Category: Academia

Posted on

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?”
Posted on

Misc. Browser Links

I’ll post sooner than later (yet this weekend, certainly) about Thanksgiving at home this year, but in the meantime, it’s time once again to post a ton of links to stuff open in my browser that I want to and/or need to come back to sooner than later.  In no particular order here:

Posted on

“The Four Hour Work Week” and “The Happy Academic”

Several months ago, I mentioned that I was starting to read Timothy Ferriss’ “self-help” lifestyle/work/get rich (sorta) book The 4-Hour Work Week, and I finally got around to finishing it the other day/week. I should mention it’s not that I read that slow– I just have other things to do/read, and I read Ferris’ book in 20 minute or less bursts while on the bike at the gym.

The short version: I am not a Ferris convert/disciple, but it’s an entertaining book with occasionally good tips, some of which sorta/kinda connect with the happy academic lifestyle.  Much more after break.

Continue reading ““The Four Hour Work Week” and “The Happy Academic””

Posted on

Yet another miscellaneous links round-up post

Still have lots of pages open in my browser, and this morning seems like as good as any a morning to try to clear that:

  • From Jakob Nielsen, “Children’s Websites: Usability in Designing for Kids,” which cbd posted a while back.  I don’t always agree with Nielsen’s proclamations about all things internets, but this seems pretty interesting and potentially useful for English 444.
  • Speaking of which:  some of my teaching evaluation reviews from this last summer’s section of English 444 and English 328 were pretty bad, and I think it’s mostly because the 7.5 week summer term makes students kind of crabby, and because this is another short term that comes after the short spring term.  I try to warn students, try to repeat often the mantra of “it isn’t half as long, it’s twice as fast,” but often to no avail.  Next year/this school year, I’m scheduled for spring term teaching, so we’ll see if that makes much difference, and I am also tentatively scheduled to teach a section of 444 this winter as an overload.
  • “Project explores potential for use of iPad in education at Penn State,” which is another story about what the headline suggests.  The one thing that’s a little different/unusual is I sort of know a couple of the people involved with this project.
  • Tweet Library is a software for keeping a Tweet library on an iPad, which is all fine and good, though I personally would prefer to have it on my desktop.
  • Here’s a pretty interesting assignment from Bill Wolff at Rowan University, “wrtf10 assignment 2: mixin’, mashin’, and remixin’.” There’s a couple of different things I can steal/borrow here for stuff students are doing this term in both 328 and 121.
  • I don’t know exactly how much this matters, but here’s a link to a blog that links to a site called Haltadefinizione, which has super-duper high resolution/detailed images of some famous paintings.
Posted on

I dunno, I don’t think they hate me…

“Why Do They Hate Us?” is a commentary in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education by Thomas “not his real name” Benton where he laments the sorry state of “anger about professors.”  This piece gives me pause right out of the gate when he begins recapping a series of not so hypothetical unpleasant conversations he’s had over the years.  Among the “unpleasantness” he raises:

  • “What you teach is worthless—I mean, who needs more measurements of Walt Whitman’s beard when the economy and the environment are collapsing?”
  • “Why don’t you English profs just teach people how to write?”

I have to say as someone who teaches writing and not literature in an English department, I don’t think these hypothetical jabs are as inaccurate as Benton implies.

  • “I wish I had tenure and didn’t have to worry about being fired for not doing my job.”

Hardly a new argument, of course, one that misses the point of tenure, and one that seems to also forget that lots of employees– those in unions, those who work for the government– are notoriously hard to fire.  So when this comes up in polite conversation– which it does with my family once in a while– I shrug my shoulders, put up a sort of weak fight intended to educate the complainer that it is isn’t about job security but about academic freedom, and I agree that the system is problematic.  But on the inside, I also agree with Alex Reid when he wrote this about people who say things like “I wish I had tenure and didn’t have to worry about my job” sorts of comments:

“Well, maybe that’s why you don’t have tenure. To get to tenure, a person has to exhaust a tremendous amount of labor. Seven years of graduate school (on average), working as a TA or adjunct, borrowing a lot of money all for the chance to just compete for a tenure-track job. Most people wouldn’t take that risk (probably because they are sane or something). Then one has to negotiate the job market and tenure process. Really you can only get to tenure if you have a tremendous amount of intrinsic motivation for doing the work required.”

  • “My job [pharmaceutical sales] saves lives; your so-called work is a waste of other people’s time and money.”

Pharmaceutical sales?!  Anyone who would actually say that just deserves a punch in the mouth.

Benton then trots out a pretty long and old list of books proclaiming the death of the academic culture (including, for example, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published a lifetime ago in 1987) and then goes into a pretty typical laundry list of what’s wrong with America as the cause for why “they” “hate” “us.”

I’m not going to go through all of Benton’s reasons for why he feels hated because none of them are remotely new.  Instead, I thought I’d create my own little list as to why I don’t feel like I’m hated.

I’ve clung firmly to the stance that at the end of the day, what I do here is a job. It’s a good job and it’s a job that takes a lot of experience and training, but at the end of the day, it’s a job not unlike many other jobs that take experience and professional training– doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, CEOs, small business owners, etc., not to mention a lot of jobs that might not require as much schooling but that require a level of skill and experience I don’t possess– mechanics, carpenters, welders, farmers, etc.  I mean, I am enough of an elitist to acknowledge that being a college professor isn’t work that can be done by “just anyone,” but academics too often think it’s something much MUCH more than it is.  And again and again, I think that the saddest academics are the ones who somehow thought that becoming a professor was like being crowned prince of the kingdom.

I’m pretty ignorant about most other jobs, too. I agree that it is frustrating to read again and again AND AGAIN that professors are pampered because they can’t get fired, they work six hours a week, they’re drunk before noon, etc., etc.  At the same time, I don’t really know what my allergist does either.  As far as I can tell (based on my once a year or so 20 minute visits where he listens to my breathing, asks me how my shots are going, and where we bullshit about local news and events), he doesn’t do much of anything.  A monkey could go around and see patients like this.  What’s he doing to earn all that money?

Obviously, I know I don’t know what I’m talking about here.  Heck, for all I know there’s a blogger written by an allergist complaining about how stupid people are about the work he does, and I do think my allergist knows his stuff reasonably well.  The point is this:  given that I don’t really know what a lot of professionals really do, why should I be surprised that they don’t know what i do?

I think it’s okay that students go to college for many reasons, including getting a job and/or becoming a professional. I think that when people like Benton write this– “A generation ago, we could still defend the belief that our courses in literature, art, history, philosophy—the liberal arts, broadly defined, and always self-critical—were enriching in ways that could not be deposited in a bank or measured by outcomes assessment”– they’re assuming that at one point going to college was purely an intellectual curiosity, the study of the liberal arts just for the sake of the liberal arts.  That’s silly.  Higher education in North America for the last 300 years (and before that in Europe, of course) has always had some occupational component to it.   Becoming “self-critical” and a “better” and “enriched” person was and continues to be the mission, but to suggest that was ever the only reason for higher education is just wrong.

I value my teaching and my colleagues, and I do only the scholarship I want to do. Maybe another way of putting this:  not all jobs in higher education have been created equal by any stretch of the imagination, and at EMU, a lot of the traditional and fairly wide-spread problems of work in higher education just aren’t here.  There is “solidarity” of a sort among faculty through the faculty union, and the requirements for tenure and promotion and tenure are modest enough here that we get to do things that we want to do and not that we feel like we have to do.  Though I will admit this isn’t true everywhere.

I am lucky enough to live in a college town where being a professor isn’t a weird job. I’m lucky enough to live in a county where there are literally 75,000 or more college students and a stone’s throw away from Ann “college town central” Arbor.  I have to admit it’s a lot easier to be a college professor when you’re surrounded by a lot of other college professors.

So, like I said.  I don’t feel too hated.  And I don’t feel too sorry for myself either.

Posted on

And in more link catching up news

Again, in no particular order– just things I want to keep track of that I have left open in my browser for a while now:

  • “Reading in a Whole New Way,” which is a very readable/accessible piece about how technology has altered the sense of “book,” from Smithsonian.com. And this is a link to the article itself, where there is worry about the iPad.
  • Speaking of which:  “Revisualizing Composition:  Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students” is a WIDE whitepaper/study about the way that students use writing technologies to write in different aspects of their lives.  There’s a lot here, but I was struck by the idea that students write as often for “personal fulfillment” (with Facebook, texting, etc.) than for school.
  • “Nine Important Trends in the Evolution of Digital Textbooks and E-learning Content,” from something called “xplana.”  I think these trends are debatable at best, but I like things that speculate about the future of publishing, especially when they are horribly wrong.
  • I really liked this cbd post “Taking Notes,” and I wanted to keep a link– a note?– of it for future reference.  Lots of good stuff here.
  • To be honest, I don’t know if this is worth passing on, but I will anyway:  From Inside Higher Ed, “An Adjunct’s Novel,” which in some ways seems amusing but in many ways seems rather predictable to me.
  • Here’s a link to an iPhone app I might try out later, something called the Sleep Cycle alarm clock. Though the whole thing seems a bit problematic to me.  First off, I set an alarm for a particular time not because it is the “best time” for me to necessarily wake up, but because it is the time that I logistically need to wake up to go on with my day.  Second, I don’t get how this app could possibly work, and I guess what bothers me most is that the reviews suggest that it does indeed work.
  • I might get this book called The Whuffie Factor:  Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business because it does sound pretty interesting.  But to be honest, between stuff I’m reading for school and for fun right now, this is going to have to go down the list a bit. Still, for the Kindle (iPad, of course) edition, it might be worth it for the next time I’m on a plane.
  • What’s the point of an iPad?  How might it be used in the “real world?”  Here’s a link from Apple to tell us. I’ve pulled my iPad out a couple of times in my first year composition class and what I think is interesting is that my students in that class seem pretty dismissive of its usefulness.  So much for “digital natives” understanding this stuff so much better.
  • Speaking (again and again!) of the iPad:  I recently won an iShine give-away from PadGadget by being early enough on Twitter to retreat an article from the site PadGadget.  Here’s a review of the iShine, which I mostly agree with.  I prefer to have my iPad in its Apple case because it’s easier to prop it up and such, but the iShine bag is handy and easy too.
  • Finally, this is something I really ought to do with my laptop:  from Lifehacker comes “Starting from Scratch:  A Step-by-Step Guide to Reinstalling Your OS.”
Posted on

The moral of the story might be that there is no such thing as “open education”

I will admit that it is at a minimum ironic that The Chronicle of Higher Education has the article, “Online, Bigger Class May Be Better Classes,” parked behind a firewall.  And I have some sympathy/some level of agreement with this post from Alan “CogDog” Levine about how this is bad, along with the complaints of one of the main sources in this article, George “elearnspace” Siemens.

But here’s the thing:  perhaps this is evidence that at the end of there is no such thing as “open learning education,” for two basic reasons.  First, perhaps what we’re getting at is the age-old difference between “learning” and “education.” Here’s a quote from the article (from behind the firewall, btw, which I get access to because of my connection with Eastern Michigan University):

“We have to get away from this whole idea that universities own learning,” says Alec V. Couros, who teaches his own open class as an associate professor of education at Regina, in Saskatchewan. “They own education in some sense. But they don’t own learning.”

Of course.  People can “learn” about all sorts of things without any connection with any sort of institution, and with college classes taking place in the open– in organized ways, as they discuss in the article, or less organized/visible ways, as I’ve been doing with my classes for years– and all the other “stuff” that is out there on the internets, it seems to me that someone self-motivated enough could literally learn damn near anything nowadays.

But if you want an education, something that is tied to some sort of institution, that involves a program of study/curriculum, where you have (in theory) reliable and trained instructors, and– and this is critical– where you get some sort of degree or certification that is recognized by others, if you want these things, it ain’t free.

Now, in some fields, it used to be there was no difference between learning and an education.  Someone can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I believe that it used to be possible for someone to become a lawyer/member of the bar simply by “reading” the law– that is, literally going to a law library, reading on one’s own, and then taking a test.  But I’m pretty sure that has not been the case in the U.S. for quite a while.  And while someone could sit at home, in libraries, and/or in various online forums and do all the reading required to earn a PhD, I guarantee you that no university in the world– even one promoting “open learning/education”– would hire someone who claimed to have earned their education by participating in “open learning/education.”

Second, open learning isn’t really “free” and isn’t really completely “open” since it depends on “non-free” and “closed” institutions. As far as I know, everyone who has anything to do with the open learning movement is somehow tied to a “real” university.  In other words, the folks who are engaged in open learning/education really couldn’t do it without the financial support, resources, and credibility that comes about from being associated with a distinctly not open, traditional university.

Don’t get me wrong– I think that the idea and theory behind open learning is great, and it’s one of the reasons why I advocate moving classes from behind the firewall of CMS like Blackboard.  Education should be a public experience, and I think these folks– Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, many many others– are doing great things.  But I also think that open learning is not going to transform education until we get to the point where we don’t think a college degree as a credential for a particular occupation.  And I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon ever.

Posted on

New school year again– eventually

I say “eventually” because most of my pre-fall term thinking as of late has been occupied by the impending faculty strike, which I predict here will begin on September 1. I’m sure there will be more posts/news on EMUTalk.org about all this.  All I will say here is that it annoys and frustrates me that we’ll probably be going on strike, mainly because of insurance and the Board of Regents micromanaging.  It seems avoidable to me, but it will almost certainly not be avoided.  Hopefully, since classes won’t begin until September 8, that won’t happen this time around.  Hopefully.

Anyway, the new school year is still on my mind, and as I have written in the past here and elsewhere, the new school year feels more like “the new year” to me than the actual New Year in January. I tend to measure things more in school years, which I suppose is a given since I’ve been doing this stuff for a while.  Actually, this year I start my 23rd year teaching in college (counting my time as a graduate assistant), which means a) I am about to cross over to a point where I have teaching college classes for more than half my life, and b) I am not at a point where I am old enough to be a parent to all but the “non-traditional” undergraduates and most of my “traditional” graduate students. Insert music here about drag getting older, etc.

This fall, we go into the year in exile while the building my department is normally in is closed for remodeling.  For the next 18-24 months, our offices are in a dorm and our classrooms are all over campus.  I’m hoping to do a CCCCs talk about this dislocation, actually.  Stay tuned for details.

I’m teaching English 328, which I’ve probably taught 50 times by now.  So not much new there from what I’ve done in the recent past, though I had some good experiences/experiments this summer with peer review I will try to repeat, and since this is an online class where there are some collaborative elements, I want to play around more with some things like Skype and Tinychat to do some synchronous discussion.

I’m also teaching English 505, which is a grad course called “Rhetoric of Science and Technology” I’ve now taught twice before, once online and once in person.  It’s a bit of a bear of a class to teach, because it is one of those classes that is (potentially, at least) about everything, and also because this is the rhetorical theory class for students in our professional writing MA program.  Without getting into the wisdom of that, what I’m going to be doing to get students “up to speed” is to this time teach Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students as sort of a “basically, this is what rhetoric meant/means” before we get on to the more contemporary stuff.  We’ll see how it works out.

And last but not least, I’m teaching an Honor’s Section (that has to be capitalized, right?) of first year composition.  I did this years ago, and I think honors students are an interesting lot to work with.  I haven’t completely figured out the syllabus for this yet, and given some of my challenges with the 505 class, I probably won’t figure it out completely until either the term strikes or we go off strike, whichever comes first.  But basically, I’m going to have them watch RiP! A Remix Manifesto early on in the class and requite students to develop research topics around it.  I think it is generally a good idea and it is also something I hope to talk about at the CCCCs in Atlanta.  Once again, stay tuned/we’ll see how this works out.

A lot of potential out there right now, no?

Posted on

A few miscellaneous thoughts on eReading and annotating

I have in mind a few more blog posts over the next few days about the end of the summer term/beginning of my 13th school year at EMU, but I’ll start this morning with some of the things/links/thoughts I’ve come across lately about publishing, reading, and writing.  Most of these have been left open in my browser for well over a week, and it’s time to clear them out.  And the clean the desk and then the kitchen.

First, there’s this helpful info-graphic, I believe from Newsweek:

Click on it to read it more clearly. Much more after the jump.

Continue reading “A few miscellaneous thoughts on eReading and annotating”

Posted on

The “ground zero mosque” and maybe why blogs (and their “writerly spaces”) still do matter

Earlier today– I can’t remember if it while I was on my bike ride, grading/wrapping up stuff for the summer term, reading my Google Reader feed, or what– I had this feeling that my long suffering and delayed project, Blogs as Writerly Spaces, had kind of run its course.  I mean, I haven’t done anything with it in months and months (I have poked at it more recently than my link above might suggest, but still), and I kind of have a bit of a “milked dry” feeling about the whole thing.  I’ve worked my survey data (such as it is) and other research into at least five different presentations over the years, and it has been feeling a little wrung out to me.  Besides, blogging is kind of “been there, done that” nowadays, right?  How do I write a book-length project (or hell, even a decent article-length essay) about this phenomenon that has either become irrelevant in the shadow of Facebook, Twitter, and whatever is next?  Who cares about a medium that has either faded away or has been subsumed/consumed by MSM to the point where even freakin’ Stanley Fish has a “blog” as part of the New York Times?

Anyway, this was all in the back of my mind while listening to the radio on the way to Costco and I was listening to “Here and Now” and they had a story (mp3) about this story in Salon by Justin Elliott, “How the ‘ground zero mosque’ fear mongering began,” and I had a tiny twinge of second thoughts on my project.  Maybe there’s something there there after all.  Elliott has a time-line how this mosque/community center/whatever it is controversy got so out of hand, and how a right-wing conspiracy theorist blogger named Pamela Geller (her blog is called “Altas Shrugs”) started and fueled this whole thing.  Elliott has a time-line and corresponding links to Geller’s blog to make a pretty compelling argument how her blog made this into a story.  Granted, Geller is more “connected” than most bloggers (her bio points to appearances on various news outlets, and she was apparently on Hannity’s radio show, etc.), but I think Elliott makes a pretty compelling argument that this non-story turned into a story in part because of Geller’s persistence and blogging.  Take a look at Atlas Shrugs now and it’s clear that she’s still using this story, or it’s still using her.

The politics here are interesting in a way, but the dynamics of the rhetorical situation are much more interesting to me.  And maybe I ought to not completely close up that book project yet.