Category: Teaching

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"How to email a professor"

Via Dr. B’s blog, I found this post on Orange Crate Art: “How to e-mail a professor.” SOLID solid advice; in the near future, I’m either going to point out this entry to my students or I’m going to write up my own version of this advice (referencing Michael Leddy’s post, of course) and pass this out.

I for one like to communicate with my students via email (though I have colleagues who either would rather not have their students email or who even go so far as to say that their students cannot email them), but I do think it can be a problem. I get a lot of email– at least 100 messages a day– of various levels of importance. I get a lot of spam and junk of course, and while my “junk filter” works relatively well (I’m using the Mail software that comes standard on the Mac nowadays), I also get a lot of junk and spam in my inbox, all mixed in with some mailing list mail, important school mail, student mail, advertisements, mail from friends, etc. And the “student mail,” too often with a subject line like “hey,” can disappear into the mix in the inbox, or, far worse, be determined by my software to be “junk.”

Anyway, the advice offered by Leddy is pretty darn good, the sort of “common sense” that sometimes needs to be directly taught in order to be realized.

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Handwriting not being taught + students cheat with cell phones = technology is bad for education

The current issue of NCTE’s InBox has two articles (and slightly recycled) from different newspapers that are both presented (more or less) as examples of how technology is bad for schooling. First, there’s “The Handwriting Is On The Wane” from the Hartford Courant. I don’t exactly know what they mean by “THE Handwriting” (shouldn’t that just be “Handwriting is On the Wane”?), but given that the byline is “By ROBERT A. FRAHM, Courant Staff Write” (as opposed to “Writer“), perhaps the folks in Hartford have some sort of “master handwriting” in mind. Anyway, here’s a typical quote:

Relying more and more on e-mail, blogs, websites, instant messaging and other electronic forms of communication, students at all levels are forgetting the fine art of handwriting, educators say. Cursive script, the graceful looping style that connects one letter to another, might be going the way of the inkwell and the fountain pen.

When students do write by hand, many resort to printing, educators say.

“It’s true. Unfortunately, a lot of schools are not spending enough time on handwriting,” said Priscilla Mullins of Zaner-Bloser Educational Publishers, an Ohio-based firm that produces classroom materials for handwriting, spelling, grammar and related subjects.

Of course, this is old news, and, interestingly enough, it’s old news where Zaner-Bloser has commented. She was making the same kind of argument in South Carolina back in January.

The second “sky is falling” piece is “High-Tech Cheating Comes to High Schools,” which appeared in the Detroit News but which was a reprint of an article from the Sacramento Bee. Basically, it’s about using cell phones to cheat:

“Some people text you during tests and ask if you know the answer to No. 3,” said Amy Pederson, a 17-year-old senior at Sacramento’s Folsom High School.

The number of high school students who admit cheating has steadily increased, said Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and one of the nation’s top researchers of high school and college cheating. His most recent survey, published in June, found that 70 percent of students at public and private high schools admit to some form of cheating on tests.

Lance Chih has seen it.

“Last year in one of my classes we had a sub,” said the 18-year-old senior at Folsom, “and students were distracting the sub while they took pictures of the test.”

Once again, we have an article where the usual suspects– McCabe in this case– provide a reporter with a dramatic and dire warning about cheating. I don’t know how “recent” his survey his and I don’t know how he defines “cheating” exactly, but I blogged about McCabe a bit back in August 2003.

I will say this though: at least the reporter for this story was careful enough to follow-through and ask the teachers about what they “do” about these things:

“A lot of this stuff is just a matter of monitoring the classroom,” said Shannon Morgan, a math teacher at Folsom High School.

“You can tell just by their body language if they’ve got (a cell phone) out,” said Sean Rivera, who’s also a math teacher at Folsom. “You grow a third eye. … We can just tell. Those of us who’ve been in the business long enough can tell when they have a phone out.”

Some educators believe the problem is changing too rapidly to be quelled by conventional methods, and it’s time that teaching methods evolved with technology.

“The days of teachers just getting up and lecturing … those days are kind of over,” said Mark Hyatt, president of the Center for Academic Integrity. “Especially the younger generation — they want to be part of the action.”

See? Maybe the kids today aren’t going to hell in a handbasket….

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Cool use of Screencasting (and my own Teaching Online adventures continue)

Via Collin’s blog comes this link to Will at Weblogg-ed about giving student feedback via a screencast. For the time-being, I really just want to link to this so I can come back to it later when I start working more earnestly on my CCCCs presentation. But I guess I’ve got two thoughts for now:

  • I’m not sure I like the idea of screencasting for each student’s essay, but it’s an interesting demonstration.
  • Personally, I’m having enough problems/”challenges” just keeping up on the “basics” for my online class. I’ve whined about this before, so I’m not going to whine about it now, but I guess what I’m getting at/wondering about is the tradeoff between doing things like screencasting or podcasting versus the time it takes to make screencasts and podcasts, not to mention the learning curve.
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Dark sitters

The Little Professor observes/wonders why it is that it is common for teachers to come into a class of students who are sitting in the dark. Judging by the comments here and the fact that Inside Higher Ed linked to it in their “Around the Web” section, I am guessing that this is a common phenomenon in colleges in the English speaking world.

A few thoughts:

  • I haven’t experienced this for a while because I tend to teach in the late afternoons and evenings, and, in my experience at least, the lights tend to be on later in the day. I also tend to not teach classes populated with first year students, the most likely group to remain patiently in the dark, especially at the beginning of their college experiences. And to tell the truth, I suspect that some of these students come from high schools where they were told to not touch the light switches, that those switches were in the domain of the teacher. That’s just a guess though.
  • Having said that, I have indeed come into classrooms of students sitting silently in the dark and have always thought it kinda weird.
  • Despite some of the theories advanced on the Little Professor’s site, I suspect the reason for dark sitting is a simple group psychology phenomenon. I remember seeing a little movie about this in high school psychology/sociology class. The movie was (supposedly) footage from an experiment. The first scene showed a single person sitting in a waiting room. Smoke started to come in from one of the vents. It didn’t take more than about 2 minutes for this person to get up to inform someone about the smoke situation. The second scene showed a waiting room with about 10 people sitting around in it. Smoke started to come in from one of the vents. No one moved, and if I am recalling this right, the reason given by participants was something like they thought someone else would do something.

Anyway, if there are any students reading this: go ahead and turn on the lights. Or, if you really want to mess with people, turn them off.

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U of M dentists beat me to my podcasting idea (but not really)

The Ann Arbor News ran a story today in the business section (of all places) titled “iPods help drill U-M students dentists: Lecture ‘podcasts’ now available.” Drill students– get it? get it? Ah, that dental humor….

Actually, this isn’t really what I’m trying to attempt with including audio in my online class, at least not exactly. I’m not even completely sure I’m doing what would be called “podcasting” because I haven’t quite figured out that part of the technology out yet, particularly the RSS stuff. I mean, I know that blogger has an audioblogging feature that is stupid easy to use: just record a message with them with a phone. The sound quality isn’t fantastic, but it is passable and I think I can set that up with RSS, but I want to do something more sophisticated than that.

Of course, the concern/worry I have is that if I build some sort of podcast outside of the class shell, I’m not convinced that my students will use it. And furthermore, I don’t know if I really need to build it outside fo the class eCollege software. As I think I mentioned earlier, I can record sound files with my iPod and a Belkin microphone, save these things as mp3s, and then simply upload them to the eCollege site. They aren’t “podcasts” in the purest sense, but hey, who cares? If they help…

… which brings me back ot the dentists. Basically, they are doing some podcasting of lectures at the U of M dental school, and you can even get them through iTunes (no, I’m not going to try to find a link to them….) The dean of the college is behind it– he says in the article that he’s on his fifth iPod.

But the thing that I thought was interesting for my purposes was this:

[Jared Van Ittersum, who was credited with heading the podcasting concept at U-M] said podcasting lectures evolved from a similar effort at the U-M Medical School, which provides low-resolution video of professors’ lectures for students to download from the Web.

But given the prevalence of the music players among students, podcasting emerged as a more mobile medium, said Trek Glowacki, an employee at the dental school’s informatics department and a student at U-M’s School of Information. Glowacki led the pilot study into whether students preferred podcasting to video. He found most picked the pod, which also involved far fewer university staff hours to deliver.

This interests me for a variety of different reasons, but besides the idea that the technology of the podcast is easier and more mobile for students, I think it is also considerably easier and more mobile for instructors as well. I could record and broadcast video of myself with eCollege, but even with the support I would get from Continuing Education at EMU to do this, it would still be an enormous pain in the ass. I mean, I’d have to go to a studio someplace, they’d have to cut the video together (or I’d have to do it, and that’d be a totally different learning curve), it would take a long time for students to download, etc., etc. Making and delievering a 10 minute mp3 file (albeit a not great sounding one) takes me a total of 20 minutes: 10 for the recording and 10 with the futzing. Not counting-retakes, of course.

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Go read My Freshman Year right now

I finished reading Rebekah “not her real name” Nathan’s book My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student the other day. I say “not her real name” because the author had originally written the book under a pseudonym about students at AnyU, but it’s been pretty well documented that Nathan is really Cathy Small and AnyU is actually Northern Arizona University.

I think that anyone who teaches college and who ever wonders what the heck these students are thinking should read this book. No, should be required to read this book. About a month ago, there was a discussion on the WPA-L mailing list I posted about here, one where folks were complaining about “the students today” in relation to the Tommy Lee Goes to College show. (BTW, I did actually watch parts of a couple of episodes of the show; I didn’t find the students that surprising or even that “bad” or whatever. I just thought the show was kind of boring). These folks complaining about students need to really really read this book.

I don’t think Nathan’s/Small’s book says anything about the student experience that is too surprising or even that different from (what I remember of) my college experience. But it’s her willingness to really partake in the contemporary student experience that is most striking to me, I think. Nathan/Small has real empathy for her students as she writes this book, and I guess it’s just refreshing to see some educator to be as undertanding of students as we educators would hope students to be of the world around them.

This is not to say that Nathan/Small doesn’t have any critiques of contemporary students. For example, the chapter on international students’ views about the general ignorance of the world outside of the US American students have is pretty effective, and she is critical of the “corporate state” of affairs at most American universities nowadays and how this is driven in part by student demands. But she does a good job of complicating these problems. This book never reads like a “those dumb kids today” critique because Nathan/Small goes to great lengths to examine why students have the perspectives they have, and she points out frequently enough that in many ways, the problems of students today aren’t a whole lot different from the problems of students in her generation or even in the 19th century.

My only problem with the book is its focus on “traditional students:” 18-22 year olds living in the dorms. This isn’t really Nathan’s/Small’s problem exactly because this is what she sets out to do, but it’d be interesting for someone to do an ethnographic study like this of more non-traditional students. Of course, it’d be a heck of a lot more difficult to follow non-trads around for a year….

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Teaching Online at EMU: Thoughts after (less than) a week

Despite the numerous things I resolved to do in my last post, it sure seems like most of my week has been dominated by the “Figure out this online teaching stuff” resolution (though I am happy to say that I was at the gym three long mornings this week, too). A few thoughts this morning about the process so far:

  • I think I might need to start keeping a private log/journal about some of what has been happening with me and my students’ work in this class. I say “private” because it just wouldn’t be cool to talk about individual students here.
  • The learning curve is flattening a little, but there is significant stuff I still need to figure out. Like the grade book feature, for example.
  • For the most part, I think eCollege is pretty good and pretty straight-forward software. But I guess I have two complaints about eCollege so far. First, as I mentioned before and as is typical of all CMS systems that I’ve seen, it doesn’t quite match my teaching. It’s a bit like putting my ball into their box: I can do it, but it doesn’t quite fit. Second, the eCollege interface is just plain ugly (IMO). Take a look at this demo class page: my class shell is uglier than this with ill-fitting fonts and a kind of neon green color scheme. Icky, and as far as I can tell, there isn’t much I can do about it.
  • The best thing about eCollege so far is the support. I email these people and I get an answer in a few hours. Simple as that. And I guess this is the real tension about using some sort of institutionally supported software (like eCollege) versus open source products (like moodle, as Jenny is using, or drupal or whatever): on the one hand, open source products give users tremendous flexibility. On the other hand, if you use open source software, you are on your own, basically.
  • Teaching online reminds me (unfortunately) about how much of my teaching is in my head and depends on a physical presence. I take notes and have some things written down or typed up before I go into a class, but most of what I teach is based on memory, and most of the exchange happens with me speaking to students and with students speaking back to me and to each other. Being “there,” present in a non-virtual form in a classroom, makes a difference. But beyond that complicated problem that I’m not going to go into now, there’s the more practical issue of getting stuff out of my head and into a format that my online students can interact with. That ain’t that easy.
  • eCollege (and most of these other CMS products, of course) have some interesting double-edged teaching tools that make me think about my face to face teaching, too. For example, eCollege allows me to track in minutes how much time students spend in different parts of the class. I can tell that some students have already spent hours online and I can tell in what parts of the class they have spent their time. And I can also tell that there are some students who have spent very little time with the class so far. Now, on the one hand, this kind of electronic surveillance is obviously kind of creepy. But on the other hand, we conduct this kind of “surveillance” in face to face classes, too. Teachers make judgements (accurate and inaccurate) about the extent to which students are participating in a class by the cues they give. Students who sit up straight, nod with the discussion, raise their hands, volunteer comments, etc., we judge to be engaged. Students who are reading the newspaper, slumped back, nodding off, silent, etc., we judge to be not engaged. Either way, we make these judgements with a more simple form of direct observation/surveillance.
  • I’m thinking about proposing a presentation/talk for Computers and Writing that is basically about all of this. I’m not sure I can articulate this that well yet, but I guess I didn’t think the learning curve and the work would be as hard for someone like me, who has been invested in teaching with technology for a long LONG time now. But I’m beginning to think that it might be even more difficult for me than it is for some of my colleagues who are more or less starting from scratch. We’ll see…. I haven’t seen the CFP for C&W 2006 yet…
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New Year's Resolutions

Today’s the first day of classes here at EMU. Since I don’t teach today, my original plan was to actually not be at school today, but it turns out that I have a Faculty Council meeting I need to attend. Oh well; summer is over.

I’ve thought of the beginning of the school year as the beginning of “the year” pretty much my whole life and certainly since I started teaching 17 years ago. Jeesh, 17 years ago. I was a graduate assistant back then. I was 22 years old in an MFA creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, teaching first year composition about three or four months after I finished my BA. Ah, memories….

Anyway, since I’m at the beginning of the new year, I thought it might be good to make some new year’s resolutions (and I also thought that if I made them here, I might stick to them, too). So here they are, more or less in this order:

  • Get into shape. This might seem like the sort of thing I would mention on my unofficial blog, but I mention it here because I have an academic schedule this term that allows me few excuses for getting exercise and I really do want to make losing some weight and being a bit more healthy my top priority this semester.
  • Figure out this online teaching stuff. So far, so good, though I haven’t seen any activity on my online class yet. It’s pretty early though. And one of the things I am going to have to figure out for sure this year for my online teaching is podcasting and (possibly) screencasting, too. I just found out my CCCCs proposal was accepted; it’s called (right now) “Broadcast Composition : Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and for the time-being, it’s going to be about using things like podcasting and other “lower-end” multimedia to supplement my online teaching. But that could change and evolve.
  • Read. I have mentioned this in the recent past on my blog, but basically, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) finished with my textbook project, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) pretty much off of the job market, and I have therefore reached a point in my career where I don’t have to produce scholarship in order to participate in that “academic game.” So, for a while at least, I think I’m going to become mainly a consumer of scholarship and read, both current scholarship and some of the things before.
  • Blog. And despite what Ivan Tribble said again, I stand by what I said back in July: While he did have some valid points, I think blogging can help someone on the job market and I think it helps those of us who are more “established” in academic careers too. To read more about Tribble II, I’d suggest reading Collin’s entry about this. By the way: it occurs to me that it is a little– I don’t know, strange/funny/ironic — that Tribble in this article seems to think that blogging under one’s own name can be okay and yet he’s sticking to his pseduonym here. Hmmm…..
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Plagiarism: The Lawsuit/Web Site, The Building, The Movie

Here’s kind of a catch-up post on some stuff I’ve come across lately:

  • Bill H-D sent me this link to an article in Inside Higher Ed, “New Tack Against Term Paper Providers.” Here’s a quote:

    Lawyers for a graduate student named Blue Macellari filed a lawsuit in federal court in Illinois alleging that three Web sites that sell term papers made a manuscript she had written available without her permission. She is charging the owner of the sites (as well as the sites’ Internet service provider) with copyright infringement, consumer fraud and invasion of privacy, among other things.

    But it gets a bit more complicated than that.

    According to Macellari’s complaint, a friend doing a casual Google search of Macellari’s name last January came across references to a paper she had written during a year abroad at the University of Cape Town in 1998, which Macellari had posted in 1999 on a personal Web site at Mount Holyoke College, where she earned her degree.

    But the friend found links to the paper not on her Mount Holyoke page but on two Web sites, DoingMyHomework.com and FreeforEssays.com, that said the paper was in their databases. Macellari says she later found several hundred words of her paper on another site, FreeforTermPapers.com.

    In other words, Macellari’s essay got lifted from her web site by some online papermill. Great, just great. Those papermill/spam bastards ruin it for everyone.

    Stopping students from publishing their writing on their web sites obviously isn’t much of a solution. But it is probably not a bad idea for me to recommend to students that they slap a creative commons agreement on their work. It isn’t going to stop people from taking their work, but it might give them ammo for a legal remedy.

  • In the “building” department and via Johndan’s blog comes this article “Brothers From Another Mother,” by Clay Risen and published in a web periodical called “The Morning News.” Here’s a quote from the first paragraph:

    Plagiarism is usually associated with college term papers and the occasional historical bestseller. Recently, though, the big story in architecture circles has been a growing list of supposedly “copycat� designs—in other words, architectural plagiarism. The hot architecture gossip blog, The Gutter, has made a regular feature—called the Gutterland Police Blotter—out of tagging similarities between, say, Rem Koolhaas’s elevated subway sheath at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a train station in Santiago, Chile. In a groundbreaking ruling earlier this month, a federal judge allowed a suit against Freedom Tower architect David Childs to go forward; the suit, by a former architecture student, accuses Childs of stealing the tower’s design from one the student had presented in a class project. And a recent New York Times article noted three other high-profile clashes between purported plagiarizers and their alleged sources.

    Johndan talks more about this on his site as well; for me, it raises some interesting questions about what counts as a “text,” what’s the difference between “copying” and “imitating” (I guess, as they say, doing it well is part of it), and do the rules of “words in a row” literacy apply to things like architecture.

  • Finally, Plagiarism the Movie. Well, okay; just kind of a cool flash intro to Washington State University’s plagiarism site, which also has some good info.
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My Freshman Day (sorta…)

I participated in a freshman orientation session yesterday morning at EMU. Basically, the session I lead was about “life in the classroom,” and my job was to give them a sense about what classroom life was like in 50 minutes or less. Needless to say, I didn’t manage to accomplish that; I think they’ll actually have to start going to class before they can figure out for themselves what it means to be a “college student.”

I was able to work through an explanation of the handout they give to students, which has sections about things like the need to attend class, reading the syllabus, appropriate class conduct, not cheating, where to get tutoring help, etc. I guess it was useful for them. I mean, all of this stuff strikes me as common sense, but of course, what counts as “common sense” depends on the community that you are in. For example, a couple of students asked about this thing called a “syllabus” and about books (“How am I supposed to know what books to get for my classes?”). Questions that definitely mark these kids as “new.”

And I should point out that they were “kids.” We have a lot of “non-traditional” students at EMU, but as far as I could tell, all of these students were right out of high school and getting ready to live in the dorms, away from home for the first time ever. Most of these students were born around 1987, and this makes me feel quite old. Given that I was in my junior year in college back in ’87, it is no longer a stretch to say that I’m old enough to be the father of these kids. Yikes.

Anyway, while a lot of the questions these future students had about the classroom struck me as simplistic and obvious, I was also struck by how little I knew about the part of EMU that they inhabit on a day-to-day basis. Maybe I’m thinking about this now because I am reading the excellent book My Freshman Year by Rebekah “not her real name” Nathan, which is about an anthropology professor who enrolls as a freshman to research the life of college students the same way that studied other “distant and foreign” cultures. I haven’t come close to finishing reading it yet, but early on, Nathan talks about how different the university looks to her as a student than it did as a college professor. Among other things, she means this in a basic geographic sense: Nathan talks about how as a faculty member, she was able to park and thus enter the buildings where she worked from a particular vantage point. But as a student, especially living in the dorms, the university had a completely different geography, one that she found disorienting and confusing.

I experienced a little bit of that confusion myself on Sunday. While most of the orientation session I led was on “my turf” of the classroom, the students also asked about things having to do with meal plans, some dorm life issues, and registering for classes. There were two “student leaders” in my group, college juniors and seniors who were hired to usher around the new freshman, and I’m glad they were there. I had no clue about the questions these students were asking, and I found some of the answers surprising– the meal plan that students buy works everywhere except Wendy’s in the union, for example.

I could go on, and I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised that what the university looks like is different based on one’s point of view. But I guess I was just struck by how very different this place seems to look to students than it looks to me. Something worth thinking about as I get ready to actually teach….