Category: Teaching

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BlackCT and Social Media

There’s a blurb article in Inside Higher Ed that kind struck me, mainly because I’m starting to work on an article/chapter about using WordPress as a content(learning) management system, “Blackboard to Unveil New Learning Suite.” Here’s a quote, with my emphasis added:

Blackboard plans to announce today the release of a new version of its widely used e-learning suite, with an emphasis on incorporating social networking tools such as wikis, YouTube, Flickr, and Slideshare. “We provided a very intuitive process to search for and add content from YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare to a course without ever having to leave the LMS,” said Stacey Fontenot, a Blackboard vice president, in an e-mail.

So, why is this a plus? What is the problem with having students experience the internets the way that they experience it in every other way? As far as I can tell, the answer is teacherly control, surveillance, and grading. I don’t completely dismiss the value of such things, but is it really a selling point to anyone who uses stuff like Blackboard that you never have to leave the comfort/control of the course shell?

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… why just Twitter?

I saw a couple of interesting and thought-provoking presentations at ATTW today, some of which I might blog about later, but for the time-being, the one on my mind is one done by some folks at Old Dominion University (Liza Potts, Kathie Gossett, and Vincent Rhodes) called “Tweetagogy: Building Community in 140 Characters or Less.” The short version is they were discussing how they used Twitter as a community building tool with students in their PhD program, which is an especially important task since their PhD program includes a lot of students who are some form of “distance learners.”  Check out the Prezi presentation for the full details.

It’s not that I disagree with them– at least not exactly.  I think there’s a lot of potential for Twitter like they are talking about, forming community around a topic/affinity of some sort is one of those ways.  They had a lot of great ideas and suggestions for some software tools to make Twitter work better for this.

Still, why just Twitter?  The responses they are giving me when I asked this question on the ATTW twitter feed were that things like blogs weren’t as successful, that Twitter was easier/blogs were harder, etc., etc.

I dunno.

Like I said, I like Twitter quite a bit, but I also like blogs and facebook and all kinds of stuff.  I think most of our students are the same way.  So it seems to me that these tools can play off of each other quite well, as I’m trying to do here.

And this is more than 140 characters.

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“Internet Explorer, I’m looking in your direction”

Before I get down to some biz-ness, I decided to take a look at Daring Fireball, one of my (new though it’s not a new blog) regular reads.  In the “colophon” section, we learn a little more about the site’s author and such, and this little bit about web standards:

Web standards are important, and Daring Fireball adheres to them. Specifically, Daring Fireball’s HTML markup should validate as either HTML 5 or XHTML 4.01 Transitional, its layout is constructed using valid CSS, and its syndicated feed is valid Atom.

If Daring Fireball looks goofy in your browser, you’re likely using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Internet Explorer, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and have trouble viewing or reading Daring Fireball, please do let me know.

Heh.  Perhaps I’ll come back to this in 444.

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Remainders on my browser

I have a habit of leaving Firefox open with dozens of tabs leading to dozens of things I either intend to read, bookmark, come back to for teaching, etc., and then I get busy with other things and I don’t.  In any event, in an effort to close some windows and to keep track of some of these things later, here’s a list of links to stuff, some of it tied to teaching and scholarship, some of it just kinda cool/interesting to me:

  • SecondBar allows you to have a menu across two monitors, which is how I roll on my desktop computer.  Not sure if it works yet or not, to be honest.
  • “Let Us Now Trash Famous Authors” by Christina Davidson is an article/web piece from The Atlantic might be useful for 621 in talking about why it is really important to be careful about how we work with “subjects” (e.g., “people”) in our research.  Davidson goes back to the town of Moundville, Alabama and retraces some of the history of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is about sharecroppers during the depression and which is also famous for having some iconic depression era photos by Walker Evans.  Well, when Davidson tries to talk to some people about it all, the only ones she (apparently) can find who know the book feel like it exploited and humiliated the families.  Which I think just goes to show you that we always have to kind of careful about what we think will be “harmless” research or writing.
  • “No Ink, No Paper: What’s the Value of an E-Book?” is an NPR story that argues, basically, that publishers ought to move aggressively to e-books and take their substantial losses now instead of waiting for the inevitable.  Interesting points.
  • Chicken chicken chicken, which figures very briefly into my CCCC 2010 talk.
  • “Thank Sex for Making the Internet Hot.” I have always said that when it comes to figuring out what advances in technology matter, look at porn.  As I understand it, when man figured out how to fire clay into things, the first things they made were not pots for holding stuff but sex toys.  I might be wrong about that.  Anyway, this is an NPR story in which an actual technology historian talks about how sex paved the way for many new technologies, with a fair amount of focus on the internet.
  • “The Posting Hour” is about insomniacs and forums like Facebook.  Kinda interesting, I guess.
  • And finally (for now), there’s the Google Apps Marketplace, which looks to be a sort of “App Store” for things Googley.  I haven’t played with it much yet so I don’t know how useful it might or might not be, but it was an open tab, so there you have it.
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CCCC 2010: The preamble

I think I’ve finished with a draft of my CCCC 2010 presentation. That’s a link to the web-based version of my talk that I’ll be giving next week; it’s not the same as actually “being there” of course, and I suspect I’ll be tweaking this in the next few days. I’m reasonably happy with this, though it is one of those classic presentation issues that come up where there’s no way it can “all fit.”  I have timed this pretty carefully though so that it is less than 20 minutes, because I am of the opinion that anyone who goes over their allowed speaking time ought to be shot. Well, okay, not shot.  But at least booed.

What I like about this right now is the “show” aspect– that is, the chance of sharing a fair chunk of video from RiP: A Remix Manifesto. What I don’t like about it is the same thing I don’t like about most conference presentations, that “unfinished” feeling.

Oh, and by the way, the other reason I post these things nowadays on the ole blog here is because this spiel is likely to get more readers/hits than the actual talk itself in Louisville before I actually give the talk.  But that is perhaps a different story.

More CCCC 2010 updates soon.

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Three things that occur to me today about Lessig’s talk Thursday night

I went to the “wireside chat” Lawrence Lessig gave Thursday night, a talk mostly (but not entirely, as I’ll mention in a moment) about issues of copyright and remix on the ‘net. You can watch it all yourself now by going to this site; I certainly think it’s a worthwhile viewing experience, especially if you haven’t ever seen Lessig speaking and thinking about copyright and remix.

Three somewhat related thoughts about it all:

Continue reading “Three things that occur to me today about Lessig’s talk Thursday night”

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“Easy” isn’t “useful” (and it might be just kind of “dumb”)

Via Will Richardson’s blog and his entry “Transformative Technology?  Really?” about a video from a company (maybe the company?  I don’t know) that makes “smart boards,” those touch screen white boards where you can project all kinds of stuff.  Here’s a link to the video (I don’t think there’s a way to embed it). The video shows elementary school teachers using the board and discussing its use in mock interview-style discussion.

It’s all rather bothersome in at least two different ways. First, I swear they say “ease” or “easy” at least 30 times in this 5 minute video.  Second, the uses they demonstrate of this board aren’t exactly “transformative:”  really, it seems to replicate classic elementary school pedagogy, with students sitting in neat rows, the teacher pointing at something on the board, and, instead of writing with chalk and erasing with an eraser, the teacher just uses his hand!  Wow!  And to the extent that the students are actually involved in using these things, it is to do stuff that would just as easily be done on a whiteboard or a chalkboard.

It’s all rather odd because I know these smart boards can actually be interesting tools.  They have them at Will’s school (none in Pray-Harrold as far as I know, and I don’t think there will be any coming into the building anytime soon), and, from what I’ve seen, Will and his teachers use them a lot to project some sort of web-based thing, to project some sort of slide show, and/or to demonstrate something on the computer desktop the teacher wants to show.  The touch screen makes it a lot easier to do these things than it is with a computer hooked up to a projector. And at Will’s school, I think the students play around with them as much the teachers– at least that’s what I’ve seen.

After seeing this, I immediately thought of this recent CHE article, “Class Produces Parody of ‘The Office’ to Highlight Challenges of Teaching With Technology.” This one does include a YouTube video:

It’s funny because it’s true, and the smartboard promo video is also not funny because it’s true.

I wrote an essay a while back about chalkboards as a technology, and I quoted Larry Cuban in it as saying something along the lines of teachers don’t change the way they do things as a result of technology just because they can.  Rather, teachers change the way they do things as a result of technology if they perceive that new use of technology as being beneficial to their teaching– both for their students and themselves.

I guess I’d amend/revise that slightly. If teachers aren’t willing or aren’t able to really rethink the way that technologies can transform their teaching, then they shouldn’t bother with the expense and hassle of things like “smart” boards.  And if teachers want it all to be so “easy” that they don’t have to think about it all, well, that’s kinda dumb.  I worry about this at my own institution where I see some of my colleagues wanting things like “smart” boards and other bells and whistles not because they would do anything significantly or meaningfully different because it’s cool.  Kind of like that Monty Python sketch about the button that goes “bing.”

Actually, that University of Denver video has some good advice for getting started with teaching with technology:  get the students involved, allow for more collaboration, and don’t be boring.  Of course, the professor at the end of that video also talks about trying out “those clickers.”

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I was doing and thinking about a lot of other things while writing this post

There’s an interesting article in CHE right now, “Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention,” about various research and perspectives on multitasking– or rather, the myth of multitasking.  There must be something in the air about multitasking and the bane of every non-multitasker’s existence, talking on the phone while driving.  Just yesterday, I was listening to NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” to US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood sounding a little like a crazy old man about the need to keep both hands on the wheel at all times.  I do not understand how someone can text and drive at the same time, I don’t think bus drivers or truckers ought to be talking on their cell phones (unless they have something like a head set), and I try to use my headphones when I’m driving and talking on the phone.  But doing anything while driving is pontentially dangerous, including perfectly legal (and even encouraged!) things like eating, drinking (I’ll bet spilled coffee in the lap is responsible for many more auto accidents than cell phone class), talking to others, listening to super-duper loud music, etc.

Wait, I got distracted.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, multitasking….

The CHE article is good and probably worth teaching because it covers the issue from a variety of different angles– certainly not just from the “multitasking is bad” one.  There’s some kind of information here about the “history” of research on multitasking and various experiments, but I have to say (as someone who doesn’t do this kind of research) that a lot of this seems kind of like parlor games to me.  For example:

As far back as the 1890s, experimental psychologists were testing people’s ability to direct their attention to multiple tasks. One early researcher asked her subjects to read aloud from a novel while simultaneously writing the letter A as many times as possible. Another had people sort cards of various shapes while counting aloud by threes.

Well, duh, but isn’t that more like making someone say the alphabet backwards during a sobriety test or something?  I don’t know if that necessarily tests a person’s ability to do more than one thing at once though giving most attention to a single task.  For example, as I am writing this post, I am listening to my iPhone (REM right now) and I was just interrupted to take a phone call from my wife.  That’s multitasking, but it’s not like what these people seem to mean by multitasking.

Or I guess that’s the problem here– I’m not sure there’s a very clear definition of what multitasking is.  For example, part of the argument that comes up against multitasking is that increasingly old school argument about no laptops in the classroom.  Here’s an extreme example of that:

“I’m teaching a class of first-year students,” says David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “This might well have been the very first class they walked into in their college careers. I handed out a sheet that said, ‘Thou shalt have no electronic devices in the classroom.’ … I don’t want to see students with their computers out, because you know they’re surfing the Web. I don’t want to see them taking notes. I want to see them paying attention to me.”

I don’t know who Meyers is or what his scholarship says, but that last line– I want them paying attention to me– seems pretty telling and egocentric.  And  it’s this potential lack of paying attention to me, the professor/teacher/sage on the stage/keeper o’ wisdom that has got most people like Meyers thinking like this.  Don’t get me wrong; I will sometimes ask students to close up their laptops to pay attention to something, especially if it is one of those times I have to go into a five minute lecture “about important stuff for the class” mode.  But generally, I don’t want to be the center of the class, and if my students find it easy to be distracted by Facebook (or whatever), then it’s probably a combination of me being boring or them not wanting to be in class.

One more thing:  I don’t think multitasking is even remotely a phenomenon that has come abut only with the age of the Internet.  I grew up in a multitasking household.  The television was ALWAYS on when I was a kid, and now when I am home visiting my parents, three sisters, and all the kids and in-laws (I think it’s 17 0r 18 people total), it is not at all uncommon for their to be three different televisions in different rooms but still within sight, all tuned to different channels.  My parents always read the newspaper or magazine while watching TV (or with the TV on– I’m not sure the difference was ever very clear when I was a kid), and layered over that would always be some kind of conversation.  When I go back home now, all of my adult siblings and their spouses will sit around watching TV, playing some kind of game, checking laptops or cell phones, watching children, eating snacks, and planning the next meal, all at the same time.

I mean, really:  in “real life,” who just “pays attention?”

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Lotsa links/reader round-up

I have been procrastinating from cleaning my office by a) teaching (well, that’s kinda my job, so that doesn’t count as procrastination), and b) looking through some piled up google reader links.  So in an effort to put off office cleaning a bit longer, here’s a bunch of links in no particular order:

Okay, cleaning will commence.  Soon….

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The fall term that was

Alex Reid’s post (along with just the end of things) prompted me to post this end of the term summary of things:

Overall, I was pleased with the way my graduate class, Rhetoric of Science and Technology, turned out this term.  It was the first time I taught it online, and we posted a staggering 1,738 comments on 91 posts during the course of the semester.  If you average that out to about 200 words a post (many were less, many were more), I’d say that the class wrote about a novel and a half (in draft form, of course) worth of text.  Besides quantity, the quality of interaction was quite excellent– lots of give and take, lots of smart comments that indicate to me a lot of reading and a lot of thinking.  And as a bonus, we even had a couple of the people whose work we read weigh in on the class, not the sort of thing that can happen with the course is behind a firewall.  Anyway, the next time someone suggests you can’t teach an advanced seminar class online, I’m going to point them to this site.

But I will say there are two things I’ll definitely be changing the next time I teach this class.  First, the wiki writing experience didn’t work.  The idea was to use a wiki for students to work collaboratively on reading notes for the texts we were reading since a lot of what we read during the class is dense and complicated stuff.  That didn’t work well for two reasons.  First, with all of the activity going on at the class web site/blog, the wiki was too often repetitive and/or forgotten.  We tried talking about the last thing I assigned (a couple chapters from Collin Brooke’s book) on the wiki exclusively, but that didn’t work that well either.

Second, I think I’m going to change up the writing assignments for next year.  Instead of having one “seminar paper” at the end, I’m going to have a shorter project in the middle of the term where students will write based on the first group of readings (probably “the old stuff” and related essays); another shorter project for the second part of the term based on those readings (many of which I will probably get students to research and find); and a more comprehensive and “worth more” final.  We’ll see; this was only the second time I taught this course, so I’m still trying to figure it out.

My section of English 328:  Writing, Style, and Technology was a little more, well, odd this term.  In contrast to English 505, 328 is a class I’ve taught literally 50 or more times, and I kind of feel like I’ve “got it down” pat.  Perhaps that’s part of the problem, which is why I’m looking forward to changing some of it up in the winter term, a lot of those based on the stuff Derek has been messing around with this term.  It’s been fun for both me and our colleague Cheryl Cassidy (Cheryl is the other person here who has taught the bulk of these 328 classes over the years) to watch Derek begin to find his way in that class.  Anyway, this term was weird in several ways I probably shouldn’t go into in any detail; let’s just say that a majority of the students who signed up the class originally didn’t finish it, which is a first for me.

And then there was my section of English 121, Researching the Public Experience (aka first year comp/rhet).  This was the first time in years and years (maybe ever?) since I’ve been at EMU where I taught a “real” section of this class– that is, one that was offered during a normal term and one that was actually made up of mostly first year students and one where we got to participate in the “Celebration of Student Writing.” (I teach this often enough in the spring or summer terms, but those classes are 7.5 weeks long and usually mostly juniors and seniors who transferred in, who took it and failed it before, and/or who just forgot to take it until the end of their degree programs.  This is different population of students to say the least.)  I’d say it both went pretty well and it was kind of depressing, too.

It went reasonably well mechanically/logistically.  I used a wiki powered by MediaWiki, and that had advantages and disadvantages.  All of my students posted all of their work to different pages within the wiki and they used the wiki to comment on each others’ various drafts and exercises.  Students liked being able to see what others in the class were doing in one centralized place like this, and I liked it for those reasons along with various “classroom management” issues.  I didn’t collect any paper from them this year, I knew exactly when they did (or didn’t) do things because it was all time-stamped on the wiki, and viewing the “history” of one of the major portfolio assignments gave a very clear picture of the revisions and changes that they made.  But the problem of the wiki was it was still a little more technical/complicated for students to negotiate than I would have preferred.  Maybe I’ll use it again the next time I teach this; maybe I’ll try using something like PBWorks or whatever else has come along in a couple years.

But it was also kind of depressing because of what I guess I’d call an “achievement gap.”  This has been on my mind/in the news around EMU as of late because the board of regents and other forces around campus are growing more concerned about the institution’s retention rate, which is something like 39%— that is, around that percentage of students actually graduates from EMU within six years.  Compare that to U of Michigan, where the number is more like 90%.  I saw this statistic played out in my section of freshman comp.  Of the 25 students on my role, 9 of them either withdrew from the class or failed it– and pretty much the only way to completely fail the class is to just not show up and/or do the work.  Of the 16 who did finish, three were juniors or seniors who were taking 121 too late and who were already well on their way to graduation.  Of the 13 “real” first or second year students left, I would guess that five or six of them won’t be at EMU in a year or two from now– some for good reasons (I know at least one student in this class who was planning on transferring because of a change of heart about a major), but most because of “life distractions” (e.g., working too much) or because of their abilities.

So, if my section of 121 was a little micro-version of the institution, that 39% figure seems about right.  Actually, it might even be kind of high.

Anyway, I don’t worry that much about the sorts of issues that Alex was worrying about in his post, about the problems of teaching writing as a series of discreet moves rather a more authentic writing/writerly experience.  Institutionalized education is by definition artificial and a form of imitation of “the real,” which also has an element of “realness” in and of itself.  Alex uses the youth soccer coaching analogy, and I think that works well here too:  writing classes are more like practice, where the players run through a series of drills and do some scrimmaging to prepare for the “real game” that comes later.  I’m okay with that.

But what I do worry about is that ever-eternal problem at “opportunity granting” institutions like EMU:  what is the line between giving a kid who did not do great in high school a second chance with college versus just taking money from someone who is so poorly prepared for college that they just don’t have a chance of succeeding?  That’s the kinda depressing part.

Anyway, the term is a wrap, and for the first time in many a holiday season, I’m not taking any work with me on my various travels– some things to read (mostly for fun), a notebook and a pen (no laptop), and an iPhone.   See ya next year.