Category: Teaching

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The iPhone giveth, the iPhone taketh away

Two articles I might include in 516 this coming term, if I decide to have some kinda discussion in there about hand-held devices:

  • How the iPhone could reboot education is from WIRED about a project at Abilene Christian University where all the first year students and most of the faculty have iPhones and use them in different and kinda cool ways.  This article has links to other iPhone and education (sorta) articles.
  • AT&T takes blame, even for the iPhone’s faults is a NYTimes article that more or less makes the claim that the problem with the iPhone and connectivity is not AT&T but the phone itself.  I think this is interesting because I’ve said to plenty of people that I love my phone but hate AT&T; perhaps I ought to give a little less hate.

In both cases, it seems to me it begs the question if we ought to call these devices “phones” anymore or something else.  But like I said, a potential topic for 516 for the winter, which I’m hoping to start planning and/or thinking about in earnest very soon.

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“Another one bites the dust” makes me think I should revise an old presentation

I came across this last week but didn’t have time to post a link or anything: “Another One Bites the Dust” is an Inside Higher Ed story about an international effort at online education closing up its “doors,” so to speak:

Of all the projects to build international online universities, U21 Global might have been the most ambitious. Universitas 21, the international consortium of highly reputed research universities that opened U21 Global in 2001, predicted the program would enroll 500,000 students and be netting $325 million annually by 2011.

But the program has been fraught with financial losses over its eight-year run, and currently enrolls only 5,000 students. A number of affiliated universities have walked away, including four in the last two years.

Basically, the article explains how this is another example of these online programs, which frankly seem primarily designed to make universities and investors a lot of money as opposed to provide quality education, failing. There are a bunch of others that have either failed entirely or which have not done well. In fact, with the exception of the University of Phoenix and Kaplan and a couple of other programs like it, I think it’s fair to say that online programs are successful– both in terms of extending opportunity to students and making money– when they are tied to “real” and previously existing colleges and universities. I’d wager that places like Phoenix and Kaplan make most of its money from people who need “just in time” education for their current job or to move into a slightly better one– an accounting course, something on how to make a web site, etc. I would bet that the number of students they have that look like EMU students, both traditional and non-traditional, are minimal.

This all reminds me of a presentation I gave almost 10 years ago now at an Midwest MLA called “Haven’t we said this before? What the History of Correspondence Courses Teach Us About the Promises and Problems of Online Distance Education Courses.” Basically, I sum up some of what David Noble wrote about in his article “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education” and in his book called Digital Diploma Mills and his comparison online teaching to correspondence school programs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  I managed in that process to actually get a hold of a thesis a guy did at U of M in 1938 about correspondence schools and some other research on distance education of the time.  True, the comparisons that Noble makes between now and then are relevant in that the hype was similar:  back then, the postal service was going to make the brick and mortar universities irrelevant.  Much in the same way that failed to happen, the idea that online universities are going to replace places like EMU is pretty far-fetched.

But the comparison that Noble doesn’t follow through on that my (admittedly limited) research did suggest was that correspondence courses and “hybrid” courses (ones that were taught primarily by mail but that also did meet face to face a few times a term) did play a role in the educational experience for lots of people back then, in Michigan in particular.  In other words, correspondence courses really were a bit like online courses now:  they aren’t a replacement to the university experience, but they can certainly be a part of the mix.

It’d be interesting to revisit that presentation at this stage.  For one thing, the research process took me into a lot of cool places at U of M– a special collection of institutional documents, the book storage facilities, etc.  For another, now that I’ve been teaching online a lot for the last couple of years, I think I have a little more to stay on the practice.

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Hello, China!

In the “build it and they will come” (sorta) department:  I received a lovely email today from Sally Stephenson about using my freely available and online textbook, The Process of Research Writing. Stephenson is teaching in China and wrote to thank me for making TPRW available free and online:

I am currently on sabbatical from Frostburg State University in Maryland, now teaching Ph.D. students in China at Hunan Normal University, and so much of what we take for granted academically in the States is totally alien here. I am grateful for your permission to use your material and will make good use of it, and credit you accordingly. I especially appreciate all the trouble you took to put the APA and MLA examples up in Chapter 12. I’ve been drilling them on paraphrasing and quoting–something foreign to Chinese culture, which is based on the “one-for-all and all-for-one” philosophy–and am about to tackle the monster of citations and references.

In my search for your well-hidden email address, I also enjoyed browing your blog. Most blogs are blocked here in China, so you might be interested to know yours made it through the “Great Firewall” as it is not-so-fondly called.

So, not only do I have a fan in Asia; I’m escaping Chinese censorship.  Go figure!

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“Downloading Optimism” (and btw, what’s new with electronic books?)

I know that the image there is going to be too small to read, but go ahead and click on it to read it.  This comes from Lucy Knisley who seems to be a bit of a Renaissance woman of sorts with comics, journal writings, illustrations, crafts, etc., etc.

Really REALLY smart stuff about a group of old school comics folks lamenting the falling of print, which was written and drawn by a comic artist who is obviously enthusiastic about digital books.  As she points out, there was a point in the past where these codex book things were weird (where’s the scroll?), and of course there was a time where print itself was weird, too (why are all the letters so neat and orderly?), not to mention stuff like page numbers, etc.  And, as she writes here, “I’d just rather not expend all my energy worrying over how my words are delivered, and instead concentrate on the quality and content of the words.”  Exactly, and the problem with journalism and traditional publishers is that they keep thinking that they are in the bottle business instead of the wine business.

Anyway, this also jarred in me the question again about “e-readers” or electronic books or whatever you want to call them. Knisley talks in this comic about reading stuff on her iPod/iPhone, but I don’t know if I could/would be willing to do that.  I don’t mind reading blogs or email or similarly “short” sort of things on my iPod, but I don’t know if I’d want to read a book-length work on my phone.  Too little of a window for me.

The Kindle is still problematic for my own reading tastes, as far as I can tell.  I don’t really like the way that the device is locked down/locked into amazon.com only content (remember that infamous 1984 issue?), it apparently doesn’t handle PDF files well, and it doesn’t allow for easy annotations.  I’ve heard good things about Barnes and Noble’s Nook, but I’d certainly want to play around with it.  For me, the ability to handle the PDFs from academic journals and the things I assign students to read in various classes.  I don’t need one of these things to “just read” novels or magazines or whatever, which perhaps makes me a reader who is not in the marking plan for companies like amazon.com or B&N.

Anyway, must reading for 516 and/or 444, probably for 328 too.

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A couple of blog talks

I’m giving a couple of talks today about blogging as part of a “Technovations” Forum sponsored by the Faculty Development Center:

I’m not entirely sure how many people are going to be at these talks or if what I’m intending to talk about is going to be useful or not, but I thought I’d put these up here to share with the world, so to speak.  And to help me remember what I did with these files later on….

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A few miscellany

For the first time in what seems like a month, I feel “caught up,” almost.  I think ever since the “National Day O’ Writing” thing, I’ve been bailing water.  Anyway, I haven’t thought through much in terms of anything too interesting to say, but thought I’d post a few links, a few updates:

  • My English 505 class goes well, and it took a somewhat surprising turn the other day:  Richard Vatz, the author of “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” contacted me after coming across the class online.  Which is just another one of those examples I suppose of the pros and cons of putting an online class truly online and “out there” for the world to see.
  • Utah State UP will live another day with a different model, as a (mostly?) electronic press.
  • “Are we naked in the cloud?” from the Atlantic. I think the answer is “well, yes,” which is why cloud computing will only go so far, at least until these sorts of ownership/privacy issues are sorted out.
  • Just got on Google wave; we’ll see how it goes….
  • Maybe I haven’t been writing enough lately because I haven’t been feeling grumpy.
  • I tried to comment on this post about imagining an online composition platform at Alex Reid’s blog (and that didn’t work), so I’ll post something here:

    For starters, I don’t think online versions of first year writing is a good idea– at least not entirely online, and at least not at EMU.  We admit a fair number of first year students at EMU who are “at risk” in some fashion, and what I see in my current section of freshman comp is a real mix in levels of responsibility and maturity.  Some students would be fine with a completely online class; many would not.  Hybrid first year writing classes is another issue though.

    Second, the online platform that I imagine is probably something like a wiki.  I’ve been using media wiki for this term and I used a wetpaint wiki for my spring 2009 term class.  Of course, this isn’t an online class, but I like the interface for publishing student work and class materials, and I think that students like it too.  There is a level of “individuality” with this set-up because I have organized the site by having each student have a page, but at the same time, all the stuff is right there together.  The down-sides of these sites are they don’t foster ongoing conversation that well (though I suppose that’s in part because we haven’t tried– it is a face to face class, after all), and there are different technical issues.  Mediawiki is a little unwieldy for students; Wetpaint is super easy to use, but there isn’t much you can do to customize it.

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A bit about the National Day On Writing at EMU

This is kind of quick and scattered, because as a result of the stuff I helped out on doing for the National Day on Writing here at EMU on Tuesday, I am woefully behind on dealing with the writings of my students– blogs, online postings, wiki entries, “essays,” etc.  But in brief, it was quite the event.

Linda Adler-Kassner and Cathy Fleischer (the two folks who were the leads on this here) estimated that about 1700 students participated, and we (meaning me, Derek Mueller, and Steve Benninghoff, along with some great help from reps from Apple) uploaded about 400 things to the web site– pictures of hand-written activities, blog entries, and YouTube videos.  It was a tremendous amount of fun, but it was a huge amount of work and I still kind of feel like I am physically recovering from being that “on” for pretty much 12 hours straight.

Now, the NDoW was/is one of those kinds of events that is really easy to be cynical about. Someone– it might have been Clay Spinuzzi too– said having a National Day on Writing is sort of like having a National Day on Hygiene.  I don’t completely disagree with these sentiments.  As we were talking about the various activities for the local NDoW at different meetings, there was not an insignificant part of me that was thinking “this is all pretty goofy.”   Or worse:  how is the (capital D) Discipline of Composition and Rhetoric (or maybe more specifically, just Rhetoric) ever going to be taken seriously if we present it to the rest of the academy and beyond as merely Freshman Composition, or, as one of my students described the NDoW,  as the “Writing Carnival?”

But you know what?  We do every once in a while do need to celebrate things that are  mundane and something we all (should) do, like writing or hand-washing, simply because it gets little recognition and it’s simultaneously important.  What I saw on Tuesday was a lot of college kids having fun doing activities where they thought and wrote about writing, sometimes in surprisingly profound and interesting ways.  And I think it turns out that “goofy” and “interesting” are not mutually exclusive.

As one of the uploaders, my job was to take pictures of things written by hand or to upload videos that people took with flip video cameras.  Most of the students were at the event as part of a class or to get what we call at EMU “learning beyond the classroom” credit, but there was no requirement to upload anything.  These students, mostly college freshman, who came up to the upload station were usually rolling their eyes when they held up their work or handed me the video camera, a smirky and often not at all concealed “OMG, this is so stupid” look on their faces.  But then, after I uploaded the artifact and showed it to them on the web site, they inevitably let their guard down a bit and showed a little pride and pleasure that their thing– a movie, a six word memoir, a “PEOP,” whatever– was up there for the whole world to see. Given that the site had 28,000 hits on Tuesday, I think it’s fair to say that the stuff done at the NDoW has reached a broader audience than your typical academic essay, which makes me think that maybe serious academics ought to pay attention to some of the less than serious NDoW projects to get the word out.

And God forbid we do things that allow our students to associate “writing” with “fun.”

Anyway, go check stuff out at the EMU National Day on Writing site. As someone really interested in this idea of how people perceive themselves as writers (or not), I think there’s a goldmine of stuff there.

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“Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines”

In sort of a danah boyd postscript, I heard on NPR this morning the story “Facebook, Myspace Divide Along Social Lines.” A lot of this is the same old “white and rich people use Facebook, brown and poor people use MySpace,” though it is a little more nuanced than that in this story. The story did remind me of one of my early experiences with MySpace and part of a talk I gave at Creighton University back in 2006. To quote from the NPR story:

MySpace pages do look busier than Facebook; on MySpace you can customize graphics and music while Facebook is limited to one spare blue-and-white design. The MySpace clutter seems to symbolize something more to these kids. Sixteen-year-old Nico Kurt lays out his view of the MySpace users this way: “It seems trashy to me. The only people who use it are trashy people.”

The “trashy thing” rang true for me, at least what I remember.  Back in 2006, it was impossible for me to chose a profession like “Professor,” “Teacher,” or even “Student,” but it was very possible to chose the profession “Go Go Dancer,” and it was easy to join professional networks having to do with nightlife, fashion, modeling, gaming, and television. Now, I am assuming that things have changed on MySpace a bit in these regards, I don’t know.  The only time I visit MySpace nowadays is when I click on a link for some indie band that has a site there.  But “trashy” and “cluttered” are both good adjectives for MySpace, IMO.

Oh, and I think I trust Nico Kurt’s judgment in a couple of other ways:  Facebook is likely to be replaced by something else coming along before too long, and Twitter is for old people.

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The remains of the weekend

There’s actually a longer post embedded in some of these items, but for now, I thought I’d just get some of these down here.  After all, I had intended on doing so last night but went to bed instead….

  • Cheryl Ball posted on Tech-Rhet asking about a Mac organizing software from a company (or maybe that’s the software) called Circus Ponies. It’s an organizational tool, which might be useful, though I find that my problems with organization and/or “getting things done” are not software-related.
  • Talking/working with Derek on a panel, and two ideas I want to get down before I forget: 1) it sure seems like a lot of people (including me) aren’t blogging at the same rate they used to blog (that’s a post one of these days, btw), and 2) while Facebook and Twitter are kinda cool, they aren’t a very good replacement for blogs.
  • Where have blogs gone?  Well, one theory I have is as newspapers and other print journalism go online, they are pressing into the space that was once occupied more by individuals.  This is not to say that individual blogs are going to go away, but why read (or even write) on your own individual blog if there is going to be a big newspaper out there willing and able to host your posts and comments?
  • Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff notes some of the writing on the backs of desk chairs of classrooms where she is doing evaluations.
  • Alex Reid has a nice post about learning to write and how it impacts how we should and shouldn’t teach classes like first year writing.  I’ll need to come back to this.  I never actually took first year writing– I tested out of it.  I even was videotaped giving the speech I gave to get out of it, and I believe they took me and the other people who tested out to a lunch.  Thinking back on it briefly now, I believe we were an informal focus group.
  • Fine writing advice, he gist of which I give all the time and which I have to work very hard at myself to follow (and I frequently fail at that).
  • I kind of feel like I been a teleworker/web worker/distance worker/whatever for a long time, but that’s because I teach a fair amount online, and also because tenure-track faculty tend to have the luxury of working wherever they want.  Of course, the problem with “decentralized” work in general and defining “the work” of a college professor in particular is that I’m always working, in an office or not.
  • What’s the big trend now?  Nowism.  Actually, it’s more interesting than it sounds.  I like the list of “now applications” that are down the page a ways, and I like the term “Liquid Modernity” which comes from Zygmunt Bauman.
  • “The lost chicken hatcheries of Iowa City, IA.” Of course I have to note that, even though I am not all that crazy about chickens in Ypsilanti (I have yet to spot a coop in my neighborhood).
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digital_nation looks like a cool resource; on the other hand…

Via this post on Henry Jenkins’ blog (who is moving his blog to his new digs at USC– hopefully this address will stay the same with no problems) comes information and a recommendation for “digital_nation:  Life on the Virtual Frontier” from PBS’ Frontline. It looks cool; I’m not sure if it’s aired yet or not, but there are some interesting video clips.  It could be good for 516, and even for the first year writing class I’m teaching right now where there are some students working on social networks for their research projects.

On the other hand, I have to say that I’m not entirely a fan of some of the people featured here.  For example, I personally have yet to be convinced that danah boyd’s work youth culture online is based on anything beyond common sense, her own gut feeling, and some experiences talking with kids.  Maybe her talk at U of M in a couple of weeks will change my mind.  And I think that Marc Prensky’s idea of “digital natives” is pretty much wrong in all sorts of ways.  But hey, these are the folks that PBS is talking to, and these are the folks who are leading, for better or worse.  And even if I think they’re wrong, they’re still interesting.