Category: Teaching

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Learning vs. Teaching vs. Credentialing

There’s been a couple of interesting developments in higher education news in the last couple of days that has me thinking more about how the “education” part of things in colleges and universities actually works.  First, there’s the announcement that U of M and  several other universities will be offering “free courses” on a variety of different topics for anyone out there on the internets who might be interested.  This is being done through an outfit/start-up called Coursera, which I assume is making money through data mining of its users and maybe by eventually morphing into an actual credit-granting enterprise.  Here’s an interesting quote from the annarbor.com article about this:

For U-M, adapting to the platform gives faculty a unique way to communicate with alumni and prospective students.

“This is a great way for alumni or prospective Michigan students to experience a little bit of what a U-M education is like,” Scott Page, the professor teaching Model Thinking, said in a release.

Added Martha Pollack, vice provost for academic and budgetary affairs: “This is one more way for us to connect with prospective students and alumni.”

The other event– seemingly the opposite kind of thing but maybe not– comes from Inside Higher Ed in the article “Pacing Themselves.”  Here’s a long quote:

The media conglomerate Pearson today announced a partnership with Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana to provide online, self-paced courses that the company says will help Ivy Tech deal with student demand and overcrowding issues in required general education courses.

For Pearson, which already sells modules for instructor-led courses, the move represents a further step in the company’s strategy of inserting itself into virtually every area of e-learning short of full degree programs.

“We thought it was time for us to have a self-paced play that our partners could then plug into their institutions and get more students into higher education,” said Don Kilburn, the CEO of Pearson Learning Solutions.

Meanwhile, the partnership allows Ivy Tech to refer certain students to hands-off self-paced general education courses — which it does not currently offer — without building such courses itself.

“It is a way to test out that modality and see if it works for some students without taking a lot of business risk on our own,” said Kara Monroe, associate vice president for online academic programs at Ivy Tech.

Both of these events problematize in strange ways this mission of education in colleges and universities.  And by “educational mission” of the university, I basically mean three things:

  • Learning, or more accurately, extending to students the opportunity to learn.  Universities are pretty good at that, but so are lots of other things– wikipedia, the public library, about.com and other web sites, a good book, life, etc.
  • Teaching, which is when a professor (or instructor or adjunct or grad student) guides a student in learning something.  There’s really nothing I teach that students can’t learn on their own through some of the things I mentioned as sources for learning, but the advantage students get in being taught a subject by someone who knows a lot about the subject is guidance, interactions with other learners, systematic efficiency (because teaching is really good at steering learning in a way that is less likely to be counter-productive), positive (and negative) feedback, and so forth.
  • Credentialing, which means some sort of evaluation that is recognized by others as having some merit.  Practically speaking, this means a “seal of approval” (e.g., grades) given by teachers for these discreet learning units we call “courses,” which are systematically taken (a “major” which leads to a “degree”) and which are also validated by institutions (say EMU) which are in turn validated by both official evaluators (say the North Central Association) and unofficial but certainly more powerful evaluators (various “top university” rankings like US News, what employers say, word of mouth, etc., etc.).

Now, learning, teaching, and credentialing are obviously all related, though in complicated ways.  For example, teaching someone something is not the same as them learning it.  It takes a willingness to learn and to be receptive to teaching,  and everyone who has ever taught– especially something that is not considered by many “fun,” like first year composition– knows there are a surprising number of students who don’t seem able or willing to take on the learning challenge.  Another example:  a lot of professors are completely comfortable with the teaching and learning part of education, but most would just as soon avoid the credentialing/grading part of what we have to do to make this whole enterprise work.  Faculty get even more squeamish when we talk about the mean cousin of credentialing, assessment.  

Anyway, to turn back to what I think is troubling (at least to me) about both the Pearson Learning Solutions and the Coursera deal.  It seems to me that the Pearson “solution” is a rather cynical way of skipping ahead to just the credentialing leg of the stool and calling it a day.  There’s obviously no teaching involved and with only an e-textbook and “10 free hours of online tutoring support,” it doesn’t seem to me like there’s much of a chance for a lot of student learning here either. Besides that, the credential they are trying to provide here is minimal at best.  I mean, given that the unofficial value of an Ivy Tech Community College is probably pretty low to begin with (certainly relative to the institutions sponsoring Coursera courses), what does this sort of move do to the perceived market value of their degrees?

The Coursera “great minds” courses might seem at first to be a completely different and more noble venture, but it seems to me that this isn’t education.  Sure, there’s a lot of learning potential with these classes, but so what?  There are already plenty of places on the ‘net to learn about science fiction and fantasy literature, for example.   As of right now, U of M (and I suspect the other institutions associated with this) is not really thinking of this as education at all; it’s marketing, something that might connect with alumni and maybe with potential students.

Of course, this could change.  I seriously doubt that U of M would ever accept their own Coursera courses as credential-worthy credit that is the same as their more traditional courses, but that doesn’t mean that Coursera isn’t going to try to sell that credit to someone else.  Inside Higher Ed had an article on all this, and here’s a passage that made me think this idea of Coursera granting credit ala Pearson:

“There are no definite plans yet for what courses, if any, might have certificates and, if they exist, how much might be charged for them,” wrote MacCarthy via e-mail. “That said, if there were to be some monetization and revenues in the future, universities would partner with Coursera in determining any future structure or pricing for certificates.”

Ng, one of the Coursera founders, said “no firm decisions have been made yet” on how the company’s university partners might recognize the achievement of their non-enrolled students. “We’ve had informal discussions with the partner universities about different certificate options, but the final decision will be made on a per-university and per-course basis,” Ng wrote via e-mail.

These certificates wouldn’t be the same as credit– well, at least initially, and at least at a place like the University of Michigan.  I can imagine a scenario where the Ivy Techs of the world say “sure, we’ll count that as credit,” and I can also imagine a slippery slope where all kinds of institutions– maybe never U of M but places like EMU– start counting a certain number of these certificates as transfer for things like general education.

The other thing that both Pearson and Coursera are attempting here is a version of education without teaching.  This is patently obvious in the Pearson/Ivy Tech arrangement, but it is also the case with the Coursera courses.  The idea here is to have tens of thousands of students in these classes– potentially a great learning environment, but not something where you could really expect any meaningful teaching.  At best, the teaching that might take place is in the form of an army of part-timers to watch over those thousands of students participating in discussions and quizzes and the like.  That appears to be the case with their hiring.

So I really don’t think this is the future of higher education on the internet.  At least I don’t hope this is the future of higher education on the ‘net.  I’d kind of like to keep the teaching in education….

 

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“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”

I got suckered into a point of purchase/cash register impulse buy the other day.  It was The Altantic, and the thing that got me was the cover headline “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”  I should have known better.  After all, this is the same magazine that brought us “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” a few years ago.

As was the case with the Nicholas Carr article (and I can now only assume that Stephen Marche, the author of this Facebook piece, is busily preparing a book-length treatment on his topic), I think the answer to his headline is “not really, but it’s more complicated than that.”  Marche is a clear and thoughtful writer, and if nothing else, I can see this being a useful reading in one of the various classes I teach where social media comes up as a topic, particularly undergraduate classes.  As I understand it, I think Marche is saying that a) there are lots of things that have increased “loneliness” (and we’ll get to whatever the heck that is supposed to mean in a moment), and b) it depends a lot on how you use Facebook.  Marche trots out a lot of pretty well-known bits of pop-research/knowledge on how suburbia, television, etc. (think of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone) have caused us as a culture to be more lonely, all of which is to say that at its worse, Facebook is one among many contributors to loneliness.

And then there’s this quote paraprhasing John Cacioppo, who Marche calls the “world’s leading expert on loneliness” (and of course I need to point out that being the world’s leading expert on anything is lonely, and being the leading expert on loneliness has to be the most lonely of all):

Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user.  “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.”  So of social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy.  If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.

Duh, right?  And I assume we can substitute “talk about issues of the day with people far away from you” or “meet for dinner and drinks” or “invite people to a party” for “football” and be fine.

Ultimately, I think this article raises a couple of questions that are different from the nature of social networks and Facebook per se.  First, how is it that psychologists study “loneliness?”  Because while Marche does a good job of citing/quoting from the scholarship on this, it all seems kind of sketchy to me– though, of course, this is not my area of expertise.  For example, according to Marche, the “best tool yet” for measuring loneliness is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which is basically 10 questions, each of which begin “how often do you feel…”  Here’s a link to an interactive version based on the survey; for me, my answers boil down to “it depends.”

Second, I always wonder about the extent to which the issue is not really “loneliness” but the complex emotions and connotations of the word “friend,” and how Facebook’s choice of that word complicates our relations between “friends” on Facebook and our relationship/interactions with Facebook as an interface and a tool.  Would there be articles like this one if Facebook had chosen instead to call the people you connect with “contacts,” or “connections,” or “acquaintances?”  After all, my Facebook friends in “real life” actually range from “people I care about and love deeply” all the way down to “people I don’t know at all” and even a few “people I actually don’t like or trust.”   What if we instead had “followers” ala Twitter, a social network which (at least so far) seems significantly less emotionally loaded than Facebook?  What if Facebook had always had categories of designating the degree of friendship and the nature of the connection, sort of like the professional Linkedin?

So, even though Marche is suggesting Facebook as a service is making us lonely and disconnected (and it’s not as if he’s the first person to make this claim), I think the real anxiety around Facebook is with its implications on “friendship.”  Facebook flattens the inherent hierarchy of friendship and relationships, putting “BFFs,” boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses, ex-Sig-Os, frenemies, work colleagues, people you went to high school with, and Velveeta Cheese all in the same big bucket– and let’s not forget that’s a bucket Facebook draws on to sell us specifically targeted ads.   It is nerve-racking and anxiety-inducing to think that my friendship status with people and products are on Facebook essentially the same thing.

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Boldly (or foolishly) going where I haven’t gone before: HTML5

I’m teaching Writing for the World Wide Web right now, a course I’ve taught about once (sometimes twice) a year since I developed it back around 1999/2000.  There’s always been a coding component to the course, and despite the changes in web publishing that have taken place over the last decade or so, I still firmly believe students in this writing course should have to get in there with HTML and CSS, even with things like wordpress and social networks where coding is really unnecessary.

When I first learned and started teaching this stuff back in the mid-1990s, you could make analogies between making web pages and the early days of printing:  that is, the first printers made the books, wrote the books (or printed previously written books like the Bible), and sold the books, all pretty much out of the same shop.  Back in the day, working in “web publishing” meant you wrote copy and you wrote code, and you probably did some other computer server stuff too.  I don’t think that’s as true anymore, at least based on what I see in ads and what students out on the job market tell me.

That said, I think a “working knowledge” of HTML and CSS is still pretty important even for that tech/pro writer who is only going to be writing copy that goes into a CMS or that someone else codes/deals with.  I had a student a few years ago in this class who had (still does, actually) a “real job” as a tech writer and she told me that after my class, she was able to have completely different and more productive conversations with the person who actually deals with the company’s web site.  So even if this student doesn’t do a whole lot more with HTML and CSS herself, I feel like my mission has been accomplished.

Now, I’ve always had a bit of a “learning along with my students” approach to code.  One of my first publications was “Teachers Learning (Not Teaching) HTML With Students: An Experimental Lesson Plan for Introducing Web Authoring Into Writing Classes.” The title is basically what it’s about:  instead of “teaching” coding to students– which suggests and/or requires a certain level of expertise that is above and beyond the students’ knowledge– why not try to learn how to do HTML along with students?  I called this an “experimental lesson plan” because back then, I really did know more about HTML coding than the vast majority of my students.  But I kind of put myself in this position of learning along with my students when I first started messing with CSS.  In fact, I was a “leader” in a workshop on CSS (along with people who knew what they were doing, Bill Hart-Davidson and Steve Benninghoff) where I knew nothing about CSS, and it was a good year or two of teaching Writing for the WWW after that before I finally got a working knowledge of CSS under my belt.  Anyway, all this is to say that I have had plenty of these “let’s learn this together” kinds of experiences in this and other classes, and generally, I think it works out.

So with that in mind, I decided to give this HTML5 thing a whirl in my class, even though I knew nothing about it before the term began.  We’re using Head First HTML5 Programming, which builds off of the book Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML.  I like the approach that Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson take in explaining HTML and CSS in that book and it seems like they do a pretty decent job of picking out the highlights of what’s most important to understand and what you need to know.  So I am willing to trust them when it comes to them explaining the basics of HTML5.  And this brings me to a disturbing realization that is settling in as I try to learn with/teach my students this:  I’m not sure I understand HTML5, and I’m not convinced I ever will.

I’ve always thought it was kind of silly when people claimed that HTML and CSS were “programming languages” because, well, they’re not– or, without going too deeply into the definition of “programming” (let alone “language”), HTML is just not that complicated, and CSS is only just a little more complicated.  It certainly is not learning a new language. In contrast, HTML5 is essentially javascript, and that my friends, that is a computer language, and thus there is a reason why this book is called HTML Programming.

I am barely ahead of my students in the book as I write this post (and no, I didn’t read the book before I assigned it, something I do all the time, believe it or not), and I have two reactions so far.  First, this is waaaaay over my head, though since many of my students are better at and more practiced in mathematical equations than me (the last math class I took was in 1984, and I learned the other day that my high school freshmen-level son has now eclipsed my math skills based on his coursework), they might have a better handle on this.  We’ll see.  Second, I am not yet convinced that this is something that needs to be in a class about writing for the web, for while I think a working knowledge of HTML and CSS is pretty important for understanding how content online works and it is definitely a “writerly” activity, it seems to me that HTML5 so far is so much more programming-oriented.  From what I’ve learned so far, I don’t think I need to know HTML5 to successfully write web-based content in the same way I don’t need to know how my transmission works to drive my car.

Mind you, it’s interesting, much in the same way that it might be interesting to take a class in transmission repair.  I’m just not sure it’s necessary for me and my students to know, and I don’t think I’ve ever put myself so far out there on teaching “learning” something along with my students.

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A late start to birthmonth/link round-up

It’s been a pretty busy and confusing couple of weeks around here for me. Besides some work stuff I’m not going to go into in any detail right now (and this even showed up on twitter), I also have been kind of thrown off by Will’s winter break followed by our winter break, both of which weren’t really “breaks” because it was just work work work.  Plus I made the mistake of assigning some HTML5 projects in Writing for the World Wide Web— a mistake because I don’t really know anything about HTML5.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here and I’ve got lots of links that have been piling up, so I thought I’d blog about those a bit tonight.  So in no particular order:

8 tools to make your web site for free  Mostly graphic editing things, but pretty nice list.

The top 10 ways to create digital magazines A nice list of resources here.  It’s kind of interesting:  about a year ago, I got involved in a mobile computing initiative here at EMU that has kinda floundered a bit.  My proposal/interest in this as to learn more about software for producing documents (books, magazines, etc.) that are intended to be read on the iPad.  A year ago, I didn’t know a whole lot about the options.  But now, besides these choices, I’m working on converting my  failed textbook project into an iPad book with iBooks Author.  I’m looking forward to investigating these software options, too.  It’s interesting what a year makes in iPad-land.

Top 10 pro tips and tools for budding web developers and designers.  A lot of “top” whatever numbers in this update.  I like this one if for no other reason one of the tips is get educated.

100 Mac Apps to Rule Them All.  Sure, you don’t need most of these, but it’s a cool list.

The QWERTY Effect:  How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words.  Nice article, really a good one for 354, Critical Digital Literacies.

From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg.  Actually, this is a review of this book by a blogger at e4innovation.com

Ebooks:  The Giant Disruption.  Nice article about the pros and not so much of eBooks.  This is another topic I can see figuring into 354 the next time I teach it, and maybe 516, too.

 

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Blogs vs. Research Papers vs. NYTimes vs. Cathy Davidson

Cathy Davidson of Duke and HASTAC fame is one smart cookie and last week she had this interesting post/response to this New York Times article, “Blogs Vs. Term Papers” by Matt Ritchtel.  I came across this one kind of backwards, via Davidson first, though it works as well IMO to read her first and Ritchtel second as it would to work it in the original order.  It’s interesting stuff as much because of the reporting and response on display here as much as the subject matter itself, so I’d encourage to read both of those on your own first.  The order is up to you.

A few thoughts in response (to the response or the original?):

  • I completely understand Davidson’s take on being misquoted at best and misrepresented at worse in Ritchtel’s article.  I’ve been interviewed by reporters for different things over the last decade or so 2 or 3 times and I have learned to be extremely careful about what I say.  Because let’s face it:  Ritchtel knew the story he wanted to tell and then he went out and found people to talk to confirm that story and when they didn’t, he told his story anyway.  I don’t think that this was a “I’m just going to observe the world and report the truth” sort of piece, and I frankly think true “reporting” is rather rare in journalism nowadays.  Feel free to call me cynical.
  • Having said that, while Davidson might be misquoted and feel used and abused here, Ritchtel does come around to talk about the problem of the false dichotomy of blogs versus term papers.  Sort of.  He writes:

    “As Professor [Andrea] Lunsford illustrates, choosing to educate using either blogs or term papers is something of a false opposition. Teachers can use both. And blogs, a platform that seems to encourage rambling exercises in personal expression, can also be well crafted and meticulously researched. At the same time, the debate is not a false one: while some educators fear that informal communication styles are increasing duress on traditional training, others find the actual paper fundamentally anachronistic.”

    I’ll get to some of the problems there about his definition of blogs as “rambling exercises” in a second.

  • Davidson tells a compelling story of giving up on research paper writing assignments in her first year composition class at Michigan State back in the 1980s. Instead, her student wrote resumes and letters of application and she turned her class into what she describes as a mini employment agency of sorts.  She also says she got in trouble for this.  I don’t disagree with this approach entirely, but what Davidson has done here (and I suspect she realizes this but doesn’t weigh in on the matter) is stumble into one of the long-standing and unsettled arguments about the purpose of first year composition:  is it for students to write “for life” and beyond the classroom, or is it to write “for school” and for upcoming classes in these students’ academic experiences?  The simple answer is both, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to abandon research and academic writing entirely.  Maybe her students were able to get some kind of job for the summer, but how’d they do writing research-oriented essays in their other classes in the next year or two?  Oh, and as someone who has been a WPA off and on a few times, I have a lot of sympathy with the person who had to tell Davidson to get with the program.
  • There is no debate between “research papers or blogs” much in the same way there is no debate between peanut butter and jelly, and everybody– even Richtel sort of– admits that.  But what exactly do these people mean by “blog?”  Richtel suggests that the definition of blog is based on content– the blog as genre approach– but even that’s inconsistent because while he says blogs can “also be well crafted and researched,” he suggests it is more often a form that is “rambling,” focused on personal response, and anarchistic.  Davidson more positively characterizes the genre blogging/blog writing as context specific, urgent, compelling, and interactive.

    I’ve written and presented about all this in many other places, but I think the short answer is blogging is perhaps best understood as a publishing platform much in the same way that paper books are (maybe were) platforms, and what one publishes in both depends a lot on your purposes, intending audience, etc.  It seems pretty clear to me that Davidson is not asking her students to blog about whatever they want– personal and anarchistic writing is likely not encouraged.  That’s great, but it seems to me they don’t really agree on what blogging even is.
  • Davidson points out that she’s working with an exceptional group of students at Duke, young people who I think likely fall into that top 1% in all kinds of ways and who are eager to take what sounds like a pretty cool class, “This is Your Brain on the Internet.”  I’d like to suggest that this is what makes her students’ writing compelling, not blogging per se.  To paraphrase myself from “When Blogging Goes Bad” for a moment, just because you give students the opportunity to write in a powerful and public space like a blog doesn’t mean they will automatically write.  Students (and everyone else, I suppose) needs a reason to write, be that reason personal or an assignment in a class.  I’ve assigned blog writing in many different ways in classes where I was probably not as compelling an instructor as Davidson and where the students were significantly less motivated and/or academically inclined, and I can assure you that the  platform/genre of blogging did not magically translate into success.
  • Finally, Davidson will get no argument from me or most contemporary comp/rhet scholars that there isn’t much point to assigning traditional research papers, meaning the “go out and write a research paper” assignment with no discussion of audience, purpose, apparatus for supporting process, etc.  This might be the difference between teaching composition now and teaching it 30 years ago.  But I am increasingly convinced that the reason why students write more effectively with new web tools (blogs, wikis, Google docs, and before that, web 1.0 web sites, newsgroups, and before that, MOOs/MUDs, email mailing lists, etc.) is largely the novelty of it all.  And blogs can certainly can become stale busywork when students get assigned blogs again and again and when they are used poorly.  In fact, at this point, the most novel thing a good teacher like Davidson might be able to do is to restrict students to writing a paper-based five paragraph essay.  Heck, require it to be typed with a typewriter– it’d be a history lesson for students.
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In honor of national novel writing month, a new blog (for a month or more)

I’ve been trying lately to follow my own advice to my students in English 621 by working on a project in small bits and pieces as time allows instead of doing what far too many of us do far too often, which is to think “oh, I’ll get to that when I can really spend a solid couple of days on it,” which translates to “never.”  And I’ve been making decent enough progress on revisiting my dissertation to see if I can’t re-see/re-shape it into something for now.  The basic premise of the complexities of rhetorical situation in the digital age are still true, and if nothing else, I’ve been enjoying going back to poke at something that I wrote a long time ago.

Anyway, while that “touch it every day” project is going well, I’ve decided to kind of put it on hold and/or let it compete for time with a new blogging project about iPads (and similar mobile devices) and academic work.  I’m calling it Academic iPad.

Why, you ask? Well, three reasons, basically.  First, while I have always been a bid admirer of National Novel Writing Month and the “just do it and stop over-thinking it” attitude behind that project, I really don’t have a novel in me right now, and November is anything but a “slow month” in terms of work stuff.  So I thought I’d try something a little more modest, and I figure I can write a blog entry a day for a month.

Second, to the extent that people find this blog through a particular search for something (as opposed to those who read this blog once in a while because they might know me in “real life” or through my work at EMU or in computers and writing or whatever), it tends to be about iPad stuff and usually academic iPad stuff.  I figured that perhaps that justifies a whole new space.

And third, I thought I should do something tangible for my participation in EMU’s mobile computing/eFellows initiative.  There is a longer/insider story behind this that I’m not going to go into now, but last winter, I got involved in an initiative here where faculty were supposed to be doing things to learn more about incorporating mobile devices into their work.  But other than getting an iPad from EMU (as a loaner, at least in theory), I haven’t done much of anything with all this.  So I thought if nothing else, I could create a blog/web space that could serve as a place for resources and reflections on the role of iPads (and other “mobile computing” technologies) for academics.

So we’ll see how it goes.  I make no promises that this continues beyond this month, which might also be a good thing, a blog/web site that has a definitive ending point.

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Readings and thoughts for the coming school year

We don’t start the fall term here at EMU for another two weeks, but I have a very specific sense of “the summer is over” this morning.  Annette and I are back from “Grownup Camp 2011,” our time up north while Will is at camp, and now it is time I face the to-do list associated with the new school term.

I am not alone in this feeling.  Lots of stuff showed up in my web reading this last week about education in some fashion or another; for example:

  • In Doonsebury, a discussion between a university president and a dean about what exactly it is higher education is supposed to do.
  • Via Aaaron “One Flew East” Barlow comes this interesting infographic about how students love technology.  There is some “truthiness” to this, but there are also some bullshitty claims here too.  I know plenty of students of all ages who definitely are not even in “like” with technology.
  • Pitched to the typical college student, Lifehacker has a bunch of tips for getting it ready for school.
  • Or not– why not opt for the UnCollege approach?  This is all fine and good I guess, but the main problem I have with such things is it confuses the abstract and philosophical concept of “education” with the bureaucratic and pragmatic goal of a “credential,” e.g., a college degree.  Hopefully a credential will lead to an education, but no amount of educating one’s self will lead to a credential, and I am cynical enough to recognize that universities are in the credentialing business first.
  • And there’s some secondary ed stuff out there too worth checking out.  The  LA Times has an op-ed column “The myth of the extraordinary teacher” by Ellie Herman, who is herself a secondary school teacher, explains in stark terms the conditions that she’s working with.  It’s probably not surprising for anyone who actually works in the schools, but it might be a bit surprising for all those folks out there who have made teachers– particularly secondary school teachers– out to be the lazy bad guys.
  • There’s also a great piece in the September 2011 Harper’s about the experience fo going back into secondary school teaching called “Getting Schooled” by Garret Keizer.  No link I’m afraid, but it might be worth buying the print version.

I could go on, but that’s enough.  I’m not sure what to think of all of this vexing over schooling as of late.  My default position to such “hell in a handbasket” kinds of critiques is generally we’ve always been going down hill, ever since at least the ancient Greeks and probably before that.  Still, it does seem a little different to me as of late, perhaps because I’m getting too old.

In any event, I still haven’t come up with any new school year resolutions of note yet.  I want to continue my too slow and too inconsistent readings and reviews of journal articles because it seems to me like not many other people out there read them.  I am prepping for two new classes.  I am trying to concentrate on not eating white food and/or low carbing it.  Etc.  One way or the other, time for not getting stuff done is over.

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Teaching and the shifting definition of technology

I read Steven J. Corbett’s “Technology and Teaching” in Inside Higher Ed this morning mainly because I was quoted in it and that doesn’t happen too often.  I show up in the beginning of the piece:

Is it a given that technology enhances the acts of writing, as it does the arts and sciences of film-making, design, engineering, data collection and analyses, and so forth? What about the teaching and learning of writing?

In a flurry of recent exchanges (subject “Writing horse-shoe-of-horse-heading-east Technology”) on the Writing Program Administration (WPA) listserv, scholars in writing studies have argued these points in some theoretical and practical depth. Maja Wilson, from the University of Maine, sums up the argument nicely: “Steve [Krause, of Eastern Michigan University], and others were arguing that to teach writing, you need to teach the tools available now and not teach or allow the tools on their way out (pen, pencil), because if you aren’t teaching the tools, you aren’t teaching writing. Rich [Haswell, professor emeritus from Texas A&M University], and others argued that, while teaching the use of all those tools can be a good thing, it isn’t necessary to teach writing: writing itself transcends the particular tools, so while teaching the tools can be involved in teaching writing, it isn’t necessarily the same thing.”

Corbett then goes on to explain the “pros” and “cons” of teaching with “technology” in a fairly user-friendly and pro-technology sort of way, making points that would not surprise anyone who does even a hint of scholarship in teaching with technology.  A lot of what he’s suggesting here as new has been standard practice for lots of folks like me for years and years.  But that’s not really a criticism though because I don’t think that is Corbett’s audience.

Anyway, I largely agree with what he’s saying here, though I thought I would gently raise two issues.  First and foremost, Corbett doesn’t define technology, simply assuming it means “computer stuff we all don’t take for granted nowadays.”  I raise this as an issue in part because that was one of the points I was trying to make in that email exchange on the WPA mailing list he’s quoting.  Writing is inherently tied to tools and technologies, and literacy itself (as Ong talked about tons of times a long tine ago) is a technology.  Try writing something without a tool and see how it goes and you’ll see what I mean.

But I also think the issue of defining technology is more than philosophical hair-splitting because I think far too many people teaching writing– especially those who throw up any resistance to “technology” in the writing classroom– use their short memories as a way to resist new things.  Corbett doesn’t mention word processing, email, or even computers as technology per se because those things have been naturalized to the point that they fit into that “stuff we all take for granted” category.  This is understandable:  I haven’t seen an essay from a student written with anything other than a word processor in at least 15 years, maybe more.  Everyone has an email account nowadays, and I can count on one hand the number of students I had last year who didn’t own a computer.  But a) this doesn’t mean that there still aren’t problems with “taken for granted” technologies that writing teachers ought to discuss (I can’t tell you how many students don’t know how to do things like paginate, indent, double-space, and similar such things on something like MS Word), and b) let’s be aware that today’s new-fangled and cutting edge technology is likely to be “taken for granted” tool of tomorrow, and maybe, just maybe, teachers shouldn’t be so paranoid about trying something new.

So for me, one of the main ways I am trying to convince, cajole, con, or otherwise persuade the reluctant to consider current technologies for teaching writing is by trying to remind them that they have always been using technology to teach writing, and a lot of those “stuff we all take for granted” technologies were once resisted.  The current fears of “technology” (e.g., social media, laptops, cloud computing, etc.) all existed with “stuff we take for granted” (e.g., word processors, spell checkers, email, etc., and if you go back far enough, ballpoint pens, typewriters, pencils, etc.).

The other issue I have is pretty petty, but I’ll mention it anyway.  Corbett writes:

And the issue of students being distracted by social networks like Facebook is a valid concern for any techie teacher. A recent Inside Higher Ed article suggests just how distracting the thrall and temptation to visit online social networking environments in classrooms can be for students. But the article also suggests (and I would agree) that a vigilant teacher can stay on top of the problem of the compulsive web-surfer often simply by watching students’ eye movements and gestures. By circulating the room frequently, and training ourselves to be aware of the subtle and not-so-subtle eye and hand movements that can belie a Facebook frequenter, we can take steady steps toward keeping students attentive and on task.

I see his point and I’ve certainly experienced in my own teaching.  But as someone who frequently multitasks myself (meaning I have a FB window and G+ window open right now, I’m listening to the radio, etc., etc.), I think that teachers need to get over the whole “I must be the complete center of attention” thing a bit.  Or they need to be more interesting.

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A few brief thoughts on Google +

As someone who has been on Google Plus for a little less than a week now, I too am a bona fide expert on this new social network– or at least as much of an expert as the people who haven’t really used it for anything yet but speculate on its usefulness.  For example, ProfHacker has a post here about it, and they point to an article in GradHacker here.

It is far FAR too early for anyone (certainly me, as an expert) to speculate too much about what G+ is for (or not); that said, let me speculate a bit on what G+ is for (or not):

  • Everyone seems most excited/interested in talking about hot G+ allows you to set up “circles” that sort out who you connect with and for what purposes.  For example, some of my circles are “comp rhet folk,” “EMU,” “Friends.”  So far, the vast majority of people I’m following are in the “comp rhet folk” circle and are fellow geeky-types who are mostly kicking the G+ tires.  Anyway, this is not that big a selling point over Facebook for me because I’ve been setting up groups for Facebook for a long time now.  I spent one afternoon a year or so ago putting all of my “friends” into lists, and I have a couple of lists (for example, “students”) which I regularly do not post updates to.  If that makes sense.  So while I agree that G+ makes it a lot easier to sort out friends, it is not as if this is completely impossible on Facebook.
  • One thing that is a lot easier with G+ is to “start over” in terms of the whole social networking thing.  If I were to do Facebook all over again, I wouldn’t have friended everyone I have; in fact, I might have even left FB to just the handful of “real friends” I have out there.
  • The most potentially useful part of this is the poorly named “Hangout,” which is group video chat, basically.  I haven’t used this yet and I am kind of dubious as to how well the group chat will work technically, but I can definitely see the point in trying to use this kind of tool for teaching, particularly for online teaching.
  • I’m a big fan of just about all things Google.  I love gmail and google reader– use them every day– and google docs and google sites are go-to places for me for teaching, working with collaborators, etc., etc.  Having said that, I have to wonder what is “in it for them” with G+.  Sure, Facebook is kinda evil, which is why it is useful to try to a) figure out how to set various privacy setting there, and b) remember that whatever you post on Facebook doesn’t just stay on Facebook between you and your friends.  But always remember that Google is primarily a media company, so how will they use this new service to sell ads and/or mine user data? (And BTW, literally as I am writing this, Jeff “Yellow Dog” Rice just posted about this very topic in some interesting ways.  And I also just came across this somewhat alarming discussion of the issues of privacy on ZDNet).
  • Right now, G+ feels a little to me like Ning.  As they describe it on their web site, Ning lets you “create your own social web site.”  This was at one point pretty popular with some of my MA students/colleagues interested in secondary education I think because it gave teachers the chance to “control” a social setting.  So you had some of the advantages of  a social network site but while closing out all the “nasty bits” of the internets and MySpace and such, those “real world” elements that secondary schools are always trying to make sure do not leak into the closed world of classrooms.  Well, the problem with creating your own social network is it isn’t really too “social” (and/or much of a party) if people aren’t showing up.  Which makes me wonder if G+ will go the route of Wave or Ning.  On the other hand….
  • … Who knows?  Before MySpace was “the place” to be, there was Friendster; and before Facebook was it, there was MySpace, which was sold off very recently for what is a relatively measly $35 million.  So who knows where we’ll be in a year?  Right now, G+ is mostly a curiosity and one that makes me think more about my relationship with Facebook more than anything else, but a year or so from now, maybe it’ll be the “go to” social network and Facebook will all but done.  And then my mom will join G+ and the “cool kids” will be on to the next thing.
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The Happy Academic returns and answers the question “Should I get an undergraduate degree?”

The idea that college is a waste of time and money is not exactly new.  I’m not sure if it was this 1975 essay by Caroline Bird or not, but I recall teaching something like it in a first year composition class when I first started teaching in college in 1988.  But it sure seems like there have been a rash of articles lately once again raising questions about college, about how college grads can’t get jobs (as reported here in the New York Times) or that majoring in something in the liberal arts is foolish because it doesn’t prepare people for jobs, as Kim Brooks writes in her Salon.com piece “Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?”

As the short (7.5 week) spring semester come crashing to an end here (I finished the grading for one class yesterday and my other class today), these things are on my mind.  Way back when, in previous blog incarnations, I attempted to answer the questions “Should I get a PhD?” (probably not), “Should I get a Masters degree?” (there are good reasons for this), and “Should I get a graduate degree in creative writing?” (sure, just as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into).  So I might as well round things out and talk about the undergrad experience as well.

Let me start with some things that I think are obviously true, though I am not sure these truths are as obvious to everyone:

  • The bigger issue is that every able adult in this country ought to have the equivalent of a high school diploma and ought to be functionally literate. We’re not there yet.  It turns out that those 47% of Detroit adults are illiterate stuff that was reported back in April/May is probably wrong, but still, the high school graduation rates in Detroit and similar metropolitan/poor people areas are not good.  So to me, before we go around talking about the pros and cons of a college degree, let’s be clear that we have a ways to go to cover the high school problem first.  Further, a lot of the problem with too many students going to college instead of seeking some other trade stem from policies in secondary schools.
  • A college degree has replaced a high school degree as an entry into the middle-class/white collar world. A generation or two ago, you could take a high school degree and get a job as a bank clerk, insurance sales apprentice, office manager, etc., etc.  Now that entry point is a college degree.  Does that mean these sort of general and entry-level white collar office jobs require that level of education?  No, but that’s the way that it is, and this is one of the problems I have with the whole “college isn’t worth it” crowd.  It is all fine and good to say that a college degree shouldn’t be necessary for these kinds of jobs, but in the real world where real people are actually trying to apply for jobs, it is.  Which leads me to my next point:
  • Seeking work in a “trade” or in “manufacturing” isn’t much of an option nowadays. We don’t really make things in this country anymore– or rather, we don’t make enough things to provide decent paying manufacturing or trade jobs, certainly not enough money to motivate people to think about that kind of work as a first rather than a third or fourth option.  Should it be this way?  Of course not, but it is what it is.  And let’s be clear that manufacturing work isn’t necessarily “livin’ the dream.” I’ve had several students over the years in classes who worked in factories of one sort or another (mostly involving automobiles), and the consensus from all of those students was that the work sucked, which is why they were going to college in the first place.  And speaking of this, there’s another issue that Brooks and others who point to places like Europe and their strong support of technical and trade training:
  • In the U.S., we believe in a “everyone should have the chance to be whatever they want to be no matter what” system of higher education. Instead of a system where students are more or less “tracked” into future career possibilities in their early teens through testing and the like (thus pointing some students toward some kind of trade school and others toward college prep), we have a secondary school system that more or less pushes everyone towards college, and also a system of institutions that can extend that opportunity to just about anyone who is able to graduate from high school.  Have lots of money and/or fantastic grades and test scores?  We’ve got an elite university for you!  Somewhere between pretty good and kinda mediocre with some money to work with?  There’s a “public,” state-sanctioned university near you!  Barely graduated from high school, don’t have any money, and/or just not so sure about this “school thing?”  Community college and you’re set!  And if none of those things seem appealing, there just might be a proprietary school where you can spend lots and lots of  money on a potentially worthless degree.  Given the American myth ideal of “opportunity” for one and all, I can’t imagine this changing.  And while I like promoting opportunity as much as any other American, there are some problems with this I’ll get to later.
  • People with college degrees are better off than people without college degrees in all kinds of different ways. This gets lost in the whole “college is a waste of time and money” argument, but that just doesn’t match up with the on the ground and current economic realities.  This MSNBC Money article does a good job of summing this up:  for example, college grads make 60% more than high school grads, and the current unemployment rate for people with undergrad degrees is 5%.  And along these lines:
  • Every article I have seen arguing that college is somehow a waste of time and money has been written by someone who went to college. Which to me means that a lot of these writers are some combination of bitter, forgetful, snarky, and/or ironic.

Anyway, given all that, the answer to the question to me is pretty obvious:  yes, you should try to get a college degree.  There are, of course, many caveats to this.

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