that now would be the time to wait. A good friend of mine who has a Kindle himself tells me that he has heard Kindle 2.0 will be announced in the first quarter. This is perhaps what Amazon wants folks now to “get in line” for, but I think I’ll wait to know what I’m getting to put out my money.
“The Future of Writing” (though this did happen in the past…)
Something I just stumbled across in the blogosphere that might come in handy for a variety of classes, certainly 516 and the multimedia part of 328: “The Future of Writing,” which was a two day conference at UC Irvine back in early November. There are a bunch of podcasts of speakers and stuff that might be good “assignments.”