Via John’s blog, I came across A Companion to Digital Humanities, which was published in 2004 in good ol’ fashioned book form by Blackwell. I haven’t had a chance to look at it too much yet, but I can see at least one chapter I might use in my current English 516 class.
Will Podcasting "Hit it" this year?
See this article from Open Culture, “Podcasts to Hit Inflection Point in ’07.” Will podcasting become the next big thing? Here’s what these folks say: “The answer boiled down to this: Podcasting stands poised to proliferate in ’07, much like the web did back in ’95 and ’96.”
Personally, I dunno about that. I’m trying to do more with podcasting in both of my classes this term (note to self: I need to record one for my online section of English 328). I’m using them in two different ways. I’m posting audio notes/lecture materials into the online “course shell” materials (this is the emuonline interface), and I’m posting more informal/weekly updates about stuff going on in the class on the class web sites/blogs. Those are “real podcasts” in that you can actually subscribe to them with something like iTunes.
I am going to try to get some students to do some of this stuff too, but that’s a slightly different issue because of the online nature of the class.
I really don’t know how many of my students are listening and paying attention to these things, to be honest. In the research I did for my article “Broadcast Composition,” the evidence I came up with in my very small and limited survey was that about half of the students listened to them, and about half didn’t. I guess I could go with either the glass being half-full or half-empty on that one.
But one thing I am starting to work with/planning to do is skipping ahead to do some more videocasting this term. Maybe that really is going to be the next big thing….
MIT "for free"/My online semester
I’ve been slightly MIA lately because of ongoing talk on EMUtalk.org, the new semester (more on that in a bit), other school things, and life in general. But this morning (via the NCTE Inbox column), I came across this article in the Christian Science Monitor, “How to go to M.I.T. for free.” Actually, this isn’t that new, though there are two things that struck me.
First off, this is an interestingly different approach to online education than EMU and most similar kinds of schools. Of course, M.I.T. can afford to give this stuff away because I believe the going rate for tuition per year is a gazillion dollars a year, and because these students don’t really need the online courses or online teaching materials. Which leads to the second thing…
In so many ways, the content is obviously not what an education is about. A big part of it is of course interaction:
A college education is “really the total package of students interacting with other students, forming networks, interacting with faculty, and that whole environment of being associated with the school,” says James Yager, a senior associate dean at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Fair enough. But an education from a place like M.I.T. is also a brand name.
Don’t get me wrong– I’m not trying to dis’ M.I.T. or similarly prestigious schools. But even if someone could work through all of these free online classes and learning tools and stuff and gain “an education,” they still wouldn’t gain a “credential.” And, without paying the gazillions of dollars in tuition, they wouldn’t get the piece of paper.
Of course, some of this is also on my mind because I am literally soaking in online teaching this term. I’m teaching an online version of English 328 (which I’ve taught plenty of times before) and English 516 (which I’ve never taught online).
The second one is the real experiment because it’s the first graduate course we’ve taught online in the writing program, and I think (maybe?) in the entire department. And to be honest, it’s off to a bit of a rocky start. I’m not as prepared as I would prefer, and I think I’m going to have to work at making clear expectations. This isn’t as much of a problem for English 328, I suppose in large part because I’m more prepared for this course, but also because I think more of the students in this class are experienced with the whole online class thing.
Anyway, we’ll see. I realize that online graduate courses aren’t a new thing everywhere, but it’s new for us.
The "home office"
Clancy says that this “home office” thing is a new meme, but I actually posted about what has got to be the fourth or fifth version of my current home set up on my unofficial blog way back in May. I guess that makes me an accidental trend-setter. BTW, Clancy, I would have posted to your site, but it didn’t like my login info and I gotta get on with some other work…
This current version of my home office is soon to be altered yet again since I am pretty sure I am soon going to hauling home most of my school office, where I currently keep most of my books, snowglobes, miscellaneous toys, etc. I don’t really know if I have the space, but I look at it like this: sooner or later, they are going to remodel the building that houses the English department at EMU, and I have a feeling that this is actually going to be sooner than later (it’s just a feeling, but still…). Besides that, this term I am teaching entirely online, and I am hoping to be on sabbatical for a term next year. So it’s probably time to move and revise the home office yet again.
But now it’s time to actually work.
Oh, for what it’s worth: The above picture has flickr notes, and it also shows a much MUCH cleaner home office than the one I am working in right now.
EMU in the CHE for all the wrong reasons
From the January 5 Chronicle of Higher Education comes this article, “Cashing In on Virtual Courses: At Eastern Michigan U., professors can double their pay by teaching online, but some of their leaders find that unfair.” For the most part, it’s a recap of the problems with the grading stipend loophole for online teaching at EMU that I’ve discussed here in the past and also on EMUtalk.org. But there are a few differences.
First off, this has now become national news, and (I assume, at least) that one of the reasons why this is in the Chronicle at all is because this deal of paying teachers $150 extra per head for classes of more than 25 students is so out of whack with the normal practices at other institutions. I mean, this is a pretty sizable article, and there isn’t one other school mentioned in it. Shouldn’t this give the people in the leadership at EMU pause?
Second, my department and my department head are both specifically mentioned in it. Go figure! Here’s a lengthy quote with a few editorial comments along the way:
Mr. Eiss [note– This is Harry Eiss, the “poster boy” for this practice of enormous overrides and a guy who has an office just down the hall from me] used to teach more courses online, but his department has capped the number a professor may teach online each semester at two courses. [note– This happened a couple years ago, before the rise of online classes, when Eiss was scheduled to teach five or more overload CE classes, some of which appeared to be meeting at the same time.] And it has decided to cancel the online version of his advanced course on critical approaches to children’s literature, which he taught in the fall. [note– This was because Eiss was letting in so many students into his advanced online writing class that the other versions of the class that other faculty were teaching were canceled because they didn’t fill.]
According to Laura J. George, head of the English department, the children’s literature committee decided it was important to have face-to-face interaction in every writing class that is offered, which includes Mr. Eiss’s advanced course. She says the department introduced the cap because it became clear a few years ago that Mr. Eiss was teaching an “exorbitant” number of classes online.
“There were some concerns about quality and service to students,” she says.
[note– Not surprising, all this is more complicated than is suggested here. I think it’s fair to say that the department (and this is a discussion at the department level now, not just at the Children’s Literature committee) is okay with online classes, but it believes that these classes shouldn’t be overloaded.]
Mr. Eiss says his fellow professors are wrong about the quality’s being lower. He thinks they are simply jealous.
According to the grading-stipend policies at Eastern, for every student Mr. Eiss takes over an established limit of 25 he earns $150. So for this winter’s course, in which he may enroll up to 100 students, or more than 70 extra, he could make as much as $10,000. A salary report released recently by the university reported that Mr. Eiss was the second-highest wage earner among the university’s 680 faculty members last year. His nine-month base salary was about $68,000, and he made an extra $95,000 by teaching overload courses.
I wouldn’t want to speak directly about Eiss, but let me just say something in general terms here about the charge of faculty being “jealous,” about the “hard work” of these faculty teaching these huge overloads in online classes. If one decided that they wanted to completely divorce themselves from the workings of the department– that is, hypothetically, if faculty member decided they no longer were going to come to department meetings or volunteer to serve on the various committees that do the work of the department, then one could probably teach extra classes. Also, if one decided and/or convinced themselves that it was okay to lower the standards of what counts as teaching in these overloaded online classes in order to “cash in,” then it seems to me that a faculty member could indeed manage to teach online classes like this.
But for me, this isn’t something to be jealous about. It is a practice of a fellow faculty member that I for one find unethical.
Two more “behind the scenes” aspect of this story I thought I’d mention: first off, this is a “discussion” that is still going on in the department in terms of policies that we will be adopting to govern online teaching. That’s all I’ll say about that for now.
Second, the writing faculty started talking about this a while ago, and I think it’s fair to say that we’re all on the same page when it comes to these class caps. Simply put, online writing classes don’t have any more students than face to face classes. My online version of English 328 has 20 students in it and my online version of English 516 has 15 students in it, the same caps as I would have in a normal classroom.
Besides the obvious pedagogical benefits of these lower numbers, we decided as a committee that we didn’t want to undercut or cannibalize each others’ teaching. I mean, if I let in 80 people into my online section of English 328 just because I want to make more money oh, excuse me, work harder, then I would end up causing some of my colleagues’ versions of English 328 to not make. Thus the term cannibalize.
And third, this is (as you can imagine) a topic of discussion on EMUtalk.org right here.
Good "Google Tipping Point" article
I’m not sure if I’ll have a use for this in class or something later on, but I thought I’d make a link to this here anyway: Google’s Tipping Point, from the blog Techcrunch. There’s a lot of good links from the article, too. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that, at the end of the day, Google is not this neutral and “free” and natural search service; it’s a business. That makes it more difficult to not do evil.
One semester down as interim WPA; nothing too bad happens
As I type this, I am sitting at a table on my in-law’s lanai (basically a screened-in porch) in southern Florida, watching my son burbling about in the pool while I simultaneously get some prep work done for next term’s teaching and enjoy weather a heck of a lot better than in Ypsi.
Anyway, one of my now former colleagues asked me in a recent email how things went for my first semester as the Interim WPA. So I thought I’d give a somewhat belated reflection on it. All things considered, I think I’d have to say things went pretty well. For starters, the program still exists, and given the fact that I see my primary role this year as “program sitter” while Linda AK is on sabbatical, I think that’s pretty good.
I was really pleased with the great group of graduate students I had the chance to work with this semester in the practicum class for first-time teachers. They all did outstandingly well, which made my job rather easy. All the returning GAs did well too, as did our large staff of lecturers and part-timers who teach in our first year writing program. I was fortunate enough to have an outstanding assistant/”visiting scientist” -type in Jennifer Castillo and in grad student Amy McBain who helped organize the annual Celebration of Student Writing. Oh yeah, and Linda AK, who was basically on speed-dial at all times.
I didn’t really do anything too new (well, other than make the CSW Movie, which turned out pretty well), but I think I did manage to get everything done we were supposed to get done. I think. I guess I’ll find that out later though.
So really, nothing terribly bad happened, and when you think about the scale of things, that’s fairly remarkable. I mean, we’ve got about 1800 students spread over 70 or so sections in the program, and, as anyone who has had this sort of job knows, it only takes one or two, um, “problems,” to put a real damper on all of the other good things that go one.
One semester down, one to go. Here’s hoping it is as smooth (or smoother).
Now that the semester is over, enjoy some cartoons
Actually, I am posting this here because I can imagine including a link to this for 516 in a section of the class on “viral video” that is still very much in the loose development stages. But really, it’s also because everyone deserves some cartoons.
Via boing-boing comes this list from the NYC cityrag of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time, all (or just most?) of which are available online.
Now, if you will excuse me, I am going back to “What’s Opera Doc?”
Podcasting the Byzantines (and beyond)
According to this post on Open Culture, one of the most (the most?) podcast courses posted in iTunes is one called “Twelve Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire” (here’s a link to the web site for the course). Not exactly the sort of thing that you’d expect; and yet, at the same time, it is one of those kinds of topics that strike me as kind of pleasant to listen to on my iPod while at the gym.
Podcasting– both the audio and video varieties– have been on my mind lately as I think about next semester. There’s the ways I want to include audio comments and podcasts in my online teaching, which will be all of my teaching in the winter term, but I also am trying to figure out ways to make podcasting a topic of conversation in my graduate course. And then there’s also a program sponsored by EMU Faculty Development Center on teaching faculty to podcast. On the one hand, I kind of feel like this is “faculty development support” I don’t need– actually, I think I’m reasonably well-equipped to provide support. On the other hand, signing up for this program would allow me access to a little bit of grant money. Hmmm….
The World Premiere of "The Celebration of Student Writing: The Movie"
I’m pleased to announce my first entry into “film making,” this eight and a half minute flick, “The Celebration of Student Writing: The Movie.” This was a ton of fun to make, and I think it’s ultimately going to be useful too. I’m obviously biased, but I think it does a pretty good job of showing what the CSW is all about.
Anyway, watch and enjoy: